Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
House members during the Electoral College vote at the Capitol, January 6, 2021
In a last-ditch effort to reverse the 2020 election results, Republican members of the House and Senate challenged the certified electors from Arizona and Pennsylvania. Only seven senators voted for the challenge, but a majority of GOP House members did.
I took a close look at those who refused to go along. As you might expect, some are principled moderates, but many are in swing seats where voters will elect a center-right Republican yet might balk at an extremist.
These are exactly the Republican incumbents who will face primary challenges from Trump loyalists in 2022. And since the party base that votes in primaries is heavily Trumpian, many of them will be displaced—paving the way for Democratic pickups.
At the top of the Trump hit list are the ten Republican House members who voted for Trump’s impeachment, beginning with Liz Cheney of Wyoming. But right behind them are the more than 80 who refused to play Trump’s game of challenging the Electoral College results.
Republicans will be badly split between Never Trumpers and Always Trumpers.
I asked our intern, Prem Thakker, to look up the names and districts of Republicans who did not support Electoral College challenges and who won with less than 60 percent of the vote. Prem found 33. As I suspected, several won by ten points or less, some by fewer than 1,000 votes. A couple were virtual ties. All of this is conveniently displayed in Prem’s chart, below.
If these Republicans are ousted in primaries by far-right challengers, their seats are vulnerable. Several were on the red-to-blue target list of 2018, when Democrats flipped 42 House seats.
One factor that complicates this calculus is redistricting. Not all of these candidates will be running in districts identical to the ones where they ran in 2020; and in states where Republicans control redistricting, they will do what they can to protect vulnerable red seats, quite apart from who holds them.
But it turns out that Republicans have fewer trifectas now than during the last redistricting, which took place after the 2010 census. And in several other states, reforms have led to nonpartisan redistricting systems. Given the disgraceful history of Republican gerrymandering, this progress is good news for democracy, and it’s good news for Democrats.
In terms of our exercise to identify Republican-held House seats that could flip if moderates are successfully ousted by extremists, it turns out that since 2012, several key states with vulnerable GOP seats now either have a Democratic governor or a nonpartisan redistricting process. The ones on our potential flip list where Republicans still have a trifecta and there is partisan control of redistricting are Texas, South Carolina, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Iowa. But out of 33 vulnerable GOP seats on our list, just nine are in those states.
In short, Republican fratricide is one of several factors that suggest why Biden and the Democrats might break the usual jinx by which the party of a newly elected president loses large numbers of House seats in the first midterm.
Here are several others. For starters, Biden is personally popular, and that honeymoon could last a while. His approval rating on how he handled the transition is 67 percent, and his major initiatives enjoy broad public support.
Biden, and by extension the Democrats, will also benefit from the end of the pandemic and the resulting economic recovery. The country will likely be in a more optimistic mood by fall 2022, and the Democrats will deserve much of the credit while Republicans will be in the role of obstructionists.
As I wrote in this extended assessment of Biden, his party, and the progressive movement, the election of Jaime Harrison to chair the national Democratic Party puts in place a party leader with Biden’s personal backing, deeply committed to long-term state-level party organizing. This portends other House pickups.
Moreover, if you compare the dynamics of the big Democratic gains in 2018 with the House losses in 2020, one big reason was a huge amount of on-the-ground organizing in 2018. This was set to be repeated in 2020 but had to be aborted because of the pandemic. Phone calls and texts are no substitute for being on the doors.
With the exception of a few states such as Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and above all Georgia, where some canvassers, especially from unions such as UNITE HERE, did brave the risk of infection to go door-to-door, the progressive organizing army of 2018 was all dressed up in 2020 with no place to go.
They will be out in force in 2022, their ranks redoubled. Meanwhile, Republicans will be badly split between Never Trumpers and Always Trumpers.
All factors considered, the odds are at least even that Democrats beat the midterm jinx in 2022 and gain House seats.
