By any reasonable historical standard, the Republicans should control the House of Representatives for the remainder of the decade. The districts are gerrymandered six ways to Sunday. The Democrats just won the national popular vote in House races by well more than a half a million votes and still came up 17 seats shy of taking control. Very few of the races the Democrats lost were even remotely close, meaning that there is little hope of winning more than a handful of those seats in the near future.
Add to this that the party of a two-term president is normally not just beaten in the sixth-year of his presidency, but completely decimated. It happened to Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon (Ford), Reagan, and the Lesser Bush. The only exception was Clinton, and that is explained by the public’s backlash against the impeachment proceedings that were underway at the time. The Democrats should expect nothing better than disaster in November 2014.
But the Republicans are probably going to screw it up.
People are going go to be pissed when we go over the Fiscal Cliff. They are going to be pissed when the Republicans continue their obstruction next year. They won’t like their refusal to address climate change in the face of Superstorms and powerful hurricanes and unprecedented droughts. They’ll be furious when the House refuses to pass any gun control laws in the wake of the Newtown Massacre. They will flip out when the Republicans mess with the Electoral College in a desperate effort to stave off demographic doom. They’ll hate them when they mess with the debt ceiling again. There will be a backlash against the anti-union laws. There will be a price to pay for refusing to do anything about immigration reform. The war on women will continue in the states, and the resistance will build.
More and more Republicans will disassociate themselves from the national party.
ObamaCare will kick in and people will like it.
I think by November 2014, it will be pretty clear that the only way for the country to move forward is to give the Democrats control of the House. The gerrymandering has created a nice seawall for the Republicans, but it is probably going to be inundated much like the Atlantic Coast was during Superstorm Sandy.