Back in November of 2012, I took a look at what it would take to win back control of the House of Representatives. My findings were grim.
Any district that was won by 10,000 or less votes should be considered highly competitive. Under 5,000 should be considered a toss-up. You can see that there are only seven presently highly-competitive seats and only four toss-ups. That is a horrible place to begin our campaign to retake the House. Only half of these districts [17] were won by less than 20,000 votes. Only 22 of [34] are in states that Obama carried, and almost none of them are districts that Obama carried.
But, by August, I was beginning to feel a little bit more upbeat. By then I had noticed a significant erosion of the GOP’s advantage with elderly voters, and their traditional unity and message discipline were breaking down. I had reason to at least offer a message of hope.
Now that the GOP has shut the government down, some polling is indicating that if the midterm elections were held today, the Democrats would win back the House. Obviously, we have to add all manner of caveats to that statement, but I didn’t think it would even be possible to make that argument when I looked at the results of the 2010 gerrymander in the 2012 elections.
