The State of the House

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH)

One of the things lost in the hubbub of the 2014 Midterms is that the House is up for reelection too (you may not have realized this considering the only thing the media is remotely interested in discussing is the Senate).  While the eventual victors of the House are not in doubt (the Republicans will be winning, regardless of if that means that John Boehner will be winning), the actual margin of victory is very much in play.

One of the things that John Boehner has publicly stated is that he wants to hit 245 seats for his majority.  This would put the Speaker with a larger majority than any Republican has held since the Truman administration and there’s an additional (self-serving) math that comes with Boehner increasing his majority.  The more Republicans he can get in his caucus (particularly moderate Republicans from swing districts), the less often he’ll have to rely on Democrats to get legislation passed, and have some of the Hastert Rule embarrassments he’s run into in the past few years.  Plus, it will mean there's less of a chance that he has to go to a second ballot when the vote for Speaker comes before the House.  

On the other side of the aisle, while the Democrats will occasionally talk about winning back the House, their goal is pretty simple: hold as much water on the sinking ship as possible (ie keeping net losses to a minimum) in hopes that Hillary Clinton will open up some coattail opportunities in the Midwest and Great Lakes region in 2016, when the House could once again be in play.

The better question here, though, is who will get closer to achieving their goal-will it be the Democrats keeping net losses relatively minimal (say, 1-3) or Speaker Boehner picking up his goal of eleven more seats?  Let’s find out.

The Foregone Conclusions

Starting off the race, we find four seats that are, for all intents and purposes, done.  The retirements of Reps. Bill Owens, Mike McIntyre, and Jim Matheson in NY-21, NC-7, and UT-4 respectively have meant that the Democrats are basically starting off with a deficit of three seats-the Republicans seems almost certain not only to win the seats, but to become a bit more demographically diverse, with both the first Republican Millennial in Congress (Elise Stefanik in New York) and the first African-American Republican woman in Congress (Mia Love in Utah).  Conversely, the Democrats have basically won CA-31 with Rep. Gary Miller retiring in the most Democratic-seat in the country held by a Republican.  Count all four of these as wins for the dominant party.

The Projected Math: Republicans +2 (I’ll be making estimates as of if the election were held today-these will almost certainly change in the tossup races below, but I feel pretty darn confident about these four).

The True Tossups

Rep. Brad Schneider (D), who is running one of the country's
closest races in the tenth district of Illinois

Wikipedia is a wonderful thing (I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that they’re doing one of their seemingly constant pledge drives right now, so if you’re feeling generous, go over and donate), and they have a pretty spectacular list of five of the best election predictor sites on the web and what their current rating is for most seats (the sites are those run by Charlie Cook, Stuart Rothenberg, and Larry Sabato, as well as Daily Kos and Real Clear Politics, the last being my own personal favorite, though I do find Sabato to be extremely reliable).  As of the past two weeks (it’s Wikipedia-it’s not perfect), I am showing the following seats as being ranked tossups by all five sites: AZ-1, AZ-2, CA-52, IL-10, IA-3, NH-1, and WV-3.  These seven races are the only races in the country where every single political analyst thinks that neither side has an advantage.  If you live in one of these seven districts, as a result, your vote in the House matters probably more than anywhere else, so I suggest you don’t let the millions of dollars being spent to get you to the polls go to waste.

Of the seven, six of them are currently held by Democrats (the sole exception being Iowa-3, where Rep. Tom Latham has retired).  If there is a wave, it’s very likely that all seven of these seats go to the GOP, but as of now I’m going to, for the sake of the projected math below, assume 70% of them do and the Democrats hang on to two of them (while either party genuinely could win any of these seats, I’m thinking WV-3 and AZ-2 look the best for the Republicans of the seven, while IA-3 and IL-10 look the best for the Democrats).  If the Democrats can hold (or pick up) most of these seats, John Boehner’s goals will be kaput.

The Projected Math: Republicans +6, bringing them up to +8 (for the record, this is being pretty generous to the Republicans as of today, though this is what I think will happen as of right now)

The Marginal Tossups

Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY)

For this exercise, I’m going to list only the races where two or more of the pundits think the seats are tossups.  That includes the following 9 races: CA-7, CO-6, FL-2, FL-26, IL-12, MN-8, NE-2, NY-1, and NY-11.

It’s worth noting that this list is a teensy bit kinder to the Democrats than the last one.  Four of the nine districts are actually held by the Republicans (CO-6, FL-2, NE-2, and NY-11), while the remaining five are held by the Democrats.  It’s also worth noting that NY-11 is the only seat that has 2+ tossup rankings where the remaining pundits project the seat will go to the non-incumbent party.

Personally, I think that the Republicans do have the advantage in most of their seats (excepting embattled Rep. Michael Grimm in the 11^th), and I would personally guess that the Democratic challengers lose all but that seat (Gwen Graham in FL-2 being the biggest question mark of the three).  The Democrats conversely have the advantage in at least CA-7, and perhaps MN-8 (Democratic turnout will be high in Minnesota in November, as MN fares fairly well in Midterms in terms of turnout, so I’m guessing that saves Nolan).  For the sake of argument, I’m going to say the Democrats save those two seats and pickup NY-11, and guess they lose the rest of the seats considering the national environment.

The Projected Math: Republicans +2, bringing them to +10.

The Rest of the Race

County Freeholder Aimee Belgard (D-NJ)

There are of course dozens of other seats across the country that are in play on paper, but it’s worth noting that almost all of them have an inherent advantage to the incumbents.  I do think that the pundits may be giving too much credit to the Democrats in CA-26 (Rep. Julia Brownley is not a great campaigner), GA-12 (Rep. John Barrow may oddly suffer from strong statewide candidates driving up more partisan Republicans in his Peach State district), ME-2 (polls have been all over the map here, but State Sen. Emily Cahn (D) clearly has not put away Rep. Mike Michaud’s seat and has to be hoping that she gets some coattails from his gubernatorial campaign), and MN-7 (where Rep. Collin Peterson is facing his first real campaign challenge in two decades, and we don’t know what this district will behave like if it is genuinely contested).  Conversely, I think Republicans should be sweating a bit harder over NJ-3 (where polling has shown County Freeholder Aimee Belgard gaining on Mayor Tom MacArthur) and VA-10 (State Del. Barbara Comstack isn’t quite the campaigner we expected her to be for the GOP, and County Supervisor John Foust may benefit from the “ignore the national trends, we’re just getting bluer” approach that Virginia has taken in the past decade).

That said, though, barring opening up the map a bit more (it’s open in theory in other districts, but not in reality, in a similar way to how Minnesota is theoretically a competitive Senate seat, even though it’s not), John Boehner nearly has to run the board to hit his eleven seats (it’s worth noting that I am projecting Boehner essentially running the board as is and he still is one shy of eleven).  Conversely, the Democrats nearly have to run the board to keep their wins down to a zero-sum game.  The reality is that while there are a lot of exciting races this year, there’s probably not going to be a lot of movement.  Unless the race changes, we’ll be in for a very exciting, but ultimately not particularly consequential election night.