The Republican Party is poised to win the House majority in 2022, boosted by the rare combination of President Trump’s ouster and down-ballot victories that put the GOP in command of the decennial redrawing of district boundaries.
House Republicans flipped nearly a dozen Democratic-held seats in the Nov. 3 elections, a surprising gain that left them a handful shy of the majority. With such a thin margin, there is loose speculation redistricting could effectively deliver Republicans the speaker’s gavel before a single Democratic incumbent is defeated. The GOP preserved control of key state legislatures and governor’s mansions, a crucial advantage in the partisan battle over reapportionment.
Trump’s defeat was another stroke of good fortune for House Republicans. Historically, the party that holds the White House loses seats in midterm elections. That has held true for Democratic and Republican presidents going back to Ronald Reagan’s first midterm in 1982, with the exception of 1998 and 2002. President-elect Joe Biden presents an immediate challenge for House Democrats heading into the 2022 midterm elections.
“We start in a great position,” said Dan Conston, who runs the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC affiliated with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California. “But the last thing Republicans should be doing is measuring the drapes.”
Democrats captured the House two years ago in a 40-seat swing, riding voter dissatisfaction with Trump to the majority after eight years out of power. Public opinion polls suggested the Democrats would flip as many as 15 more GOP-held districts this year. Instead, Republicans picked up 11 seats, giving them a total of 212. If the Republicans come out on top in an unresolved contest in upstate New York, that number would climb by one.
The threshold for a majority in the 435-member House is 218 seats.
Both parties begin the new election cycle playing on an uncertain battlefield. In the coming months, state legislatures and governors in states without nonpartisan redistricting commissions will play political cartographer, haggling over the borders of new congressional and legislative districts. Their goal: maximize the number of seats drawn to guarantee the election of a Democrat or Republican, a process known as gerrymandering.
The GOP begins with an edge. The success Republicans enjoyed in the Nov. 3 elections, particularly in states expected to gain House seats based on population shifts over the past 10 years, has empowered them to influence reapportionment, if not outright dominate the process.
For instance, with an influx of new arrivals from other states, Texas could gain three new districts, based on an analysis from Dave Wasserman, chief House race handicapper for the Cook Political Report. Many of those new residents are Democrats and have made once deep-red Texas more competitive. But the GOP holds the governor’s mansion and gained seats in the Legislature last month, positioning the party to gerrymander the new seats to elect Republicans.
In other words, redistricting in Texas could produce half of the seats Republicans need to win the majority. But GOP insiders are cautious when discussing the matter and wary of becoming overly reliant on the process. The redrawing of congressional boundaries is complicated and arcane. Incumbent politicians have been known to cut deals with the other side that prioritizes their political survival over opportunities to increase their party’s representation in Congress.
“Since Republicans came within a handful of seats of the majority after the 2020 elections, the majority should be within reach,” said Nathan Gonzales, editor and publisher of Inside Elections, a nonpartisan political prognosticator. “But redistricting makes handicapping the House a little complicated because there will be new lines around the country.”
The Democrats are still trying to pick up the pieces from their down-ballot disaster and have yet to analyze the results fully. Initially, House Democrats are going to have to focus some time and attention on filling vacancies in safe seats created by incumbents who resigned to take positions in the Biden administration. Meanwhile, the National Democratic Restricting Committee, founded by former Attorney General Eric Holder, is leading the party’s redistricting efforts.
Trump is promising to remain on the scene as a major figure, possibly even running for president again in 2024. He could give the Democrats a prominent Republican to run against as they attempt to shield themselves from any voter rebuke generated by the Biden White House. (The possibility that Trump might hang around is a matter of concern for otherwise confident Republicans.)
But House Democrats are not pinning all their hopes on Trump.
They are signaling plans to spotlight Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene and her penchant for provocative rhetoric, describing the Georgia Republican as “Steve King on steroids.” Iowa’s King, defeated in his GOP primary this year, has a history of making racially charged comments. Democrats also hope to make an issue of many House Republicans’ refusal to accept the results of the presidential election and their parroting of Trump’s claims that Biden was elevated through a massive conspiracy.
“Democrats are going to exploit the fact that Republicans let a lot of extremists into their caucus,” a Democratic operative said. “They’re going to have to answer for that every single day.”
