The prospect of hanging, as Samuel Johnson said, greatly concentrates the mind, and the prospect of the 2010 elections may be concentrating the minds of Democratic House members, at least those elected (unlike most of the Democratic leaders and committee chairmen) from less than overwhelmingly Democratic seats. In a recent blogpost, I noted that commentators are taking seriously the possibility of Republicans recapturing a majority in the House—and much earlier in this cycle than they did in the 1994 cycle, the last time Republicans overturned a Democratic majority. But I added that in my view the Republicans’ chances of winning a majority are still well under 50%. Now comes Democratic strategist Ed Kilgore with a clear-sighted blogpost explaining that in some important respects the 2010 cycle doesn’t resemble the 1994 cycle. I think most of Kilgore’s points are well taken; there were a lot more open Democratic seats in the South that were ripe for Republican taking in 1994 than there are now, for example.
One of the key factors that is hardest to determine is candidate recruitment. In the 1970s and 1980s Democrats had far more talented candidates in opposition-leaning seats than Republicans, which helped to account for their persistent large House majorities between 1974 and 1994. In the early and mid 1990s, however, Republicans eliminated this talent gap. In the 2006 and 2008 cycles, however, Democrats did far better than Republicans in candidate quality and candidate recruitment. Now there are signs that Republicans are doing better in both than they have been in some time. National Review’s Jim Geraghty collects some of the evidence (though he makes one mistake, listing Adam Putnam of FL 12 as an endangered Democrat rather than a Republican who is leaving the House to run for statewide office). My rule of thumb is that even in sweep years the winning party wins only 50% of the seats it seriously contests, while losing 10% of the (usually very small) number of seats seriously contested by the other party. That would suggest that the Republicans need to make serious challenges in 80-plus seats in order to make the net gain of 40 that would give them a House majority. My sense is that they aren’t there yet, but could conceivably be if things break all their way. In any case, and despite Kilgore’s serious arguments, there are reasons for Democrats to be nervous.
