McClatchy: At RNC meeting, fears of midterm wipeout

[Virginiá]

There is no such thing as a 55-45 two party house vote. Even the biggest waves in history (1994, 2006, and 2010) were only 7-8 points. The Republicans are virtually guaranteed control of Congress in 2019.

Depending on how you want to classify a wave, those aren't the biggest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_1958
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_1960
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_1964
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_1974
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_1976
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_1982
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_2008

Those were all bigger in terms of popular vote, and some in terms of PV/seat change. 1974 was something like 16 points. And while I don't have the popular vote numbers for the New Deal waves, I'm sure they were just as massive. All things considered, I'd hardly say Republicans are guaranteed control. They do have a decent advantage, though.

[Virginiá]

I'm sorry Beet I accidentally hit modify instead of quote on your post and for some reason didn't realize it when I was doing my post!


There are tons of elections in between those dates that were much closer in the PV. You can't honestly call a 16, almost 17 point win the simple result of a structural advantage, not to mention some of those other elections. Those were all waves in the popular vote, and a number of times they didn't add much to Democrats' seat count as the PV would imply because they already had so many seats.

Like I said, it depends how you want to classify a wave. 1976, Democrats still had a wave in the popular vote, but gained only 1 seat because they were already at 291 seats prior to the election.

[Virginiá]

because Barack Obama isn't running for President

He certainly gave that election quite a shot of energy but Democrats also came a little shy of 10% in 2006. Putting aside 2010-2014, where Obama being president or being on the ballot didn't come close to wave-like numbers in the House, Democrats don't need to have Obama to have a wave.

Democrats are probably getting overconfident about 2018 (myself included), but I also think Republicans are are underestimating (often significantly) the chances of them getting wiped out next year. It doesn't take a veteran strategist to see all the warning signs popping up.