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But looking closely at the map of the House – and the latest rankings released Tuesday by CNN – I feel that this calculation may minimize (perhaps a lot) the chances that Democrats 23 places they must take control of the majority.
Let's go over the numbers.
For the moment, CNN has 40 (!) Seats held by the Republicans, considered inappropriate for the party. This total includes 26 GOP seats in play, 11 Republican seats supported by Democrats, two GOP seats as likely Democrats and a solidly Democratic seat.
Compare that to the total number of Democratic seats evaluated as negative or worse: three. Yes, just three. Two of them are seats – the 1st and 8th districts of Minnesota – and the third, the 14th of Pennsylvania, is considered a Republican seat. But even that is a little misleading. the 14th arrondissement is the current seat of the representative Conor Lamb (D), who runs (and wins) in the 17th arrondissement.
And a little more basic mathematics: if the Democrats win the three GOP-held seats that are currently being rated by CNN as strong or probably Democrat and, say, two-thirds of the Republican seats in the Leaning Democrats category, they must win Only half of the seats were deemed necessary to take back the house. If the Democrats win the 14-seat Republicans who are classified as strong, probable or leaning, they must win only nine of the 26 GOP seats considered by CNN as majority candidates.
All of this is compounded by the fact that, as I said earlier, there are very, very few seats held by the Democrats in real danger. If Republicans defended 40 of their highly vulnerable seats but had, say, 20 seats held by Democrats who were in similar danger, the GOP would be in a decent position. Yes, they would lose a bunch of their own seats but if they could counter those losses with gains in Democratic seats, it would make calculations more difficult for Democrats.
However, this is not how this election cycle unfolded.
It's not just the sheer number of seats that portrays such a disastrous picture for the majority of the House – even if the image they paint is dark enough. That's the story too. After the civil war, there were only three mid-term elections – 1934, 1998 and 2002 – in which the president's party did not lose seats in the House. In each of these three cases, a catastrophic cultural event (Great Depression, Clinton indictment, September 11) displaced the vote. These three elections are very clearly exceptions to a long-standing political rule.
There are two problems related to this cornucopia of evidence that suggest that Democrats will almost certainly win back the House in 41 days.
The first is that all conventional wisdom suggested that Trump would lose in 2016 to Hillary Clinton and he won. What is true. It is also true that the polls foresaw a close victory for Clinton at the national level; she won the popular vote by nearly 3 million.
Which, uh, ok. Anecdotes about how you won – in a state where Ronald Reagan won 63.6% of the vote and Republicans held the national convention in 1984 – may not be the best proof of the absence of a vague democrat. But whatever.
Mathematics are maths. And the calculation suggests that Democrats are in a very strong position with 41 days before the nation's vote.
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