Others are not so sure. The Cook Politics Report has predicted Republicans will win 2.5 seats from the redistricting.
GOP advantage. The key takeaway from the Times report shows that the Republican Party is well on its way to taking advantage of the historic advantage enjoyed by a party that is not in power.
midterm elections.
Even before there is any push from redistricting, Republicans are not far from capturing the House.
GOP starts with the advantage. It controls more state legislatures and is squeezing more safety seats out of those states.
Republicans control the redistricting process in the states that oversee 179 House seats. Democrats control the process in states overseeing only 75 seats.
Those who remain are either overseen by split governments or bipartisan or nonpartisan committees, or they have a single member of Parliament.
North Carolina is an example. CNN’s John Avlon looked specifically at North Carolina, a state that’s essentially even in the party register between Republicans and Democrats. Still, the state legislature gave Republicans a 10-4 seat advantage in the new congressional map, he said in “New Day.”
“Looking at the maps, you would think that the state is becoming more white and more rural, which traditionally means more Republican,” he said. “That’s despite a census showing that North Carolina has become more diverse and less Caucasian over the past decade. It’s a fraudulent redistricting system at work.”
Watch his segment.
That would be a reception of two seats in North Carolina compared to the current ratio of eight Republicans to five Democrats, which only exists because
the courts ordered the gerrymandered maps to be redrawn in 2020.
Advantage in Texas. It’s a similar story in Texas, where the competition seats were replaced by safety seats and one in favor of Republicans.
“The number of white counties will increase, although the growing Hispanic population is almost entirely responsible for Texas winning two seats in the U.S. House of Representatives during reallocation.” “,
CNN’s Eric Bradner wrote last month.
Advantage in Ohio. Republicans won about 55% of the vote in Ohio in the 2020 presidential race, but they will have an edge in 12 of the state’s 15 congressional seats in the map set by the Republican-led state Senate. control,
According to The Columbus Dispatch.
Ignore stand-alone commissions. Utah’s legislators ignored an independent redistricting committee supported by voters and instead pushed a map dividing Salt Lake City into four distinct counties,
according to The Salt Lake Tribune, and dilute the state’s only current democratic district, pushing it in the Republican side.
There will be legal battles across these various maps, but after the census is delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there will be less time for the courts to work.
Read tea leaves. According to CNN’s Ethan Cohen, who tracks these, more and more Democrats have retired so far in this cycle. He wrote: At this point in the 2020 cycle (November 16, 2019) 28 House members (20 R, 8 D) are on their way out of the chamber at the end of their term, including 6 members (3 R, 3 D ) has run for higher office.
Tuesday is
Jackie Speier, a California Democrat who became the 25th House of Representatives member (15 Democrats, 10 Republicans) to announce that she will not be running for re-election. That number includes nine (five Republicans, four Democrats) running for Senate or governor.
The same goes for retirement in the Senate. The other important retirement announced this week is
Senator Patrick Leahy, a long-serving Vermont Democrat. Cohen points to Leahy as the sixth senator and the first Democrat to announce that he will not seek another term. Overall, Republicans will defend 20 Senate seats and Democrats will defend 14 seats in 2022.
State Senate play. CNN’s
Simone Pathe has the November version of her semi-regular update on
The 10 Senate seats most likely to overturn by 2022.
What happened in a month? The seats themselves are unchanged, and Republicans are defending them more. But the landscape is radically different than it was a few months ago, before the Republicans won an uncomfortable victory in the race for governor of Virginia. They still have obstacles and some flawed candidates, Pathe writes.
The GOP is more than excited about its chances in races in states like New Hampshire and Colorado.
Despite all that, Pathe’s analysis is that the seat most likely to tip over is still Pennsylvania, where
Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican, is about to retire.
From the archives: The Republican Party in Vermont. See this report on the last time a Republican represented Vermont in the Senate. It was 2001 – it wasn’t that long ago, actually. The Republican Party is Senator Jim Jeffords.
The Senate then, as it is now, was split 50-50. Jeffords is a moderate Northeasterner who has grown annoyed with the GOP. Instead of seeing the White House cut education funding, among other things, he left the party and thus handed control of the Senate to Democrats. This Time magazine report I found on CNN’s website
make the operation look like a Cold War defection.
Education then and now. I was struck by Jeffords’ frustration with an increasingly conservative GOP. That resonates today.
What I find more interesting is his anger at cutting education funding. Education, we learn from the Virginia governor’s race, will be the top issue for Republicans looking to 2022. The question is whether parents want more money for schools or more individuals. people talk about their children’s experiences.
.
