Could be….
Republicans are working on the underlying nuts and bolts to channel less votes to their advantage ….
That while Democrats focus to today and memories of their 2018 ‘wave’ that was nowhere last November…
There best hope is booming economy, turning out the vote and a almost gone pandemic…
Every ten years, Members of Congress often face an existential threat to their reelection that is mostly out of their hands: redistricting. From intra-party primary fights, that sometimes get very ugly, to running in radically different districts, redistricting in a handful of key states could easily flip control of Congress on its own. As the AP points out, southern states in particular will be a key focus in terms of redistricting in advance of the 118th Congress in 2023. “The states from North Carolina to Texas are set to be premier battlegrounds for the once-a-decade fight over redrawing political boundaries. That’s thanks to a population boom, mostly one-party rule and a new legal landscape that removes federal oversight and delays civil rights challenges.”
That “population boom” has been centered in the south, with North Carolina set to gain an additional congressional district, Florida likely to have two additional seats with as many as three in Texas. “Republicans control the legislatures in those states, leaving them with near total say over what those new districts will look like — a sharp contrast to other parts of the country where state governments are either divided or where nonpartisan commissions are tasked with redrawing Congressional and state legislative lines.” Currently, Democrats have just a one seat majority with five vacant seats, so those six new districts could be a majority-maker for Team Red.
In the five months that have passed since the election, GOP state legislators have introduced at least 253 bills restricting various voting rights in 43 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU. These lawmakers are taking advantage of the perception held by a large majority of Republican voters who believe that 2020 was not a legitimate election. According to polling from Quinnipiac in the weeks following the election, 77 percent of Republicans believe that there was widespread voter fraud, due in large part to Trump’s “big lie.”…
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Despite losing the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives in 2020, Team Red had a banner year in terms of recruitment, nearly toppling Team Blue’s majority in the lower chamber. Last cycle, the House GOP conference saw the number of women members in their ranks more than double in a single election. As Politico noted the day after the election, “female GOP candidates won in some of the toughest races in the country and have been responsible for flipping six of seven Democratic seats thus far.” The authors go on to note that, “Republicans say the success of GOP women in key swing districts should serve as a roadmap for how to win back the House in 2022. Under President Donald Trump, the party’s standing has suffered in the suburbs. But the GOP now sees a recipe for success in these areas, although those same Republican women could face competitive reelection races in the next midterms.”
Lastly, more than any other variable, the state of the economy will likely have the most outsized impact on GOP hopes for the midterms. In the latest CBS News/YouGov poll, “60 percent of U.S. adults support President Joe Biden’s handling of the economy and the coronavirus.” Two years is an eternity in the life of a country, especially when it came to the totality of COVID-19’s effect on every aspect of our economy. This past week, the Federal Reserve released the following positive forecast for the economy:“The Federal Reserve expects the U.S. economy to grow at its fastest pace in four decades this year as the unemployment rate falls to 4.5 percent … and then ticks down closer to pre-pandemic levels — 3.9 percent in 2022 and 3.5 percent in 2023. GDP growth [will] reach 6.5 percent this year, up from its previous projection of 4.2 percent.” If the Federal Reserve’s rosy predictions pan out over the next few months and years, Democrats will be in a strong position to campaign on the state of the economy.
