How the House Fell: Republican Chaos and Democratic Focus

[cally]

This is an excellent analysis and offers insights I have not seen elsewhere


The message from Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader, was urgent and unsparing. In a meeting with Republican lawmakers before they left Washington for the August congressional recess, Mr. McCarthy warned that time was running short: Unless they intensified their campaign efforts and forcefully delivered a coherent message, he said, Republicans would suffer grievous losses in November.

Instead of arresting their political decline, House Republicans proved unable at every turn to stay ahead of their troubles — including many of their own making.

By Labor Day, Republicans were fatally unprepared for an onslaught of Democratic campaign spending that overwhelmed their candidates from South Florida to Seattle. Party leaders on Capitol Hill and in the White House soon turned on one another and against their candidates with growing intensity. Two key groups — the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party’s campaign arm in the House, and the Congressional Leadership Fund, a powerful Republican super PAC — plunged into all but open warfare over messaging and money.

Democrats, in turn, delivered a message about health care with the repetitive force of a jackhammer. They cracked congressional maps drawn to favor Republicans and seized an array of open seats, while also felling longtime incumbents who had grown complacent.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/us/politics/democrats-republicans-house.html?emc=edit_nn_20181111&nl=morning-briefing&nlid=6527692020181111&te=1

[customerserviceguy]

1. While I agree with the points made here

certainly on making health insurance a campaign issue, and the fracturing of 7-8 year old gerrymandering, my impression of the outcome of the midterms contains my opinion of what happened to the electorate in the last two years.

The urban blue areas got bluer, the rural red areas got redder, and the suburbs flipped just enough to go from red to blue, or at least purple. When a swing election was in a Congressional district, this seemed to be the case, I can't think of any House seat that flipped from red to blue that was not heavily dominated by the burbs. That was clearly the case with the 1st District here in SC. The GOP'er, Katie Arrington, did well in the counties outside Charleston County, which contains the suburbs of Charlestown, SC. My location is just north of there, and my 7th District went pretty heavy for the GOP'er in that race. The place I moved to last year was part of the 1st District in the not-too-distant past, and had my town and the next one been left in the 1st, Arrington probably would have won.

I expect that the GOP will take into account demographic shifts during the next redistricting.

What hurt GOP representatives in suburban areas was probably the cap on state and local tax deductions that was part of the tax bill. Yes, it was in there to hurt blue states, but GOP seats in those states were merely collateral damage. Lost votes for GOP Senate candidates were made up for by an increased turnout in rural voters, for whom tax deductibility is not a burning issue.