Democrats and Republicans are grappling with the narrowest House battleground map in decades, forcing them to search for ways to expand their offensive prospects as they compete for control of the lower chamber.
The smaller battlefield is the result of both parties drawing new maps designed to give their candidates an advantage before the general election even begins. While the exact size of the battlefield is still shaping up, both parties are already having to target districts that typically wouldn’t merit a second look.
“The play this time — there’s fewer competitive seats of the old nature, so we’re going to have to be winning seats in Democrats’ areas,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said on the sidelines of House Republicans’ annual retreat late last month.
That reality, McCarthy said, has drastically altered what a wave election could look like. In other words, he said, the 2022 midterm elections won’t be a repeat of 2010, when the GOP netted 63 seats, or 1994, when Republicans picked up 54 seats in the House.
“If we win 18 seats, that’s equal to 1994,” he said. “If we win 33 seats, that could be the largest in like 90-something years.”
Still, McCarthy sounded a note of optimism, pointing to the 2021 elections in Virginia and New Jersey, where Republicans made massive gains, as a sign that the GOP still has a chance of competing in areas that tend to favor Democrats.
“This redistricting is pretty much a wash,” he said. “What it’s done is narrow the number of competitive seats. Having said that, if you look at New Jersey and Virginia, you wouldn’t say those are competitive states, though those have always been an early indicator of what would happen in the House.”
Republicans need to net just five seats in the House to recapture the majority that they lost in 2018, and the political winds are blowing in their favor this year. Midterm elections are typically seen as a referendum on the party in power, and Democrats currently hold control of both chambers of Congress and the White House.
But the decennial redistricting process has also complicated things for both parties.
A decade ago, 155 seats were considered competitive, according to an analysis by the data website FiveThirtyEight. With the way 2022 is shaping up, that number is poised to drop to 122, with only 41 seats projected to fall into highly competitive territory.
It’s a change from even two years ago, when Democrats represented 20 districts won by former President Trump in 2016. This year, McCarthy said, “you’re only going to have about 13.”
Partisan gerrymandering — the process of drawing new political lines to benefit one party over the other — is a centuries-old phenomenon in American politics. A decade ago, Republicans pressed their advantage in the redistricting process after making big gains in the 2010 midterms.
And while Republicans still control the redistricting process in far more states, Democrats are flexing their map-drawing muscles where they can.
In Maryland, for instance, the Democratic-controlled legislature passed a heavily gerrymandered congressional map that would have likely given Republicans only one of the state’s eight seats. That map was tossed out last month by a judge who called it an “extreme gerrymander.”
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican who opposed the first map passed by the legislature, signed into law a new congressional map on Monday that creates six districts favoring Democrats, one favoring Republicans and one competitive district.
Meanwhile, in New York, the state’s new congressional map creates 20 Democratic-leaning seats and only four Republican-leaning seats. Two other seats would be competitive, but with a Democratic tilt. A lower-court judge invalidated that map last week, though an appellate judge said on Monday that the map could stay in place for now.
In one of the clearest signs yet that both parties are looking to expand the battlefield in the face of an otherwise shriveled map, House Majority PAC (HMP), the main super PAC supporting House Democrats, announced that it had spent nearly $102 million to reserve advertising in 50 media markets — a drastic expansion of its initial ad buys in recent years.
In 2018, the same year that Democrats recaptured control of the House, HMP spent $43 million on initial advertising reservations across 33 media markets. Two years later, in 2020, the super PAC’s initial ad reservations totaled $51 million in 29 markets. The explosion in initial spending was cast as an effort to safeguard Democrats’ paper-thin House majority at any cost.
“Through these historic television and digital reservations, House Majority PAC is making it clear that it is taking the early steps to do whatever it takes to protect and secure a Democratic House Majority in 2022,” HMP Executive Director Abby Curran Horrell said.
The same day that HMP announced its massive block of early ad reservations, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) moved to expand its list of offensive targets, upping the number of districts it plans to compete in from 70 to 72.
While just over half of those 72 districts look at least somewhat like traditional battlegrounds — 12 were won by Trump in 2020, while President Biden carried 27 by relatively narrow margins — 33 of them are districts where Biden won by 10 percentage points or more, margins that in previous years might have suggested that they were out of reach.
Mike Berg, a spokesperson for the NRCC, acknowledged that Republicans are reaching into heavily Democratic areas in their bid to recapture the House majority, saying that the GOP is simply taking advantage of the political challenges that Democrats are already facing this year.
“The House battlefield is expanding into deep blue territory because voters are frustrated that Democrats’ socialist agenda caused the highest inflation in 40 years, a massive crime wave, and the worst border crisis of all time,” Mike Berg, a spokesperson for the NRCC, said.
A spokesperson for the NRCC’s Democratic counterpart, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, did not respond to The Hill’s request for comment on Tuesday. But one Democratic strategist familiar with House races said that with control of the lower chamber on the line and the number of competitive districts shrinking, neither party has much choice but to try their hand in tougher-to-win districts.
“I think you’re going to see things get more expensive. You’re going to see a lot more throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks,” the strategist said. “It’s kind of just this new reality that we’re living in.”