Democrats see Harris as boosting their chances for House majority

Democrats are increasingly bullish about their chances of flipping the House now that Vice President Harris, and not President Biden, will sit at the top of the ticket in November. 

Coming out of the party’s national convention in Chicago last week, a long list of lawmakers said the eleventh-hour roster change has led to a flood of new volunteers, a spike in campaign fundraising and a burst of new energy among base voters, all lending new hope that they’ll win back control of the lower chamber next year.

“I don’t know a member who doesn’t think that,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said. “We’ve seen the enthusiasm; we’re hearing it.”

“No question about it: It elevates a lot of our races, it may broaden the map,” Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.) echoed. “Look, we’ve still got to finish it. But just looking at volunteers and small-dollar donors — those are two variables that matter, we know they are.”

There’s been a “huge uptick in both cases,” Kildee added. “And that makes a difference.” 

The overt optimism, so visible at the party’s convention, where Harris formally accepted the nomination, marks a sharp contrast to the Democrats’ mood just two months ago, after Biden’s disastrous performance in a debate with former President Trump. The prime-time event had tanked the president’s already dreary approval ratings and threatened to drag other Democrats down with him.

“The path we were on was unsustainable,” Rep. Annie Kuster (D-N.H.) said. “To be earnest, I thought we were going to lose 20-plus seats, and lose the Senate, and lose the White House.”

And now?

“Oh, I think we’ll win,” she said.

Kuster is watching closely. As head of the New Democrat Coalition, she leads a group whose members include 22 front-liners — the most vulnerable incumbents — as well as 30 nonincumbent candidates who are vying for seats controlled by either Republicans or outgoing Democrats. The numbers since Harris’s ascension, she said, have moved visibly. 

“I’m seeing polling all over the country, every day. And we are flipping 5-plus points in all these districts,” Kuster said.

In her own New Hampshire district, Kuster said Biden’s numbers had fallen 10 points since January, from being 8 points up to 2 points down. Harris, she said, has reversed the downward trend and now leads by a comfortable margin.

“We couldn’t have done it” without Harris, Kuster said.

Republicans have acknowledged that Harris’s higher popularity, relative to Biden’s, creates new challenges as they race to keep control of the House. Most obviously, they’ve been forced to pivot their message toward a brand new target in the very last months of the campaign. 

“We just spent the last four years trying to define Biden, and we have a very limited amount of time to define Kamala,” a House GOP strategist said this week. 

Harris has also opened a spigot of Democratic fundraising, providing incumbent Democrats with a significant cash advantage over their GOP challengers around the country — a trend the strategist called “concerning.”  

“If they are 3-to-1 on the ad spending, you kind of become whatever the Democrats say about you, because you don’t have the ability to push back and respond,” the strategist said. “We know we’re never going to be at parity on the candidate level, but we have to raise enough that our message isn’t drowned out.”

Still, Republican campaign operatives have also rejected the idea that Harris’s arrival on the ticket spells doom for the House GOP majority. They maintain that their internal polling indicates that, while Harris is much more popular than Biden, that bump at the top of the ticket hasn’t had any notable effect on individual House races.

They also see Harris as an easier target than Biden, in some ways, because of controversial policy positions she’s backed in the past, including support for a fracking ban and the “defund the police” movement.

All things considered, GOP strategists said the race for the House is exactly where they thought it would be at this point in the campaign: neck and neck. 

“House Republicans prepared for a trench warfare fight for the majority since day 1 of the cycle: recruiting an all-star roster of challengers, building a cash advantage for our incumbents, and honing a quality-of-life message that works no matter the district makeup or political environment,” Will Reinert, national spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in an email.

“Because we are well-prepared, we are well-positioned to grow our majority, but it’s going to be a knife fight until the very end.” 

Democrats of all persuasions are quick to warn that there are no guarantees, and the party has plenty of work to do at all levels if it hopes to seize the Speaker’s gavel next year. Indeed, that was a common theme at the convention, where top Democrats cautioned that the race is too close to call, and victory will hinge on which party grinds harder in the final sprint. 

“We’re very euphoric now. Everybody’s excited. I just got on my phone a message from one of our candidates in the Midwest, saying, ‘My fundraising has gone up 300 percent, my volunteers 150 percent, my polls are good,’” former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said during an interview at a CNN/Politico event in Chicago. 

“So that’s good, but that’s today. Now what we have to do is turn that into a victory, and that takes work. … It takes every minute,” she added. “No wasted time, no underutilized resources and no regrets the day after the election that we could have bought one more precinct in an Electoral College state.”

Recent analyses by election handicappers have given credence to the cautious approach. A forecast released Monday by Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ), for instance, found that while the Republican chances of keeping control of the House dropped 5 percentage points since Biden dropped out of the race, the GOP is still favored — with a 56 percent chance — to keep its grip on the chamber. 

Scott Tranter, the director of data science for DDHQ, told The Hill that he expects “the chances of someone to win the House to be a roller coaster the next couple of months as we get more House-specific polling, more fundraising.”

“So many of these races are toss-ups. … We don’t know how it’s going to turn out,” he added.

Still, there’s no question, in the minds of Democrats, that they’re in a much better position with Harris than with Biden, and that they’ve been encouraged by what they’re seeing on the ground. 

Pocan, for instance, said Wisconsin Democrats have seen an influx of 42,000 new campaign volunteers since Harris jumped to the top of the ticket. And anecdotes like those were floating all around the United Center during last week’s convention. 

“We’ve all been comparing notes. At our own events, House parties and stuff like that, I mean, the numbers of people who are wanting to be part of it, helping us and other candidates — you can feel the energy,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said. “These people want to be part of this movement.”

Democrats have also been energized by Harris’s decision to tap Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as her running mate. Walz, who served in the lower chamber for 12 years, is highly regarded among his former House colleagues. But his rousing speech at the convention last week — combined with his Midwestern roots and military background — has given Democrats new confidence that they can appeal to rural voters who have eluded them in years past. 

Kuster called them the “Friday Night Lights” voters. 

“You have to be able to speak across the aisle, speak to independents, speak to those moderate Republicans,” she said.

“[It’s in] places we’re not expected to prevail, that have rural and exurban areas, that Tim’s going to be helpful,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) said. “We’re trying to get him down to Austin. 

“We know it’s a very long shot on Texas,” he added, “but he can be a big help to Colin Allred,” the Texas Democrat looking to jump from the House to the Senate this year.