A Conservative View Of The 2020 Open Seat Congressional Elections-- Trump's Toxicity Is Going To Cost A LOT Of Republicans Their Congressional Seats

The November Emerson poll was released yesterday. The polling shows Bernie and Status Quo Joe tied for first place in the Democratic Primary, with only Elizabeth Warren as another viable candidate. Bloomberg shows up at 1% and Deval Patrick shows up at 0%, tied with Delaney, Bullock and poor Michael Bennet, an unpopular conservative Colorado senator, who is likely to have a very hard time being reelected in 2022.

And despite Status Quo Joe's empty and pathetic braggadocio at the debate Wednesday night, this particular poll shows Bernie as the only Democrat beating Trump in a head-to-head match-up. As you can see, Biden would lose to Trump by a couple of points, which helps explain why Trump is always attacking him, which encourages many Democrats to mistakenly assume Trump is afraid of Biden, rather than manipulating Democrats into nominating him.

The presidential race will have an out-sized impact on congressional races. Who will sit out the elections? Who will want to punish Trump's enablers? How many infrequent voters will show up to vote for or against Trump and his allies. Right now, Trump's average RealClearPolling disapproval number is 52.9% and his approval is 44.3%, putting him 8.6 points underwater nationally. State by state, Trump's disapproval is nothing short of shocking. He is down in approval from inauguration day in every single state, including state's where he still has relatively high approval, like Wyoming, where his net approval is +26, his most robust in the country-- but still down 13 points since inauguration.

There is not one state in the country that Hillary won in 2016 that is now looking favorably on Trump. And among states that Trump won, many now sport negative approval numbers for him:

• Alaska- minus 1
• Montana- minus 1
• Florida- minus 2
• Georgia- minus 3
• North Carolina- minus 3
• Utah- minus 3
• Nebraska- minus 4
• Arizona- minus 4
• Ohio- minus 6
• Pennsylvania- minus 9
• Iowa- minus 12
• Michigan- minus 13
• Wisconsin- minus 17

Yesterday Sabato's Crystal Ball looked at the 28 open House seats-- 20 of which are being defended by Republicans and 8 of whom are being defended by Democrats. They claim that only 8 of these seats are competitive, 7 of which are held by Republicans. These are the 8 seats they find competitive:

And these are the seats they assert are safe.

There are also 4 empty seats that will be filled by special elections:

The North Carolina congressional map has been, at least in part, de-gerrymandered and it is widely rumored that George Holding who now finds him sitting in a very Democratic seat, is about to announce his retirement. There may be a few other retirements as well but it doesn't look that there will be as many open seats in 2020 as there were in 2018. Since the end of WWII, there have been, on average, 38 open seats per cycle. There are 28 so far, but there’s still plenty of time for this cycle’s tally to match or perhaps even exceed the postwar average.

The open seats have a decidedly Republican lean: Of the 28 open seats, more than two-thirds (20) are currently held by Republicans, while just eight are held by Democrats.

Most of these open seats will be easy holds for the incumbent party: 20 of the 28 are rated as Safe Republican or Safe Democratic.

However, eight of the open seats are competitive to at least some degree in our ratings, and all but one of those are currently held by Republicans. This gives Democrats more of an opportunity to net seats from the list of open seats, at least so far.

While the incumbency advantage historically observed for House members may be eroding, open seats still tend to be harder for the incumbent’s party to defend than if the incumbent him or herself was running. In 2018, 12 of the Democrats’ 43 pickups came in seats where the incumbent didn’t run again. So while the bulk of the Democratic pickups came by beating incumbents-- they beat 30 last year, and also flipped an additional seat (SC-1) where the GOP incumbent, Mark Sanford, ran for reelection but lost his primary-- Democrats won 12 of 39 GOP-held open seats. In other words, Democrats converted about 30% of their possible open-seat opportunities. Meanwhile, Democrats won about 15% of the GOP-held seats where incumbents ran again. So the Democrats’ batting average was significantly higher among the open seats than among the ones defended by Republican incumbents.

Meanwhile, Republicans did not defeat a single Democratic incumbent in 2018-- but they did flip three Democratic open seats.

This is a long way of saying that open seats are still often more vulnerable for the incumbent party than ones held by incumbents.

...The seat that stands out [in the top-most chart] is TX-23, which runs from the outskirts of El Paso to the San Antonio area and has been competitive throughout the decade. Rep. Will Hurd (R) is retiring after three terms; this is just one of three districts held by Republicans that Hillary Clinton carried in the 2016 election, and it’s also the only seat in the country where we make the incumbent party an underdog. There are many candidates on both sides, but veteran Gina Ortiz Jones (D), who came within half a point of beating Hurd last year, is running again and is sitting on a $1.4 million warchest. Meanwhile, the leading GOP candidate appears to be veteran Tony Gonzales (R), who Hurd recently endorsed. He only has a little over $100,000 in the bank. Money isn’t everything, but Ortiz Jones’ big financial edge, residual name ID from her near-miss last time, and the likelihood (although not certainty) that the Democratic presidential nominee will once again carry the district combine to make the Democrats the favorite in this district.

The one Democratic-held open seat, IA-2, gives the GOP a Toss-up target in a Trump-won district. Democrats have rallied around Rita Hart, a former state senator who was the party’s lieutenant gubernatorial nominee last year, while Republicans have state Sen. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R) and former Rep. Bobby Schilling (R), who represented IL-17 from 2011-2013. Miller-Meeks unsuccessfully challenged retiring Rep. Dave Loebsack (D, IA-2) in 2008, 2010, and 2014, coming within striking distance of him in those latter two elections, while Schilling’s old Illinois district is separated from IA-2 by the Mississippi River.

Otherwise, these open seats largely will test the GOP’s ability to defend suburban turf in places like Long Island, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, and Atlanta.

[The middle table above] shows the open seats rated as safe. This group includes a mix of long-serving members on both sides-- although there are clearly more Republicans heading for the exits than Democrats-- as well as some more recently-elected members who are seeking greener pastures: Reps. Bradley Byrne (R, AL-01), Joe Kennedy (D, MA-04), Roger Marshall (R, KS-01), and Ben Ray Luján (D, NM-03) are seeking Senate seats, and Rep. Paul Cook (R, CA-08) is running for a county supervisor position, which may actually be a greener pasture depending on one’s perspective (there have been a handful of other sitting U.S. House members from California who have attempted to make such a switch in recent years). Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D, HI-02) is pursuing, rather quixotically, the Democratic presidential nomination.

Some of these seats could hypothetically be competitive in really bad political environments for the incumbent party. For instance, retiring Rep. Peter Visclosky’s (D, IN-01) post-industrial northwest Indiana district fell from voting for Barack Obama by 24 points in 2012 to Hillary Clinton by 13 in 2016, although it should remain Democratic in 2020. If Indiana Republicans wanted to aggressively gerrymander the state after 2020 to add to their 7-2 statewide U.S. House delegation edge, though, this district might be an attractive target to break up.

...Finally, [the third table above] shows the vacant seats that will hold special elections later this cycle. Of these forthcoming special elections, only CA-25, from which Katie Hill (D) recently resigned, seems truly competitive. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) just set the all-party primary for March 3, concurrent with the state’s presidential primary. A big, Democratic-leaning first-round turnout could allow state Assemblywoman Christy Smith (D) to win the vote majority required to win the special election outright, but she may not have the Democratic field entirely to herself: Cenk Uygur, a progressive commentator, also is apparently running, but he is taking flak for past controversial comments. Former Rep. Steve Knight (R) is running to reclaim the seat he lost to Hill by nearly nine points last year, among other Republicans.

Overall, 2020 is not going to see the number of open seats we saw in 2018. Last cycle, only 375 of the 435 House seats featured an incumbent running for reelection, meaning that there were 60 open seats. That was the second-highest number of open seats in the post-World War II era, eclipsed only by 1992. That was a national redistricting year, and redistricting often leads to more open seats than normal years.

Last cycle, only Pennsylvania drew new lines, as the state’s Democratic-controlled Supreme Court threw out a Republican gerrymander and replaced it with a more balanced but arguably Democratic-leaning map. Democrats converted a 13-5 GOP delegation into one that was split 9-9, with three of those four Democratic flips coming in open seats and the fourth coming when Rep. Conor Lamb (D) beat Rep. Keith Rothfus (R) in a redrawn Pittsburgh-area seat (Lamb had won a special election under the old district lines before winning the incumbent vs. incumbent bout).

A similar situation is playing out in North Carolina, where a state court just threw out a Republican gerrymander. The state currently features a 10-3 Republican-dominated U.S. House delegation. North Carolina’s GOP-controlled state legislature passed a replacement map that likely would result in an 8-5 GOP delegation, netting Democrats two seats. It’s unclear whether this map will ultimately be adopted: It may be that the Democrats can get an even better map. Rep. George Holding (R, NC-2), whose district likely would become unwinnable for him under a new map, is already telegraphing his retirement. Rep. Mark Walker (R, NC-6) might also find himself in a Democratic district, although he may challenge a sitting GOP colleague elsewhere. In any event, the North Carolina remap may very well contribute to the open seat total, too. We will issue new ratings in North Carolina once the new map is finalized.

One final note: In 2018, Americans elected a 235-200 Democratic House majority. So that means Republicans need to win 18 more seats than they won in 2018 to win a House majority in 2020.

However, since the 2018 election, a few developments have effectively risen the bar for needed GOP gains. As noted above, Democrats seem likely to net at least a couple of seats because of the North Carolina remap. Also, Republicans are at least a small underdog in one of their current open seats-- TX-23-- and Rep. Justin Amash (I, MI-03) left the party. So instead of Republicans having to win at least 18 currently-Democratic seats to win the House, the real number may be more like 21, and that doesn’t even include whatever effort they will need to exert in Amash’s seat.

Republicans do have a path to win the House, which largely goes through flipping a significant number of the 31 Trump-won districts held by Democrats. Such a result cannot be ruled out in an age where ticket-splitting is on the decline.

But so far this cycle, Democrats stand to benefit more from retirements than Republicans. Also, significant one-off events, like Amash’s defection and the North Carolina redistricting, are making life harder for the Republicans.

That’s why the Democrats continue to be favorites to hold the House of Representatives majority.