2016 Campaign: GOP House Majority Threatened?

A complete loss of the chamber is unlikely, but it’s the GOP margin that counts.

With Donald Trump lagging in the polls and proving a drag on Republican Senate candidates up and down the East Coast, some are beginning to wonder not just whether the GOP will lose in November, but how devastating the losses might be.

Could Republicans actually fritter away the largest House majority since 1928 in one election cycle?

Those already feeling heartburn are alarmed not just by the five-point Democratic advantage on the generic congressional ballot, but by the Democrats’ massive fundraising edge this cycle: The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) sent donors a memo on Tuesday warning that their Democratic counterparts had “massively outraised” them by a $7 million margin in July.

“If those trends continue into the fall, that would be a big problem for House Republicans,” says Brian O. Walsh, who served as political director for the NRCC in 2010, when Republicans won 63 seats and recaptured the House.

Retaking the lower chamber would be a coup for Democrats. It is also a monumental and probably insurmountable challenge. That said, top Republicans have long estimated that the party would lose somewhere in the range of five to 15 House seats this cycle, but GOP strategists have grown increasingly bearish in their projections since the convention, with 20 seats now considered by many to be the worst-case scenario. One senior Republican, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, says he fears the losses could reach two-dozen.

And while none of these outcomes would hand Democrats the House majority, Republicans close to party leadership worry that a severe loss — a reduction in the GOP membership to, say, 225 or 230 from the current 247 — could nevertheless prove devastating for a party that hopes to present a united front against a newly inaugurated Democratic president. “They want to do what they can to safeguard their most vulnerable House seats,” says Dave Wasserman, the House editor of the Cook Political Report.

Speaker Paul Ryan this week summoned some of the GOP’s top donors to Jackson Hole, Wyo. to urge them to help preserve his House majority as a check against the eventuality of a second Clinton administration. And while he’s unlikely to say it out loud, it’s the size of the majority rather than the majority itself that concerns him most. Currently, he can lose 29 Republicans and still pass legislation on a party-line vote. But if that margin for error is drastically reduced, the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which has 39 members now and figures to have at least that many in the next Congress, will possess even greater leverage over leadership’s decision-making in the 115th Congress.

Republicans right now boast a 29-seat majority, which means Democrats would need a net pick-up of 30 seats to regain control of the House, a difficult undertaking even in a good year. Redistricting has made it easier for parties to retain the seats they already hold. And Walsh, now a partner at the Austin, Texas based consultancy Red Print Strategies, says that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has done a “piss-poor” job of recruiting competitive candidates. “They would have to win 90 percent of the seats they have in play in order to win the House back,” he says, whereas in 2010, when Republicans were looking to retake the majority, they targeted about 100 seats with the goal of winning 40.

Wasserman says he’s simply “not seeing the kind of movement in the House playing field that we were seeing in ’06 or in ’10,” when Democrats picked up 31 seats and Republicans picked up 63 seats, respectively.

GOP strategists have grown increasingly bearish in their projections since the convention.

Still, a number of GOP strategists are increasingly concerned by the drag Trump appears to be having on Republican candidates in competitive Senate races. He’s not hurting House candidates yet, and several observers say he will actually help some lower-chamber hopefuls in districts where he’s popular. But increasingly, party insiders are worried that when the public starts paying attention to House races more closely starting in late September, many will begin to follow the pattern of the Senate contests in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, where Kelly Ayotte and Pat Toomey have taken a tumble in the polls. Before the Republican convention in July, Trump trailed Clinton by an average of about five points. Following the Democratic convention in mid August, polls began to routinely show him between eight and ten points behind. As Trump’s deficit has reached double digits in their states, Ayotte and Toomey —who consistently poll four or five points better than the GOP presidential nominee — have struggled to stay above water.

“We’re seeing slippage in these races,” says one Republican strategist, who describes the polls in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania — and the tightening of previously uncompetitive Senate races in North Carolina and Arizona — as a “symptom of the larger disease, which is Trump.” In the House, he says, “The races that are going to be competitive, you’re only starting to see, because races aren’t quite ripe enough, they’re not polled enough, and they’re not that firm yet. You can see it in the generic ballot, though.”

Republican operatives in battleground districts, resigned to the likelihood that Trump will continue to flounder, have begun testing the same message now being offered by Ryan in fundraising appeals: that a GOP-controlled House will be a necessary check on the new Democratic administration. They’ve concluded that their best remaining option — aimed at opening donors’ wallets and mobilizing base voters on Election Day — is to start explicitly warning of the possibility that President Hillary Clinton and Speaker Nancy Pelosi could rule Washington. It’s a rhetorical device of last resort, but they won’t hesitate to use it come October if Trump is trailing by margins large enough to suppress Republican turnout in critical swing districts.

“It’s really a question of, ‘How negative does the environment get?’ Right now, nobody knows,” says Walsh.

#related#Of the 45 Republican-held districts that the Cook Political Report lists as potentially competitive, 36 favor Republicans at the presidential level by five points or less — 27 of them by three points or less. If Trump does lose, it remains to be seen how much he’ll hurt down-ballot candidates, but a three-point drag across the board would get the Democrats close to the 30 seats they need. That, however, doesn’t account for the fact that Trump is almost certain to help Republican House candidates in a number of districts across the country where he is massively popular.

“I can paint two paths for you, and I don’t know which way it’s going yet,” says Walsh. “Redistricting maps can handle a Category 3 hurricane. They cannot handle a Category 5.”

Among Republicans right now, the debate is about which category Hurricane Trump will fall into.

— Eliana Johnson is National Review’s Washington editor. Tim Alberta is National Review’s chief political correspondent.