House Republicans’ 2022 Strategy To Beat Democrats: Target Socialist Agenda And Job Killing Policies
House Republicans have laid out their path to winning back the chamber they came close to flipping in 2020. They plan to rely on a similar playbook: slamming the Democrats as socialists who will implement “job killing policies,” while at the same time downplaying any divisions within the GOP.
Since President Biden has taken office, the National Republican Congressional Committee has honed in on the impacts of closing the Keystone XL pipeline and delays in reopening schools.
“It’s going to come down to two different agendas: one is about freedom one is about having the right to self-determine your economic freedom, your individual liberties. The other one is about big government,” National Republican Congressional Committee chair Tom Emmer said in a call with reporters on Wednesday.;
“Every voter is going to have a clear understanding of the Democrats’ socialist agenda and the damaging impact it’s going to have on their daily lives.”
The party is;targeting 47 Democrats and needs a net gain of five seats to flip the chamber. The committee has split its targets into three categories: battleground districts where Mr. Biden lost or won by less than 5%; districts where House Democrats trailed his margins or where they won by less than 10%; and districts in states expected to add or lose congressional districts.
“Liz Cheney not losing her position really showed, ‘Okay we’re going to move on,'” she said.
Reality Check : The Democrats Legislative Fix Will Never Happenand Doesnt Even Touch The Real Threats
Its understandable why Democrats have ascribed a life-or-death quality to S. 1, the For the People bill that would impose a wide range of requirements on state voting procedures. The dozensor hundredsof provisions enacted by Republican state legislatures and governors represent a determination to ensure that the GOP thumb will be on the scale at every step of the voting process. The proposed law would roll that back on a national level by imposing a raft of requirements on statesno excuse absentee voting, more days and hours to votebut would also include public financing of campaigns, independent redistricting commissions and compulsory release of presidential candidates’ tax returns.
There are all sorts of Constitutional questions posed by these ideas. But theres a more fundamental issue here: The Constitutional clause on which the Democrats are relyingArticle I, Section 4, Clause 1gives Congress significant power over Congressional elections, but none over elections for state offices or the choosing of Presidential electors.
Opinion: The House Looks Like A Gop Lock In 2022 But The Senate Will Be Much Harder
Redistricting will take place in almost every congressional district in the next 18 months. The party of first-term presidents usually loses seats in midterms following their inauguration President Barack Obamas Democrats lost 63 seats in 2010 and President Donald Trumps Republicans lost 40 in 2018 but the redistricting process throws a wrench into the gears of prediction models.
President George W. Bush saw his party add nine seats in the House in 2002. Many think this was a consequence of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America nearly 14 months earlier, but the GOP, through Republican-led state legislatures, controlled most of the redistricting in the two years before the vote, and thus gerrymandering provided a political benefit. Republicans will also have a firm grip on redistricting ahead of the 2022 midterms.
The Brennan Center has found that the GOP will enjoy complete control of drawing new boundaries for 181 congressional districts, compared with a maximum of 74 for Democrats, though the final numbers could fluctuate once the pandemic-delayed census is completed. Gerrymandering for political advantage has its critics, but both parties engage in it whenever they get the opportunity. In 2022, Republicans just have much better prospects. Democrats will draw districts in Illinois and Massachusetts to protect Democrats, while in Republican-controlled states such as Florida, Ohio and Texas, the GOP will bring the redistricting hammer down on Democrats.
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Voting With The Party
This section was last updated in 2014.
The following data comes from OpenCongress, a website that tracks how often members of Congress vote with the majority of their party caucus.
- The average Republican voted with the party approximately 93.6 percent of the time.
- The average Republican voted with the party approximately 94.3 percent of the time.
- The top Republican voted with the party approximately 98.2 percent of the time.
- The bottom Republican voted with the party approximately 75.1 percent of the time.
Reality Check : Biden Cant Be Fdr
Theres no question that Biden is swinging for the fences. Beyond the emerging bipartisan infrastructure bill, he has proposed a far-reaching series of programs that would collectively move the United States several steps closer to the kind of social democracy prevalent in most industrialized nations: free community college, big support for childcare and homebound seniors, a sharp increase in Medicaid, more people eligible for Medicare, a reinvigorated labor movement. It is why 100 days into the administration, NPR was asking a commonly heard question: Can Biden Join FDR and LBJ In The Democratic Party’s Pantheon?
But the FDR and LBJ examples show conclusively why visions of a transformational Biden agenda are so hard to turn into reality. In 1933, FDR had won a huge popular and electoral landslide, after which he had a three-to-one Democratic majority in the House and a 59-vote majority in the Senate. Similarly, LBJ in 1964 had won a massive popular and electoral vote landslide, along with a Senate with 69 Democrats and a House with 295. Last November, on the other hand, only 42,000 votes in three key states kept Trump from winning re-election. Democrats losses in the House whittled their margin down to mid-single digits. The Senate is 50-50.
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The 2024 Presidential Election Will Be Close Even If Trump Is The Gop Nominee
One very important thing we should have all taken away from both the 2016 and 2020 presidential contests is that the two major parties are in virtual equipose . The ideological sorting-out of the two parties since the 1960s has in turn led to extreme partisan polarization, a decline in ticket-splitting and and in number of genuine swing voters. Among other things, this has led to an atmosphere where Republicans have paid little or no price for the extremism theyve disproportionately exhibited, or for the bad conduct of their leaders, most notably the 45th president.
Indeed, the polarized climate encourages outlandish and immoral base mobilization efforts of the sort Trump deployed so regularly. Some Republicans partisans shook their heads sadly and voted the straight GOP ticket anyway, And to the extent there were swing voters they tended strongly to believe that both parties were equally guilty of excessive partisanship, and/or that all politicians are worthless scum, so why not vote for the worthless scum under whom the economy hummed?
The bottom line is that anyone who assumes Republicans are in irreversible decline in presidential elections really hasnt been paying attention.
Can Republicans Win The House
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee came out with a memo yesterday asserting that the House was not likely to land in Republican hands, but Nate Silver thinks its more likely than Democrats may want to admit:
The DNCC memo, of course,; is meant to serve a purpose other than providing an accurate forecast of November theyre trying to make sure that the base doesnt become so demoralized that they stay home and make a bad election even worse.
Im still not certain that Republicans can take back the House, but its certainly possible for the reasons Silver points out.
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How Republicans Can Win In 2022
- STUART WESBURY | Special to LNP | LancasterOnline
For Republicans, the only goal must be to win back the U.S. House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.
That should be easy. In November, even though Donald Trump was not reelected president, the down-ballot races boded well for the GOPs future. But we Republicans are not acting like we want to win anything. So where do we go from here?
Of late, Republicans have separated themselves into several distinct groups, each with a different attitude and view.
For one group, retribution is the goal. These enthusiastic Trump supporters, distressed by the seven Republican U.S. senators who found Trump guilty in his second impeachment trial, are in a very unhappy mood. While the Republican Committee of Lancaster County did not pass a vote to censure Sen. Pat Toomey, other local committees did. The Pennsylvania Republican Party rebuked, rather than censured, Toomey.
The other senators who voted with Toomey to convict Trump were subjected to a variety of admonishments, as was, most notably, U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. It began to look like an inquisition.
This is very serious. A very large group of Republican voters, numbering in the millions throughout the United States, are similarly angry. They continue to challenge the validity of President Joe Bidens election, wrongly insisting victory was stolen from Trump in November.
In other words, the fight goes on and many solid Republicans are on the proverbial chopping block.
Republicans Will Likely Take Control Of The Senate By 2024
The usual midterm House losses by the White House party dont always extend to the Senate because only a third of that chamber is up for election every two years and the landscape sometimes strongly favors the presidential party . But there a still generally an out-party wave that can matter, which is why Republicans may have a better than average chance of winning in at least some of the many battleground states that will hold Senate elections next year . If they win four of the six youll probably be looking at a Republican Senate.
But its the 2024 Senate landscape that looks really promising for the GOP. Democrats will be defending 23 seats and Republicans just 10. Three Democratic seats, and all the Republican seats, are in states Trump carried twice. Four other Democratic seats are in states Trump won once. It should be a banner year for Senate Republicans.
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Reality Check #: The Electoral College And The Senate Are Profoundly Undemocraticand Were Stuck With Them
Because the Constitution set up a state-by-state system for picking presidents, the massive Democratic majorities we now see in California and New York often mislead us about the partys national electoral prospects. In 2016, Hillary Clintons 3-million-vote plurality came entirely from California. In 2020, Bidens 7-million-vote edge came entirely from California and New York. These are largely what election experts call wasted votesDemocratic votes that dont, ultimately, help the Democrat to win. That imbalance explains why Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 and came within a handful of votes in three states from doing the same last November, despite his decisive popular-vote losses.
The response from aggrieved Democrats? Abolish the Electoral College! In practice, theyd need to get two-thirds of the House and Senate, and three-fourths of the state legislatures, to ditch the process that gives Republicans their only plausible chance these days to win the White House. Shortly after the 2016 election, Gallup found that Republican support for abolishing the electoral college had dropped to 19 percent. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a state-by-state scheme to effectively abolish the Electoral College without changing the Constitution, hasnt seen support from a single red or purple state.
Why Republicans Are Likely To Win The 2022 Mid
The public opinion in the United States may indeed be generally opposed to the Republican Party coming to power in the 2022 mid-term election, yet we should not close our eyes to the fact that the GOP is still well-positioned to take back the House and change the balance of power in its favor.
Taking a glance at what happened during recent months, it seems highly probable that the Republican party may have little to no chance to win the 2022 mid-term election. The first and the most noticeable incident that helps this idea prevail is that it was a Republican president who instead of leading the country towards peace in a time of crisis back in January, actually added fuel to the huge fire of division and riot in the U.S. and encouraged his extremist supporters to attack the Capitol Building, creating a national embarrassment that can hardly be erased from peoples memory.
To compound the puzzle, while no one can deny the destructive role the former president Donald Trump had in plotting for and leading the , in the battle of Trump against the truth, the members of the Republican party chose to opt for supporting the former at the cost of sacrificing the latter; It was on this Wednesday that Republican leaders in Congress expressed their opposition to a proposed bipartisan commission designed and created for investigating the Capitol riot that was carried out by Trumps supporters.
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The Plausible Solution: Just Win More
Whether the public sees Democratic demands for these structural changes as overdue or overreaching, the key point is that they are currently exercises in futility. The only plausible road to winning their major policy goals is to win by winning. This means politics, not re-engineering. They need to find ways to take down their opponents, and then be smarter about using that power while they have it.
They certainly have issues to campaign on. In the few weeks, we have learned that some of Americas wealthiest people have paid only minimal or no federal income tax at all. Even as the Wall Street Journal editorial writers were responding to a Code Red emergency , the jaw-dropping nature of the reportfollowed by a New York Times piece about the impotence of the IRS to deal with the tax evasions of private equity royaltyconfirmed the folk wisdom of countless bars, diners, and union halls: the wealthy get away with murder.
Of course this is a whole lot easier said than done. A political climate where inflation, crime and immigration are dominant issues has the potential to override good economic news. And 2020 already showed what can happen when a relative handful of voices calling for defunding the police can drown out the broader usage of economic fairness.
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For The People Act Matters
Gerrymandering, under state laws, can be done by the party in power. That means the GOP has a significant advantage as they control the legislature in most states. In some states, redistricting is done by an independent commission, but that’s a rarity. According to Ballotpedia, the GOP has a trifecta in 23 states, compared to the 15 by Democrats.
In a bid to break their dominance over redistricting, the Democrats have introduced HR 1 or the For The People Act. Amongst other things, the bill bans partisan gerrymandering and state-level voting restrictions, which would make it harder for the GOP to limit voting rights. So naturally, the party filibustered the bill in the Senate. TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier told Mother Jones, “Absent the passage of HR1, the GOP is poised to gerrymander their way to a House majority.”;
If HR 1 is passed, it would abolish partisan gerrymandering by state governments in favor of independent commissions. It also invalidates existing maps that have the intent or effect of unduly favoring or disfavoring one political party over another. This is an issue that has to be fixed in Congress because as the Supreme Court ruled in 2019, federal courts cannot review partisan gerrymandering. There is however some hope for Democrats. A stripped-down version of HR1 has been proposed by Sen Joe Manchin. It does get rid of some of the more controversial measures but keeps in the ban on partisan gerrymandering.;
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Republicans Can Win The Next Elections Through Gerrymandering Alone
Even if voting patterns remain the same, Republicans could still win more seats in Congress through redistricting
In Washington, the real insiders know that the true outrages are whats perfectly legal and that its simply a gaffe when someone accidentally blurts out something honest.
And so it barely made a ripple last week when a Texas congressman said aloud whats supposed to be kept to a backroom whisper: Republicans intend to retake the US House of Representatives in 2022 through gerrymandering.
We have redistricting coming up and the Republicans control most of that process in most of the states around the country, Representative Ronny Jackson told a conference of religious conservatives. That alone should get us the majority back.
Hes right. Republicans wont have to win more votes next year to claim the US House.
In fact, everyone could vote the exact same way for Congress next year as they did in 2020 when Democratic candidates nationwide won more than 4.7m votes than Republicans and narrowly held the chamber but under the new maps that will be in place, the Republican party would take control.
If Republicans aggressively maximize every advantage and crash through any of the usual guardrails and they have given every indication that they will theres little Democrats can do. And after a 2019 US supreme court decision declared partisan gerrymandering a non-justiciable political issue, the federal courts will be powerless as well.
How The Republicans Can Win The White House In 2016
The Republican Party finds itself in an odd place heading into the 2016 presidential election. Theyve made tremendous gains at the state level under President Obama, hold a near-unbreakable majority in the House, and now control the Senate as well.
But theyve come up short by a significant margin in the last two presidential elections, where turnout is higher and the electorate is more diverse, and have plenty going against them in the next one.
Presidential elections are unpredictable and it often appears that one party can’t lose until it does. Democrats bounced back from three demoralizing blowout losses to win in 1992 against an incumbent, President George H.W. Bush, who seemed unbeatable earlier in his presidency. Republicans could do the same in 2016.
So what does the GOP have to do to finally crack the White House? These are some broad theories on how they win:
Cut Into the Democratic Base
The guiding principle behind a number of Republican candidates is that the party can only win when it reverses its losing margins with Democratic-leaning groups. That means winning converts among the most important planks of President Obamas winning coalition young voters, minorities, and single women.
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