Democrats likely will win back a number of House seats in next week’s midterm elections that “Republicans were lucky to have,” American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp said in an interview that aired Friday on “Rising.”
Schlapp said Republicans probably over-performed in 2016, winning House seats in districts where Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton defeated President Trump. It stands to reason, he said, that the GOP will lose a number of those seats in the midterms.
“There’s about 23 House districts that Republicans have in the majority that Hillary Clinton won, and so you might say we outkicked our coverage,” Schlapp told Hill.TV’s Buck Sexton on Thursday.
“We actually have one of the largest majorities we ever had because we’ve won in a lot of Democratic seats, and the nation’s evenly divided,” he continued.
“There’s no question that President Trump makes Republicans and conservatives very happy, but he has the opposite effect on a lot of other people,” he said. “So what I think you’ll see is Democrats winning back a lot of these seats that probably the Republicans were lucky to have.”
Schlapp, whose wife, Mercedes Schlapp, is White House director of strategic communications, stopped short of predicting that Democrats would retake the House majority. They would need to gain 23 House seats to do so.
A RealClearPolitics generic congressional vote on Friday showed Democrats leading Republicans by 7.5 percentage points on a generic ballot.
The Cook Political Report has rated 72 Republican seats — and only five Democratic seats — in the House as “at risk” ahead of the November midterms.
However, Democrats have a much more difficult path to regaining the majority in the Senate, with the tide moving against various Democratic candidates in states won by President Trump.
— Julia Manchester
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