Parties focus on each other’s blunders to gain House seats

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With one year until Election Day, Republicans appear likely to maintain House control despite the horrid state of their party’s national brand.

While the government shutdown badly damaged Republicans’ standing with voters, the rocky rollout of the Affordable Care Act is at least as worrisome to Democrats.

{mosads}Strategists in both parties say that a repeat of the chaos of the government shutdown or continued struggles with ObamaCare are the most likely things that could trigger a wave election. Barring that, the most likely result will be a small gain by one party or the other.

Democrats need to win a net of 17 seats to retake House control, and to do so they’ll have to beat a number of entrenched Republican incumbents in GOP-leaning districts.

Republican and Democratic strategists largely agree the most likely result in 2014 is a single-digit swing in seats for one party or the other. The Hill’s race ratings reflect this, with equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans in the mix and just a dozen races rated as pure toss-ups.

There are few obvious targets for either party, as both sides have been successful in past elections at taking out incumbents in districts that lean toward the other party. That means for Democrats to have a big night, they may need to defeat Republicans in GOP-leaning districts and likely win the popular vote by an even wider margin than the upper single-digit lead they’ve held in recent polling.

Top GOP targets include centrist Blue Dog Democrats who’ve won many elections in tough districts, while Democrats are hoping to target some Tea Party Republicans who won slightly Republican-leaning districts in 2010 and 2012. Democrats are also eyeing seats where recruitment failures last time around handed the GOP districts thought to be leaning Democratic.

“Democrats would need another shutdown-like event to put the House seriously in play,” David Wasserman, The Cook Political Report’s House editor, said.

Republicans predict they’ll pick up seats as the implementation of ObamaCare continues to struggle and voter fury from the shutdown fades.

“The 2014 cycle will amount to a referendum on President Obama and his policies. You’re seeing how quickly new issues are coming to the fore, especially on his healthcare law, how quickly Democrats are embracing them, which they won’t be able to escape next November,” National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) told The Hill. “They’re downplaying the [healthcare exchange] website problems which are real and serious, they’re brushing off the other problems, and people are really upset.”

Walden predicted a small gain for his party in 2014.

“Republicans can and will pick up seats in this election cycle,” he continued. “I believe strongly we’ll hold the House and I think we have a much better than average chance of picking up seats. We’re probably talking an upper limit of eight to 15 seats for us to pick up.”

Top House Democrats say they’re optimistic about the election, though they stop short of predicting they’ll win back the lower chamber, a major shift from their tone before the 2012 election.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) declined to offer any predictions for the election, saying he doesn’t spend “a lot of time trying to peer into crystal balls.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told The Hill in late October that she’d changed her prediction from “We’re working to win the House” to “We can win the House” as a result of the shutdown.

Israel argues that voter fury over the government shutdown, which polls show has brought voter approval for Republicans to historically low levels, will continue to reverberate next November.

“The shutdown was searing and it has fundamentally changed the landscape. It’s no longer a theory that House Republicans have hurt the economy. People have felt it firsthand,” he said.

Israel and Democrats used fury over the shutdown to raise huge sums of money and convince top-tier candidates to run in races where they’d been struggling with recruiting.

“We used that to put boots on the ground, because once you have boots on the ground, that doesn’t change,” Israel said.
Republicans say voter anger will subside, but they admit the shutdown helped Democrats.

“My concern with the shutdown has less to do with the national political environmental implication. That’ll continue to shift and move,” said Brian Walsh, who runs the Congressional Leadership Fund, the largest GOP super-PAC focused on House races.

“Unfortunately, the real implications of the shutdown are the tangible things. There’s no doubt Democrats got a few more candidates to jump into races than pre-shutdown. There’s no doubt they got a donor surge and money in the door.”

Israel predicts Republicans will hurt themselves again before next November, potentially as soon as the next time Congress has to vote to keep funding the government and raise the debt ceiling, in January and February, respectively.

“It’s not Republicans shooting themselves in the foot that surprises me,” he said. “It’s how quickly they reload.

“At the end of the day, there are still two-thirds of the Republican caucus who supported a continued shutdown and default. They are driving the Republican bus, and I don’t think they can help themselves from steering to the hard right.”

Republicans say another shutdown is unlikely and believe the Obama administration will continue to struggle with the implementation of its signature law.

“We don’t need to do another shutdown,” Walden said. “But ObamaCare doesn’t go away, that’s a known. We don’t know if it’s going to turn out to be the best thing since sliced bread, or it could be Hurricane Katrina.”

Democrats acknowledge ObamaCare must be fixed — and soon — for them to do well in 2014.

“It’s important to get it fixed,” Israel said. “We definitely need the administration to improve its game on ObamaCare implementation. You have a lot of House Democrats demanding more accountability and working hard for their constituents to make sure that happens,” said Ali Lapp, the head of the House Majority PAC, the major Democratic super-PAC focused on House races.

“But it’s not like the government shutdown and the fiscal recklessness of the Republicans just happened and is solved,” Lapp said. “What’s going to happen in January and February? Their internal divisions aren’t going anywhere, and there are all these Tea Party extremists they have to cater to.”

But Lapp refused to consider what would happen to her party electorally if the administration continued to struggle with implementing ObamaCare, or if it didn’t enroll enough people and health insurance rates jump before the next elections as a result.

She laughed. “It’s Halloween — it’s scary enough today.”