McClatchy: At RNC meeting, fears of midterm wipeout

[Beet]

Luckily, the Senate is stacked in their favor, and thanks to gerrymandering, they can lose the popular vote by an absurd percentage and still keep the House.

[Beet]

Luckily, the Senate is stacked in their favor, and thanks to gerrymandering, they can lose the popular vote by an absurd percentage and still keep the House.

Dems winning the two party house vote 55-45 would probably be enough to flip it, and that's definitely possible. (2012 was only 51-49 D)

There is no such thing as a 55-45 two party house vote. Even the biggest waves in history (1994, 2006, and 2010) were only 7-8 points. The Republicans are virtually guaranteed control of Congress in 2019.

[Beet]

In the elections from 1958 to 1982, the Democrats had a structural advantage in the House and massive Party ID structural advantage, so their margins there are not the result of a "wave", but structural factors unique to that era which no longer exist. There is no reason to think a 10% margin is anywhere within the realm of possibility.

[Beet]

Luckily, the Senate is stacked in their favor, and thanks to gerrymandering, they can lose the popular vote by an absurd percentage and still keep the House.

Dems winning the two party house vote 55-45 would probably be enough to flip it, and that's definitely possible. (2012 was only 51-49 D)

There is no such thing as a 55-45 two party house vote. Even the biggest waves in history (1994, 2006, and 2010) were only 7-8 points. The Republicans are virtually guaranteed control of Congress in 2019.

they are not guaranteed control. You get a popular vote win of 8 points nationwide for the House it is impossible for them to keep a majority.

8 points isn't necessarily enough for the Dems to get a majority.  Look at the House margins last year.  You can't count up to 24 seats that the Republicans won by single digits.  The tipping point seat was actually Mia Love's district, which she won by a 12.5% margin, while the GOP won nationally by 1%.

Now, obviously there isn't going to be a uniform swing.  But just crudely shifting the 2016 margins of every district by 9 percentage points towards the Democrats gives a Dem. national victory margin of 8 points, yet they still fall short of a majority.  So it's certainly possible that 8 points won't be enough.  If you look back at the House margins in the 2000s, you'll see that the Dems now have a somewhat bigger structural disadvantage than they did under the district lines of that decade.

By god it's even worse than I thought. It would take an 11.5% margin. At this point, the Dems have to put electoral reform much higher on the agenda.