2022 seems likely to be a crushing Republican victory--and yeah, that's the kind of scenario where you do get incumbents like Hayes losing. That doesn't mean that she'll lose per se--but that candidates who are equivalent to her in terms of safety, like Kathleen Rice, Gottheimer, Perlmutter, etc. will have a decent shot of being the equivalent of Claudia Tenney or Steve Russell.
Uniform swing isn't real, elasticity exists, etc. etc. - but we'll see in November, maybe you're right.
Uniform swing isn't real--and that's certainly an argument for Hayes possibly losing. Suburban Connecticut has a fairly rich Republican tradition and is pretty elastic.
I think a lot of times the PVI, polling, and otherwise quantitative expression of politics comes to occupy way too much of this site's imagination. For instance, I dk s*** about Connecticut, but I can tell you that regardless of how risky it looks on paper that Ed Perlmutter isn't losing. Could be an R+6 national environment (and I don't think it will be), but it doesn't matter. The community isn't a "D +6" district; it's a Jefferson County district, a Denver/Boulder suburbs district, believe it or not a
unique place with its own racial and class politics that I will say now confidently is not electing a Republican short of a massive and uniform shift in that party's politics to the right. At the end of the day, numbers only provide a crude approximation of a district's politics.
For instance, even though they have similar districts, I can tell you for a fact that Gottheimer is in way bigger trouble than Perlmutter. Gottheimer's white voters are just rich suburbanites concerned about things like the SALT deduction, keeping their schools segregated, and Israel, who really only vote Democrat federally because the GOP nat'l brand has gone full fash. But Perlmutter's similarly educated and white voters contain a lot of people who live off 93 and work in renewable energy and tech, are far to the left of New Jersey suburbanites on cultural issues (and have been even since CO was a red state), want to keep pot legal... The only GOP candidate I see winning here is a Jeffco moderate who is pro-gay, pro-pot, and serious about tackling climate change. That person does not exist, and even if they did would never make it out of a COGOP primary.
I don't doubt that the GOP, esp. with Biden's miserable approvals (tho who knows if they'll hold), will likely take the House. But the idea that they are gonna nominate a bunch of Glenn Youngkins in suburban districts and win 60 seats is actually way more implausible to me than the idea that Dems will hold the House. IIRC Youngkin didn't even win a primary! Maybe districts like Hayes' will be in play. But if that happens they will be few and far between imo bc each district like that needs a best fit candidate, and most GOP primary electorates will nominate a loon instead.
