Yeah this one is over, I changed my username recently, but the message remains the same, Clinton/Northam/Kaine/Biden/Warner voters for Republicans, including one who has veered as far to the right as Glenn Youngkin are not going to win a race like this, which has been greatly nationalized, to the benefit of T-Mac, of course. My prior is Democrats need to win by at least 5 or 6 to feel good about themselves, a narrow win is a sign of a 2014 style wave building, a loss would be a sign of a disastrous wave building where the Democrats could lose 40-45 seats come 2022.
I think a narrow loss probably means a 30-35 seat loss. Republicans would have to start winning seats that Biden won by nearly 15 points to get above that.
Even to get to 30-35 seats the GOP would have to flip fairly deep blue suburban districts like VA-10. That's simply not going to happen. The flip side of 80% of the country being in gerrymandered/safe districts is that fluctuation on that scale is very hard. When Dems did it in 2018 there was a ton of low hanging fruit. There aren't that many Dem districts that Biden lost in 2020. And there are quite a few GOP districts that Biden won.
