U.S. House looks like GOP lock for years

Ledyard King | THE NEWS-PRESS Washington bureau

WASHINGTON - Congressional districts around the country will be redrawn about five years from now in Florida and other states, and it doesn’t look good for Democrats.

The party faces long odds in its quest to reclaim control of the House, where the Tea Party wave of 2010 put Republicans firmly in charge.

The GOP’s 58-seat majority in the chamber won’t shrink much and could easily expand, analysts say. That’s because of projected population shifts to mostly red states in the South Including Florida) and West, and Republican dominance of state legislatures, which draw congressional maps in most states. Any Democratic resurgence will almost certainly take a generation, even under best-case scenarios for the party.

“The 2010 elections were the most important mid-term elections of our generation,” said David Wasserman, who analyzes House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “Republicans not only were able to lock in their congressional gains but of course they won so many state legislative (chambers) that they could very well perpetuate their majorities beyond 2020.”

Few states embody the challenges facing Democrats like Florida, the largest presidential swing state, where Republicans hold 17 of the state’s 27 House seats.

A court order to redraw the state’s congressional lines objectively — in accordance with a constitutional amendment passed by state voters in 2010 — could give Democrats a net increase of one seat after the 2016 elections. The new map, if approved by the Florida Supreme Court, would immediately make three seats vulnerable to a flip: Republican-held seats in District 10 in Central Florida and District 13 in the St. Petersburg area, and the Democratic District 2 seat in Northern Florida.

The projected addition of another seat in 2022 based on population gains could be another opportunity for Democrats in a state where their registered voters outnumber Republican registered voters by about 400,000 (4.56 million vs. 4.16 million).

But Republicans dominate the Legislature, where the lines are drawn. And the concentration of Democrats in large cities and coastal communities, especially in South Florida, make it difficult to expand the number of competitive districts that are legally defensible.

Since 2008, the Democratic Party nationally has lost 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats, more than 900 state legislative seats, 30 state legislative chambers and 11 governorships. Last week’s victory by Democrat John Bel Edwards over GOP Sen. David Vitter in the Louisiana gubernatorial race was a rare Republican loss in Dixie.

Of the 7,383 state lawmakers across the country, 3,172 — or 43 percent — are Democrats. Democrats hold only 30 of the 99 state legislative chambers (Nebraska has a unicameral chamber), and only one of those 30 (the Kentucky House of Representatives) is in the South.

When they control redistricting, Democrats have traditionally created “coalition districts” that tend to include a variety of different liberal groups — blacks, Hispanics, progressive whites — sprinkled with independents and Republicans to form Democratic-leaning seats, according to Kimball Brace, president of Virginia-based Election Data Services.

He said Republicans have taken the opposite tack, drawing districts that tend to lump together voters with similar demographic backgrounds. That approach has created deep-red districts and very blue ones, winnowing the ranks of moderate lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

“What you see now is a much more polarizing constituency where you get the Freedom Caucus,” Brace said, referring to the group of hard-line conservatives that helped send former speaker John Boehner packing. “Democrats are never going to take back the House this decade because of that kind of line-drawing.”

Election Data Services, which has consulted with numerous states on redistricting, projects that House delegations in 17 states will either grow or shrink when congressional seats are reapportioned in 2020 for the 2022 election cycle.

Eight states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas and Virginia — are expected to gain at least one seat. Nine states — Alabama, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and West Virginia — are expected to lose a seat.

Of those 17 states, seven are controlled by Republicans, three are controlled by Democrats, and seven have divided state governments, though that could change by the time lines are redrawn.

It seems obvious that Republicans would benefit by gaining congressional seats in states where they control redistricting. But they could benefit even if they lose seats, simply by drawing new lines that force Democratic incumbents to run against each other.

Democrats acknowledge their challenge is systemic and might take more than an election cycle or two to fix.

Democrats regroup

A task force assembled by the Democratic National Committee last week issued a “Victory Action Plan” with recommendations designed to rebuild party strength. Among the recommendations: “values-based” messaging, recruiting the next generation of Democratic candidates from a cross-section of backgrounds, and working with state parties on redistricting strategies.

“While the party has successfully grown and improved its ability to support candidates at all levels of government, recent election cycles make it clear that the DNC must do more to ensure that its success at the national level is reverberating more strongly down the electoral ballot,” the task force report said.

The task force was led by Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, who is being replaced next month by Tea Party Republican Matt Bevin, another sign of the challenges facing Democrats in the South.

There are glimmers of hope for the party.

Eleven of the 14 “toss-up” districts are held by Republicans, according to the Cook Political Report. In addition, three Republican-held seats (two in Florida, one in Nevada) are considered potential pickups for Democrats next year, while only one Democratic seat (Rep. Gwen Graham, D-Tallahassee) is in danger of flipping to Republicans.

In addition, more states are exploring the example of California, Arizona and New Jersey, which leave it up to independent commissions to draw congressional lines. Seven states — Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming — don’t redistrict because each state has only one at-large House member.

Democrats could pick up a congressional seat here or there over the coming years. And their prospects could grow significantly in 2018 if voters elect a Republican president next year who turns out to be unpopular, Wasserman said.

But it may not really matter what tactics Democrats employ because much of their base (white liberals and minorities) live in or around large cities.

Keeping compact communities in the same congressional district is often seen as preferable to splitting them up, so removing partisan bias from the process still would benefit Republicans, who tend to dominate in suburban and rural areas, Wasserman said.

“It’s an unfortunate turn of migration patterns for the Democratic Party,” he said. “Democrats can’t control where their voters choose to live. And yet, for a variety of reasons, Democrats are urbanizing as a party in a way that’s unhelpful to their legislative prospects.”

Contact Ledyard King at lking@gannett.com; Twitter: @LedgeKing