'We always knew tonight would be a challenging night,' Steve Israel says. House Dems deep in abyss

After a night of punishing losses, House Democrats are deeper in the minority than they’ve been in nearly 80 years — and party strategists say it could take years — possibly until after the next round of political map-drawing in the 2020s — to dig out of the hole.

With votes still being counted in more than a dozen congressional districts, Democrats were on track to shed 13 to 16 seats, an outcome that would leave the party with as few as 185 of the chamber’s 435 seats. The last time Democrats had such a small House delegation, Herbert Hoover was president, Charlie Chaplin was making movies, and Alka Seltzer was just hitting the shelves.


The Democratic casualties spanned the nation, stretching from the farmlands of the Midwest, to the Texas border, and even to liberal enclaves in the Northeast. But the most damaging defeats occurred in the South, where two popular Democratic incumbents lost in deeply conservative districts that will be hard for the party to win back anytime soon.

( Follow 2014 midterm elections results)

Georgia Rep. John Barrow, a savvy campaigner known for his colorful TV ads, and West Virginia Rep. Nick Rahall, a nearly four-decade veteran of the chamber, represented their party’s best hopes of retaining a congressional presence in those conservative strongholds. But, in an indication of just how far their party has fallen out of favor in the region, both longtime congressmen were blown away, losing by more than 9 points.

Democrats also lost two deeply conservative seats held by retiring moderate Democrats in Utah and North Carolina, Reps. Jim Matheson and Mike McIntyre, respectively. Matheson had represented his district for 14 years and McIntyre for 18 years. But the seats, which Democrats conceded long before Election Day, are almost certainly in the GOP column to stay.

Democratic officials wouldn’t discuss the party’s grim long-term House prospects, lest they look like they‘re surrendering. But some of them conceded the obvious.

( House election results by state)

“I won’t sugarcoat it,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel said. “We always knew tonight would be a challenging night, and it was for Democrats at every level.”

Heading into this year’s midterm, control of the chamber had never been seriously in question. The realities of redistricting and demographics have created a congressional map that is heavily slanted against Democrats. And that fact, party strategists fear, could make capturing control of the House a very steep endeavor until after the next round of line drawing, which will follow the 2020 election.

According to the Cook Political Report, 247 of the House’s 435 districts favor the GOP, while 188 tilt Democratic. In 2012, even as Mitt Romney was taking a national drubbing, he managed to win 21 more congressional districts than President Barack Obama.

( Also on POLITICO: Obama: Midterms? What midterms?)

Democrats were also up against history: The party occupying the Oval Office during the sixth year of a presidency almost always loses congressional seats. But the scope of the GOP victories left Democratic strategists shellshocked. Many of them believed they’d lose a dozen seats at most.

The most surprising result was in California, where Democratic Rep. Jim Costa, who was widely seen as safe, was trailing an obscure and underfunded Republican farmer named Johnny Tacherra by more than 700 votes. The Associated Press had yet to call the race. The fact it’s even close speaks volumes about how bad a year it is for Democrats: Two years ago, Obama won the Central Valley, majority-Latino district with nearly 60 percent of the vote.

Democrats were equally stunned to lose a Las Vegas-area congressional district that Obama carried with 54 percent of the vote, and a district in the president’s backyard of suburban Chicago where he won 58 percent.

( Also on POLITICO: How Democrats lost the Senate)

Democrats suffered especially painful defeats in the Northeast, a region that’s been favorable to them in recent years but that broke away from several of their candidates this time. Democrats lost three seats in New York and one seat each in Maine and New Hampshire. Two years ago in the Maine district, Obama won 53 percent of the vote; this year, the Democratic congressional candidate, Emily Cain, received 42 percent.

The prospect of many years more in the minority has some Democratic strategists fretting the next round of candidate recruitment. It’s a lot harder to persuade blue-chip candidates to jump in when they’ll be consigned to back-bench status for the party out of power. They also worry that longtime lawmakers could choose to retire rather than wait out the next crack at a committee chairmanship, or just being part of the governing party.

That could have a vicious cycle effect, some party operatives say: more retirements, fewer top-notch recruits, more opportunities for Republicans to pick up seats.

Other Democrats aren’t so pessimistic. Once the party gets over the sting of the election, they’ll be look ahead to a much brighter forecast: A presidential election year that’s certain to be kinder to the party than a midterm, when Democrats often struggle to get their supporters out to the polls.

The glass-half-full Democrats also point out that in 2016 a number of Republicans who won seats Tuesday will now have to defend districts that are plainly vulnerable to Democratic takeover. If all the current vote tallies hold in each of the uncalled 2014 races, there will be 28 House Republicans representing districts that Obama won in 2012 and just five Democrats in seats that Romney won.

But on Wednesday, it was Republicans who were sounding a confident note.

“It could be a 100-year majority,” National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Greg Walden told reporters.

Lauren French contributed to this report.

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