House Democrats spent the past two elections crowing about ousting Republicans from longtime red districts that had suddenly grown competitive. Now, Republicans are about to make many of those targets disappear from the battlefield entirely.
GOP mapmakers are readying to shore up more than a dozen of the most hotly contested House battlegrounds from the past four years, narrowing Democrats’ path to maintain control of the House, as they prepare for midterm elections that are historically tough for the party in power.
Democrats got their first taste of a shrinking playing field on Tuesday, when Republican state lawmakers in Indiana unveiled a draft congressional plan that would transform the state’s most competitive district into a relatively safe red seat by siphoning off voters in deep-blue Marion County, which includes Indianapolis.
Just like that, Indiana’s 5th District, where both parties spent well over $10 million last year, became an easy hold for freshman GOP Rep. Victoria Spartz.
“Clearly, this is a bit of a kneecapping to anyone who’s interested in running as a Democrat in Indiana-05,” said Christina Hale, the 2020 Democratic nominee who narrowly lost to Spartz.
“The deck is stacked,” Hale said. It’s not impossible for Democrats to seriously contest the seat again, she conceded, but it won’t be competitive soon. “We probably won’t see a real race for a number of years.”
Even with Congress more narrowly divided than it’s been in two decades, Democrats are stuck on defense — still scarred from 2020, when they vowed to send Republicans deeper into the minority only to end up losing 13 incumbents of their own.
Now Republicans get a total reset in many of the places where they had their closest calls last year. Besides Indiana, they can also easily shore up the increasingly purple suburbs with ruby-red rural areas in competitive districts in places like South Carolina, Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, Utah and — perhaps most importantly — Texas, where Republicans are poised to bolster at least a half-dozen vulnerable members.
The moves will all boost Republicans’ chances to flip control of the House, and top Democratic strategists are well aware of the headwinds.
“It’s easier to defend the castle than to storm it,” said Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “The first priority is to defend those incumbents,” he added.
The DCCC telegraphed its strategy earlier this year when it announced it would target 21 Republican districts. The list was notably devoid of any targets in North Carolina and only two each in Florida and Texas — three states where Republicans have total control of the redistricting process. By this point in the past election, the committee had declared plans to contest twice as many GOP seats.
The DCCC’s own post-election autopsy revealed the shortcomings of its 2020 game plan. Maloney, who replaced Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) as the chair…
Read More: Democrats’ House targets vanish as GOP redraws new maps