| Despite their desperate attempts to keep control of the House, Republicans are poised to lose next week. National Journal reports that “Republicans threw out the rulebook to hold onto their slim House majority” by gerrymandering Texas and Florida while suing to remove limits on coordinated committee spending.
No amount of rigging by Republicans can overcome the fact that voters know they’re to blame for the cost of living crisis.
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National Journal: The campaign cycle that threw out the rulebook
- Regardless of next week’s results, this midterm cycle might be remembered for forever changing how House campaigns traditionally unfold. Goaded by the White House, Republicans sparked an unprecedented redistricting war and successfully sued to remove limits on coordinated committee spending, empowering partisan state legislatures and national committees in the battle for legislative control.
- These unprecedented moves may not be enough to beat back the blue wave. Democrats appear set to retake the House—potentially by a wide margin—but the GOP’s aggression likely lessened the blow.
- President Trump and his allies twisted arms—and sometimes ended careers—in statehouses across the country to redraw congressional maps in Republicans’ favor.
- “You don’t sit there and try to rig the election starting in July of the off year with mid-decade redistricting—which has never been done before—unless you are confident, as confident as we were even back then, that they were going to lose the majority,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Deputy Executive Director Will Van Nuys told National Journal.
- Van Nuys said Democrats developed a three-pronged strategy for handling the redistricting war: Recruit strong candidates in districts with even a slim chance of becoming competitive; fight the process in states like Indiana, where the push fell short; and go on the offense in states like Utah and Missouri, where legal action helped Democrats save seats.
- In another series of legal battles, national GOP committees successfully lifted limits on how much money they could spend on coordinated campaigns with their nominees. Prior campaign finance law set limits on how much national committees like the NRCC could spend in collaboration with campaigns: between $65,000 and $130,000 depending on the House district. The Supreme Court ruling removed those limits, allowing Republicans to spend an additional $126 million in coordinated spending and Democrats an additional $46 million, according to Reuters.
- Van Nuys said Democrats are prepared to take advantage of the coordinated-spending rulings and are focusing those efforts on the final weeks of the election. He said the GOP’s impetus for the lawsuit came because of strong fundraising by Democratic candidates over the years.
- “We have dealt with the most Republican attempts to rig the midterms, and we are playing in the most districts across the most states in the country, and we have been the most aggressive in fighting back on them,” Van Nuys said. “[We] can guarantee that not only have we been successful on that front, but we will win the majority on Election Day.”
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