The flip side of the equation
It's interesting how many GOP members of Congress won Biden's districts.
You probably don’t know this because chances are you don’t follow the situation, but there’s an effort to flip Congress next year by simply winning back seats won by Republicans in districts Biden carried two years earlier. Unbelievably, there are 18 such members of Congress, which tells me that Joe Biden was definitely a flash in the pan. It’s likely there would have been more of these members of Congress had the red wave actually panned out last year.
Electorally, a lot can change in two years, especially in the case of many of these districts that were revised by redistricting. And you would think the reverse would be true, but it’s not: just five Democrats won in districts carried by Donald Trump, with one of them being my former home district, Ohio’s Ninth District. (I’m not sure what the fine folks of my former home county did to deserve the renewed punishment after two decades of being drawn out of it. For a state that’s supposedly gerrymandered Republican, they sure did my peeps dirty.)
But there’s much more to the equation than that. One also has to consider whether Biden would actually carry these districts again, given his subpar record. These may have been districts that normally trend Republican but saw independent voters decide to take a chance on Biden in a time of uncertainty.
Unless a court intervenes, it appears that the districts that were drawn for 2022 will still be in effect in 2024, so that aspect shouldn’t change. We may not even get a change in the two main competitors, although Joe Biden keeps postponing his official re-election announcement. So the election for Congress, particularly in the House, may depend on just how well the Republicans pass helpful legislation and how well they deal with the inevitable push to make MAGA Republicans (or anyone else who runs as a Republican) sound like extremists.
Some say that the number of districts which vote one way for President and the opposite way for Congress will continue to shrink as the electorate and parties become more polarized, but I think there will always be some that fall in the middle.
The trick to me, though, is pushing more of them to the right. That’s part of my job here.