Republican incumbents who survived 2018 are in safer districts.
How could Democrats possibly top their success from 2018? Check the list.
Fresh off picking up at least 40 seats nationally – a race in North Carolina remains in limbo – to take control of the House of Representatives, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, recently unveiled a 2020 target list of more than 30 GOP-held districts across the country that the party believes could be flipped in its direction.
The names include a pair of embattled incumbents in a California delegation so Democratic-heavy – Democrats hold 46 of the state’s 53 House seats – that there simply aren’t many GOP seats left to flip.
The list highlights a possible contrast between California and the rest of the country in the upcoming election cycle.
While national Democrats are pitching 2020 as a continuation of a power shift that began last November – “(2018) was just the tip of the iceberg for Democrats,” committee Chairwoman Cheri Bustos, an Illinois congresswoman, said in a news release – the seven GOP House members remaining in California appear well suited to buck that trend, at least in this state. By several measures, those districts, including four in Southern California, are safer for the GOP than the battleground districts that flipped in 2018.
Unlike voters in the five Southern California House districts – four in Orange County and one in Los Angeles County – taken from Republicans last November, voters in the state’s remaining GOP districts are fans of President Donald Trump. When Trump was on the ballot in 2016, they chose him over Hillary Clinton by an average of 16 percentage points.
Those seven GOP districts also are whiter, and have a lower percentage of residents holding bachelor’s or advanced college degrees, than the state as a whole.
Such factors favor a California Republican Party that otherwise is struggling for relevancy . Democrats control all statewide offices and hold a supermajority in Sacramento. What’s more, California is the one state in America where “Republican” is now the third choice for political registration, trailing “Democrat” and “No Party Preference.”
Still, to hear national Republicans tell it, recent Democratic gains in California and elsewhere are signs of overreach – not popularity – and the party’s politics will backfire in 2020.
“The Democratic Party has become the Party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, socialized health care, and open borders,” said Torunn Sinclair, spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Democrats in 2018 were helped by the fact that many House Republicans supported ideas – tax cuts for the wealthy; stripping down government health care – that turned out to be unpopular with most voters, said Rob Pyers of the nonpartisan California Target Book, which studies legislative races.
