Dems would need huge electoral wave to win US House: report

Democrats who think the backlash against President Trump will win them the House in this year’s midterm elections may have to think again.

In order to win a majority in the House of Representatives — roughly two dozen seats — Democrats would have to pick up a nearly unprecedented 11 percentage points nationwide, according to a Brennan Center for Justice report.

The surge would be necessary to counter-act Republican “extreme gerrymandering,” or aggressive re-drawing of district boundaries, the report said.

“It would be the equivalent of a tsunami,'” said Michael Li, a senior counsel who heads up redistricting work for the center, which is based at New York University School of Law. “Democrats would have to win larger than any sort of recent midterm wave — almost double what they got in 2006 — in order to win a narrow majority.''

The center has joined lawsuits in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania claiming Republicans unfairly changed district boundaries in those states.

The center also joined a lawsuit before the U.S. Supreme Court filed by Republicans in Maryland who claims Democrats there changed boundaries in one district to preserve an advantage.

The Dems haven’t won 11% in a midterm election since 1974 when they won by 14% and gained 49 seats.

Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who is chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a statement to the Associated Press that the Brennan Center report “makes clear that Republican gerrymandering has undermined the voting power of Americans and threatens our democracy.”

Matt Walter, president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, told the wire service that the report is part of a liberal narrative.

“As called for by the Constitution, map-drawing is a political process left to the authority of state legislatures, and this so-called study is another attempt by Democrats to undermine that process and replace it with liberal courts, or cherry-picked experts from liberal faculty rooms to draw maps that rig the system for Democrats,'” Walter said in a statement.

With News Wire Services