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We welcome back to the program.
David Wasserman of Cook Political Report.
He serves as their senior editor and elections analyst here to talk about those House and races, the other things connected to campaign 2024.
Hello there.
Hey, it's not as if we lack for material this morning.
What holds your attention most from year on to Tuesday?
So we have a fascinating race at all levels.
The House is especially fascinating, always has been to me, but we've got a situation where Democrats might have a better shot in the House.
Certainly they have a better shot than in the Senate, but their chances in the House have arguably improved a little bit in the last few weeks and months, even as the presidential race has gotten even tighter and we've seen Kamala Harris's lead narrow.
And there are three reasons why Democrats have an opportunity to flip control of the chamber.
Right now, there are 221 Republican seats, 214 Democratic seats.
So Democrats need to pick up a net of four to make Hakeem Jeffries the Speaker rather than Mike Johnson.
And there are a couple of reasons why they have a decent chance to get there.
The first is that the House is being fought on friendlier terrain for Democrats than the Senate or possibly the Electoral College.
You know, we've got 16 Republicans running for reelection in districts that voted for Joe Biden four years ago.
There are only five Democrats running for re-election in districts that voted for Donald Trump.
And most of those Democrats and Trump districts have decent brands heading into Election Day.
Some could be tough to beat.
The 16 Republicans, most of them are in two blue states where Democrats underperformed in the 2022 midterms, California and New York.
The second reason is you've got a decent number of check and balance voters out there who dislike both presidential candidates.
They don't want either party going too far in the next Congress.
And the dynamic in 2016 and 2020 was a lot of these voters, particularly suburban independents and especially women, they didn't like Donald Trump at the top of the ticket, but they were open to voting for a more normal Republican down ballot.
And Republicans actually had pretty good years in those elections.
But this year, voters are very conflicted about their expectations of who's going to win.
And to the extent a lot of those same voters want a check or an insurance policy on Trump going too far, they're opting for a Democrat down ballot.
We're noticing a handful of key races where Democrats are outperforming Harris in polling.
And then the third reason is that House Republicans have been a mess for the last two years.
It took them 15 votes to elect a speaker last January.
It took just eight Republicans to overthrow that speaker, Kevin McCarthy.
And we've seen downstream fundraising consequences of that leadership turmoil.
Democrats have clobbered Republicans at the candidate fundraising level.
It's a disparity unlike anything we've seen in a long time.
And the median Democratic incumbent, as of the beginning of October, in a competitive race, had three times as much money raised as the median Republican challenger, $6.3 million to $2.2 million, whereas the median Democratic challenger had raised just as much money as the median Republican incumbent.
What that means is that a lot of Democrats are going to be controlling the narrative or have controlled it in the final weeks of the campaign.
And so with that in mind, if you want to ask our guests questions about what is expected when it comes to the House, races, Senate races, top of the ticket to 202-748-8000 for Democrats, 202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8002 for Independents.
And you can always text us at 202-748-8003.
If that, everything you said boils down to specific races that kind of illustrate what you're just talking about, where would you look to first?
Well, when we add up all the seats that at least lean to Democrats, we get 205 districts.
When we add up all the seats that at least lean towards the Republicans, we get 208 districts.
And then we have these 22 toss-ups in the middle.
Our House editor, Aaron Covey, has an excellent overview of all of this up this morning at cookpolitical.com.
We just moved several race ratings, six in Democrats' favor, two in Republicans' favor.
We see several Republican incumbents, including Anthony DiEsposito on Long Island, Brandon Williams in Syracuse, Don Bacon in Omaha, Nebraska, as slight underdogs for reelection.
There's also a number of other vulnerable Republicans who are polling even at best, people like John Duarte in California's Central Valley, or Laurie Chavez-DeReamer in suburban Portland and Bend, Oregon.
But then the insurance policy for Republicans is open seats.
Republicans don't have really any vulnerable open seats to defend, whereas Democrats have four vulnerable open seats.
Two of those are in Michigan.
And one of the seats we moved this morning is Alyssa Slotkin's open seat in Lansing.
This is the seat that Democrat Alyssa Slotkin's leaving to run for Senate.
We believe Republican Tom Barrett might be entering election day with a slight advantage over Democrat Curtis Hurtel.
And so that is the reason why Republicans might still be ever so slight favorites for control of the chamber.
If you had those 22 toss-ups break evenly down the middle, Republicans would end up at 219 to 216 for Democrats, which is even narrower than the majority that they have now.
What we know from history, though, it's likely that most of those toss-ups will break one direction.
Another open seat, if I'm right, Colorado's third district.
Tell us what's going on with that.
That's right.
This is the seat where Republican Lauren Bobert left to run in a much redder district on the opposite end of Colorado.
And the Democrat in this race, Adam Frisch, who came within 546 votes of beating her in 22, really never stopped running.
And he's raised over $14 million for this House race, in part because for much of the cycle, he was running against Bobert, who is probably the best fundraiser that Democrats have ever had.
And so now he's running against a more conventional Republican, an attorney named Jeff Heard from Grand Junction.
And if this race had played out in 2022, it never would have been that close.
But because Frisch has been able to have such a fundraising head start on Heard, Frisch has the communication advantage, particularly on the expensive Denver airwaves, in the closing month of the race.
And that's kept it somewhat close.
We still believe the Republican Heard has an advantage here.
You mentioned Representative Don Bacon, not an unknown quantity in Congress, but what makes his race really tight this time around?
This is a very unique district because Nebraska's second district is in the national spotlight.
Nebraska is one of just two states that allocate its electoral votes by congressional district.
And this Omaha seat has been trending blue for some time.
And polls show that Kamala Harris is a very clear favorite over Donald Trump to carry the one electoral vote from this district.
And that undertow could drag Republican Congressman Don Bacon under.
Now, he has been a survivor.
He has been there since 2016.
He's won the seat even as Joe Biden was carrying the district in 2020.
This time around, he has the same opponent as in 2022, Democratic State Senator Tony Vargas.
And this has been a high-dollar race with Democrats accusing Bacon of getting closer to Trump and the MAGA wing of the party for endorsing a rule change in Nebraska that would have converted the state's electoral votes to winner-take-all.
That was highly controversial in Omaha.
But Bacon is emphasizing his bipartisan credentials.
He actually has an ad featuring the widow of his Democratic predecessor, Brad Ashford, endorsing his reelection campaign and hitting the Democrat as excessively partisan.
Dave Walzerman with us always.
A lot of information there when it comes to these down ballot races.
Again, call the line that best represents you.
We'll start with Beverly.
She's in Wyoming.
Democrats line.
You're on with our guests.
Good morning.
Yeah, I was just wondering why they don't have Democrat ballots, our candidates in Wyoming.
And maybe if they had diversity, they might have a free election.
But it's going to be so hard for these Republicans to get a good base because they're all backstabbing each other.
And the ones that are the rhinos, well, I hope they win.