Even as the GOP's hopes of re-taking the Senate get slimmer, their chances of running up the score in the House get fatter. Just this week, the redistricting plan most likely to be implemented in Texas sent Dems reeling. The plan would
...likely end the House career of Democrat Ken Bentsen and would threaten the reelection of at least four other Democrats: Charles W. Stenholm, Jim Turner, Max Sandlin and Chet Edwards [and would] produce at least three new GOP seats -- including the two new seats added to the delegation because of the state's population increase in the 2000 census.
Dem strategists are running scared today:
The Texas plan, which some Democrats suggested could result in the loss of as many as nine seats, would put the GOP so far ahead in the national competition to win a majority of at least 218 seats that the odds of a Democratic House would become prohibitive given the declining number of marginal, competitive seats across the country.
"I can't tell you how bad this is," a Democratic strategist said yesterday. "If this stands, and we have to live with just a one-seat gain in California, it is going to be very hard to win the House back."
Nationwide, with plans in place and expected to be in place, the GOP expects to pick up 8 - 10 seats. Not quite the 15 - 30 seat gain that I once predicted, but still enough to put the chamber out of easy reach for the Dems until 2012.
Posted by wasylik at October 5, 2001 05:16 PM