House races uncertain amid Harris’s ascension to Democratic ticket

The ascension of Vice President Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket has bolstered the party’s chances of keeping control of the White House for another four years, but the effect on House races is much less clear.

Since replacing President Biden as the Democrats’ likely nominee, the vice president has delivered a bolt of energy to a deflated base, sparking a boost in grassroots enthusiasm, a spike in campaign fundraising and fresh hopes that Democrats can keep former President Trump from a second term.

But if the roster change has shifted the Electoral College and other state-level races toward Democrats, the impact is much more murky in the House, where gerrymandering is routine, polling is less reliable and outcomes are complicated by the penchant of some voters to split the ticket to bring a balance of power to Washington — a trend that’s forecast to be more pronounced this year than in cycles of the recent past.

The result, according to leading election handicappers, is that the House remains up for grabs as Democrats head to their convention in Chicago this week.

“Since Harris got in, there’s been very little public House polling on individual races, but the House generic ballot polling has been fairly static for a while in polling averages, with either Democrats or Republicans up a tiny amount,” Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a political newsletter and website from the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said in an email.

Kondik is predicting that whichever party wins the White House will also carry the House, but because the presidential race is too close to call at this point, so is the lower chamber.

“I’d basically just say it’s been tied.”

David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst at the Cook Political Report, another nonpartisan election handicapper, noted that a major factor in deciding who controls the House remains perhaps the most obvious one: voter turnout. The side that can energize the most voters to the polls tends to win, and in that respect Harris has been a boon for Democrats since President Biden — whose approval rating was low and dropping — bowed out of the race.

“Before Biden dropped out, there was a likelihood that Democratic base turnout was going to suffer from a lack of belief in the candidate’s ability to perform his job for another four years. But also there was a fatalism that was about to set in about the polling in the race, and how much he trailed in these key states, which in and of itself could have tanked races down the ballot,” Wasserman said.

“Now, Democrats sense that they’re back in the game, so we’re probably looking at a more normal turnout scenario, which is good news for Democratic candidates for Congress.”

The enthusiasm surge will be particularly beneficial in states like California and New York, he added, where Democrats are most reliant on turning out two key demographics of their base: minorities and young voters.

But Wasserman also offered two notes of caution for Democrats before they start measuring the drapes in the Speaker’s office. First, given the broad diversity of congressional districts, there’s no certainty that Harris, a liberal with roots in San Francisco, will benefit every Democratic candidate. And in fact, those candidates vying in redder districts might have fared better with Biden at the top of the ticket.

That list, he said, includes battleground districts held by Reps. Jared Golden (D-Maine), Mary Peltola (D-Alaska) and Matt Cartwright (D), who represents Biden’s hometown of Scranton, Pa.

“That’s a place where Joe Biden might have run better than Kamala Harris will run,” he said.

The second big question complicating House predictions involves so-called strategic voters: those who don’t much like either candidate at the top of the ticket, and therefore will vote for the opposite party down the ballot as a check on unilateral power.

Wasserman said polling earlier in the year — when Biden was still in the race — revealed that an unusually large number of voters were ready to split the ticket in an effort to prevent any one side from controlling both Congress and the White House. What’s unclear is whether that trend will hold with Harris now in the race.

“To the extent Independent voters believe there’s a good chance Donald Trump’s going to win the election, and they dislike both Trump and Harris, they could choose to vote for a Democrat downballot as a check on Trump moving the country too far in his direction. This is what we’ve seen benefiting Democratic Senate and House candidates for months now,” Wasserman said.

“The question is: If voters start to believe that Harris is the favorite in the race, does that split-ticket dynamic still benefit Democrats? And that we don’t know yet.”

At the state level — where the lines are cleaner, the polling is better and the funds flow more freely — the trends are easier to read. Since Biden quit the race, and Harris jumped in, the analysts at Sabato’s Crystal Ball have shifted their presidential prediction toward Democrats in three states — Georgia, Minnesota and New Hampshire — while those at the Cook Political Report shifted Georgia, Arizona and Nevada in the same direction.

On Thursday, the Cook analysts reported a similar trend in Senate races, releasing new poll results indicating that Democratic candidates for the upper chamber in six swing states — Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and North Carolina — are all leading their GOP opponents by a comfortable margin.

Those trends have invigorated House Democrats, who suddenly feel a wind at their backs and are now more bullish, with Harris on the ticket, about flipping control of the chamber.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said she’s seeing an “explosive enthusiasm and momentum” in South Florida.

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) said the new ticket is “just gonna be rocket fuel for Democratic turnout.”

And Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), who heads the House Democrats’ campaign arm, said the Harris-Walz roster change has “injected huge enthusiasm across the country” — and just in time for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next week.

“We’ve seen great turnout from volunteers working to get out the vote. We had our biggest fundraising day right after Vice President Harris announced her candidacy,” she said. “We’re seeing it everywhere across the country.”

Yet other Democrats are warning colleagues not to take anything for granted.

“There’s no question that there’s new energy … But I don’t think this election’s over either,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), who heads the Democrats’ messaging arm. “I’m not on a sugar high. … We got our work to do.”

Across the aisle, Republicans have a vastly different view of how Harris has impacted the House map. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is predicting Republicans will not only keep control of the lower chamber, but will pad their numbers — particularly with the arrival of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as Harris’s running mate. Republicans consider both candidates to be far too liberal to connect with voters in the battleground states that will decide the presidential contest.

Election handicappers are also warning that clear forecasts regarding control of the House are premature, as voters recalibrate their thinking given the new Democratic ticket, and all sides await new polling — internal and external alike — that might provide a cleaner picture of final results.

“What’s fluid right now is the psychology of voters as to the outcome of the [presidential] election,” Wasserman said. “Whereas in May and June it seemed that most voters expected that Trump would win.

“Now it’s much less clear.”

Mychael Schnell contributed. 

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