House Math

Winning just 194 seats to 241 for Republicans in the House of Representatives last Nov. 8, Democrats face a daunting task in 2018 to win the 218 seats needed to retake the chamber because, politically, Republicans own the south as Dixiecrats once did.

The crimson flood that drenched Dixie is perhaps currently best demonstrated in the Aug. 15 GOP primary for the U.S. Senate between three arch-reactionary candidates. One is named Strange and the other two named Brooks and Moore could just as well be called Stranger and Strangest for all that they relate to what some of us still like to think is the norm in the United States — a dubious proposition of late.

If Democrats are going to retake the House they have to gain 24 seats outside the south in places like Orange County, Calif. Orange County is shared among seven House districts — four held by Republicans. But the county, once a bastion of Reagan conservatism, has taken on an increasingly blue tinge and Democrats see chances of gains there in 2018.

Among the few seats Democrats gained last year were one in Florida and one in Virginia, leaving Republican southern congressional totals hardly dented.  In the 11 states that fought the United States as the Confederate States of America, Republicans came out of the 2016 election with 99 seats. The 11 states are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

Bill Moyers, a key assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson, is said to have said that on the day LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law LBJ, a southerner, said prophetically, “I think we have just delivered the south to the Republican Party for the rest of my life and yours.” LBJ died in 1973. Mr. Moyers, of course, is still very much alive.

LBJ, a southerner, knew and prophesied that after nearly three-and-a-half centuries of slavery, rebellion, Civil War and Jim Crow race did and would trump all else in the south, where Republicans seized their opportunity with a race-based “Southern Strategy” that, 50 years later, is now their Trump-card across the south.

The strategy worked. It propelled Republicans to control of the House the same way “Jim Crow” gave Democrats a near lock on the House from 1932 to 1994.

There is hard evidence for this in the House majorities elected in 1962 and 2016.

Elected in November 1962 and sworn into office in January 1963, the 88^th Congress relied on a truly bipartisan majority to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act over near unanimous opposition from southern House members.

The House elected in 1962 had 258 Democrats and 177 Republicans. Republicans had a slim Republican majority of 165 to 162 seat outside the 11 deep-south states. But in those 11 states Democrats won 96 seats to just 12 for Republicans.

In 1964, 136 Republicans joined 154 Democrats to pass the civil rights law. But in the 11 southern delegations the vote was 8 Democrats yes against 87 Democrats and 10 Republicans opposed to civil rights.

That moderated Republican Party no longer exists.

Fast forward to 2016. The House elected Nov. 8 returned 241 Republicans and 194 Democrats — almost a mirror reversal of 1962 in the national totals but also in the 11 southern states.

In the south there were 99 Republicans elected to 39 Democrats (since 1962, population shifts have increased those 11 states total of House seats from 112 to 138):  Most of the Democrats’ southern house seats are in gerrymandered minority-population heavy districts or in rare southern blue territory like the Washington, D.C. Virginia suburbs or around university cities.

This is the resulting House math:

Total seats: 435. Needed to control: 218.

With a head start of 99 seats in the Confederacy, Republican math is 218 minus 99 = 119 seats needed from the remaining 297 seats in the other 39 states — 34%.

For the Democrats, reduced to 39 seats in the former Confederacy, the basic calculation is 218 minus 39 = 179 seats needed from the remaining 297 seats in the other 39 states — 61%.

If you then factor in dozens of other decisively Republican districts in red states like Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma, Kentucky Kansas, Indiana, and West Virginia; if you add in GOP districts in big chunks of overall blue states that locally vote Republican for Congress, like central Pennsylvania and upstate New York, if you recognize that even a blue state like New Jersey, with 12 total seats, elected 5 Republicans — then the Democrats’ number becomes all the more daunting.

They need to win 80% of the 297 seats outside the 11-state GOP confederate base. On Nov. 8, Democrats won 155 – 52% — of those 297 seats to 142 for the GOP. To get to 218 seats they need to win 24 more, probably almost all outside the deep-south unless they can begin to find one or two more in Dixie that they can turn.

Is it possible for Democrats to ride a decisive national election some day, perhaps 2020, to regain House control? Could the present circumstances in which the nation feels like it is unraveling produce a wave election in their favor in 2018? Both outcomes are possible. Neither is in any way knowable now.

It could become more possible after the 2020 Census — providing Democrats win back state legislative chambers and governors’ offices because state legislatures draw the congressional maps following each census and governors sign the maps into law.

The first House election in which new maps will be in effect will be 2022. Coming out of the 2016 election, Republicans have control of two-thirds of governors’ offices and two thirds of state legislatures.

So for now while the Stars and Stripes flies atop the U.S. Capitol, it is the Stars and Bars that guarantees Republican control of the House.

The House delegations elected last Nov. 8 in the 11 southern states broke as follows between the two parties.

Alabama, 6R, 1D

Arkansas, 4R, 0D

Florida, 16R, 11D

Georgia, 10R, 4D

Louisiana, 5R, 1D

Mississippi, 3R, 1D

North Carolina, 10R, 3D

South Carolina, 6R, 1D

Tennessee, 7R, 2D

Texas, 25R, 11D

Virginia, 7R, 4D