The National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Tom Emmer of Minnesota says that they are targeting 54 Democratic seats. Republicans need to win justr 17 seats to regain control of the House. He says that he is very confident that they will win the House on November 3rd. That may be true but will they still win on November 12th after Democrats have ample time to manufacture enough votes to win seats they lost on election day.
Emmer laid out the plan the Republicans plan to use in regaining the gavel in the House. He says they are targeting 54 vulnerable seats and need only 17 to win. He notes that there are currently 30 seats that Democrats won in districts that Trump won in 2016. The magic number had been 19 but Republicans flipped two seats in special elections this year. Republicans hold a money edge and enthusiasm for Biden is about the same as having peanut butter and mustard sandwiches for lunch.
Emmer said:
“So we have targeted 54 seats. The top 30 Donald Trump won in 2016. The top 13 of those, Trump won by six points or more. These are Republican seats.”
“We have 43 Democrats currently sitting in seats that are better for Republican candidates than that seat in the California suburbs and we only need 17 to win, so you pick those top 30 and then you’ve got the next 24, of which the vast majority are seats that Hillary Clinton won by the slimmest of margins back in 2016. Keep in mind, in 2018, in the fall, two things. One, we got outspent heavily. We got outspent 2 to 1. The average winning Democrat spent $4 million. The average winning Republican spent $2 million and yet we only lost our majority, with 115 million turning out, only lost our majority by 106,000 votes, Matt. To put it in perspective, there were 8.5 million Trump voters that showed up in 2016 that did not show up in 2018 and I can tell you they’re showing up this fall. I think you’re gonna get all the 8.5 plus more. It’s gonna make a huge difference. I can feel it.”
Emmer added, too, that one of the things working in Republicans’ favor heading into November is strong candidate recruitment. From veterans like Alek Skarlatos—the hero who stopped a terror attack on a train in Europe in 2015 who’s running in Oregon’s Fourth District—to Army Ranger Sean Parnell in Pennsylvania’s 17th among others, to record numbers of women like Yvette Herrell in New Mexico’s Second District or Nancy Mace in South Carolina’s First, the GOP feels strongly about its candidate recruitment.
“You’ve gotta win with great candidates,” Emmer said. “We have a record number of women, after the primary in New York on Tuesday, I think we will have the record number of Republican women on the general ballot in all-time history. We have a record number of minority candidates.”