How Current Presidential Polling May Impact House Races

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— On Monday, Rep. Angie Craig (D, MN-2) became the first House Democrat from a marginal district to call for President Joe Biden to drop his reelection effort.

— With Biden intent on continuing his campaign, we thought it would be worth examining how his current polling could impact the House playing field.

— If the national popular vote were tied, we would expect Donald Trump to carry 10 additional House seats, compared to his 2020 result.

— If Trump won the popular vote by closer to three points, about where national polling suggests he is now, he could be positioned to flip about two-dozen previously Biden-won districts.

— It is possible that, even though the practice has been on the decline for some time, ticket-splitting may make something of a comeback in 2024.

Biden and House Democrats

On Monday, President Biden, amidst the continuing fallout from his poor debate performance late last month, sent a letter to the members of his party in Congress. The overriding takeaway from Biden’s message? “I am firmly committed to staying in this race.”

As we laid out last week, Biden’s fate—and, quite possibly, that of his party—is entirely in his own hands. Because Biden won most of his primary contests in landslides, he is set to arrive in Chicago at next month’s Democratic National Convention controlling almost all of the pledged delegates.

In the immediate days after the debate, the loudest voices urging Biden to abandon his reelection effort were largely limited to figures in liberal media. The morning after the debate, for instance, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who hosts what is reportedly the president’s favorite morning show, called on Biden to step down as the presumptive Democratic nominee.

But last week, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D, TX-37) became the first sitting House Democrat to go on record asking Biden to step aside. Doggett made for an interesting, if outright ironic, messenger: at 77, he is not much younger than either of the current presumptive major-party nominees, and, as he is a sure bet for reelection in his Austin-area seat, Doggett will begin the next Congress as the Texas delegation’s most senior member.

After a couple of Democrats from similarly safe blue districts went on record echoing Doggett’s sentiments, Rep. Angie Craig (D, MN-2) caught our attention on Monday: she became the first Democratic member from a marginal district to call for Biden to step aside. We are making a bit of a distinction here, as even though Reps. Jared Golden (D, ME-2) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D, WA-3) both publicly doubted Biden’s ability to beat Trump, neither has actually called for him to leave the race. As of this writing (Wednesday afternoon), Rep. Pat Ryan (D, NY-18) had also asked Biden to drop out (Biden carried Ryan’s Hudson Valley seat by 8 points in 2020).

But whatever public stances they take towards him, few could have more at stake in Biden’s performance than the frontline House Democrats. Given this, we wanted to explore how Biden’s standing in some of the key House districts could look if his numbers don’t improve.

Table 1 includes the two-dozen closest Biden-won districts, based on how the districts that will be used this year would have voted in the 2020 election.

Table 1: Potential Biden 2020/Trump 2024 districts

Notes: Open seats are highlighted in yellow; Table 1 considers two-party totals.

For context, though Republicans currently hold a narrow majority in the House, 224 districts on the 2024 map would have backed Biden in 2020, while Trump would have claimed 211. Using the 2020 results as a baseline for a uniform swing, Table 1 considers two scenarios.

The first scenario features a tied national popular vote. Before the debate, Biden was running about even with Trump in FiveThirtyEight’s national poll aggregator. This is the rosier of the two scenarios for Biden, as it assumes he can recover the ground he’s lost since the debate.

For this, each district swings about 4.6 percentage points to Trump (a number commensurate with Biden’s actual 2020 two-party popular vote margin). With a tied popular vote, we could expect 10 Biden 2020 seats to flip to Trump, with four more districts being within a few tenths of a point of doing so. Of course, in reality, things likely wouldn’t be as tidy, as some districts would shift more than the national swing while some would see less pronounced, or even leftward, shifts.

Considering their marginal nature, it isn’t too surprising that, in terms of their current representation, these 10 hypothetical Biden-to-Trump seats are currently evenly divided between the parties.

With the exception of CA-40, where Rep. Young Kim (R) holds a seat that is typically redder than what its presidential topline may suggest, all the GOP-held seats that flip in this scenario are hosting races that the Crystal Ball rates as competitive (we are defining that term to encompass seats that we rate as either Toss-up or Leans Democratic/Republican). First-term Rep. Tom Kean (R, NJ-7) would hold the closest Trump-won seat. As we mentioned last month in our Virginia primary preview, if Biden slips only a few points in our state, we could easily see the Virginia Beach-area VA-2 flipping to Trump, as it does in this case. In Arizona, GOP Reps. Dave Schweikert (R, AZ-1) and Juan Ciscomani (R, AZ-6) both won with less than 51% of the vote in 2022 but would also find themselves in Trump seats.

Democrats, meanwhile, would be defending a pair of open, Trump-won seats in Michigan: the adjacent pair of Districts 7 and 8—the former covers the area around Lansing while the latter includes Flint. Two other Democratic-held Great Lakes state seats in this category are OH-13 (Akron) and PA-7 (the Lehigh Valley). While these seats could get tougher for their Democratic incumbents—who both have some of their own strengths—the concurrent Senate races could work in their favor. Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Bob Casey (D-PA) will almost certainly run better than Biden in their respective states, and they seem likely to at least carry those types of marginal seats.

Finally, in North Carolina, first-term Rep. Don Davis (D, NC-1) was given a tougher seat when the state adopted a new GOP-drawn map last year. In 2022, Davis won his seat (which was bluer than the version he is running in now) by close to 5 points while NC-1’s result in the concurrent Senate race was about even. So a 2.9-point Trump win in his district would not be insurmountable for Davis, although he may not be as well-positioned to outperform the top of the ticket in counties that are newer to him.

The second scenario is where the playing field would really start tilting against Democrats. As of Monday, RealClearPolitics’s national aggregator gave Trump a 47.5%-44.1% lead over Biden, while the president trailed Trump by a slightly lesser 42.1%-39.7% in FiveThirtyEight’s average. In splitting the difference between the two outlets, we came up with a 3.3-point two-party margin for Trump.

The far-right column on Table 1 reflects a uniform swing from the actual 2020 result to a 3.3% Trump popular vote advantage in the two-party vote. All told, Democrats would hold 15 of these 24 potential Biden-to-Trump seats. The aforementioned Rep. Angie Craig would actually hold the most marginal Trump-won seat in the House under this scenario. Importantly, over the past few cycles, Craig’s district has tracked well with Minnesota overall (meaning, in this case, one would expect the state’s electoral votes to be in the GOP column for the first time since 1972, albeit very narrowly so).

While we won’t namecheck every seat that flips to Trump in this category, arguably the most important district here is NE-2. While GOP Rep. Don Bacon has been a frequent Democratic target since he was elected in 2016, his Omaha-district is also critical at the presidential level. In a situation where Biden holds the “Blue Wall” trio of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin but loses the Sun Belt states of Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada, NE-2 could provide Biden’s 270th electoral vote. In fact, we would go a little bit further and say that this configuration would represent Biden’s likeliest path to 270 (Crystal Ball Managing Editor Kyle Kondik discussed this scenario when we moved some Electoral College ratings last month). With the Nebraska legislature returning to Lincoln for a special session later this month, Gov. Jim Pillen (R) is renewing his push to change the state’s Electoral Vote allocation format to winner-take-all, although legislators turned back a similar effort earlier this year.

Some of the Democratic incumbents in seats that Trump carries in this scenario might still be favored: in South Texas for instance, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D, TX-28) routinely outruns the top of the ticket—Cuellar, who is also under indictment on bribery charges, caught a break last month when it was announced that his trial would not take place before the election. Going farther west, Democrats’ Nevada gerrymander, which served them well in 2022, would begin to buckle, as Rep. Susie Lee (D, NV-3) would have a Trump +1 seat. Still, though Biden’s position has been wanting in Nevada for months by this point, national Republicans have not seemed to take much of an interest in House races there (although that could obviously change).

Aside from the seats listed on Table 1, a uniform swing to Trump would have implications in other hotly-contested races. All three co-chairs of the Blue Dog Coalition—Golden, Gluesenkamp Perez, and Alaska’s Mary Peltola—would be defending double-digit Trump seats in the more extreme scenario (though to be fair to Peltola, Alaska has been a double-digit Republican-won state in presidential contests since 1996). This may explain why Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez have taken a “who cares, he’s going to lose anyway” stance on Biden: if Trump is perceived to be on an easy path back to the White House, red-district voters who may otherwise feel threatened by Democratic control of Washington could be more likely to split their tickets. Marcy Kaptur (D, OH-9), who is running for a historic 22nd term, would have a similar Trump +11 seat. Meanwhile, Democratic offensive opportunities could get less promising. On Long Island, the bluest district that is currently held by a Republican is Rep. Anthony D’Esposito’s NY-4 (we rate the race as Leans Democratic). D’Esposito could still be an underdog, but if Trump’s deficit in the district were cut to 7 points instead of 15, his odds would look less daunting.

Conclusion

The goal of our exercise here wasn’t to predict exactly which seats could flip to Trump, but we thought it was important to explore why some frontline Democrats may be feeling anxious. While precise uniform swings rarely materialize in practice, we would note that Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Alan Abramowitz found that one of the best predictors of Biden’s 2020 margin in a given state was by simply adding three points to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 margin (though there is, of course, more volatility at the district level).

If Trump is truly flipping two-dozen (or more) districts that Biden carried in 2020, it is possible that ticket-splitting may come back in style this year, at least to some degree. In a recent interview with the New Yorker, New York Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn observed that Democrats’ problems could have less to do with their party’s brand and are driven more by Biden himself. According to data compiled by Ethan Chen, in surveys that have come out since the debate, House Democrats have outrun Biden in national generic ballot polling by an average of a little over 3 points.

For now, our overall House ratings continue to reflect a chamber that we feel remains competitive, although it is fair to say that as the Democrats’ odds in the presidential race go down, so too do their chances of flipping the House.

J. Miles Coleman is an elections analyst for Decision Desk HQ and a political cartographer. Follow him on Twitter @jmilescoleman.

See Other Political Commentary by J. Miles Coleman.

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Views expressed in this column are those of the author, not those of Rasmussen Reports. Comments about this content should be directed to the author or syndicate.