Republicans Rushing to Save House Seats From Onslaught of Democratic Money

CINCINNATI — As the 2018 midterm campaign enters its final full week, House Republicans are rushing to fortify their defenses in conservative-leaning districts they thought were secure, pouring millions of dollars into a last-minute bid to build a new firewall against Democrats.

Republicans, in defending a 23-seat majority, are likely to lose a handful of open or Democratic-tilting seats as well as another dozen suburban districts that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016, according to political strategists in both parties. But now Republican officials are increasingly concerned about Democratic incursions in some of the remaining 30 competitive districts on the House map where the Republican candidates thought they had an edge.

For the final two weeks of the election, Democratic campaigns and outside groups are on track to substantially outspend Republicans, strategists on both sides say. Democrats are set to spend $143 million on television advertising in House races, compared with $86 million for Republicans, according to one analysis by a Democratic strategist tracking media buys.

Democratic super PACs and other outside groups are poised to outspend their Republican counterparts by a wide margin, erasing an advantage Republicans planned on having.

Much of the Democrats’ unanticipated firepower comes from one source: Michael Bloomberg, the liberal former New York City mayor who may run for president, plans to spend about $20 million on House advertising through his super PAC, Independence USA, in the final week of the campaign, a Bloomberg adviser said.

With Democratic challengers out-raising their opponents in more than 100 districts last quarter and President Donald Trump energizing the left as well as his own base, well-financed House Republican groups are scrambling to put down emerging threats in states like Florida and Washington while augmenting existing spending in Kansas, Virginia and Minnesota.

In a Florida district that includes northern Palm Beach County, where Republicans have swept in in the closing days of the race, first-term Rep. Brian Mast said he welcomed the help.

“I don’t like being hit over the head by outside groups,” Mast said.

The midterm campaign has returned to the sort of bipolar dynamic that defined it at the start of the year. Senate Republicans are confident once again in retaining their one-seat majority in that chamber thanks to a favorable map of races. But Democrats are poised to pick up an array of governorships in major states and could dislodge Republicans’ eight-year hold on the House.

Republicans hope they can keep the House if they sweep the closest races, a tall order given the Democratic enthusiasm in many districts.

But much of the Republican spending is aimed less at securing a majority than at limiting the breadth of a Democratic takeover as the field of competition grows well beyond 40 seats.

“It’s the suburban seats and it’s the flow of money,” Rep. Tom Cole, a longtime Oklahoma Republican and former House campaign chairman, said of the party’s two overriding concerns.

Many Democrats remain deeply scarred by Trump’s victory, memories that have been unnervingly revived by the recent spike in conservative enthusiasm. But unlike at this moment in the presidential election, when Clinton sought to harden her party’s putative blue wall, it is Republicans who are on the defensive in the battle for the House, with the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Congressional Leadership — the two main groups financing Republican advertising — routing money anew into campaigns.

“Some of the guys who should be in trouble are doing OK,” said Michael Steel, a longtime House Republican strategist, alluding to lawmakers in districts Trump lost or only narrowly carried. “But there appear to be little fires everywhere.”

The biggest danger for Republicans in House races remains in the moderate suburbs of blue states like New York, New Jersey and California, where they could lose up to a dozen seats — half their margin of control. Then there are a handful of other affluent districts just outside other cities where voters have recoiled from Trump’s divisive style of politics.

“I think we’ll have a suburban wave,” said Liesl Hickey, a former executive director of the NRCC. “A lot of the districts that we are most likely to lose are Democratic-leaning, they’re just going to what their modern DNA is.”

But what poses so much peril for Republicans is that a surge of donations to all manner of Democratic candidates has allowed them to go on offense in districts that had received far less attention and money. Those races in more conservative, exurban areas could make the difference between Democrats winning a splinter-thin majority or claiming a firm grasp on the House.

Trump’s standing in these districts is not as dismal as it is in those races Republicans are likely to lose. But two years after he carried the districts, his conduct in office has pushed his disapproval ratings to about the same level of his approval ratings. And with Democrats enjoying an advantage on intensity and money, and Republicans in many of these races unprepared for the scale of both, Republicans are vulnerable. For example, officials in both parties have long viewed Rep. Peter Roskam of Illinois as at risk because he represents an upscale, Chicagoland district that backed Clinton. But now Rep. Randy Hultgren, a Republican hailing from a more far-flung Chicago suburb that backed Trump, also appears in jeopardy. Hultgren's Democratic opponent, Lauren Underwood, raised more than $2 million in the last quarter while he took in $455,000.

It is a similar story in North Carolina, where Trump touched down Friday to help a couple of Republican candidates running in conservative districts near Charlotte who have been out-raised by Democrats and have had to rely out on outside groups.

“This is a tough environment for Republicans and when you get outspent 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 over the last few weeks you’re asking for trouble,” said Corry Bliss, who runs the House Republican super PAC and has been forced to fill that gap between Republicans and better-funded rivals.

In a particularly frustrating development for Republican leaders, they are racing to protect two House seats they had already spent tens of millions of dollars defending in special elections: one anchored in suburban Atlanta’s Cobb County and the other in central Ohio. In the Georgia seat, Republicans say a combination of robust Democratic turnout — propelled by Stacey Abrams’ campaign for governor — and a heavy financial investment by Bloomberg has put them unexpectedly on defense.

Tilting the political map further, Bloomberg’s group is also financing ads in two other conservative-leaning suburban districts long viewed as relatively safe by Republicans: one held by Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington, the other a seat in the suburbs of Jacksonville, Florida, that former Rep. Ron DeSantis vacated to run for governor. Republicans are straining to keep up. Just in the last few days, Republican committees have spent millions on Beutler and Mast of Florida — both of whom hold center-right, outer-suburban districts — as well as for a couple of conservative open seats in Virginia and Florida. At the same time, they have added additional funding into a Virginia Beach-based district and seats in southern Minnesota, in suburban Des Moines and around Topeka, Kansas.

“We’re now seeing opportunities that we didn’t think would be there,” said Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., adding: “I do feel confident that we’re going to get the majority and then some.”

Former Rep. Lynn Westmoreland , R-Ga., who served as vice chairman of the party’s campaign committee, said Republicans faced races that were “tightening up” across the board, especially in diverse suburbs and districts full of right-of-center “soccer moms.” He said Republicans stood a chance to hold the House if some of those moderate women returned to the fold.

The difference between a narrowly held Democratic House, or even one with the barest of Republican majorities, will most likely turn on about 20 districts that Trump won comfortably but not overwhelmingly and that contain a mix of new developments as well as smaller, older communities. Many of these seats were gerrymandered by Republican state legislators to protect incumbents, but that was in the pre-Trump era, when Republicans could more reliably count on the votes of moderate women.

“They have an assumption about that voter and their fidelity to the Republican Party that is not true under Donald Trump,” said , the Chicago mayor and former House Democratic campaign chief, of voters he called “anti-Hillary but never pro-Trump.”

Republicans in some once-safe districts expressed confidence they would hang on. In the Cincinnati area, Rep. Steve Chabot is counting on the addition of a heavily Republican exurban county that was added to his district to ward off a well-funded challenge from Aftab Pureval, the 36-year-old Hamilton County clerk who raised more than twice what Chabot did in the last quarter.

“One of the things he has been successful at is raising a boatload of money,” Chabot acknowledged. He lost his seat once before when Barack Obama was at the top of the 2008 ticket and had to win it back two years later, but he said he felt assured of his success this time. Chabot said that his race was “not really” competitive and that he might win by more than 6 points.

On his way to pick up a few dozen Xavier University students to caravan with them to an early voting site, Pureval said that he had his “eyes wide open” about the difficulty of the district and that he was counting on a wave of energy to overcome the Republican gerrymander. One danger for Republicans may be lawmakers who have never faced true political combat.

Some in the party fear Rep. Rob Woodall of Georgia may have waited too long to take his race seriously. Woodall, who holds a rapidly diversifying suburban district, has yet to run a single television ad, and Democratic polling in the governor’s race has shown Abrams with a solid lead in the area.

Carolyn Bourdeaux, the Democrat challenging Woodall, said she was mystified by his approach to the campaign. Bourdeaux has raised far more money than Woodall and finished September with about $273,000 more in the bank than he had. Unchallenged on television, she has positioned herself as a nonthreatening moderate in a changing district and has declined to endorse left-wing priorities like single-payer health care.

“He has not put together a particularly aggressive campaign at all,” Bourdeaux said of Woodall.