If history is any indicator, that is not true. IMO, the House will be much harder to take back. During the 62 year period 1933-1995, the Dems controlled the House for 58 years and the Senate for 54 years. The power of incumbency is very strong. The Reps must now come up with the candidates to challenge the incumbents who will be able to use their office to campaign for the next two years.
The Senate is easier to target because it is fewer in number and only one third is elected every two years. It is easy for us to target because you need fewer challengers and we don't have the problems of gerrymandering of districts, which affect House races. Also, demographics work against us as the minority population, a core Dem constituency, continues to increase faster than the general population.
And I imagine some republicans won't like being in the minority and will retire, leaving us seats to defend.
That is going to happen in both Houses. After being in charge for 12 years in the House, it is going to be hard for some Reps to accept being ranking members on committees and not being able to set the agenda. I can only imagine how it will be to have Rangel, Conyers, and Waxman being in charge. It is going to get ugly.
Frist screwed us by retiring, I know people hated him as speaker but that was a seat we had to work for that otherwise we would not, and without that seat the democrats may not have even gotten in their head they could take the senate, and we could have held missouri and maybe montana (where we needed to remove Burns because of ties to Abramoff and then we would have won it easily).
Frist's retirement didn't cost us his seat. Dole did a very poor job of recruiting candidates and allocated resources terribly. If the Reps had poured money into the Burns campaign from the beginning, we would have held MT. Instead, we accepted the conventional wisdom that Burns was tainted and a loser. MT now has two Dem senators. WY has a Dem governor. ND has two Dem senators. Neb has a Dem senator. The Reps have not done a good job of recruiting candidates. Schumer and Emmanuel made some inspired choices including Webb, Sestak, Casey, and McCaskill.
The Dems now control more state houses and governorships than we do, which portends some bad things for us in the future in terms of redistricting and controlling the local process. The bottom line is that we suffered an historic reversal that can't be fixed by the next election. The Dems will have control of at least the House for some time to come.
We lost a lot of seats in strongly republican districts, in many cases because the person we had was either proven corrupt or perceived as corrupt. We gave the people no choice. They will vote republican if they get a chance.
We will have to really screw up not to win FL-16 and TX-22 next time around, unless the winners there really deliver on conservative promises.
We may only need 10 seats to take back the house, and we should be able to do that. Especially if we have a presidential candidate that is strong.
I agree that is how it looks now.
But we do not know how this new Congress will operate and they are going to have to run on a record, not just against ours.
We can regain both Houses if we run as Republicans.