100? So 278?
IF Republicans drew all the districts in the country to maximize output and had well funded top tier candidates running in all of them I suppose we could win 290 in a good year. But that is not the reality.
Morris is off his nut in fantasy land if he was being serious.
+100 would require the biggest paradigm shift since the great depression.
Just taking back he majority would be an impressive enough accomplishment.
I don’t know if Morris mentioned the Senate but it is out of reach. Just to make a net gain of Senate seats this cycle would be a victory. Never mind that many potential challengers are RINOs. A Senate with 51 “Republicans” like Mark Kirk and Rob Simmons wouldn’t be too helpful.
Sickoflibs has posited that it would be best not to take the majority in 2010 but rather just leave the rats in narrow control so Obama can’t pull a Truman (run against the new congress, win) or a Clinton (move a bit to the center in order to work with the new congress, win) in 2012 or shift any of the blame for what is gonna happen the rest of his term.
If those comparisons hold up, what I’m thinking is that the election would be akin to the 1894 (not 1994) midterm (where the GOP reached almost what it got in 1920), which occurred as a result of the Panic of 1893 (and against the Cleveland administration). We discussed that weeks ago, where the GOP made inroads in heavily Dem locales in the Deep South and border states, but a lot of it eroded in 1896, even as we elected McKinley.
While you’re absolutely correct that the GOP couldn’t consistently win 278 House seats under the current lines without a major realignment, gagining 100 seats in 2010 wouldn’t requre a paradigm shift if we coughed up 25 or 30 of them in 2012.
For the record, if we controlled redistricting in every state, didn’t get greedy when drawing the lines and ran top-notch candidates in every district, I think that the GOP could comfortably hold 300 House seats.