With President Biden struggling to right his listing re-election campaign, Democrats and Republicans are closely watching how the presidential contest is affecting races farther down the ballot.
And no contest could prove more consequential than the razor-close battle for control of the House.
Only four seats separate the Democratic Party from House control, a number still within the party’s grasp, even with the president’s struggles. But unless the party can turn around its bid to hold the White House, even that small hill could prove steep.
“This is a monumental election coming in November,” said Yevgeny Vindman, a retired Army colonel who helped blow the whistle on former President Donald J. Trump’s attempt to strong-arm the president of Ukraine into investigating Mr. Biden, and who is now the Democrats’ choice to hold Virginia’s most closely drawn House seat. “Really the best chances Democrats have are in the House of Representatives.”
Mr. Biden’s disastrous debate performance last month and the ensuing chaos at the top of the Democratic ticket have brought the battle for the House into sharp focus. That is because losing the White House would almost certainly cost Democrats the Senate as well.
It is simple math: For Democrats to hold the Senate, they would have to successfully defend every one of their contested seats, not only in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona, but also in the solidly Republican states of Ohio and Montana. Even then, with the West Virginia seat being vacated by Senator Joe Manchin III all but ceded, the party would have to win the presidency to break a 50-50 tie, or beat a Republican incumbent in the Republican states of Florida, Missouri or Texas.
Political prognosticators closely watching the House are not counting Democrats out, though they give Republicans a slight edge in retaining the speaker’s gavel. If major Democratic donors pull back from Mr. Biden, a rush of support could come to embattled House candidates.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report on Tuesday moved six states toward Mr. Trump in its presidential predictions, including Arizona and Nevada, which feature key House and Senate races. But it notably did not shift any congressional races toward Republicans.
“From the limited data we’ve seen, there hasn’t been a significant shift” toward either party since the debate, said Erin Covey, the Cook Report’s House political analyst. Mr. Biden, she said, “was already a drag on House Democrats, from the beginning.”
She continued, “For a lot of voters, the age issue was already priced in.”
Kyle D. Kondik, an election forecaster at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, was more favorable to Republicans.
“I don’t really view the presidential race as a coin flip anymore, and if you believe that, you probably have to apply that to the House too,” he said, giving Republicans the edge to hold control.
Republicans are sensing a shift, especially in districts represented by freshman Democrats without a strong identity separate from Mr. Biden, or in districts with relatively unknown Democratic challengers.
One Republican, Laurie Buckhout, a combat-tested retired Army colonel in North Carolina, is challenging just such a Democrat, Don Davis, a freshman representative who has said he has charted a course independent of the president in his swing district but may not be known well enough to elude Mr. Biden’s unpopularity.
“When it comes to the big questions and the big votes, he aligns himself with Biden,” Ms. Buckhout said. “I think the biggest issue has been the Biden presidency.”
The National Republican Congressional Committee has reserved millions of dollars in advertising time in districts like Representative Jahana Hayes’s in Connecticut, which Mr. Biden won by 11 percentage points, and Representative Gabe Vasquez’s in New Mexico, which the president won by seven points.
Each side can still point to advantages. For Democrats, it is the nine endangered Republican seats in three blue states — California, New York and New Jersey — which will not figure in the presidential race. Democratic incumbents in districts that Mr. Trump won in 2020, such as Representatives Jared Golden of Maine, Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania and Mary Peltola of Alaska, have proven themselves capable of winning, even in strong Republican years.
Mr. Golden and Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a freshman Democrat in a Washington district that Mr. Trump won, have each taken the unusual step of predicting a victory for Mr. Trump in November.
“We all saw what we saw, you can’t undo that,” Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez told a local new broadcaster. “The truth is, I think, is that Biden is going to lose to Trump. I know that’s difficult, but I think the damage has been done by that debate.”
Ms. Peltola, facing questions over her continued support for Mr. Biden, said on Monday that she was avoiding Washington this week, despite a weeklong House session. Instead, a spokesman said, she will be “putting up fish with family to fill freezers for the winter.”
Still, the map slightly favors Republicans to maintain their narrow — and sometimes chaotic — grasp on power, according to House watchers. Mr. Kondik, the election forecaster, rates just nine Republican-held seats and nine Democratic seats as pure tossups (the Cook Political Report puts it at 11 each).
But Mr. Biden’s eroding stature in districts on Long Island in New York and in Central Valley in California may be putting a Democratic comeback in jeopardy.
Beyond the pure tossups, about a dozen Democratic seats are rated as tenuously leaning toward the incumbent party; Republicans must hold only about eight seats tenuously controlled by the G.O.P.
One of those Democratic seats is the one in Virginia occupied by Representative Abigail Spanberger, who is leaving it to run for governor. The Republican candidate for the seat, Derrick Anderson, a former special forces officer with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been taunting his Democratic opponent, Mr. Vindman, to state where he stands on Mr. Biden’s candidacy.
The district “deserves the truth and real leadership,” Mr. Anderson posted on social media Tuesday. “But Vindman hasn’t said a word about whether Biden should still be president.”
Republicans say the president’s struggles are shoring up the party’s ability to hold on to seats in districts Mr. Biden won in 2020, while putting new ones into play, like Representative Eric Sorensen’s Democratic district in Northern Illinois, which Mr. Biden won by 10 points in 2020 but where he now holds only the narrowest of leads, according to Republican polling.
For their part, Democrats are keeping their heads down and focusing on local issues far apart from the rancorous debate over Mr. Biden’s viability. In a longtime Democratic district outside Portland, Ore., Republicans caught a break in 2022, when a left-wing Democrat, Jamie McLeod-Skinner, beat the moderate Democratic incumbent, Kurt Schrader, in a primary. Ms. McLeod-Skinner then lost narrowly to a Republican, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who flipped the seat in the general election.
This time, the Democratic establishment’s choice, Janelle Bynum, a state representative, easily beat Ms. McLeod-Skinner in the primary to take on Ms. Chavez-DeRemer, a politician she has beaten before.
“I’ve never been concerned with the top of the ticket,” Ms. Bynum said in an interview. “I think I’ve developed a reputation in the state as a person who produces results. It’s the fundamentals of lawmaking what neither Lori Chavez-DeRemer or any other candidate has been able to match.”
Democrats still say their House candidates are simply better than their Republican competitors and can outperform Mr. Biden, just as Democratic candidates for the Senate are running well ahead of the president. The poll trumpeted by Republicans as showing Mr. Biden’s erosion of support in Northern Illinois also shows the House Democrat in the district, Mr. Sorenson, nine points ahead of his Republican challenger.
“Democrats run common-sense, independent-minded candidates who are focused on kitchen table issues,” said Viet Shelton, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Meanwhile Republicans run extremists.”
What is for certain in this election, with such a narrow battlefield, is that the races will grow even more fierce and expensive. In Virginia, Mr. Vindman was able to raise more than $5 million for a Democratic primary that he cruised through last month. That left him with $1.3 million in cash, far more than his Republican opponent.
For all the focus on Mr. Biden, the wild card in some districts may be Mr. Trump. In Northern Virginia, it may be the former president’s stated plans to convert large swaths of the federal work force into political appointments, serving at the whim of the president and not subject to civil service rules that now protect most federal workers from political interference. Such issues might glaze the eyes of most voters, but in Virginia’s Seventh District, in the far suburbs of Washington, where 59,000 voters are in the federal work force, Mr. Trump’s plans for the government may matter — a lot.
“This idea of purity tests for civil servants?” Mr. Vindman said. “I’d say a majority of people will be concerned.”
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