We're going to need to take quite a few conservative districts and states to get Congress back
There's no way around that.
Cook political does a cool table of districts by partisan lean, which I'm using the data from.
The GOP had 15 pick-ups Tuesday, mostly in slightly Republican districts (average R+1.5 or so). The Democrats had three pick-ups (I had said two in an earlier thread, which was wrong: we beat two incumbents and picked up another from a retiring GOP incumbent). The two incumbents we beat were just on the red side of swing districts (FL-2 and NE-2, both R+6), and the retiring incumbent we picked off was in CA-31, which is D+5.
I want to make the point that the "playing field" here, as it were, was mostly slightly red districts, that is, districts whose voters are not liberal. There's no need to construct some scenario by which this was a secret request for progressive politicians: conservative voters elected conservative candidates.
The GOP currently holds 10 districts that are D+1 or more. The most Democratic is IL-10, which is D+8. (Between D+4 and R+4 or so is considered a "swing district".) Second place is NY-24, where Katko (R) just won by nearly 20 points (does anybody know what the hell happened there?). In a Presidential year we should do well in those districts. But we need 38 new districts to take back the House, so that means we need 28 red districts that are currently GOP-held (we already hold 9, thanks to those Blue Dogs that everybody here loves to hate on). This also means that we will need to add 28 moderate/conservative Democrats to our caucus.
Now, gerrymandering is a lot of the problem here, but simply stomping our feet and screaming about that doesn't actually change it: we need to take those districts, period, as badly drawn as they are. (But then again sensibly-drawn districts that follow geographic and jurisdictional lines still disadvantage us, because we crowd so many voters into cities -- there's no red districts that are even close to as red as the bluest districts are blue, because we always have some voters in rural areas whereas there are essentially no Republican voters in urban cores.) And, for that matter, obviously gerrymandering had nothing to do with losing the Senate.
Currently the reddest district we hold is MN-7, R+6, Colin Peterson. We had two more redder districts in the 113th, but lost them. This is especially troubling because once you lose a cross-party district like that it's much harder to get it back because of the strength of incumbency -- Gene Taylor and Ike Skelton could hold their districts for decades despite a high partisan clash with their constituents (pork works...), but now that we've lost those there's not a realistic way to get either district back any time soon.
On the plus side, the 38 districts we need pretty much exactly fit in the districts that classify as "swing", along with the districts that are blue that we need to take back. If we run the table from R+1 up, we only have to get into the R+4 districts. However, we will not run that table: incumbents are very difficult to beat, and we need to watch for retirements, scandals, etc. and strike then and there. That could move us pretty far into R+ territory, though: some of the R+6 to R+9 districts. Our two candidates that beat Republican incumbents, Graham in Florida and Ashford in Nebraska, prove that this can be done if we have the right candidate and they run the right campaign (and, in fact, in both of those cases that involved distancing themselves from Obama and the national party). Kyrsten Sinema in AZ is another recent example of a Democrat that can take (and, now, hold) a red district.
People here are gnashing their teeth about the party turning more conservative and how ridiculous that is as a response to the mid-terms, but the simple fact is that conservative districts are where we need to start making wins. There aren't many liberal districts that the GOP is holding. Winning conservative districts will mean finding and running conservative Democrats in those districts, which will mean moving the caucus as a whole somewhat to the right.
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