Republicans Only Need 6 Toss-Up Seats to Regain House Control: Analysis

Voters wait to cast their midterm elections ballots at Burton Barr Library, a polling station in Phoenix, Arizona, on Nov. 6, 2018. Nicole Neri/Reuters

Republicans only need to win six of 31 toss-up House elections in order to take control in the upcoming 2022 midterm elections, said a top election analyst.

New ratings from the Cook Political Report, which is often described as “nonpartisan,” show that at least 212 House seats are likely to lean Republican. At the same time, about 192 seats were classified as leaning Democrat, said the Cook report in a report issued on Wednesday morning.

Cook’s estimate suggests there are 31 toss-up seats in the midterm elections. It means Republicans need to only win six of those seats to re-capture the House.

Historically, the party of the president tends to lose midterm elections. For example, two years after President Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992, Republicans won in landslide numbers during the 1994 midterms, buoyed by then-Rep. Newt Gingrich’s (R-Ga.) “Contract with America” policy proposals.

But Clinton, in a recent interview with CNN, claimed Democrats have a good chance of keeping both the House and Senate in November.

“We could hold both these houses,” Clinton said. “But we have to say the right things.”

“And we have to note the Republicans always close well. Why? Because they find some new way to scare the living daylights out of swing voters about something,” he alleged.

Clinton then said that last year, Republicans targeted critical race theory, or CRT, a Marxist-inspired ideological framework that asserts there is systemic racism everywhere that favors white people.

In 2021, Clinton said GOP officials made critical race theory “sound worse than smallpox” and claimed it wasn’t being taught in public schools.

However, numerous “diversity, equity, and inclusion” training in public school and corporate settings are based on CRT. And Criticalrace.org has repeatedly highlighted CRT-derived curricula popping up at schools across the United States.

“But they didn’t care. They just scare people,” Clinton added.

Aside from Clinton’s interview, other election experts have predicted Republicans will make large gains come November.

“Looking at the aggregate number of people who have cast a ballot in each major party primary, we see a clear turnout advantage for the Republicans, compared to the 2018 midterm election, with Republicans up just under 48 percent in primary turnout nationally, while the Democrats are down just over 18 percent,” private pollster Jim Ellis of Ellis Insight told The Epoch Times earlier this month.

“We saw 20-25 percent of the Republican primary voters had never even voted in a Republican primary before they had come out for the first time this year,” added Conor Maguire, a principal and managing director at WPA Intelligence, to The Epoch Times.