Dem
50
Ties
1
GOP
49
While we are on the subject of fingers being pointed, the Democrats may be soon be at it as well. If it turns out that the Republicans take the House by, say, three seats, a lot of the blame can be placed on the New York state legislators who drew up the congressional map. They swung for the fences and drew up a map that was supposed to grab three Republican seats. But the map was so egregious that a judge threw it out and appointed a special master to draw up a fair map.
As a consequence, instead of Democrats flipping three Republican seats, Republicans flipped three Democratic seats. One of them was the seat of their congressional campaign leader, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), who ran the DCCC, ending up spending a nice chunk of the DCCC's money on his own campaign, and lost anyway. In addition, two Democratic seats on Long Island went from blue to red. So instead of new map being D+3, it was R+3. That wasn't the plan.
Of course, in defense of the mapmakers, they knew that Texas and Florida had wildly gerrymandered maps, so they felt they had no choice but to do the same thing. It seems unfair that Texas and Florida got away with it but New York didn't. But that's how it turned out. Democratic strategist Peter Kauffmann put it this way: "Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered." He thinks the legislature should have put much more thought into drawing a map that could withstand the expected legal challenges. It didn't, and the result may be a Republican House.
We'll have a couple more items on this general theme later this week. (V)