5 Reasons Republicans Are Beginning To Worry They Could Lose The House In 2014

Let me start off by saying that for the GOP to lose the House of Representatives would require a meltdown worse than we’re seeing in the Arctic.

“The number of competitive districts is at its lowest since Cook first started the partisanship rating in the 1998 election cycle,” the Cook Political Report announced earlier this year.

After the Republican landslide of 2010, the party’s leaders redistricted the congressional map so effectively that even though they received 1.4 million fewer votes than Democratic House candidates in 2012, they still kept a 17-seat majority in the House. And even without yogic gerrymandering, Americans have naturally gerrymandered themselves.

“Democrats move to cities and overwhelmingly vote for Democrats,” The Atlantic Wire‘s Philip Bump wrote. “If Democrats want to re-take the House, they should move to Wyoming.”

I explain how safe the Republican House majority should be to illustrate how remarkable it is that Republicans have begun to worry that they could lose the House, something they hadn’t imagined was possible until the first election after the next redistricting in 2022.

“Several influential Republicans told us the party is actually in a worse place than it was Nov. 7, the day after the disastrous election,” Politico‘s Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei reported last week. They couldn’t find a Republican in Washington D.C. who didn’t see “a disaster in the making.”

Here are five reasons that even Republicans look at their representatives in the House and see disaster.