Here we go again.
It’s late in the campaign season and the party out of power feels a big jolt of momentum and starts hyping races that insiders call “reach seats,” the House or Senate races that seem safely in the hands of one party but once a generation seem to open up for the other side.
Last week House Democrats highlighted the opponent of Rep. French Hill (R-Arkansas) as “worthy of additional investment” because the political environment has broken so much against Republicans that the six-term incumbent could be defeated.
Hill, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, was one of a dozen Republicans targeted anew by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, despite his always large stockpile of campaign cash and representing a district that favored Donald Trump by double digits all three times he’s run for president.
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Over the last 20 years each party can point to times that investing in “reach” seats paid off. For Democrats the 2006 and 2008 elections gave them historically large majorities that stretched from places like Boise, Idaho, through all of North Dakota and even a majority of Alabama’s House delegation. That paved the way for the passage of the Affordable Care Act and a Wall Street reform bill in 2010.
Big Republican wins in 2010 and 2014 gave them their biggest House majority since the 1920s, opening the doors to the 2017 tax cuts and a durable Senate majority that confirmed three conservative Supreme Court justices.
But recent history is filled with examples of the temptation to go bigger leading to the political equivalent of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown.
That’s what happened the last time Democrats chased after Hill, back in 2020, when their outside groups poured more than $3.5 million into a failed effort at that seat.
Hill won easily, by almost 11 percentage points, and nationwide Democratic hopes for gaining 10 to 15 seats or more crashed into an unexpected undertow. Republicans gained more than 10 seats on Election Day despite Trump losing the popular election by 7 million votes, a historic anomaly that happened only once before in the previous 14 elections.
“I do think they took their eye off the ball in some places,” Parker Poling, who was the executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2020, told The Washington Sun.
Even when Hillary Clinton and Al Gore lost the Electoral College in 2016 and 2000, respectively, their popular vote margins of more than 500,000 and almost 3 million helped House Democrats win a few seats down the ballot.
Instead of a historically large majority in 2021, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had just 222 seats, and every vote became a bit of a cliffhanger.
Two years later Republicans fell victim to their own overly ambitious ways ahead of the 2022 midterms, pouring tens of millions of dollars into districts where wins turned out to be mirages.
Their lone reach seat victory came against Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-New York), who was chairing the DCCC that cycle. Pelosi told Democrats the day after the election that Republicans spent so heavily to go after Maloney that it helped preserve other Democrats.
“Our chairman took an arrow for us,” she said.
When the dust settled, Republicans gained just nine seats, leaving them at the same exact skinny majority the Democrats had — 222 seats. It set the stage for a dysfunctional House for the next four years.
Senate campaigns also often take fliers on seats that seem well out of reach in normal times, but the payoff can be much higher given the reward is a six-year term that can help sustain a majority not just in the coming election but over the next two.
Without upset wins in Louisiana in 2002 and Montana in 2006, Senate Democrats wouldn’t have had sufficient votes to pass the ACA in 2009 — which has some party operatives dreaming of pulling off upsets in November in such traditionally conservative states like Kansas or Alaska.
Now, House Democrats are feeling confident about their standing in the traditional battleground seats: Of the 21 “toss-up” races, 15 are held by Republicans, according to one independent analysis, while seven more of their seats already “lean Democratic.”
“Democrats must build a durable majority heading into the 120th Congress so that the House can deliver wins,” Julie Merz, executive director of the DCCC, wrote in a fundraising memo last week.
She is trying to raise cash fast for a handful or more of these reach seats. By siloing them into their own financial category, Democrats are hoping to avoid losing focus on their core races the way they did in 2020.
Republicans rejected these Democratic moves as either attempts to trick them into spending money in places that they don’t need to, or just the equivalent of online trolling. The math in these seats, they say, simply doesn’t add up to Democratic wins.
“These seats are staying red, and Republicans are on offense across the map,” Mike Marinella, national press secretary for the NRCC, said.
In a reminder of the 2022 campaign, Democrats listed the seat of Rep. Richard Hudson (R-North Carolina), chair of the NRCC since early 2023, as a possible target.
Hudson won his district by almost 19 percentage points in 2024, as Trump won it by 16 points, about the same as his margin of victory in 2020.
Moreover, Merz’s memo also listed the seat of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) as a potential pickup opportunity, now that the onetime rising conservative star is retiring.
The temptation is there to try to win such a symbolic victory for Democrats after Stefanik’s midcareer transformation into a fire-breathing, MAGA-loving Trump acolyte.
Yet Democrats would be trying to win a seat that Stefanik, first elected in 2014 as a moderate, establishment-friendly Republican, won by almost 25 percentage points in 2024, when Trump carried the district by more than 20 points.
Trying for those seats almost sounds more exotic than Republicans in 2022 reaching for the Orange County, California, seat held by Katie Porter, whose progressivism irked many conservatives. Republican-aligned outside groups shoveled more than $10 million into trying to defeat her.
That’s more than double the $5 million those same Republican groups poured into trying to win a Rhode Island district that Democrats have held since 1991. Joe Biden had just won those seats by 10 points or more, just as he had done in Maloney’s seat.
Those races were close, but Democrats won. Meanwhile, Republicans lost several close races in the Midwest that were on much more friendly terrain, including three in Ohio that broke against them even as Republican Gov. Mike DeWine won reelection at the top of the ticket in a landslide.
Poling, who ran the NRCC in 2020, said she heard Democrats thought they could win a handful or more Republican seats in Texas alone.
“I just don’t see it,” she told The Sun, recalling the message she sent her staff to run their numbers again.
Democrats did not win a single close seat in Texas that year. They lost all 27 seats that The Cook Political Report rated as toss-ups in its final race ratings.
In fact, Republicans came within less than 32,000 votes of winning five other races, which would have won them the majority, a virtually unheard of concept given their candidate lost the presidential election.
Republicans got their trophy seat in 2022 by defeating Maloney, the first time a campaign committee chair had lost reelection in 30 years. His district, partially in the New York City media market, received an endless amount of ads, backed by more than $10 million from outside conservative groups trying to boost now-Rep. Mike Lawler’s upstart campaign.
In the end, Lawler won by less than 1 percentage point, less than 2,000 votes, and Maloney had the odd pleasure of being hailed for his stewardship of the DCCC and mitigating their losses but losing his own seat.
The next day he said the key to their national strategy was sticking to the plan.
“We resisted the temptation to chase shiny objects, and we were disciplined and focused, and we did the work. And I’m a big believer in doing the fundamentals,” Maloney told reporters.
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