January 17, 2013 08:24 AM UTC

Danger Slowly Dawns on (Some) Congressional Republicans

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Hill–there’s a chance that we’ll be referring back to this story for a long, long time:

Even as Republican officials maintain the GOP majority is safe, several lawmakers and longtime activists warn of far-reaching political ramifications if voters perceive Republicans as botching consequential talks on the debt ceiling, sequestration and a possible government shutdown.

“Majorities are elected to do things, and if they become dysfunctional, the American people will change what the majority is,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a House deputy majority whip and a former National Republican Congressional Committee chairman, told The Hill. [Pols emphasis]

Concerns on the right stem from a public perception that House Republicans were to blame – because of poor leadership strategy and rank-and-file dissent – for bringing the country to the edge of the fiscal cliff late last month.

As this fine reporting by The Hill’s Alexandra Jaffe makes clear, the House GOP majority is torn by two competing and mutually exclusive assumptions. On one side, you have an ideologically rigid conservative wing of the majority, still feeling emboldened after large gains made in 2010 and in redistricting in many states, who are absolutely determined to carry out their ideologically-driven agenda–regardless of public opinion, or short-term consequences for the U.S. economy.

On the other side, you have at least some practically-minded Republicans who realize coming out of 2012 that they have already overplayed their hand.

Conventional wisdom, backed by hard numbers, suggests that Republicans have enjoyed enough success with congressional redistricting in recent decades–though not in Colorado–to create an extremely durable GOP House majority. The simplest evidence for this is the 2012 national popular vote, which re-elected Barack Obama by nearly five million votes, while also re-electing 2010’s “Tea Party” GOP House majority more or less intact.

Democrats need to net 17 districts to take back the House in 2014, widely considered a significant hurdle to overcome.

But the party has identified “30 districts where the [GOP] incumbent [won by] less than 10 percent and an additional 18 districts that we think can perform better” in a non-presidential election year, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) said recently.

And it’s in those districts – where Republicans don’t have a deep base of voters to rely on – that a repeat disaster like the fiscal-cliff fight could matter. [Pols emphasis]

We haven’t seen the list of 2014 Democratic pickup opportunities mentioned above, but we fully expect it to include both Colorado’s Third and Sixth Districts. Although Republican incumbents held these seats in 2012, every election cycle under the current maps will remain hotly competitive in both. If Democrats picked up one or both of those seats in 2014, and that level of success was replicated across the country in other swing district races…

Seriously, folks, what must happen before conventional wisdom is forced to reassess?