Most pundits now give the Democrats a slight edge in the race for the House. But there is a very good reason why the Democrats’ chances of retaking the House may be better than that. A seat that Trump won by almost 50 points is very much in play just three months out from Election Day. Namely, WV-03.
In case you missed it, the district’s two-term Republican incumbent, Evan Jenkins, gave up the seat to make an unsuccessful bid in the GOP primary for Joe Manchin’s Senate seat. So you’d think it would be more or less a layup for Republican state delegate Carol Miller, right? Far from it. Democratic state senator Richard Ojeda is running one of the strongest campaigns in the nation, and has a very good shot at retaking a seat that was in Democratic hands for all but 10 years from 1949 to 2015, and without interruption from 1957 to 2015.
Last month, after a Monmouth poll showed Ojeda leading Miller by anywhere from two to eight points (depending on the screen), Cook Political Report moved this race to “Lean Republican,” while Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball moved it to “Likely Republican.” Since then, Sabato moved it to “Lean Republican” as well.
Then, on Tuesday, a bombshell.
Specifically, Sabato’s team moved this race all the way to “Toss-Up.”
There are a lot of reasons why alarm bells should be going off at the NRCC. For one, Trump took a whopping 72.5 percent of the vote here. I crunched the numbers at RDTDaily, and this was Trump’s fifth-best district in the Eastern Time Zone. That ran the Cook PVI all the way up to R+23.
For another, when Jenkins capsized 38-year incumbent Democrat Nick Rahall in the 2014 Republican wave, it wasn’t even close—55-44. He romped to a second term in 2016, and it looked like this district had cast aside its Democratic roots for good.
This is a long-winded way of saying that this district should not even be on the board this close to Election Day. And yet, here we are. Imagine a seat Hillary won by 30 or more being in play at this point.
I got a chance to check out Miller’s Website for the first time while digging into this race at RDTDaily—and I thought I was being punked. That Website is bare bones—something you’d expect from a sacrificial lamb candidate. My best guess is that she’s relying on morphing Ojeda into a Pelosi clone, and the national and state GOP coming to her rescue.
But there are two problems with that strategy—a term that must be used here very loosely. For one, on paper tying Ojeda to Pelosi is SOP for districts that are R+10 or worse. In districts this red, that’s usually enough to make people vote for any schmuck with an R next to it. But if this seat is still in play at this stage, that strategy isn’t working here. Plus, every dollar that the GOP has to spend in order to save Miller’s bacon is money they can’t spend in swingier districts.
Simply put, there is no way that Ojeda would be ahead in this race even narrowly if the Democrats didn’t have the edge nationally—no matter how inept an opponent Miller may be. If Ojeda can hold on to win, there’s a very good chance that the House has gone Democratic.
But he’s going to need a lot of help. Sooner or later, someone’s going to realize Miller is in a lot of trouble here. Click here to donate to Ojeda and help him keep fighting.