That’s huge. But I think the gerrymandering of the House is enough to maintain a Republican majority against even a Democratic tsunami like that.
Source?
The only useful hard data point is this one, which says a 1.2% Democratic victory margin in terms of votes translates into a devastating Democratic defeat in terms of seats. Everything else is modeling and extrapolation (mine included). In general, prognosticators say that things break even at about an 8-9% Democratic advantage. If the Democrats win by 8-9% in the House, control of the House is a toss-up–could go either way. I think both RCP and 538 used this 8-9% value last time around. The problem is that this tends to be a “generic ballot” metric, rather than a per-seat metric. So if the swing seats don’t shift as much as safe seats, the whole model falls apart. Considering the Republicans effectively control the nation’s election process, and have a huge foreign intelligence apparatus willing to selectively take down individual House candidates in key races, I’d say the 8-9% margin simply isn’t big enough to get a win. I’d say we need to win by 12% to win at all. That’s my model, the source is me 😉
EDIT: This is not to say it’s hopeless. But nothing less than the complete collapse of the national Republican party (which, thankfully, still seems to be in the cards, albeit remotely) is going to give the Dems control of anything at the national level in 2018. So… focus on the states. Governorships, state legislatures (Huge pickup opportunites! Gaining 12 more governorships is quite plausible!). We do well enough there in 2018, and we’ll be much better positioned to do something interesting in the House and/or Senate in 2022 after redistricting, when the landscape isn’t tilted quite so strongly against us.
You should change your numbers then. The chance of Democrats winning either the Senate or the House is definitely not 0%, unless that was tongue-in-cheek.
No, I took the probability of total collapse of the national Republican party into consideration. I could have said <1% for this too, but at enough decimal places, it just makes more sense to round down.