WASHINGTON (AP) — In a competitive district east of Denver, Democrat Andrew Romanoff is counting on voter anger at a divided and ineffectual Congress to help him unseat three-term Republican Rep. Mike Coffman.
"I must have blinked and missed it," the challenger said of the House's work this past year. "It's become a punch line to call this the least productive Congress in history or to joke 'how do you tell when Congress is in session or on vacation, it's hard to tell the difference.'"
Ten months to next year's midterm elections, Democrats are determined to make Congress' slim production of fewer than 60 laws and plenty of incompletes — on immigration, gun control, tax reform and basic spending bills — a defining issue, heaping much of the blame on the GOP-led House for obstructing President Barack Obama's second-term agenda.
Republicans dismiss criticism about a sparse record and insist that the driving issue in 2014 will be the impact of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), with a raft of canceled insurance policies, higher premiums and an endless cycle of problems.
"Voters are more motivated when something is taken away from them," Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., head of the campaign committee to elect Republicans, said this past fall during the woes of the health care website's startup.
Walden's Democratic counterpart, Rep. Steve Israel of New York, has his own assessment: "Voters are paying members of Congress to do a job, to get things done, not to just sit back and obsess about repealing a single law."
The election will decide who is right and who controls Congress for the last two years of Obama's presidency.
The GOP has held the House majority since January 2011 and is widely expected to maintain that edge in next November's contests. Congressional officials and outside political experts point to the drag of Obama's low approval ratings, the troubled PPACA rollout and the traditional losses for the president's party in midterm elections.
Republicans insist they will expand their 232-201 majority — there are currently two vacancies — but no one expects the gains of 2010 when the GOP notched 63 Democratic seats and captured House control. Past Republican wins and redrawn congressional lines have reduced the universe of competitive seats.
The GOP has seven top targets, including the all-but-certain pickup in Utah with seven-term Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson's retirement, and 26 other seats they've focused on to expand their majority. Democrats are looking at some three dozen potential takeaways, including open seats in northern Virginia and Iowa with the retirements of 17-term Republican Rep. Frank Wolf and 10-term Rep. Tom Latham.
Republicans repeatedly have tried to unseat long-time Democrats in Republican-leaning districts, such as five-term Rep. John Barrow in Georgia, nine-term Rep. Mike McIntyre in North Carolina and 12-term Rep. Collin Peterson in Minnesota. All three lawmakers, however, survived the tea-party driven, Republican wave of 2010 and redistricting changes in 2012.
The more likely incumbents to fall are first-term Democrats who barely won their seats in a high-turnout, presidential year.
Democrats see takeover possibilities in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Nevada and California as well as open seats in New Jersey, where Rep. Jon Runyan of the 2010 class decided against another term, and Arkansas, where Rep. Tom Cotton is running for the Senate. One of the party's top recruits is James Lee Witt, who served as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the Clinton administration and is pursuing the Arkansas seat.
