Hastert predicts House Republicans will gain seats in midterm elections
House Speaker Dennis Hastert Wednesday became the first Republican leader to predict that the GOP will gain seats in the midterm elections.
Emerging from a meeting at the Capitol Hill Club, where the new "battleground fundraising campaign" for embattled members was laid out to party officials, the speaker said trend lines in the news have him believing that the Republicans will pick up seats.
"We are going to keep seats, and we are going to increase them as well," he said, according to an aide. A Democratic House official scoffed, however, saying that their polls show the Democrats on the verge of taking over the majority.
No other Republican leader has been so bold, not even Rep. Tom Reynolds, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
In a Tuesday breakfast with reporters, he didn't predict gains, but he did highlight the mood change among voters that Republicans think will help the party in the fall. Like Hastert, Reynolds said the continued strength in the economy, changes in Iraq, and the president's poll numbers could help the party's candidates. Reynolds, who said that only 36 seats are up for grabs, compared this election year to a basketball game that the Democrats won in the first half. But, he added, "at the start of the second half, there is a little momentum with the Republicans."
He also said that Bush's support in polls, now at 40 percent to42 percent, is a boost to the party. "I'd love to have him in the low 40s" at election time, he said, explaining that "it helps put oxygen in the room." Through his spokesman, Hastert said, "The trend is going in our direction. There's better news out there."