News Journal: Democrats aren’t divided. And they’re going to win the House.

I’m hardly alone in predicting that Democrats will take back control of the House of Representatives and may (a much longer shot) end up with a slim majority in the Senate.
Why? Start with the fact that, in the past 80 years, every President’s party has lost seats in the House in the midterm elections, with two exceptions: Democrats under President Bill Clinton gained 5 seats in 1998 and Republicans under President George W. Bush gained 8 seats in 2002.
This year, Democrats have to win a lot more seats than that. If they hold their present 194 seats they need to win 24 more to gain the 218 majority. That many seats have changed hands in only 10 midterm elections since 1938, so the hill they have to climb is a steep one.
I believe they will climb that hill because President Trump has done something I would have thought impossible just a couple of years ago. He has created a Democratic party that is more united than at any time in my almost 50 years in politics.
As far back as the 1930s, Will Rogers joked, “I am not a member of an organized political party. I am a Democrat.” Unifying Democrats has always been difficult because they have always been part of a big tent party.
But this year, media coverage of liberal versus moderate factions in the party overplayed party divisions.
News about the primary defeat of Democratic Caucus chairman, New York representative Joe Crowley, focused on the liberalism of his winning opponent, Alexandria Ocassio-Cortez. She is certainly a New York City liberal.
It is also true that she won in a heavily liberal district, a district where the general election is just a formality. Much the same story explains the victory in Massachusetts of Ayana Pressley, who beat longtime incumbent Congressman Michael Capuano.
Look at other primary contests across the country, however, and you will be hard pressed to find other examples of an incumbent Democratic candidate being beaten by a more liberal challenger. FiveThirtyEight found that candidates supported by local Democratic committees won 37 of 39 primaries.
In district after district, Democrat primary voters sent a message. They put aside their differences and overwhelmingly supported the candidate they believed has the best chance to win in November and help establish a check on President Trump. Every poll taken for the past few months has shown Democratic voters with much more enthusiasm to get out and vote than Republican voters.
Democrats are also voting with their pocketbooks. Bloomberg just reported that “the Democrats’ House campaign arm raised more than its Republican counterpart for the seventh straight month in August.”
Of course this doesn’t include all the hidden money that finds its way into campaigns post-“Citizen’s United,” but it does show an unusual financial outpouring for Democratic House candidates.
A united party. A big enthusiasm gap. An unusual Democratic edge in raising money. Add to these blue wave-inducing factors two major issues on which all the polls say voters overwhelmingly prefer Democratic positions.
When it passed last year, Republicans predicted the tax cut would give them a big advantage in the 2018 elections.
Exactly the reverse has happened. A recent Republican Party internal poll done by Opinion Strategies poll became public. It found that, “by a 2-to-1 margin — 61 percent to 30 percent — respondents said the law benefits ‘large corporations and rich Americans’ over middle class families.
Clearly, Republicans have lost the messaging battle on this issue. So you won’t hear much from them about the tax bill in the next few weeks.
You will hear a lot from Democrats about health care. Democratic candidates are making sure that voters know about the Trump administration’s Department of Justice federal case in Texas, which would end Obamacare protections for patients with pre-existing conditions. And, in a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 75 percent of voters felt it was very important to maintain Obamacare protections and had greater trust in the Democrats on healthcare.
There are 37 days to go. I’ve been through enough elections to know everything and anything can change. But I’ll be very surprised if we don’t wake up on November 7 with a new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.

Ted Kaufman is a former Democratic U.S. Senator from Delaware.