Dems are hoping for an election wave, but they shouldn't be too confident

Democrats are feeling cheery at the prospect that this fall will bring an end to the power outage they suffered in 2016 and the near- irrelevance they have endured since.

Conditions look particularly good for taking back the House. Off-year elections in a president's first term nearly always cost his party some seats, and President Donald Trump's historically low approval ratings are an especially heavy weight for Republicans. The fact that so many GOP incumbents are in a rush to retire is no mere coincidence.

Democrats also have enthusiasm on their side, something that hasn't been the case in a nonpresidential year since 2006. In the latest Post-ABC News poll, more than half of Democratic-leaning voters said it has become "more important to vote" this year; only a third of Republicans felt that way.

So what could go wrong for Democrats in 2018?

Plenty, actually.

Already, Democratic strategists are getting a little jumpy about the party's shrinking advantage in the polls, especially the closely watched generic-ballot test, where voters are asked which party they would prefer to represent them in Congress.

The spread is running at 6.5 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average - just half where it was at the beginning of the year. It shows an electorate still inclined to vote Democratic but probably not by enough to flip the House.

What should be more worrisome to Democrats - ironically enough - are some of the very forces that are working in their favor.

They are on track to have a record number of candidates running, led by a surge of women and veterans. According to the latest compilation by the Campaign Finance Institute, nearly 60 percent of Republican-held districts have a Democratic challenger who has raised at least $50,000; two years ago, fewer than 20 percent had reached that threshold by this point in the cycle.

All of that is a good thing for any party. Except when it leads to large, messy primaries.

In suburban Virginia, for instance, Democrats worked hard to recruit state Sen. Jennifer Wexton (Loudoun), a former prosecutor with deep roots in the district, to take on Rep. Barbara Comstock, one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the country.

But now, there are eight other candidates in the primary, and Wexton is falling short in fundraising to Alison Friedman, an anti-human-trafficking activist who moved to the district in April. Friedman - backed by a host of liberal celebrities, among them Barbra Streisand - has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars more than Wexton.

In crowded primaries, Republicans will be rooting from the sidelines for the liberal base to pull all of the candidates leftward - forcing them to declare allegiance to single-payer health care, impeaching Trump, free college tuition. Those are October attack ads in waiting in many of the scattered pockets where Democrats need to win.

Which is why national numbers matter so little. For an electoral wave to rise high enough to wash a majority-making two dozen House seats into the Democratic column, the party will have to take territory that Hillary Clinton could not.

There again, Virginia offers reason for caution as well as hope for Democrats. They romped the Old Dominion in November, picking up 15 seats in the House of Delegates. But that victory fell one seat short of what Democrats needed to break the GOP majority. And 14 of those were in legislative districts that Clinton also won, suggesting that the party had done little to expand its reach since 2016.

Meanwhile, economic confidence - notwithstanding Monday's market plunge - has reached a level not seen in 17 years. That suggests, among other things, that the tax cuts that looked so unpopular when they were passed in December may be an asset to Republicans by this fall.

Democrats also have to contend with two givens in Republicans' favor - gerrymandered districts and outside spending by conservative groups.

As district lines are now drawn, a disproportionate amount of Democratic energy is corralled into a relatively small number of congressional seats. Foes of gerrymandering have won a recent string of court victories, but most of those rulings will have no effect on 2018. In other words, voters in Texas, North Carolina and Wisconsinwill be going to the polls in districts that courts have determined were drawn in a discriminatory or overly partisan way.

On the money front, Democrats were already expecting to be outspent by at least $100 million. Then the Koch brothers informed their donors late last month that they were going to put as much as$400 million into the midterms, their largest commitment ever. In House races, a million dollars here and there can make the difference.

Finally, perhaps the single biggest miscalculation that Democrats could make right now is to expect Trump to do all their work for them.

One thing to remember about waves. Most of them break before they reach the shore.

Previously:
• 05/03/17 Pelosi: Let's say we welcome pro-lifers in order to win
• 03/31/17 Trump struggles against some of the forces that helped get him elected
• 01/19/17 How Donald Trump came up with 'Make America Great Again'
• 11/17/16 Giddy governors gloat at gathering
• 09/26/16 What Clinton and Trump must worry about in the first debate
• 07/18/16 Dennis Kucinich's sister and her husband are among former Dems jumping on the Trump train --- how many more will follow?
• 05/10/16 Many Republicans are eating their nasty words about Trump
• 04/06/16 GOP has chosen candidate who has flouted a litany of its once-sacred conservative principles
• 04/06/16 GOP front-runner's loss may be no ordinary setback
• 03/17/16 Delegates are GOP's ultimate wild card: Making sense of the process
• 03/14/16 Trump has lit a fire ---- can it be contained?
• 02/24/16 Sanders has the resources and a plan to go the distance. Will it matter?
• 02/09/16 Why the feminist appeal isn't working for Hillary in New Hampshire
• 02/03/16 The photo finish on caucus night showed that Democratic voters are looking for qualities beyond experience and electability