‘Likely GOP Trifecta’: Cook Political Predicts Republicans Will Take The House, Senate, and White House

The Cook Political Report predicted on Wednesday that the GOP was likely to keep its House majority, declaring that “Trump Sweep Brings a Likely GOP Trifecta to Washington.”

While Cook noted that there is still a chance Democrats win the House, the “most likely outcome” is for the Republicans to win control of the House, Senate, and the White House.

Dave Wasserman, who coauthored Cook’s analysis, joined MSNBC to discuss the House races and explained why the GOP is on track to win the House.

“Republicans flipped some House seats, Democrats flipped others. And of course, there’s a kind of a bar there to go over. What races are you keeping a close eye on?” asked anchor Jose Diaz-Balart.

“Well, obviously, we’re dealing with a couple dozen races that still have some degree of uncertainty in the House. So this is going to take a while to sort out, particularly in California and Arizona, where the count is going to take days, if not weeks,” Wasserman replied, adding:

And at the same time, Republicans have more paths to 218 seats, at least in my estimation, than Democrats do, because even though Democrats were able to pick up three seats in New York, which was good news early on for Hakeem Jeffries, they picked up a seat in Syracuse. It looks like they’re going to pick up a seat on Long Island, one in the Hudson Valley.

Those three toss-up races in Pennsylvania are all clear Republican leads, narrow leads, But it looks likely Republicans are going to sweep the 10th, seventh and eighth districts in Pennsylvania. And those were really the bellwethers where Democrats might have needed to to notch wins to get to a majority.

Also, Don Bacon holding on, it appears for now in Nebraska’s second congressional district. There’s still some of Omaha to count, but that’s a place where Democrats were counting on Kamala Harris to run up a very large margin to carry the Democrat, Tony Vargas across the finish line against that veteran moderate Republican. And that appears to be going Republican’s way.

So that’s creating just a little bit of breathing room as Republicans try and hold on to their House majority. And we are seeing a strong degree, a reasonable degree of split-ticket voting. That explains why Democrats are still in the game in a lot of these House and Senate races.

“And, Dave, just what there was there was a reinforcement in the RGV area. Right, of the Republican strengths there,” followed up Diaz-Balart, referring to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.

“Yeah. And Hispanic voters are a big reason not only why we saw such a sweeping victory for Donald Trump last night, but also why Republicans are in a good position in the House. Hispanic voters, Democrats didn’t perform as well with them in some of these Pennsylvania districts as they were hoping. And also as we get a peek at some of the early California data and really we have the majority of the vote in a lot of these districts, but it’s going to be a slow count. Republicans are performing quite well in the Central Valley in a lot of these more diverse districts where Democrats had high hopes,” Wasserman replied.

Watch the clip above via MSNBC.