Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest: Republicans finally start admitting gerrymandering helped them

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' Redistricting: Since the election, lots of Democrats have pointed to the discrepancy between the nationwide House popular vote (won by Dems) and the GOP's continued control of the House majority, to which the GOP response has been mostly "Hmmrmrmf ... hey, look over there!" But in the last few weeks, something seems to have changed: namely, Republicans now seem to be loudly embracing the fact that, yes, gerrymandering saved their majority in 2012'and they're proud of it. Part of this trend stems from a recent memo from the Republican State Leadership Committee (their counterpart to the DLCC) and its REDMAP program, emphasizing the role of their 2010 legislative victories in preserving their House majority in 2012.

And on Thursday, at the House GOP's annual retreat, NRCC chair Greg Walden adopted that same line, saying "Redistricting was a blessing for us." That's also reflected in a new NRCC memo that claims that the number of competitive seats is smaller under the new round of districting, and that there are now 190 "strong Republican seats." (There's no cited discussion what constitutes a "strong Republican seat," though my back-of-the-envelope math suggests it might be districts that are around 45 percent Obama or less.)

That NRCC memo is the same one that we briefly mentioned in the previous Digest, which listed what Republicans view as the seven most vulnerable Democrats, but it turns out it also they have a second tier of 38 additional Dem targets, which it's probably worth your while to glance at. The list is dominated by freshmen who won competitive races last year, though there are a few wishful-thinking picks thrown in there (Bill Keating? Peter DeFazio?). (Also, h/t to commenter KingTag, who points out a similar DCCC "staying on the offensive" list from early 2009, if you want to step in the wayback machine and see how that all panned out. Spoiler alert: Democrats defeated precisely one of those targets in 2010.) (David Jarman)