Take Back the House, Democrats. Please.

RECENT polls put Hillary Clinton slightly ahead of Donald Trump in traditionally Republican states like Georgia and close even in South Carolina. Should she make the serious investment necessary to put those states in play for real? Or should she ignore them and invest the same money in traditional battleground states? If the only concern were to minimize Mr. Trump’s chances of winning, it would be an easy call: Caution would dictate focusing exclusively on swing states.

Yet as basic economic principles make clear, caution dictates no such thing. Most people prefer not to take risks, yes, but reducing one risk sometimes creates greater exposure to another. For example, Republican congressional majorities have repeatedly blocked our rapidly dwindling opportunity to mitigate climate change, which is one of several crucial areas where they have failed us. Immigration reform, income inequality and civil rights also come to mind. The point is that expenditures on the presidential campaign must be weighed against those for congressional races. To get what they want, Democrats must go all in.

The Democratic Party comp seems poised to recapture its Senate majority this year, but the House is a different matter. Many warn that the current 61-seat Republican majority, much of it achieved by post-2010 gerrymandering, has made flipping the lower chamber an unrealistic goal.

But that view betrays a misunderstanding of how partisan gerrymandering actually works. One aim of the practice has been to reconfigure electoral boundaries to transfer redundant votes from safe districts into swing districts. If one district usually votes 60 percent Republican and an adjacent one votes 48 percent Republican, for example, boundaries might be redrawn so that each would vote 54 percent Republican. In a typical election year, the formerly Democratic district would flip Republican. But since each new district would have only a 4 percentage point cushion, both seats would turn blue in a Democratic wave election.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/opinion/campaign-stops/take-back-the-house-democrats-please.html