How huge will this year’s Republican wave be?

President Joe Biden is unpopular, Republican base voters are more enthusiastic than Democratic base voters, and House Democratic retirements are reaching historic highs.

All of this speaks to Republicans having a very good chance of regaining control of the House of Representatives in fall. The real question now is how strong the red wave will be, and if Democrats will be able to hold on to enough seats to keep their chances of recovering the majority in 2024 and beyond alive.

While 2022 is likely to be a successful election for Republicans, the scope of their gains may be limited, according to Amy Walter, the editor of a nonpartisan campaign tip sheet.

“Every indicator we use to analyze the political environment — the president’s approval rating, voter mood, and the enthusiasm gap — all point to massive gains for the GOP this fall,” she wrote. “However, those measures are colliding with a House that is becoming increasingly ‘sorted,’ with few marginal seats and few incumbents in the ‘wrong district.’ As a result, a GOP gain of 15-25 seats is the more likely scenario for this fall.”

To be clear, a 15-25 seat increase is significant. If it passes, Republicans will regain control of the House of Representatives, giving them a governing majority — especially if the gains exceed Walter’s projection.

However, such advances would fall far short of big wave elections such as that in 2010 (when Republicans won 64 seats) and 1994 (Republicans gained 54 seats). And, if Walter’s scenario plays out, it will be a considerably less bruising election for Democrats than history says they would confront. As of 2018, the average seat loss for a party whose president had an approval rating below 50% (as Biden now does) was a stunning 37 seats.

What’s going on? A few things to consider:

• Republicans’ recent achievements have harmed them.

Republicans won up 12 House seats in 2020, shocking almost everyone, even as Donald Trump was losing the White House to Biden. Many of those seats were so-called “low-hanging fruit,” districts that Democrats surged into following two years of strong election results for their party. With those seats now in Republican hands, the Republican gain ceiling in 2022 appears to be smaller than you may assume.

• There aren’t as many districts that are mismatched as there once were.

There were a number of House members who represented districts which their party’s presidential nominee had lost two decades before. That is no longer the case. Only six congressional districts currently represented by a Democrat were not carried by Biden in 2020, according to Walter: Arizona’s 2nd, Iowa’s 3rd, Wisconsin’s 3rd, Pennsylvania’s 8th, Maine’s 2nd, and Ohio’s 9th. That’s a short list of apparent targets for Republicans; nevertheless, if they just gained those six seats and didn’t lose any of their own, they’d be back in power.

• Redistricting eliminated a large number of marginal seats.

The decennial redistricting process bolstered incumbents of both parties for the third time in a row. Only 21 districts in which Biden won by less than 7 points in 2020, according to Walter, implying that for dozens of incumbents to lose, Republicans would need a nationwide vote shift of more than seven points.

It’s worth remembering that redistricting hasn’t yet been completed in every state, and several states’ filing deadlines and primaries have yet to take place. (On May 3, Indiana and Ohio will hold their primaries.) As a result, there is still a lot of ambiguity about how the playing field will appear this fall.

However, given all of this, the much-anticipated Republican wave in the House could wind up being smaller than the national political atmosphere suggests.