For Republicans, 2012 is a year of high hopes and immense possibilities. By this time next year, the GOP could have won the White House and the Senate and kept control of the House of Representatives. But if fortune turns against Republicans next cycle and the White House and Senate escape their grasp, what’s the outlook for the House, the GOP’s last line of defense against a second term of Obama? Republicans currently occupy 242 of the 435 seats; can Speaker John Boehner keep the total above 218?

For now, the outlook for House Republicans is quite healthy. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) contends that not only are the odds of the GOP keeping the majority extraordinarily high, but they have opportunity to win a sizable number of seats that narrowly eluded them last year.

The first advantage that Republicans see is an essentially unchanged issue environment from 2010. “It’s a cliché that ‘a year is a lifetime in politics,’ but we are still talking about the big issues from 2010,” said NRCC political director Mike Shields on a conference call Wednesday. “Unemployment, spending, debt, taxes — we’re still having that fight. Those issues were huge drivers of votes among both independents and our base voters, and they’re still what we’re talking about — we’re still debating it this week! If the mood of the country shifts or underlying issues change, then the coming year’s election will be different from last year’s, but we seem to be heading into a similar political environment.”

Redistricting
The biggest change from 2010 will be altered district lines in many populous states — minor changes in some, dramatic changes in others. Shields says that the NRCC believes that 15 once-competitive seats have become safely Republican through redistricting.

Pennsylvania appears to be on the verge of finalizing a new map that illustrates the phenomenon well. The Keystone State lost one congressional seat from population shifts in the past decade, and the result is likely to be at least one fewer Democrat in the state’s delegation and several more Republicans with better odds for reelection. In the Cook Partisan Voting Index, Rep. Mike Kelly’s northwestern 3rd district has shifted from R+3 to R+5; Rep. Jim Gerlach’s 6th district has shifted from D+4 to R+1; and Rep. Lou Barletta’s 11th district leaped from D+4 to R+6.

Republican lawmakers achieved this by making some heavily Republican districts less Republican, but still safe (Rep. Bill Shuster’s 9th district, the most Republican in the state, changed from R+17 to R+10) and safe Democratic districts even more heavily Democratic (Rep. Allyson Schwartz’s 13th district shifted from D+7 to D+13) — essentially, moving excess Republicans into swing districts, and moving swing districts’ Democrats into districts that already go Democratic anyway.

“[Democratic incumbents] Mark Critz and Jason Altmire are now drawn into [the] same district, and it’s an R+6,” Shields says. “It doesn’t look like the [former Democratic Rep. John] Murtha district anymore. . . . We feel pretty bullish about Pennsylvania and North Carolina. In one, we shored up some of our members, and we unzipped a ludicrously Democratic map in the other. The most heavily Republican district in that state is [three-term Democratic congressman] Heath Shuler’s.”

The redistricting process is not yet complete nationwide; to the NRCC, the biggest unresolved issues remain in New York, Florida, New Jersey, and Texas.