Comments on: 34 House Seats in Danger

By: doug

doug — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:28:21 +0000

The article says 34 Obama districts went Republican and 49 McCain districts went Dem. So 83 are "competitive" by this definition, or 19.1% (interestingly, 34/178 GOP seats and 49/257 Dem seats also both equal 19.1%). In addition to cases like Cao, I would think many of those involve reasonably popular incumbents who were originally elected either by fluke or at a time when the district's composition (either politically or geographically) was different. So they wouldn't be competitive unless the incumbent retired, or some other significant event occurred (although this raises the question of the distinction between inherently uncompetitive seats and seats that are temporarily uncompetitive due to the power of incumbency). On the other hand, just because an Obama or McCain district voted for a Democratic or GOP rep respectively, that doesn't necessarily mean that the primary was the decisive contest. My district, NJ-07, narrowly favored Obama (after supporting Bush twice) and a GOP rep (who ended up winning by 10 points in a race that was considered a tossup or slight lean Dem), but if McCain got a few more votes and edged out Obama, that wouldn't have suddenly made it a safe Republican seat. None of this is meant to dispute the larger point, that too many seats aren't competitive. However, I think that 1) there are more factors to consider than which presidential candidate won the district, and 2) the actual proportion of competitive seats is significantly greater than 8%.

By: fester

fester — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:35:20 +0000

James, I think you are misreading the CQ report ---those 34 endangered seats are just the Dem easy target list seat as those are the seats held by Republicans with a PVI ranging from R+4 (in seats where Obama won with 50%+1) (or so) to D+30 (Cao).

CQ is classifying Delaware At-Large (Castle) as potentially endangered while as long as he runs, that is a GOP hold. This is a very simple first glance cut technique that will be better than random but it is not that good.

The more interesting thing for your argument is the 34 Obama-GOP PLUS the 49 McCain-DEM seats as the swing seats --- roughly 20% of Dems in the House come from 'McCain' seats while ~16% of Republicans come from 'Obama' seats, or about 18% of the districts did not vote party line.

By: Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » The Hazards of Gerrymandering

Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » The Hazards of Gerrymandering — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:51:12 +0000

[...] James Joyner links to a a story about the competitiveness of House races, and states: [...]

By: Jim Durbin

Jim Durbin — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:21:07 +0000

Quite a few of us are working towards making 435 seats in danger. That's the ultimate goal the tea parties will get to.

In Missouri, incumbents win at greater than 60% in the polls, while Semators and Presidents win only by thousands statewide. As long as that is the norm, corruption and lack of real change will be the name of the game.

By: The Philosopher's Stone

The Philosopher's Stone — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:15:48 +0000

All Politics Is Local...

Via James Joyner (who himself got it via Teagan Goddard) this morning comes discussion of 34 congressional districts where voters in 2008 voted for President Obama while simultaneously voting for Republican Representatives. The original article also no...

By: Bithead

Bithead — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:00:31 +0000

Mmmpppfffhh.
I keep hearing of Democrat party internal polling that suggests Democrats will lose around 40 seats in the house in the midterms.

Not competitive, perhaps.
Reactive, may be another matter.