Tag: cook

Cook Political Report House race update: 17 races +GOP, 4 +Dem.

This is not precisely a ‘Boom!’

…and I’d hold off calling DOOM on this, either. But it’s getting there. There are two interesting data points, here:

  1. Cook’s main ratings now show that there are five Republican seats that are seriously at risk of flipping, as opposed to fifteen Democratic ones.
  2. Looking at the race changes themselves: Cook took 6 Republicans and one Democrat effectively off of the board completely by rating their races as Solid.  Cook also put one race  (IA-02) into play by upgrading it from Solid Democratic to Likely Democratic.

That last point is important because it shows in stark relief the shrinking of the Democratic playing field. Right now Cook ranks the house as: 204 Solid Republican, 160 Solid Democratic. The Republicans currently control 15 seats that are ranked Likely Republican: even if you spot the Democratic party every other race (including the two Democratic-controlled seats that are ranked Likely Republican) the GOP would still have a majority in the House next year. Not that will happen: what is expected to happen is that the Democrats will probably lose a net six seats or so. Continue reading Cook Political Report House race update: 17 races +GOP, 4 +Dem.

BOOM goes the Cook Political Report Senate rankings.

Short version: Alaska, Louisiana, and North Carolina to Toss-Up: New Hampshire to Lean Democrat. To be fair, Cook is also degrading GA to Toss-Up and put Mississippi into Likely Republican territory, but the map is still bad for Democrats, and frankly just got worse for them. But this may be the most important bit:

Continue reading BOOM goes the Cook Political Report Senate rankings.

#rsrh Cook’s incredibly cynical 2012 redistricting scorecard.

Note: I wrote ‘cynical,’ not ‘inaccurate.’  It’s cynical because it admits something that most people don’t want to admit in public: if your party controls the redistricting process in your state and your state is due to either lose or gain a seat, you are going to enjoy seeing what happens to the other party’s legislators in 2012.  To summarize Cook’s current findings: they forecast a current net loss of one seat for the Democrats from redistricting, mostly because the Democratic-controlled Illinois (-1 seat overall) state legislature has every intention of hosing an estimated four Republican Congressmen; but the Republican-controlled state legislatures of Georgia (+1 seat) and North Carolina (no change) are going to do precisely the same thing to Democratic Congressmen, so it all works out*.

As you might have guessed, the news that Illinois is apparently planning to rewrite the 2010 election results to eliminate all those pesky Republican freshmen is making me less than incensed that Georgia (and probably Utah) seem inclined to reinforce the lesson embodied in said election; personally, I’m just grateful that we took control of enough state legislatures to keep the Democrats from pulling more Illinois/Wisconsin shenanigans…

Moe Lane

*To be fair, North Carolina’s existing Democratic-designed gerrymandering is epic, and is the stuff of legends among political mavens.

#rsrh The final Cook DOOMLists.

Rather than walk you through the latest changes – short version is that the sliding of the Democratic party’s House members into the abyss is operating more or less on schedule – I’d thought that I’d show you just how bad an election cycle it’s been for the Other Side. Here’s the House [UPDATE: the 2008  entries in each case are the first Cook surveys of the 2010 election cycle]:

11/1/2010 11/13/2008
Dem GOP Dem GOP
Likely D 19 1 28 0
Lean D 23 2 18 0
Toss-Up 49 1 2 5
Lean R 21 4 0 5
Likely R 8 7 0 24
Total 120 15 48 34
High-Risk 78 4 2 5

Continue reading #rsrh The final Cook DOOMLists.

Cook’s DOOMList: 10/28/2010 edition.

This may be the penultimate DOOMList from Cook with regard to the House: it’s the Friday before the election and there’s just not much time left for tracking the ongoing Democratic party’s synchronized mass career implosion.  Which is not to say that more extinction events won’t occur, but there’s a limit to how fast Cook can write them down.

Candidate District Ranking Challenger
Costa CA-20 Toss-Up Andy Vidak
Boyd FL-02 Lean R Steve Southerland
Marshall GA-08 Lean R Austin Scott
Minnick ID-01 Toss-Up Raul Labrador
Frank MA-04 Lean D Sean Bielat
Pingree ME-01 Lean D Dean Scontras
Heinrich NM-01 Toss-Up Jon Barela
Bishop NY-01 Toss-Up Randy Altschuler
Open TN-08 Likely R Stephen Fincher
Ortiz TX-27 Lean D Blake Farenthold
Connolly VA-11 Toss-Up Keith Fimian
Larsen WA-02 Toss-Up John Koster

I mildly regret to say that the latest readjustments included three that favored the Democratic party – two of which were to the benefit of Democratic incumbents.  It is regrettable to see any Democrat slip from our fingers, of course… but looking  at the list above, I think that we’ll all bear up under the crushing disappointment, somehow.  Particularly if Barney Frank continues to spiral inward…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

#rsrh Cook updates again (Barney Frank on Big Board!)

As usual, it breaks the GOP’s way.  All of these are now “Likely Democrat:”

Five more ‘safe’ seats for the Democrats that aren’t safe anymore.  Five more incumbents that the DCCC must divert money to.  Five more cracks in the firewall that the NRCC can pound upon.

As somebody noted on Twitter: twenty-two days and counting.

Moe Lane

The last (probably) pre-Labor Day Cook rankings.

House.
Senate.
Governorships.

If you don’t feel like clicking through the links, allow me to summarize: ten more House seats shifted in the GOP’s favor, and so did three Senate seats, and so did four Governor’s races. Only one of them (WY-GOV) is now off the actual board, but Cook is now projecting a net +6 to +8 GOP in the Governors’ races, a net +7 to +9 GOP in the Senate, and at least a net +35 GOP in the House. The House is particularly of interest, as there are currently forty-five Toss-Up races listed by Cook right now, and only three of them are Republican seats.

Couple this with the latest set of regional race polls from Republican-leaning American Action Forum, and the truly atrocious (for the other side) enthusiasm gap that Democrat-leaning Public Policy Polling is finding, and Larry Sabato’s needed-to-slam-a-shot of whiskey-first prediction of a lost House and Senate on the edge, and you get… a lot of people blankly staring at their scratch papers or computer screens and thinking This can’t be right. I must have subtracted where I should have added, or something. Or maybe I made an assumption that I shouldn’t have. Things can’t be this bad for the Democratic party. Continue reading The last (probably) pre-Labor Day Cook rankings.

Latest Cook Shift: Dem Woes Worsen.

It’s a little hard to immediately see, because what happened was an inadvertent cascade effect.  A couple of races became competitive at the same time that rather more races became rather more competitive, one after the other.  Net result?  Six Democrats are now in more danger of losing their seats, while one Democrat is now in less danger:

ID-01 Minnick Toss-Up Lean D
NC-02 Etheridge Solid D Likely D
NC-08 Kissell Likely D Toss-up
ND-AL Pomeroy Lean D Toss-up
PA-11 Kanjorski Lean D Toss-up
SD-AL Sandlin Likely D Lean D
UT-02 Matheson Solid D Likely D

And I doubt that progressives are going to be happy to hear that Walt Minnick is doing better, given that he’s been a highly unreliable vote for them this year.

Continue reading Latest Cook Shift: Dem Woes Worsen.

This is the January 14th Cook Competitive House Race Chart.

Here. 110 races: 50 competitive, 60 ‘potentially’ competitive. Democrats hold 40 of the 50 competitive seats and 45 of the 60 ‘potentially competitive’ seats.  But the relative ratios of Democrats at risk to Republicans at risk is not the question.

The question is what the January 21st Cook Competitive House Race Chart is going to look like.

Crossposted to RedState.