House ratings: Field continues to shift towards Democrats, particularly in New York

In the past 3 months, Democrats have increased their House majority as they picked up a remarkable 3 seats in a series of special elections organized in Illinois’s 14th district, Louisiana’s 6th district, Mississippi’s 1st district. What is particularly remarkable is that all three of these districts leaned heavily Republican; in 2004, George Bush had won them respectively with 55%, 59% and 62%. Each defeat increased the chaos of the Republican caucus as the NRCC started to settle in panic mode. After the loss of MS-01 on May 13th, Tom Cole, the chairman of the NRCC, issued a remarkable statement calling on Republican incumbents to brace for the worse and find individual ways to deal with the onslaught.

And Republicans have reason to fear a second November debacle. First, Republicans are now three more seats away from the majority and it is hard to find a GOP operative willing to suggest their party has any hope of reducing that margin in November. Second, the party continues to be at a significant financial disadvantage while the DCCC has a huge pile of cash that it will use in dozens of districts in the coming months, testing any Republican seat that shows any sign of being vulnerable. While the GOP was able to respond in the special elections, they will not have the money to do the same in the fall and will be forced to make some painful choices.

Third, the success of Travis Childers in MS-01 differed from those of Don Cazayoux and Bill Foster in that his opponent was not tragically flawed; in other words, the GOP had no easy excuse to explain the loss of that seat and has to face the terrifying prospect that all of its open seats are vulnerable, no matter how competitive they have appeared in previous cycles. A number of districts that opened up in the past few months and which Republicans believed would be safe bets for re-election are now finding themselves at the center of the storm, districts like NM-02, MO-09, AL-02 and OH-07. Democrats know that they will likely not have such an opportunity to snatch away heavily Republican seats in years – perhaps even decades – and they will do everything they can to make the most of every opening they have this year.

The field has shifted towards the Democratic Party, as a stunning 53 of the 88 seats that are listed in these rankings are held by Republicans. The 25 seats Democrats are defending include the 3 districts that they have just acquired and that are likely to remain in their hands in November. New York in particular is looking to be emblematic of the national catastrophe Republicans fear. Once dominant in the Empire State, the GOP has only 6 districts left today. Next year, they might only have 2. NY-25, NY-26 and NY-29 were already on everyone’s list of vulnerable Republican seats at the time of my last rankings, though the GOP’s catastrophic recruitment process in the first two of these districts has increased their predicament. And in a sign that New York Republicans are doing everything they can to seal their own doom, Vito Fossella’s arrest and subsequent retirement and the farce Staten Island Republicans are currently playing has suddenly moved NY-13 from a barely vulnerable seat to one of the Republicans’ two most vulnerable districts nationally. And to make matters worse, Republican chances in the three districts Democrats picked up in 2006 are rapidly fading, despite GOP boasting that they would have no trouble recapturing NY-19, NY-20 and NY-24 (though the first has been making some noise again over the past few weeks, see below).

I have written full descriptions of seats that have made news since mid-February. For detailed descriptions of the other races, check last month's rankings. I indicated upgraded or downgraded next to the seats that saw their ratings change to indicate whether they became more vulnerable or less vulnerable for the incumbent party. Here is the quick run-down:

• Less vulnerable: IL-11, IN-07, IN-07, PA-06, OH-15, OH-18
• More vulnerable: AK-AL, AL-02, ID-01, LA-04, MD-01, MO-09, NM-02, NY-13, NY-19, NY-25, NY-26, TX-22, WY-AL
  
• Changed parties: IL-14, LA-06 and MS-01
• Off the list: DE-AL, FL-10
  

Outlook: Democrats pick-up 14-20 seats, with a possibility of higher gains. My current prediction is a net pick-up of 17.

Continue reading the full rankings here.