[Promoted from the diaries by DavidNYC. Last week, I had the pleasure of promoting superribbie's excellent diary which detailed the most vulnerable GOP-held House seats. Today's diary is the inverse: The Dem-held seats where we need to play some serious defense.]
I recently completed profiling 74 House races where we have a chance to take a GOP seat. To form the list, I used the following empiric: 1. any district where the partisan score was at least 45 (meaning generic R beats generic D 55-45 in a neutral year) and the incumbent won with less than 65% of the two party vote in 2004; 2. any district in which the partisan score was under 45, but the incumbent won with less than 60% in 2004; 3. any open seat in which the partisan score is 40 or above.
To compute the district's partisan makeup, I averaged Gore's share of the 2000 2-party vote with Kerry's 2004 share plus one and then averaged that number with Charlie Cook's partisan voting index score.
By flipping that definition on its head, I came up with a list of 42 Dem seats that the GOP could go after in a strong GOP year. 2006 will not be such a year. Nonetheless, there will be some tough defenses next year. They will almost certainly come from among these (obviously, retirements can complicate things).
Given that our task with regard to GOP seats is attack all of them to the best of our abilities, and only ration resources to the extent necessary, it made sense to simply profile each of the 74 targets, point out their advantages, and then rank them by likelihood.
Our task regarding defense is different, however. We would ideally like to be able to completely ignore all 42 of these races. Most will be non-competitive when all is said and done. Therefore, I'm of two minds whether it's worth putting together in-depth profiles of all of these districts. For the ones that will undoubtedly be competitive, certainly, but the question is how many. I therefore decided that the best thing to do is to do things in the opposite order from how I did the targets; I'm putting up the ranking of our potentially vulnerable seats and I'm relying on opinions as to how many of these it's worth writing the full profile of.
For the ranking, I used the same method as in my previous list: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/23/173131/345
The list:
- Texas 17 (Chet Edwards) 86.3
- Utah 02 (Jim Matheson) 86.8
- Georgia 08 (Jim Marshall) 87
- Louisiana 03 (Charlie Melancon) 89.5
- Ohio 06 (open seat) 89.6
- Illinois 08 (Melissa Bean) 90.5
- Colorado 03 (John Salazar) 90.8
- South Dakota at Large (Stephanie Herseth) 92.3
- North Dakota at Large (Earl Pomeroy) 94
- Georgia 12 (John Barrow) 97
- Pennsylvania 17 (Tim Holden) 99.3
- Kansas 03 (Dennis Moore) 100.3
- Kentucky 06 (Ben Chandler) 100.5
- Tennessee 04 (Lincoln Davis) 101.8
- New York 27 (Brian Higgins) 102.3
- California 20 (Jim Costa) 102.8
- Maryland 03 (open seat) 103.6
- Oregon 05 (Darlene Hooley) 105.3
- Iowa 03 (Leonard Boswell) 105.5
- Virginia 09 (Rick Boucher) 105.5
- Missouri 03 (Russ Carnahan) 106.5
- New York 01 (Tim Bishop) 106.8
- Arkansas 02 (Vic Snyder) 107.5
- South Carolina 05 (John Spratt) 108.8
- Vermont at Large (open seat) 109
- Maine 02 (Mike Michaud) 110.3
- Texas 15 (Ruben Hinojosa) 110.5
- Pennsylvania 13 (Allyson Schwartz) 110.8
- North Carolina 13 (Brad Miller) 110.8
- North Carolina 02 (Bob Etheridge) 111.8
- Washington 03 (Brian Baird) 111.8
- Washington 02 (Rick Larsen) 112
- Indiana 07 (Julia Carson) 112.3
- Florida 02 (Allen Boyd) 113
- Texas 28 (Henry Cuellar) 113.3
- Missouri 05 (Emanuel Cleaver) 113.8
- Oregon 04 (Pete DeFazio) 114
- Texas 27 (Solomon Ortiz) 114.5
- Wisconsin 03 (Ron Kind) 114.8
- Illinois 17 (Lane Evans) 116
- California 47 (Loretta Sanchez) 116.5
- Mississippi 02 (Bennie Thompson) 118.3