Daily Kos Elections is pleased to announce our initial House race ratings for the 2020 election cycle. Including vacancies, Democrats hold 234 House seats while Republicans control 200 (the final seat is held by independent Justin Amash), meaning that the GOP needs to net 18 seats this year to retake control of the chamber. However, as our ratings illustrate, Republicans have a monumentally difficult task ahead of them.
Our full chart rating the competitiveness of each contest is below, with Democratic seats in blue, Republican seats in red, and Amash's in green. Seats that are rated as "safe" for the party that currently holds them are not listed. These ratings—including the safe seats—are also visualized in the map at the top of this post, which shows each congressional district as equally sized. You can find a larger version here and a traditional map here or at the bottom of this post.
In addition, two open Republican seats aren’t shown above: North Carolina’s 2nd and 6th. That’s because we’ve rated them as Safe Democratic. (More on them in a moment.)
Altogether, we give Democrats an advantage in 222 seats to 197 for the GOP, while the remaining 16 we classify as “tossups.” (You can find specific descriptions of each category at the end of this post.) This means that even if Republicans were to hold every seat where they have the edge and sweep the entire Tossup column, they’d still need to take five districts we rate as Lean Democratic or better in order to seize the majority.
That's a tall order since historically, seats rated Lean or Likely rarely change hands. In 2016, for instance, not a single one did. In 2018, meanwhile, exactly five such seats flipped from red to blue out of 53 we had in those categories on the eve of the election—and that was the culmination of a Democratic wave that had been building from the moment Trump won office. No countervailing wave appears to be forming this year. If anything, the opposite is true: Polling all cycle long has consistently shown that voters once again want to see Democrats win the House.
The one upside for Republicans is that because they lost so badly two years ago when Democrats netted 40 seats and retook the chamber, they’re now mostly on offense: Of the Tossups, just one—Georgia’s 7th—is GOP-held. That's really where their good news ends, though. Republicans start off in the hole thanks to court-ordered redistricting in North Carolina, which converted two solid GOP seats into guaranteed pickups for Democrats: the previously mentioned 2nd and the 6th. They'll also struggle to hold Texas' open 23rd District, a blue-tilting seat where they've simply been outclassed in candidate recruitment.
In fact, that's a common story across the country; a combination of strong Democratic incumbents and poor GOP fundraising has narrowed the map for Republicans long before Election Day.
One telling example comes in Michigan’s 11th District, which backed Donald Trump 50-45 but changed hands in 2018 when Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens captured it as an open seat. This suburban Detroit district should have automatically been a top GOP target, but Stevens ended March with a huge $2.5 million war chest while her best-funded Republican opponent, self-funding businesswoman Carmelita Greco, had less than a tenth that sum.
And yet Greco is still better off than another Republican, attorney Eric Esshaki, who struggled to collect enough signatures from voters and may not even make the August primary ballot as a result. Trump could still do well enough to put his party over the top, but Stevens is very much the favorite in a race we rate as Likely Democratic.
The scene that's unfolded in Michigan’s 11th is not unique. Under ordinary circumstances, seats held by freshmen members of Congress and carried by the opposite party in the most recent presidential election would be among the most vulnerable. Nevertheless, we rate another five such seats as Likely Democratic and half a dozen more as Lean Democratic. Republicans don’t need to win all of these seats to take back the House, but there's no way for them to seize the speaker's gavel without a good chunk of them.
There are many explanations for why Republicans have found themselves in this fix, foremost among them that they never really behaved as though they had a shot to win back the House in the first place. That kind of dour outlook has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy as the strong candidates a party needs to fight its way out of the minority decide to sit out a difficult challenge. Indeed, that's precisely what happened to the GOP, leaving it with weak standard-bearers in many must-win districts.
Demographic trends also play a big role. Many of the Democratic Party's wins in 2018 came in well-educated, affluent suburban districts that traditionally voted Republican but have recoiled against Trump. This phenomenon has shown no sign of abating and in fact could render another swath of GOP seats at-risk by November—the ones you see in the Lean Republican column.
Of course, the reverse is also true: Rural areas that are mainly white continue to charge to the right. That hasn't benefited the GOP to the same extent, however, simply because Democrats have held little such turf ever since the 2010 and 2014 Republican waves knocked them out of nearly all the rural seats they once controlled.
And finally, we are living in a time of extreme political polarization. Very few voters split their tickets as they once did, meaning that a district that goes Democratic for president is likely to do the same all the way down the ballot as well, and vice versa. While the coronavirus pandemic has unleashed a new era of unprecedented uncertainty, at least one thing remains steadfast: Donald Trump is unpopular, and the fate of the GOP is tied to his.
In fact, the last—and perhaps only—time a party lost control of the White House but flipped the House of Representatives came in 1848, when Democrats reclaimed the lower chamber from the Whigs but saw Zachary Taylor win the presidency. Given the absolute fealty Trump demands from his party, we're confident in saying that this 172-year-old streak will stand: If Trump cannot win a second term, Nancy Pelosi will earn another two years as speaker in the people's House.
These ratings represent our attempt to forecast the outcomes of this November’s elections using the best information we have available. As circumstances warrant, we’ll issue changes in these ratings from time to time. To keep up with any changes, please subscribe to our free newsletter, the Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest, which we send out each weekday. You can keep tabs on our continually updated chart at this link.
Note that for any House seats that will be filled in special elections, which will take place before November—such as the May 12 contests for California’s 25th District and Wisconsin’s 7th District—our ratings are for the special elections. Once those contests conclude, we will reevaluate our ratings, if need be, for the regular general election.
In brief, here’s how we define each of our ratings categories:
- Tossup: Both (or all) parties have a strong, though not necessarily perfectly equal, chance of winning.
- Lean Democrat or Lean Republican: One party has an identifiable advantage, but a win is possible for the other party.
- Likely Democrat or Likely Republican: One party has a strong advantage and is likely to win, though the race has the potential to become more competitive, and an upset cannot be ruled out.
- Safe Democrat or Safe Republican: Barring unforeseeable developments, one party is certain to win.
Even within each category, though, not all races are equally competitive: One race in the Lean Republican grouping, for instance, might be on the border of being a Tossup, while another could be closer to Likely Republican.
