Our House Vulnerability Index shows you who the most at-risk House members are next year

You may not know California Rep. John Duarte, but you'll want to: He's the most at-risk Republican in 2024, according to Daily Kos Elections' House Vulnerability Index.

After Republicans fell far short of their own lofty expectations in the 2022 midterms, the United States House of Representatives remains very closely divided. In fact, you have to go back 70 years to find a time when the gap between the two parties was smaller. With Democrats needing just five seats to flip the chamber in 2024, it’s guaranteed that the battle for the House will once again take center stage next year.

It’s natural, then, to wonder which congressional districts are likely to see the closest and most critical races. There are many ways of assessing the battlefield, of course, but one simple and reliable tool we’ve used for many years at Daily Kos Elections is our House Vulnerability Index, so we’re pleased to roll out the latest edition for the 2023-24 election cycle.

The index looks at just two criteria to assess competitiveness: (1) the margin of victory in each incumbent House member’s own race in the last election (called the House Rank), and (2) the average presidential margin of victory in that same congressional district over the last two presidential elections (the Presidential Rank). We rank both of those factors from 1 to 435, with lower numbers representing more competitive outcomes. We then combine those two ranks into a single rank and sort each party’s caucus accordingly.

What this rank ordering shows is the probable order in which congressional seats held by either side are likely to fall. It doesn’t predict how many seats one or the other party will pick up; that’s something that starts to come into view later in the cycle and is usually measured with polling data. But if you forecast or even just guess at a particular number of seats a party is likely to lose—whether it’s five, 10, 20, or more—the House Vulnerability index is very good at predicting which seats are the likeliest to fall.

Just below, we present the most vulnerable members in each party according to our House Vulnerability Index. First up are the 30 most at-risk Republicans, though you can see how all 222 members of the GOP caucus rank if you click through to our spreadsheet. Odds are that any Republican losses next year will be heavily, if not entirely, concentrated among this cohort. (Note that ties are possible.)

HVI Rank	District	Incumbent	President Rank	House Rank	HVI Score
1	CA-13	John Duarte	3	2	5
2	NY-17	Mike Lawler	6	4	10
3	CA-22	David Valadao	1	13	14
4	NY-04	Anthony D’Esposito	2	16	18
4	NY-22	Brandon Williams	11	7	18
6	OR-05	Lori Chavez-DeRemer	9	10	19
7	CA-27	Mike Garcia	4	20	24
7	CA-45	Michelle Steel	5	19	24
7	AZ-01	David Schweikert	18	6	24
7	IA-03	Zach Nunn	19	5	24
7	NY-19	Marc Molinaro	15	9	24
12	NE-02	Don Bacon	14	11	25
13	MI-10	John James	24	3	27
14	NJ-07	Tom Kean Jr.	16	12	28
15	AZ-06	Juan Ciscomani	22	8	30
16	NY-03	George Santos	8	23	31
17	VA-02	Jen Kiggans	20	15	35
18	TX-15	Monica De La Cruz	10	28	38
19	PA-01	Brian Fitzpatrick	13	31	44
19	IA-01	Mariannette Miller-Meeks	23	21	44
19	CA-41	Ken Calvert	26	18	44
22	WI-03	Derrick Van Orden	30	17	47
23	WI-01	Bryan Steil	21	29	50
24	FL-27	Maria Elvira Salazar	7	45	52
24	CO-03	Lauren Boebert	51	1	52
26	CA-03	Kevin Kiley	31	22	53
27	IA-02	Ashley Hinson	29	27	56
28	CA-40	Young Kim	17	41	58
29	MT-01	Ryan Zinke	45	14	59
30	NY-01	Nick LaLota	27	33	60

Now, your first reaction looking at the list may be mostly “Who?” Unfortunately, that’s exactly what it’s often like: Many of the most vulnerable members—on either side of the aisle—are representatives who came in largely unhyped and who, either by virtue of wisdom or innate boringness, don't say or do a lot of controversial things and remain largely off the national media’s radar.

Many of them got elected the old-fashioned way: quietly effective retail campaigning combined with a big enough shift in a swing district in a midterm election, usually helped along by an open seat. And regardless of their efforts, some of them will get promptly ushered out in a similarly unremarkable fashion when their swingy districts swing back just enough the other way.

That contrasts with many of the House’s loudest and most objectionable members, who are insulated against consequences for their behavior by the dark-red status of their districts. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, is only the 167th-most at-risk Republican. Even though she underperformed her district’s lean in 2022, she’s still not anywhere near vulnerable in 2024, just because Georgia’s 14th District is so conservative.

But not all of them! Lauren Boebert is a perfect example. Despite representing a solidly red district, she survived the closest election of the year last year, winning by just 546 votes. That shocking near-upset has elevated her into the top 30 for 2024.

The difference in vulnerability between Greene and Boebert underscores why it’s so important for grassroots progressives to choose wisely when deciding to donate time or money to Democratic campaigns. If you want to specifically donate against a prominent member of the clown caucus, this list shows that it’s much more worth your trouble to give to opponents of Boebert or George Santos—where a victory is legitimately on the table—than against Greene or, say, the similarly situated Matt Gaetz (No. 169) or Jim Jordan (No. 174).

Of course, many Democrats will face tough races next year, too. Here are the top 30 most vulnerable seats, though (again) click through to our spreadsheet to see where every House Democrat ranks.

HVI Rank	District	Incumbent	President Rank	House Rank	HVI Score
1	MI-07	OPEN (Slotkin)	6	0	6
2	WA-03	Marie Gluesenkamp Perez	3	4	7
3	CO-08	Yadira Caraveo	10	1	11
3	PA-08	Matt Cartwright	4	7	11
5	PA-07	Susan Wild	7	6	13
6	NC-13	Wiley Nickel	9	10	19
7	MD-06	OPEN (Trone)	20	0	20
8	NY-18	Pat Ryan	18	5	23
9	NM-02	Gabe Vasquez	22	2	24
10	ME-02	Jared Golden	2	24	26
11	CT-05	Jahana Hayes	28	3	31
11	VA-07	Abigail Spanberger	17	14	31
13	MN-02	Angie Craig	14	18	32
14	CA-47	OPEN (Porter)	32	0	32
15	OH-13	Emilia Sykes	13	20	33
16	IL-17	Eric Sorensen	26	12	38
16	NV-03	Susie Lee	25	13	38
18	AK-AL	Mary Peltola	1	39	40
19	PA-17	Chris Deluzio	15	26	41
20	NH-01	Chris Pappas	12	31	43
21	OH-01	Greg Landsman	23	21	44
22	OR-06	Andrea Salinas	38	8	46
22	NC-01	Don Davis	31	15	46
22	WA-08	Kim Schrier	19	27	46
25	CA-49	Mike Levin	29	19	48
26	NV-04	Steven Horsford	34	17	51
27	RI-02	Seth Magaziner	43	11	54
28	NV-01	Dina Titus	33	22	55
28	MI-08	Dan Kildee	11	44	55
30	DE-AL	OPEN (Blunt Rochester)	58	0	58

You’ll notice one difference right away from the Republican side: There are already a number of open seats for Democrats. In a way, that’s good because these aren’t “Oh no, we’re going to be hammered this year, I’d better retire” open seats; these are largely representatives seeking promotions to statewide office, most notably in Michigan’s 7th District, where Rep. Elissa Slotkin gives Democrats a strong candidate for the state’s open Senate seat.

The most vulnerable incumbent, meanwhile, is Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington’s 3rd District, thanks both to her tight win in 2022 and the fact that she sits in the third-reddest seat held by a Democrat, according to the 2020 presidential margins. Most of the top 10 for Democrats are, like Gluesenkamp Perez, freshmen who narrowly won races that 2022 conventional wisdom had them tipped to lose, such as Yadira Caraveo in Colorado’s brand-new 8th District and Wiley Nickel in North Carolina’s 13th District.

That’s something of a contrast with the incumbents in the reddest and second-reddest Democratic-held districts: Mary Peltola in Alaska’s at-large district and Jared Golden in Maine’s rural 2nd District, both of whom have established themselves as good fits for their constituencies and who won by more convincing margins in 2022, placing them further down the list.

So how well does the House Vulnerability Index work? Very well, it turns out. Daily Kos Elections has been publishing the index since 2010, which allows us to look at previous cycles to see how it’s performed.

As an example, consider the Democratic ledger on the 2022 version of the HVI. Of the 14 most vulnerable seats on the list, Republicans picked up 13 of them. (The lone survivor, of course, was Mary Peltola.) Many of these flips weren’t surprising: 2022 was a redistricting year, so this batch included a number of seats like Georgia’s 6th District and Tennessee’s 5th District that were previously blue but were turned dark red via gerrymandering, prompting Democratic incumbents to retire or run elsewhere. Nonetheless, the HVI made it clear which seats would be in trouble.

Of the remaining 206 Democratic seats, Republicans won just seven of them, and a majority of those flips came in the next dozen seats after that initial batch. That includes the loss of New York’s 3rd District to the poster child for GOP mendacity, George Santos. In fact, three of those seven second-tier losses all came in New York, where it seems like an unexpectedly close gubernatorial race created more severe headwinds for Democratic House candidates than we saw elsewhere in most of the country.

Of course, Republicans didn’t net 20 seats last year. Democratic candidates flipped a number of districts, too, in addition to winning several seats newly created through the once-a-decade reapportionment process, giving the GOP only a single-digit gain overall. Of the 10 most vulnerable Republican-held seats in 2022, Democrats picked up six of them.

There was only one Democratic pickup outside that top 10: Gluesenkamp Perez’s victory in Washington’s 3rd District, which became an open seat thanks to a catastrophic primary that saw Republican incumbent Jaime Herrera Beutler, a relative pragmatist, fall to election denier Joe Kent. But even that seat was still ranked 17th overall, so Gluesenkamp Perez’s upset didn’t come completely out of nowhere.

Looking over the 2022 flips, you’ll probably notice that the bulk were open seats. That’s not a surprise; districts are almost always at their most vulnerable when there’s no incumbent running. While most people disapprove of Congress as a whole, they’re usually willing to give their own representative greater benefit of the doubt.

An open seat, by contrast, means the party is giving up whatever goodwill and name recognition the outgoing member accrued, and starting over with someone new who’s simply less well-known. That’s why we make an important adjustment on the House Rank side of the ledger.

Usually, the score there reflects how close an incumbent’s previous race was, which is a good way of capturing which representatives are chronic underperformers or overperformers relative to their districts. The representative from each party who had the narrowest win last year gets a 1 in House Rank, the one with the second-closest win gets a 2, and so on.

However, when there’s an open seat, we don’t go by the retiring representative’s previous win; instead, we give the House Rank a 0 because the party trying to hold the seat is starting from scratch.

The other half of the equation is the Presidential Rank for each district. Candidate quality matters, of course, but it mostly matters around the margins in districts that are already swingy. The most charismatic and hardest-working candidate imaginable is still going to lose in a district that the presidential candidate from the opposite party won by 30 percentage points. So we also incorporate a rank-ordered score for how generally red or blue a district is, as reflected in the average margin of the last two presidential races in that district. 

That, of course, means the 2020 and 2016 presidential races, which were run under different district lines last decade. Daily Kos Elections, however, uses precinct-level data to recalculate how those races would have unfolded under the current congressional boundaries, so our HVI calculations are based on the current lines, not the previous ones.

With the historic decline in ticket-splitting these days, very few representatives hold districts that were won by the opposing party’s presidential candidate, let alone won convincingly. For example, among Democrats, there’s a grand total of one who represents a district won by former President Donald Trump by more than 10 points: Again, it’s Peltola, who won last year in Alaska under very unusual circumstances.

On the Republican side, only four members serve districts won by President Joe Biden by more than 10 points, and, of those, three (Duarte, David Valadao, and Mike Garcia) represent turf in California with Latino pluralities that often see low Democratic turnout in non-presidential years. Biden, for instance, won Valadao’s 22nd District by more than 14 points, which gives Valadao a 1 in the Presidential Rank column. (Note that we never revert open seats to a 0 in the presidential column; the Presidential Rank is more of a natural baseline that applies regardless of which individuals are running there.)

Finally, the House Rank and Presidential Rank are combined into one number, called the HVI Score, which is again rank-ordered into the final list of who’s most vulnerable, giving us the final number we want, the HVI Rank.

A representative can therefore be vulnerable in one of two ways. One possibility is that they run ahead of their party’s presidential candidates in a swing district, like Valadao, who gets a 1 in Presidential Rank for having the bluest GOP-held district but a 13 for House Rank for having only the 13th-closest House race in 2022, giving him an HVI Score of 14. That yields an overall HVI Rank of 3, though, so he’s still very much at risk. (Last cycle, he was 7th.)

The other alternative is someone who’s insulated by a favorable district but underperforms that district’s lean because of their clownish ways. Again, Boebert is an ideal illustration: She’s in the 51st-bluest GOP-held district—Trump won Colorado’s 3rd by more than 8 points—but thanks to her shockingly close margin of just 0.2 percent last year, she gets a 1 for House Rank, giving her an HVI Score of 52 and an HVI Rank of 24. That’s a big jump from 2022, when she was the 37th-most vulnerable Republican.

The House Vulnerability Index is not static. As every election unfolds, we see more retirements. In 2022, for instance, there were 61 open seats (plus another seven brand-new seats created through reapportionment); at the moment, there are just 13 open seats so far this cycle, so we know there will be more. As soon as a member announces a departure, we reset their district’s House Rank to 0, recalculate their HVI Rank, and then re-sort our entire list. Invariably, that bumps their district up the vulnerability rankings, though it doesn’t necessarily make their seat vulnerable (if it’s already solidly red or blue).

In addition, some states, such as North Carolina and Alabama, are likely to have new congressional maps in place ahead of the next elections. Whenever that happens, we make a mathematical adjustment to every affected incumbent’s 2022 House margin that reflects how their district has changed in terms of the presidential result. For instance, if a Democrat won by 10 points last year and their district became 5 points bluer, we’d bump their margin up to 15 points and recalculate their House Rank accordingly.

In fact, the index has already shifted a bit since the very start of the cycle, which you can see if you click through to our spreadsheet and look at the tabs labeled “initial.” Slotkin’s seat, for instance, started off as only the eighth-most vulnerable prior to her decision to run for Senate, a move that shot her district to the top of the list.

So the HVI is something you’ll want to bookmark and keep your eye on throughout the rest of the cycle as we continue to update it. It’s an invaluable tool both for analysts and activists who want to know where to focus their attention and energies.