Updated Jan. 19, 2012
Bold type indicates that the current party that holds the seat is not favored to keep it.
The following chart ranks all 435 House seats by state and district number. Note: This map eliminates NY-9 and NY-26 in order for the total number of House seats to add up to 435; obviously, this is subject to change as New York completes redistricting. It also adds FL-26 as a safe Republican seat and FL-27 as a safe Democratic seat; that too is subject to change.
February 9th, 2012
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Generally speaking, if members of the U.S. House of Representatives want to keep their seats, voters are happy to oblige: since the end of World War II, the lowest reelection rate for incumbent House members was 79.3% in 1948, which was a huge Democratic wave year.
But those figures don’t include members who decide to leave [...]
January 19th, 2012
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We here at the Crystal Ball, and of course our readers, love politics. But Americans don’t, especially now: Congress is historically unpopular, and Americans are so sick of politics that more than two-thirds of them according to one survey wished the presidential campaign was over even before it officially started.
With that in mind, here’s a [...]
January 5th, 2012
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CHICAGO — It was predictable that Illinois Republicans would be outraged by the state’s new congressional district map, which the Democrats who control the redistricting levers in Springfield inflicted on them this summer. They were so angry, in fact, that they sued in federal district court to try to get the new lines overturned.
Yet the [...]
December 22nd, 2011
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Congress is very unpopular. In November, according to the Gallup Poll, only 13% of Americans approved of the job that Congress was doing. That tied the record set in October for the lowest approval rating in the history of the Gallup Poll. Moreover, according to another recent Gallup Poll, only 20% of Americans believe that [...]
October 27th, 2011
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Since the upset victory of Republican Bob Turner (NY-9), pundits have argued over the meaning of the results. One of the more popular beliefs is that President Obama’s unpopularity played a large role in the election of a Republican in a Democratic district. Therefore, the reasoning goes, Obama will drag other Democrats to defeat in [...]
October 20th, 2011
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said that “There is nothing I love as much as a good fight.” If so, he would’ve hated where the House is headed for the next decade, because by and large it likely won’t have all that many good fights.
Instead of looking at the House through the competitive races, consider instead [...]
September 29th, 2011
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Just a day before Election Day, the painful reality hit home for Jimmy Carter: He was toast.
As recalled in Dominic Sandbrook’s excellent history of the late 1970s, Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right, President Carter’s chances for a second term — despite the Iran hostage crisis, [...]
September 22nd, 2011
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The results of last week’s special election in New York’s heavily Jewish Ninth Congressional District are being widely interpreted as signaling both problems for Democrats in the 2012 congressional elections and a major erosion of support for President Obama among Jewish voters. The special election, which was caused by the resignation of Democrat Anthony Weiner [...]
August 11th, 2011
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Michele Bachmann is surging. Newt Gingrich is struggling. And, as usual, Ron Paul is stirring the pot. The 2012 Republican presidential primary field is crowded — specifically with current or former members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Indeed, Bachmann and Paul may very well be among the top performers at Saturday’s Iowa Straw Poll [...]
August 4th, 2011
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What a week it has been! As the political world recovers from its deep exhaustion and wonders about the fallout from the debt ceiling deal, it’s worth taking a step back.
First, let’s all remember that 15 months from now, when Americans go to the polls to vote for president and Congress, this summer storm—intense squall [...]
July 28th, 2011
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As recently as the mid-20th century, white southern men from the Democratic Party dominated the Congress. There was Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson of Texas, who, respectively, ruled the House as speaker and the Senate as majority leader for much of the 1950s. And there were numerous Southern committee chairmen, including Howard W. Smith of [...]
July 21st, 2011
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Former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer is expected to officially launch his presidential campaign today. His announcement again tests the famous philosophical question: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Roemer, who the Crystal Ball has ranked dead last among 12 potential presidential contenders, [...]
July 14th, 2011
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In November 1946, a tall, mustachioed figure stood alone on a railroad platform at Washington’s Union Station, waiting for the president of the United States to make his ignominious return to the capital. In victorious times, the platform would have been full of welcomers; as it was then, at the time of their party’s defeat, [...]
June 2nd, 2011
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We all know that Louisiana is losing a U.S. House seat this year because of Mother Nature. The terrible destructive power of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 caused the population of New Orleans to decrease by about 140,000 people from the 2000 to 2010 census, which greatly contributed to the state’s congressional delegation falling from seven [...]
May 19th, 2011
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The nation got a preview of the Democrats’ sweeping congressional election victories in 2010 when Democratic candidates pulled off victories in three close special House elections. The results were just the first of many for Democrats in the last cycle, when…
Err, wait a second, let’s start over here.
Democrats lost 63 net House seats in last [...]
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