2012 House

Democrat Ron Barber will replace his old boss, Gabrielle Giffords, in the House after winning a special election Tuesday night, 52% to 45%, over Republican Jesse Kelly. The race appeared to be neck-and-neck, and Kelly narrowly won more votes cast on Election Day. But Barber built his winning margin in early voting (about three quarters of the roughly 200,000 ballots cast were early votes). This election was contested in Arizona’s Eighth District, which will effectively become the Second District in the fall due to redistricting. The new district is one that Republican presidential nominee John McCain would have won 50% to 49% in 2008, whereas the current district is one McCain would have won 52% to 46%; so Barber will run for a full term in a more favorable district. We are switching the rating of the November race from toss-up to leans Democratic. One factor to watch: Will Republicans re-nominate Kelly, who also lost to Giffords in 2010, or go with another candidate? Retired Air Force pilot Martha McSally is running against Kelly in the Republican primary; she might give the Republicans a better shot at the seat. Moving AZ-2 to the leans column leaves only 14 toss-ups among

Reps. Howard Berman and Brad Sherman (both California Democrats) were put in the same district in redistricting, and they are locked in a knock-down, drag-out intraparty fight. But it’s possible that the upcoming primary is only a prelude to their real battle in November. That’s because the Golden State now has a top-two “Jungle Primary” system. Instead of a traditional partisan primary system, all candidates run in the same primary, and the top two vote-getters advance to the general. There’s no drama in this race in terms of which party will win it — either Berman or Sherman will be going back to Congress to represent the heavily Democratic Los Angeles-area 30th district. And Berman and Sherman — though they surely would tell you the opposite — aren’t all that dissimilar in terms of their voting records. For instance, National Journal rated Berman as the 69th most-liberal member of the House in 2011, and rated Sherman as the 85th most-liberal member. The American Conservative Union’s lifetime rating for Berman is 5 (on a 100-point scale where 0 is most liberal and 100 is most conservative); Sherman’s lifetime rating is 4.65. But while Democrats are guaranteed to win this district (and

During the War of 1812, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry whipped the British in the famous Battle of Lake Erie. Nearly 200 years later, winning Lake Erie won’t suffice for Democrats seeking to reclaim the House; they need to win on the shores of all five Great Lakes. Now that decennial redistricting is nearly over, we have a relatively complete picture of where and how the race for the House will be run. While there are hotspots all over the country, the key region that will determine future control of the House is a combination of the Midwest and the Northeast — the eight states that touch the Great Lakes: Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Of these eight, Republicans controlled the redrawing of House maps in five of them — Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — after the 2010 census (courts drew the maps in New York and Minnesota, and Democrats controlled redistricting in Illinois). In other words, if the race for the House truly comes down to the Great Lakes states, Democrats will have to break some Republican-drawn maps. This is, needless to say, a daunting task. Before examining that task in more detail,

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 office voluntarily: Some retire because of age; some retire to avoid certain defeat; and others retire because — perish the thought — they are tired of being a part of the United States’ dysfunctional government. Tuesday’s announcement by Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) brings the number of retiring members to 35 during this cycle, according to Roll Call’s helpful list. That already exceeds the postwar average of 34 retirements per House cycle, according to Vital Statistics on American Politics. Vital Statistics’ historical count does not include members who resigned before the end of their term; six members have resigned so far this cycle, bringing the total number of retirements to 41: 24 Democrats and 17 Republicans. And, almost assuredly, the list of retirees will grow. Many members are retiring from seats that their parties are virtually guaranteed to keep. But some exits, like that of

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 theory about the 435 House races this year: If Americans are truly fed up with politics, then are they really going to be paying a ton of attention not just to the presidential race, but to down-ticket races as well? Granted, a presidential campaign sucks up so much media oxygen that it is difficult to ignore for even low-information voters, but it’s easier for voters to tune out races down the ballot if they’re so inclined. If that’s true, then consider that the presidential race is, perhaps more than usual, going to define what goes on down the ticket in this election. That of course would have major and as yet unforeseeable implications for the race for the House. One thing we do know is that the number of split results in House districts — as in, when voters simultaneously pick one party at

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 suit was rejected and the Illinois remap was upheld Dec. 15 by a three-judge panel, two of whom were Republican appointees of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and the other a Democratic appointee of President Bill Clinton. And that outcome was just as predictable, based on the precedents set by the Supreme Court in previous partisan redistricting cases. From the 1986 case of Davis v. Bandemer (involving state legislative redistricting in Indiana) to the past decade’s suits over congressional district lines — Vieth v. Jubelirer in Pennsylvania, League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) v. Perry in Texas — court rulings on partisan gerrymandering have reflected the judicial branch’s longstanding tendency to stay as far away as possible from the “political thicket” of redistricting. In each of these previous cases — all of which involved Democrats trying to undo Republican-drawn plans — the

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 the 2012 House elections (because of a phenomenon known as negative coattails). Research by Alan Abramowitz (among others) illustrates that there is little to any evidence that special elections predict the results in the next general House election. The political environment can change from now until November 2012. But what if President Obama remains unpopular through 2012? Will Republicans actually gain seats in the House? The history of presidential year House elections suggests that while we do not know for sure, House Democrats probably will not fare well. It turns out that this coattail effect appears inconsistently in presidential year House elections. We all remember how President Bush’s negative standing three years ago (and Obama’s significant victory) helped Democrats gain 21 seats in the House. Some of us will also recall how Republicans made major gains during President Reagan’s landslide 1980 victory. But for every 1980, there is

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 the uncompetitive races — the large number of seats that should be safe for one party or the other for the foreseeable future. Based on the latest Crystal Ball ratings, less than one in four of the 435 House seats will be competitive next year, and if one only considers the seats we rate as “leaning” to one party or the other or as “toss-ups,” there are only 46 truly competitive contests, or about 10% of all House seats. Chart 1 shows our ratings for every race in the House, listed by state. The “safe” seats on the respective Democratic (150 seats) and Republican (186) sides show where the two parties are strongest in the House looking forward to the next election and beyond. The note below the chart details some of the assumptions we made in compiling these ratings. Needless to say, this

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, a lousy economy and terrible approval ratings — were apparently alive and well until the final days of the 1980 campaign. Going into the final weekend of the campaign, Sandbrook writes, Gallup had Carter’s Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan, up three points. Harris had him up five points, while Newsweek and The Washington Post had Carter up one. But at the end, the bottom fell out for Carter. “I’ve never seen anything like it in polling,” said Pat Caddell, Carter’s pollster. What was a close race turned into a big Reagan lead in the last hours of the campaign; he ended up winning 489 electoral votes and a 51%-41% victory over Carter. Likely aiding Reagan at the end was the one and only debate between the two, held just a week before the election, when Reagan memorably asked voters “Are you better off than you