CQ House Race Ratings Show Midwest is the Region to Watch

[babylonsister]

CQ House Race Ratings Show Midwest is the Region to Watch
By CQ Staff | 5:30 PM; Oct. 01, 2007 |


There are more competitive 2008 House of Representatives races in the Midwest than in any of the nation’s other regions. Initial ratings of the nation’s 435 House races by Congressional Quarterly’s CQPolitics.com placed 25 races — 15 for seats currently held by Republicans, 10 for Democratic-held seats — in competitive categories, from a handful of tossups to a larger number of longshot bids.

Democrats’ hopes for extending the relatively narrow House majority they won in the 2006 elections depend largely on the success of their bids to take over additional seats next year in the Midwest, a sprawling, varied region stretching from Ohio in the east to the Great Plains states in the west. Republicans, meanwhile, are staking much of their hopes for reversing the damage of 2006 on this region’s races.

There is nothing unusual about the Midwest being a hotbed of competition in U.S. House politics. The parties regularly target the large number of “swing” districts that are relatively balanced between the parties and are heavily concentrated in states that border the Great Lakes and the Ohio River.

There are some congressional districts in the region that are Democratic Party strongholds, with many of them urban districts in which blacks and/or Hispanics make up majorities of the populations. Others, predominantly in rural areas, are Republican Party bastions. But there are minglings of industrial and corporate and agricultural, liberal and moderate and conservative, urban and suburban and rural in many Midwestern districts that provide opportunities, at least on paper, for both parties to compete for their seats.

Of the exactly 100 districts in the Midwest — defined as Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin — 38 gave the favored candidate for president 55 percent of the vote or less in 2004; in 12 of those districts, the leading candidate took 51 percent of the vote or less.

Republican hopes for a comeback in the region are staked in part on the fact that Democrats represent 16 of the region’s 17 districts that went for one party in the 2004 presidential race and the other in the 2006 House contest. Those include seven of the nine districts that the Democrats took over from the Republicans in the 2006 elections, which cut a 60-40 Republican advantage in Midwestern House seats to the current, marginal 51-49.

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http://www.cqpolitics.com/2007/10/cq_house_race_ratings_show_mid.html

[jmp]

1. The Dems are going to lose the House in '08.

You can't thumb your nose at the voters like they have for 9 months and expect continued support. There are going to be many mouths agape come Nov of '08.

[skipos]

3. Put your money where your mouth is over at tradesports.com

The odds of the Repubs picking up the house are 1:4.
Let me know how you do.

[babylonsister]

4. Thumb your nose at the voters, like the rethugs have been doing for

years? I'm as disappointed as you are in the Dems, but I know I won't be voting for the rethugs because they're not any better.

[illinoisprogressive]

2. I live in Illinois. alot depends on who is the nominee.