If you're a political junkie, you're probably used to seeing charts that break competitive Senate and House races down into columns with categories like Tossups, Lean Democratic, Likely Republican, published by pundits like Charlie Cook or Stu Rothenberg. (Or by Daily Kos Elections... we've got our own, too, here, here, and here.)
Charts like that only tell part of the story, though. Looking at pundits' scorecards, you might think that races just spontaneously burst into being as competitive, based on the sheer force of will of the participants. That's not the case, though; almost all House races, for instance, draw highly-motivated, well-intentioned participants, and yet somehow we don't end up with 400+ competitive races every cycle.
Instead, there are two limiting factors: one is the range of districts. More than half of all House districts are too red or too blue to be competitive; they're going to elect someone from one party unless highly unusual circumstances pop up (and if that happens, that person from the wrong party is usually only renting the district for two years). Only that other half of the districts, where the presidential vote falls within 10% of the national average, is fertile ground for a competitive race. (And that band is getting narrower, as gerrymandering becomes a more precise, computer-driven science, with more districts getting turned uglier but also dark-blue or dark-red.)
So, with that, I thought it might be interesting to tip the typical House ratings chart on its side, and look at it by sifting through all the districts in that potentially-competitive band, digging layer by layer based on the percentage that Barack Obama got in 2008 (in the newly-configured post-redistricting districts, rather than the districts as they existed in 2008). That way, it encompasses not just the races that the pundits and the national committees are paying attention to, but it also reveals what races are getting left behind. (There's a lot of them. And while it's a little late in the cycle to do anything about them now, it should give us some food for thought about what else we might be targeting in 2014.)
The other factor is money. Competitive races don't happen without advertising, PR, and a lot of groundwork, and that costs a lot. Unfortunately, the money is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: a candidate needs money to get the pundits to consider a race competitive in the first place, but a race needs to be considered competitive before the big money donors and the national committees (like, say, the DCCC) will start sending money. That's the basic reason why, despite how much we'd like to see it, Generic Well-Meaning Progressive rarely gets any traction in a potentially-interesting swing-district race. Successful candidates need to either bring their own seed money, or have enough fundraising chits to call in from donors to get the ball rolling, either connections made from holding lower office, from a prominent business position, or, in a few cases, from a long-track record in local activism.
By adding money to the mix, we can see just how much money determines what races get taken seriously and which ones don't. At each percentage level, even the ones that are right at the national average (53%, according to Obama's 2008 vote share) you can see there are races that are competitive and ones that aren't. Invariably, the competitive ones involve hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on both sides and the non-competitive ones are woefully lopsided.
(Before you start complaining about Citizens United and Super PACs, bear in mind that the numbers that we're reporting are merely the contributions to the campaigns themselves. They don't account for spending by outside groups, either the national committees or third party groups (most of which hasn't occurred yet, as they save up for the stretch run). All of this fundraising is of the fully disclosed, dollar-limited variety, and was perfectly legal for many decades before CU was a twinkle in John Roberts' eye. That isn't to say that CU hasn't magnified the problem, but this speaks more generally to the outsized influence of money in politics.)
At any rate, let's start our excavations. I've narrowed it down to districts where Obama's vote share ranged between 60% and 45% (which, if you prefer Cook's Partisan Voting Index, would range (imprecisely, since PVI also incorporates 2004 figures) from D+7 to R+8). There are a few districts, however, where there are competitive races despite having an Obama percentage over 60; we'll start there. These are either because of aggressive Democratic gerrymandering leaving GOP incumbents marooned in dark-blue territory (the three Illinois districts) or a scandal-tarred Dem incumbent (in Rhode Island). The GOP may still has a shot at salvaging some of their incumbents here too, thanks to the power of incumbency.
The "money" column is the fundraising to date for the entire cycle (up to the June 30 FEC reporting deadline), with the Dem figure on the left and the GOP figure on the right. The 2010 column shows the incumbent's re-election percentage in the last election, which gives some indication of whether they're perpetually in trouble or not used to a stiff challenge (bear in mind that some of the candidates skated by before because they were in easier districts and find themselves in much worse districts post-redistricting). The "R%" column shows what percentage of their old district made it into their new district (for example, just above, only 26% of Joe Walsh's constituents from the old IL-08 are still in his new IL-08... he'd probably still be losing even if he had all his same constituents, but this only makes it worse for him). And "PP score" is the incumbent's Progressive Punch score (overall votes for 2011-12), which scales how liberal they are from 0 to 100 (and also includes their rank, 1 through 435, with 1 being most liberal), which helps give a picture of how well an incumbent fits his swing district ideologically. (Naturally, we don't include 2010, Redist., or PP score for open seats where there's no incumbent.) "Rating" is how we at Daily Kos Elections currently view the state of that race.
For the remaining races, continue below the fold...
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