Does How Republican The District Is Matter?

It sounds logical that the Republicans won't flip Colorado-7, which Obama won by 19 points, without getting Colorado-3 and Colorado-4, both of which McCain won. I decided to look at 2008 results to see if this were true. I included all districts where the winner won by 15 points or less. Districts that had a wider margin likely weren't competitive for reasons like a poor challenger. So it didn't matter how many people voted for McCain or Obama. Even though McCain won Oklahoma-2 by 32 points, it's unlikely to be competitive.

I could use 2006, also a Democratic year, but using 2006 congressional and 2008 Presidential are using different electorates.


Clearly there were a lot of safe seats in this group. That's not a surprise. The Democrats won 6 of the 15, only 2 of which were long time Democratic seats. [Alabama-5 is in red because Griffith changed parties.] They did drop a Louisiana seat they picked up only a few months before. Texas-22 was a 2006 pick-up that flipped back. Only 1 win was over a Republican incumbent, however.


Democrats did slightly worse in this group. They were able to defend several recent pick-ups, but lost Kansas-2, a 2006 pick-up. No Republican incumbents lost.


The parties split the districts that were Presidential toss-ups.


The Democrats did better in Democratic skewing districts, but still managed to lose 7 of them.


Democrats still lost in districts Obama won by significant margins and they had a competitive candidate. The Democrats knocked off a bunch of Republican incumbents here.

In Pennsylvania, Obama won the 6th district by 17 points, but the Democrats were unable to take the seat. Yet they won 3 other competitive Pennsylvania seats that McCain won. While they didn't knock off many Republican incumbents in McCain districts, a number of those districts were recent pick-ups where they knocked off Republicans in 2006. Republican skewing open seats were much more vulnerable than Republican incumbents in Republican seats. The bad news for Democrats is that they have significantly more Republican seats than Republicans had Democratic seat in 2008.

If this provides a rule for 2010, Colorado-3 and Colorado-4 should be more vulnerable than Colorado-7. The question is how far the Republican wave will go into seats Obama won and whether the Republicans will take a higher percentage of Republican skewing seats than the Democrats did in 2008.