I’ve covered some of this before, but with Daily Kos releasing their initial House race rankings, let’s see how the national prognosticators are classifying Texas Congressional races.
Tossup – CD23
Lean R – CD07, CD32
Likely R – CD21, CD31
Republican Tossup – CD07, CD32
Lean R – CD23
Likely R – CD21, CD31
Tossup – CD07, CD23, CD32
Likely R – CD21
Tossup – CD23
Lean R – CD07, CD32
Likely R – CD21
Likely D – CD23
Tossup – CD07, CD32
Lean R – CD24
Likely R – CD02, CD06, CD10, CD21, CD22, CD25, CD31
A few notes: This is an updated list from Sabato; last time I looked I only found a set of rankings from January. I’m sure that was my oversight. Cook has “Republican Tossup” and “Democratic Tossup” rather than the plain old ordinary “Tossup”. I don’t know how he distinguishes them. The Crosstab doesn’t do categories, as it provides a probability for a Democratic win for each district. These rankings are based on my interpretation of those probabilities as of the most recent update on June 25, so “Likely D” represents at least a 75% chance of a Dem win, “Tossup” is a 40 to 60 percent chance, “Lean R” is a 25 to 40 percent chance, and “Likely R” is 10 to 25 percent.
No real surprises here. CD23 is the hottest race, though for reasons unclear to me Cook sees it as less competitive than CD07 and CD32. Those two are the next tier, with CD21 a consensus lower-chance race and CD31 on some radars but not others. The Crosstab stands alone, both by including CD24 – which strictly on the basis of 2016 performance makes sense; it likely gets overlooked due to having a lower-profile candidate who hasn’t raised much money – and by including a bunch of other races as secondary and tertiary targets. His is a quant approach while the others use subjective factors, but one wonders how far off some of those races are from the other rankings.
How much does any of this matter? In the grand scheme of things, not very much. You don’t really need Charlie Cook to tell you that CD23 is a competitive district. Rankings like these are one part validation, one part early warning system, and one part bullet point for fundraising pitches. The reasons why a given race is ranked (or not) are interesting and provide some insight into the larger national picture, but to some extent it’s like a mock draft for the NFL. It’s a good way to provide content and generate interest as we wait for a thing to happen, and we’ll all forget about it five seconds after the thing finally does happen.
I believe the Crosstab is probably more on to the final results than the others. Texas has a lot of highhanging fruit and if the environment turns out to be D-10-15 which the elections across the country have shown we might have there will be a lot of upsets. I think poling is undercutting candidates in most individual races for dems by at least 5 points with room for growth due to campaigns until November.
Hey Charles,
I am a subscriber to Cook. Their reasoning behind the toss-up CD07 and CD32 vs a leans R CD23 has to do with the preparedness of the incumbent. One of Cook’s themes this year is that Republicans, like Hurd, in traditionally swing districts are better at tough elections than those like Culberson who are not accustomed to running tough races. I agree that it’s hard to imagine CD07 going blue while CD23 stays red. But I do think that experience running in a swing district doesn’t hurt Hurd.