The Republican Advantage

• By Charlie Cook
• April 16, 2013
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The “Incredible Shrinking Swing Seat” really does keep shrinking. In August 1997, The Cook Political Reportintroduced the Partisan Voter Index, an attempt to uniformly measure the competitiveness of all 435 congressional districts by comparing each district’s performance in the two most recent presidential elections with that of the nation as a whole. With the tireless help of Clark Bensen at Polidata, we have updated the PVI six times: after redistricting in 2002 and 2012, and after the presidential elections of 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012.

By now, the trend lines are clear. In 1998, we found 164 swing seats—districts within 5 points of the national partisan average, with scores between R+5 and D+5 (a score of R+5 means the district’s vote for the Republican presidential nominees was 5 percentage points above the national average). The data 15 years ago showed just 148 solidly Republican districts and 123 solidly Democratic seats. Today, only 90 swing seats remain—a 45 percent decline—while the number of solidly Republican districts has risen to 186 and the count of solidly Democratic districts is up to 159.

In 1998, the median Democratic-held district had a PVI score of ...

The Second-Term Jinx

• By Charlie Cook
• April 8, 2013
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Pretend for a moment that you are President Obama, his chief of staff, his counselor, or another top adviser. The question before you is how to avoid the fate of so many other second-term presidencies. Dwight Eisenhower’s final four years were marred by a recession, Richard Nixon’s by Watergate. Ronald Reagan had the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton had Monica Lewinsky and the impeachment saga that followed. For George W. Bush, it was the unraveling of the war in Iraq. Bad things seem to happen during second terms in the White House. Beyond the obvious—don’t do stupid, illegal, or ill-advised things—how do you make the most of your final four years?

Obama realizes he is unlikely to have the political and legislative advantages he enjoyed during his first two years in office, when he had large majorities in the House and Senate—at different points, the Democrats held 59 and 60 seats in the upper chamber. That was not enough to do whatever he wanted but enough to get a lot done; Obama was in about as strong a position as any recent president has been. He and congressional Democrats were able to pass an economic-stimulus ...

Rebuilding the GOP

• By Charlie Cook
• March 25, 2013
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The first six months or so after a president’s reelection are usually pretty dull, particularly if neither chamber of Congress changed hands. Sure the Cabinet gets reshuffled and some members of Congress leave town and are replaced by new ones, but things can usually be described as “more of the same.”

This year has been different, starting with the first days of the new year, when all eyes were on Washington and the fiscal-cliff crisis. Also intriguing has been watching the Republican Party deal with the aftershocks from the November elections. Surprised at how badly they did in the presidential and Senate races, Republicans have been engaged in a spirited debate over how to broaden the party’s appeal beyond its base. So this year hasn’t been quite the snoozer that most status quo elections typically usher in.

Just in the span of the past few days, we’ve seen some developments worthy of raising one, if not two, eyebrows. The least surprising was the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. It’s an event best described as a gathering of a mostly younger group (the CPAC/Washington Times straw poll indicated that 41 percent of the 2,930 ...

The GOP Keeps Getting Whiter

• By Charlie Cook
• March 18, 2013
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After Republicans won only 48 percent of all votes cast for the House in 2012 but 54 percent of the seats, it’s no secret that the party enjoys the huge built-in structural advantages in the chamber that Democrats had going for them decades ago. In a January memo, veteran GOP pollster Bill McInturff observed, “If you began your career as a Republican trying to win the House in the 1970s and 1980s, you would adopt, as I do, the borrowed adage, ‘There’s no crying in redistricting.’ ” The current unprecedented geographic concentration of Democratic voters was compounded by the 2010 wave election that gave Republicans unprecedented power in state legislatures to redraw political boundaries. Combined, these two demographic developments cast doubt on whether even a 2006-size wave would enable Democrats to win control of the House at any point this decade.

But could the Republicans’ arguably rigged House majority actually be a curse disguised as a blessing? It’s an interesting question. They clearly did everything they could to purge Democratic voters from their districts ahead of 2012, no matter whether those voters were white, black, Hispanic, left-handed, or right-minded—just as Democrats would have done had the roles ...

Sequestration Hits Obama in the Polls

• By Charlie Cook
• March 12, 2013
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Just as I was about to file a column noting that President Obama’s job-approval rating had dropped to 46 percent for two consecutive days in the Gallup Poll—its lowest levels since late October—his rating popped back up 3 percentage points to 49 percent. That’s still below the 52 percent that he averaged over the first eight weeks of the year, but a 3-point drop is a good bit less than a 6-point drop.

During periods of unusually high political turbulence, instability in poll numbers is common. Sometimes when a lot is happening and voters are not sure what to think, their poll responses can reflect the impression they got from a television news story an hour before the pollster called or from a newspaper article or headline they read that morning. Their response today might be different from the one they would have given yesterday or the one they might give tomorrow. In such times, numbers bounce around a lot, so drawing conclusions from the results of one or even two polls is risky—as I almost learned again for the millionth time.

The early suspicion that Washington’s inability to head off budget sequestration would ...