After Republicans fell far short of their own lofty expectations in the 2022 midterms, the United States House of Representatives remains very closely divided. In fact, you have to go back 70 years to find a time when the gap between the two parties was smaller. With Democrats needing just five seats to flip the chamber in 2024, it’s guaranteed that the battle for the House will once again take center stage next year.
It’s natural, then, to wonder which congressional districts are likely to see the closest and most critical races. There are many ways of assessing the battlefield, of course, but one simple and reliable tool we’ve used for many years at Daily Kos Elections is our House Vulnerability Index, so we’re pleased to roll out the latest edition for the 2023-24 election cycle.
The index looks at just two criteria to assess competitiveness: (1) the margin of victory in each incumbent House member’s own race in the last election (called the House Rank), and (2) the average presidential margin of victory in that same congressional district over the last two presidential elections (the Presidential Rank). We rank both of those factors from 1 to 435, with lower numbers representing more competitive outcomes. We then combine those two ranks into a single rank and sort each party’s caucus accordingly.
What this rank ordering shows is the probable order in which congressional seats held by either side are likely to fall. It doesn’t predict how many seats one or the other party will pick up; that’s something that starts to come into view later in the cycle and is usually measured with polling data. But if you forecast or even just guess at a particular number of seats a party is likely to lose—whether it’s five, 10, 20, or more—the House Vulnerability index is very good at predicting which seats are the likeliest to fall.
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