Making Florida competitive

Interesting post by Chris Cilizza today on his WaPo blog, "The Fix."

Cilizza reviewed the big win by Bill Foster (D-Ill.) in Saturday's special election to fill former House Speaker Dennis Hastert's (R-Ill.) seat (not literally, one presumes) and, based on the degree to which that district, Illinois' 14th, went for Drunky McStagger in 2004, he posits that there will be a lot more seats in play in November than the Republicans ever imagined -- and several of those are right here in America's Wang™.

Looking for a way to compare apples to apples when it comes to congressional districts, we turned to our old friends at the Cook Political Report and their Partisan Voting Index (PVI). The PVI was developed by the folks at Cook in the summer of 1997 as a way of looking at measuring every district in the country against the nation as a whole. Each district was given a score -- R+6, D+19 -- that indicated how it performed on the presidential level when compared to the country. A score of R+6 means that the district performed six points more Republican than the country as a whole; conversely, a score of D+19 means the seat performed 19 points more Democratic than the nation. (A further explanation of PVI is behind the Cook Report's subscription wall so get one today!)

Illinois' 14th district has a PVI score of R+5. A quick look at Cook's PVI ratings reveals that 53 Republican-held seats have a score more Democratic than that. Of that group, the largest number (33) carry PVI scores between R+2.0-R+4.9 while 18 districts have PVI ratings of D+1.9-R+1.9 and two seats have PVI of D+5.0-D+9.9.

We wanted to go even further inside those numbers, however, so we did a quick scan of all the Republican held districts that had a PVI score of no lower than R+1 and no higher than R+5 -- the same rating as the Hastert seat.

(Before we get into the numbers, it's worth noting that IL-14 was a special election race held on a Saturday, so turnout and other factors are not directly comparable to a general election in a presidential year.)

That search turned up 51 districts -- the VAST majority of which would not be considered competitive in a typical cycle by most observers. (The full list of these seats can be found after the jump.)

Never mind the math, if you don't want to. Just know that those 51 districts lean Republican, but aren't locks (which you might have with, say, R+6 or greater). And check out Florida's part in that:

Florida boasts nine districts currently held by GOPers with PVI ratings between R+1 and R+5. Those nine districts are a mix of the once competitive (Florida's 8th and 12th), the occasionally competitive (Florida's 13th and 24th) and the never competitive (Florida's 5th, 7th, 15th, 18th and 25th.) Democrats have spent considerable time recruiting in Florida and are expected to put a number of these seats -- including the 24th and 25th -- in play this November.

We knew that the 13th, with Vern Buchanan stealing the seat from rightful winner Christine Jennings, would be back in play this fall. But the others? Let's take a look:

• 5 -- Ginny Brown-Waite
• 7 -- John Mica
• 8 -- Ric Keller
• 12 -- Adam Putnam
• 13 -- Vern Buchanan (as noted above)
• 15 -- Dave Weldon (retiring, thank Jeebus)
• 18 -- Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
• 24 -- Tom Feeney
• 25 -- Mario Diaz-Balart

A real rogue's gallery, that. And to think that, in light of Foster's win in Illinois, we could entertain the possibility of turnover in those Florida districts, well, that's a very exciting prospect indeed. This is a group of lockstep Bushie Republicans who ought to be disgracefully expelled from Congress ... and this might just be the year to do it.

Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart already have solid Democratic challengers, 15 and 24 also are looking good for the Dems already, Brown-Waite is a moron, Keller is a corrupt assbag (which anyone with an ounce of sense knew when he was first elected to Congress), Putnam is a hypocrite, and Mica is in the pocket of so many special interests we lose count.

Will the Florida Democratic Party and the DCCC actually understand that we can knock some of these idiots out? That remains to be seen, but I hope the Foster situation -- er, I should say, Representative Foster -- is proof positive that we ought to try.