The Cook Political Report has officially shifted its ratings for the 2022 midterm elections, reporting that Republicans are in prime position to retake the majority in the House of Representatives.
The new ratings show that Republicans are ahead in enough competitive races, with enough toss-up districts, that they have a significant chance to flip the House in 2022. Republicans are on pace to flip 5 House districts: Arizona’s 2nd and 6th, Michigan’s 10th, New Jersey’s 7th, and Texas’s 15th. Democrats, on the other hand, are likely to flip only one seat, Illinois’s 13th.
Republicans need to win a net gain of 5 seats in the House, and while the GOP only has comfortable leads in enough races to net them a pickup of 4 seats, the CPR shows that Democrats are defending 8 toss-up seats to Republicans’ 6 toss-ups. If Republicans hold all their toss-up seats, they would need to flip just one of the toss-ups in Cook’s modeling to take the majority.
The new ratings, released on a rolling basis to account for ongoing redistricting debates, currently cover 263 of the country’s Congressional districts. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for re-election in 2022. Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has previously said that Republicans are looking to flip some 70 seats in the House in 2022.
“If you’re a Democrat and President Biden won your seat by 16 points, you’re in a competitive race next year,” McCarthy told reporters at a press briefing the day after Republicans won the Virginia governor’s race. “You are no longer safe,”
“It’ll be more than 70 that will be competitive. There’s many that are going to lose their races based upon walking off a cliff from Nancy Pelosi pushing them,” he continued. “She may not care if she loses. She lost 63 the last time she was Speaker moving policy that the country didn’t care for.”
The Cook Political Report also previously shifted three Senate races toward the GOP amid the growing possibility of a wave election in 2022. The Daily Wire reported:
The political predictor shifted its predictions for the Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada Senate races, from all three leaning in favor of Democrats to all three listed as toss-ups, still nearly a year away from the 2022 midterm elections. The three states “are all states that Biden carried by 2.5 points or less,” CPR said, via Axios. President Joe Biden won Georgia by a little less than 12,000 votes, Arizona by less than 11,000, and Nevada by around 34,000 votes in the 2020 presidential election. Arizona and Georgia were also the sites of several hotly-contested audits over the election results. The three races are the only three Senate races that fall into that category, according to CPR, “and if there is a sizable partisan swing we see come next November it’s easy to see how these races get swept away even if GOP candidate quality is subpar.”
Cook Political Report House editor Dave Wassermann also noted, after Republicans’ victory in Virginia in November, that the result was consistent with a “political environment in which Republicans would comfortably take back both the House and Senate in 2022.”