The GOP right now is in a very similar situation to the Dems after the 06/08 cycles. Having come off a very successful wave election where they picked up most of their potential targets, there simply aren’t as many Dem seats that the GOP can capture in 2012 as there were in 2010. Still, there’s actually a fairly decent list of seats that the GOP could target, not enough to give them gains like they had this year, but enough that they could pull off a 10-20 seat gain if 2012 turns out to be a good year for them. These are what I consider to be there best targets. I’m grouping these into three tiers. Tier 1 consists of seats that the GOP have a good chance of picking up. Tier 2 consists of seats that are probably uphill battles for the GOP, but certainly not out of their reach. Tier 3 consists of seats that are truly longshots, or are conditional on certain things happening that are far from certain right now.
Tier 1
*PA-04/12 (Critz/Altmire) Word is that these two will be packed into a seat together, and that seat will probably be pretty unfavorable to dems. If Critz and Altmire are forced to spend resources on a bloody primary battle that could hurt them in the general as well.
*KY-06 (Chandler) Anyone who wins by such a narrow margin as Chandler did is probably vulnerable in the next election.
*NY-23 (Owens) The margin between Owens and his GOP challenger was less than the vote won by Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman (Hoffman had dropped out but his name was still on the ballot). This seems to suggest that if the GOP could unite behind one good candidate here than they could win this district. Redistricting may determine how competitive this seat is, and that’s kind of a wild card right now.
*GA-12 (Barrow) Could be killed by GOP controlled redistricting.
*MI-09 (Peters) Peters won by a very narrow margin, and he will have to go into the next election with a GOP-drawn district.
*NC-08 (Kissell) The Gov has no say in redistricting under NC law, so this will be left up to the GOP legislature. It’s pretty easy to draw a terrible district for Kissell without really endangering anybody else.
*MO-03 (Carnahan) Pretty easy to see him losing in 2012. Whether or not he goes may depend on how much of STL is in the new district.
*CA-11/18/20 (McNerney/Cardoza/Costa) The CA redistricting commission is a wild card right now, but it seems likely to me that one of these guys will get a tough seat to run in. Some have speculated that McNerney’s seat will get axed to give a seat to the Inland Empire, and while it seems more likely to me that someone like Stark gets cut it’s still not impossible. Still, it seems like one of these seats will be competitive come 2012.
TOTAL: 9
That’s all the low-hanging fruit I can see right now for the GOP. Now on to the ones that will be a little harder for the GOP to pick up.
Tier 2
NC-07 (McIntyre) McIntyre is in a fairly similar situation to Kissell. If the NC GOP wants to be ambitious, they could try to take out both, which is certainly possible without fully going into dummymander territory. But it would be a little more ambitious. You could probably switch out NC-07 or NC-08 and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. They could kill either with redistricting, and possibly both.
IA-01/02/03 (Braley/Loebsack/Boswell)