Fascinating opportunity for Democrats to take majority control of the House

| 8:30 pm EST February 11, 2023
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While House Democrats had a historically strong performance in the 2022 midterms, everyone knows that things didn’t go so great for the Democrats in rural New York State. The good news is that the handful of seats the Republicans unexpectedly won there are now easily up for grabs in 2024.

House Democrat Pat Ryan, who won a special election in upstate New York in 2022 and then won again in the 2022 midterms, clearly knows a lot about winning. He’s urging us to target five specific House seats, currently held by Republicans, that are rated as “Toss Up” or “Lean Democrat” for 2024:

Presuming he’s using Cook Political Report as his guidepost, Pat Ryan is talking about the races in NY-03, NY-04, NY-17, NY-19, NY-22. Here’s what’s so tantalizing about these races. George Santos currently represents NY-03 but he’s already agreed not to run in 2024, in a desperate effort to finish his term. Whether Santos makes it or not, his district is now rated “Lean Democrat” – making it an easy pickup for the Democrats, either in a special election or in 2024. And the other four toss up districts in New York are all represented by Republican freshmen, who will now spend their entire first term playing defense.

As the Cook ratings currently stand, if all the “Lean Democrat” and “Lean Republican” races go as expected, that would leave twenty “Toss Up” races – and the Democrats would need to win fifteen of them in order to take the House majority. Eleven of those races already have Democratic incumbents. If the Democrats were able to keep all eleven of them, they would then only need to flip four of the Republican incumbent “Toss Up” races. Flipping those four seats in New York alone would be enough.

Of course we’re going to focus on trying to win every single “Toss Up” race in 2024. But the above math shows just how important those “Toss Up” races in New York are. Pat Ryan is onto something. These House Republican seats in New York are there for the taking – and we’re going to take them.