Last week’s 2025 Cook Partisan Voting Index release underscored two important dynamics in the battle for House control: Democrats have to play an unusually robust game of defense for a party out of power, and they have no choice but to get busy competing on tough turf.
Of the 87 districts with Cook PVI values between D+5 and R+5 — The Cook Political Report’s longstanding metric of races most likely to become competitive — 56 (about 64%) currently rest in Democratic hands. And once again, the nation’s median seat has a Republican tilt, effectively forcing Democrats to make inroads on terrain that favors the GOP in order to reclaim the House majority.
(One note about methodology: We used raw PVI values rather than rounded ones, excluding certain seats on the margins where the decimal value was slightly out of range.)
After Trump’s sweeping nationwide gains last fall, several Democrats long thought to be far from the battlefield now find themselves fighting behind enemy lines. The majority-minority districts held by Reps. Vicente Gonzalez (TX-34) and Nellie Pou (NJ-09)
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