"Sleeper" House Seats

[Sbane]

CA 47 is the only one vaguely possible, as a sleeper seat. I notice that Whitman is only running about 10% behind Brown with Hispanics in the Field poll, and Hispanics in OC tend to be more conservative anyway, than those up the road in LA. The Asians in this district tend to be Vietnamese, and heavily GOP.

But then Linda tends to avoid trying to be a flame thrower.

The last sentence is the reason why she won't lose. If she was a liberal, she might have some problems but she legislates as a moderate Democrat. This is a district full of moderate Hispanics (maybe conservative on social issues but certainly not on things like health care for example) and a bunch of hyper Republican Vietnamese (but not necessarily amongst the younger, more Americanized generation). If the Republicans ran a moderate Hispanic here they might have a chance. But I don't think a moderate will make it through a Republican primary for at least the next 10 years (hopefully they will learn their lesson by that time).

[Sbane]

You can cross NY-18 off of the list, now that the self-funded guy with some money who had a small chance of knocking off Nita Lowey announced he's out of the race.  The Republicans are putting up the guy who got crushed last cycle - and he'll lose again by double digits.

To finish California, in NorCal, CA-11 (McNerry) ought to be competitive and isn't really much of a sleeper since it is a R+1 district that Bush won in 2004.  The only NorCal sleeper may be CA-18 (Cardoza), a D+4 district in the Central Valley - though I don't have much faith in a candidate whose website is down, even if he can self-fund to some extent.

There actually may be more Republican incumbents in danger in California than Democrats.

CA-11 is certainly no sleeper. Republicans have a good chance of picking it up (although it's less than 50% imo).

CA-18 is another one of those moderate Hispanic heavy districts that Republicans should be able to pick up in theory. But you need a good candidate to win this sort of district. Another thing going in Cardoza's favor is the issue of delta water pumping restrictions becoming less of a concern now that we have had a pretty wet winter.

[Sbane]

CA-10 isn't flipping. If Garamendi can win with double digits in a special election, I think he should be fine in a general election. This would be something like the 100-110th seat to flip.