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If this month's special election in South Carolina's 1st District had all the ingredients to cook up a national spectacle, the June 4 election to fill GOP Rep. Jo Ann Emerson's vacant seat in southeast Missouri is a recipe for obscurity. As both parties survey what the trio of ongoing scandals in D.C. might mean for 2014, it's easy to forget that there's a House race in two weeks' time that m…

President Obama and his administration now find themselves in the middle of not one but two tough situations: the tragic killing of four Americans at a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, and the Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of tea-party and other conservative groups. At best, they are cases of bad mishandling and embarrassment; at worst, they rise to the level of legitimate and conse…

The latest Rhodes Cook Letter is now available to Cook Political Report subscribers. In this issue, Rhodes considers the notion of Democrats as the "presidential party" relative to Republicans which now represent today's "congressional party." Analysis of the current set of special elections to the U.S. House is also provided in a section entitled "A 'Special' Time."

The Cook Political Report's House Summary Chart, featured below, provides a complete rundown of all vacancies, retirements, open seats, and potentially open seats in the U.S. House, and is updated each week leading up to every election as the statuses of current incumbents change. Be sure to continue to check back as the 2014 election cycle develops to keep up with the latest news from the House.

It's not as if Democrats aren't already looking at a tough election in 2014. They have lots of red state Senate seats to defend and few obvious GOP targets in the House. They have to prepare for the likelihood of a rough and messy implementation of the health care law they supported. Now pile on the latest White House troubles--IRS investigation of conservative non-profit groups and the Departmen…

Last week we wrote that this special election contest between Democratic U.S. Rep. Ed Markey and Republican businessman Gabriel Gomez had gotten more interesting, but was not yet truly competitive. We may have spoken too soon. Yet another poll has come out showing the race in single digits. The OnMessage, Inc. (R) survey for the Gomez campaign (May 5-7 of 800 likely voters) gave Markey a t…

Democrats have had a rough few days in South Dakota. Although U.S. Attorney Brendan Johnson, son of retiring Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson, has not made a statement, the conventional wisdom is that he will not run for his father’s seat. And today, former U.S. Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin wrote in a post on her Facebook page that she would not be a candidate. Herseth Sandlin was a favorite of m…

Republican Mark Sanford’s victory Tuesday in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District tells us only one thing about the 2014 midterm elections—that Democrats still need to capture 17 seats to win back the House majority they lost in 2010. Nothing more, nothing less. Had Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch won the special election, all it would have demonstrated was that even in such an overwhe…

For the past few months, the special election to fill the remainder of former Democratic Sen. John Kerry’s term has plodded along. It was as if the book on the race had already been written. U.S. Rep. Ed Markey would beat U.S. Rep. Steve Lynch for the Democratic nomination. He would then go on to defeat any of the trio of virtually unknown Republicans seeking the GOP nod in the June 25 special…