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I count eleven GOP-held House seats in the Northeast that, on paper, truly are very competitive for Democrats (NY-02, NY-11, NY-19, NY-22, NY-23, NJ-02, NJ-03, PA-06, PA-07, PA-08 and PA-15), but none of them can be said truly to lean Democrat. The closest would be NY-19 (Gibson) and NJ-02 (LoBiondo), but Gibson won fairly comfortably in spite of the 2012 Obama turnout and LoBiondo is well entrenched in his district. And even if the Democrats won all eleven of these CDs, they’d still fall short of 218.

New England is already solid RAT to begin with (New Hampshire might occasionally elect someone decent, but any other conservative winning a New England seat is a fluke), so there's little to gain if the RATs were able to turn New England from 95% RAT to 100% RAT. They pretty much accomplished that in Conn. because the "electable" RINOs learned being liberal didn't stop people from voting against them in droves due to the "R" next to their name. And they had a 95% socialist Senator in Joe LIEberman but the RATs tried to purge him for a 100% socialist Senator.

Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey are east coast but not New England. Of course, if by "NE" you meant "Northeast", then I suppose they'd count. New Jersey is still solidly RAT statewide probably has more conservatives elected to office now than any time in the last 30 years. There was a time when Chris Smith was pretty lonely, and even he is hardly "conservative" overall aside from being super duper pro-life. Of course I still consider guys like Leonard Lance to be worthless RINOs.

There was a time during the Speaker Pelosi era where it looked like our NY Congressional delegation was going to be wiped away to nothing. I think were down to 2 seats at one point and on the verge of slipping to a single seat. Pretty pathetic considering NY state has over 25 congressional seats. For some odd reason, New York Republicans were able to control the state Senate for years, even when the state went heavily Dem statewide. Wish they were that good at winning congressional races.

Pennsylvania has always been a competitive two-party state when it comes to congressional races, albeit one that leans Dem overall in recent years.

1960 was before my time but it certainly made for an interesting era when Republicans were competitive in New England and Democrats were competitive in the southern bible belt. Probably made national races for control of Congress less predictable. I know RAT Sam Rayburn and Republican William Martin swapped places as Speaker/Minority Leader several times.

The odd thing is that more and more Americans are claiming to be "independent" and identify less and less as Republicans or Democrats, but voting patterns seem to getting more and more partisan. Many states have aligned themselves as "Dem" or "GOP" blocs now, and I've met a ton of voters who just blindly vote for EVERY "D" or EVERY "R" they can find on the ballot (as for me, I've never voted "straight ticket" Republican and never will. Candidates have to EARN my vote)