A good week for David Cicilline keeps getting better.

In the wake of a new WPRI 12 poll showing the congressman with a six-point lead over Brendan Doherty, two national outlets on Thursday upgraded the freshman Democrat’s chances of holding onto his 1st Congressional District seat.

National Journal moved the 1st District down 12 slots on its list of the nation’s most competitive U.S. House races, shifting it to #27. “Doherty has a steeper hill to climb,” the Beltway magazine’s Scott Bland wrote.

Hours later, Roll Call changed its rating on the 1st District race from tossup to Leans Democratic. “Cicilline seems to have rebounded and looks to be in much better shape than he was a few months ago in this very Democratic district,” the Capitol Hill newspaper’s Lauren Whittington wrote.

The Sabato Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics made the same move last month, changing its rating on the race to “Leans Democratic.” One holdout that’s still rating Cicilline-Doherty as a tossup is The Cook Political Report, though its editor is also considering a change.

Still, the incumbent is far from out of the woods. Cara Cromwell, who managed John Loughlin’s campaign against Cicilline in 2010, noted during a Friday taping of Newsmakers that he’s only polling 44% in the new poll despite widespread name recognition, which could mean Doherty has more room to build support.

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse got a whole lot less liberal in 2011, at least in the eyes of National Journal.

The Beltway magazine is out with the latest edition of its widely watched annual rankings of where members of Congress fall on the ideological spectrum, and Whitehouse dropped to No. 19 on the liberal list after two years on top.

National Journal put Whitehouse in lockstep with his senior colleague U.S. Sen. Jack Reed. The Rhode Islanders shared a two-way tie for 19th place, voting for liberal policies 78% of the time. Reed ranked 10th most-liberal the prior year.

Reed and Whitehouse were the only two senators from the same state who received the exact same composite scores from National Journal for 2011. But the other half of Rhode Island’s congressional delegation isn’t in agreement nearly as often.

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National Journal is out with the 2010 edition of its famous annual rankings of where members of Congress sit on the ideological spectrum – and Sheldon Whitehouse was the most liberal U.S. senator for the second year in a row.

Whitehouse took the title of “most liberal” in a nine-way tie with senators from Ohio (Brown), Maryland (Cardin and Mikulski), Vermont (Leahy and Sanders), Michigan (Levin and Stabenow) and Nevada (Reid), according to the Beltway magazine. They voted for liberal policies 83% of the time.

Whitehouse’s Rhode Island colleague Jack Reed was right behind him, though, in a three-way tie for the ranking of 10th most-liberal senator along with New York’s two members, Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer. Reed voted for liberal policies 81% of the time.

In the House of Representatives, now-retired Patrick Kennedy and Jim Langevin were further from the ideological extremes and also further apart from each other than the senators.

National Journal ranked Kennedy the 60th most-liberal congressman, voting that way 83% of the time, and Langevin as 120th most-liberal, voting that way 73% of the time.

Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern, who represents Bristol County, was in a three-way tie for eighth most-liberal congressman, according to National Journal. He took the liberal position in votes 95% of the time.

National Journal’s Ron Brownstein said the rankings showed Congress reaching “a new peak of polarization.” Here’s how he described the magazine’s findings overall:

The results document another leap forward in the fusion of ideology and partisanship that has remade Congress over the past three decades, the period tracked by NJ’s vote ratings. For most of American history, the two parties operated as ramshackle coalitions that harbored diverse and even antithetical views. … But since the early 1980s, they have vastly diminished as the differences within each party have narrowed and the distance between them has widened.

Over that period, “it’s just a straight, linear increase” in congressional polarization, says Gary Jacobson, a University of California (San Diego) political scientist who specializes in Congress. “There’s a little bit of bumping around in the numbers here and there, but the basic movement is toward the parties moving further and further apart. The 1970s are a high point of all the cross-party [coalitions]. The last three decades are ones of pulling apart.”

The magazine has been putting together the rankings since 1981. To do so, its researchers looked through all of last year’s roll-call votes in Congress – 664 in the House and 299 in the Senate – and determined which ones showed a clear ideological distinction. Just under 100 votes were used to do the calculations. More about the methodology is available here.