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Welcome to Positive America. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. One year ago, Donald Trump won the popular vote, swept all seven battleground states, and made major gains to Latino voters and younger voters. But earlier this month, Democrats snatched big wins in New Jersey, Virginia, and several other states, thanks in part to winning back some of the very same voters who had swung to Trump last year. So what happened? What does it tell us about the midterms next year? Can Democrats actually take back the House and the Senate? And where do things stand with Donald Trump's ongoing efforts to rig the midterm elections?
Joining me to break all this down is Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report. Amy is one of the sharpest political analysts in the country with a granular understanding of races in every corner of the map. There is no better person to give us a lay of the political landscape as we head into the midterms. Amy Walter, welcome back to PodSafe America. Well, hello. Can I just say, Dan, that I got cool points from my sister. Oh, interesting. Who said, oh my gosh, my friends heard you. They don't have any idea what I do. But if I'm on PodSafe America now, suddenly I'm...
Cool. There's nothing that says cool like an appearance on a political podcast. Exactly. So now we are hip. All right. We got a lot to talk about today. I want to get into the 2025 elections, the state of redistricting, battles for the House and the Senate. This is an important podcast because it's going to air on Sunday, the historically worst travel day in America. So people are going to get our takes as they are stuck in airports or in traffic going up and down 995 or wherever else. So we got a lot to talk about here. All right. Let's start with the 2025 elections. The Democrats had huge wins. It was a rare.
positive day for the Democratic Party in the last year or so. One in New Jersey, one in Virginia, one in California, one in New York City, one in Georgia. you know, sort of won everywhere, won by bigger margins than people expected. What was your take on what powered those wins? And were you surprised by the margins? Definitely surprised by the margins. If you look at the margins in Georgia and New Jersey, right, you could look, Dan, you know well enough that the focus inside the Beltway is often where it's, where are we closest to? And so Virginia got a great deal of attention. New Jersey doesn't get as much. Certainly Georgia didn't get as much. So to see big double digit wins there by Democrats, certainly pretty instructive. I think.
What I learned from it is, first, there is, despite all of the hand-wringing among Democrats for these last, well, eight months since the election, that the party is fractured and leaderless and rudderless. Democratic voters want to show up and vote. They may not like the party, but they dislike Trump and they dislike Republicans more. So the party is motivated. I think that was answered question number one. Number two was the question about whether this realignment that we saw in 2020...
was just was a realignment or a dealignment or just a one off. I don't think we can answer that question until we get to 2028. So I want to be very careful how I say this. But I do explain why that is why 2028 is more indicative than 25 or 26. That's right. Just the kinds of people who show up in an off year election are very different than the people who show up in a presidential election. And also, as we know, in the next four years, people are going to move in and out of the electorate, whether they age in or.
They leave for reasons they didn't really want for other purposes. For other actuarial reasons. Yes, yes. So... We I think you have to be really careful not to look at the results, say, of 2025 and say, wow, OK, well, Democrats, quote unquote, fix their Latino problem or fix their young people problem. Or Donald Trump now has so alienated Latinos that they're never going to come back to Republicans. I don't think you can say that. What you can say, though, is that the kinds of people who are showing up to vote in these off year elections, which a midterm election will have higher turnout than, say, 2025 electorate. But it suggests that the people who are the most interested in turning out, especially among these voters of color.
also happen to dislike what Republicans are selling or what Republicans have done. So if you are sitting in, let's say, in New Jersey, there's the ninth district there, which is one that swung, I think, the most of any state, of any district last cycle. And it went for Cheryl this time by 20 points. So won by Trump by barely a point. swung to shore by 20 points. I think that has implications for districts in Texas, districts in the Central Valley in California, obviously in New Jersey. So that was instructive. And I do think that this idea, we hear affordability as the watchword. I do think the fact that every candidate talked about that in a way that voters saw as believable. And to me, New Jersey was the best test of this because it is a, obviously, this was a gubernatorial race, theoretically.
the top concern for voters in a gubernatorial race should be what's happening in my state. Do you think things are going well in your state? Do you think they're not? The national shouldn't influence it. But what became very clear was that even as voters in that state, frustrated by Trenton, definitely liked the idea of a change from having a, you know, Democrats were in charge of the government for two years, open to that idea, think taxes are too high in the state. It was their opinions about Trump and the national environment that really moved them. And Virginia was the same. I mean, Glenn Youngkin.
People like, if you look at the exit polls, people like Glenn Youngkin. People think the state of Virginia is doing pretty well. That would be a reason, if you're a Republican, if you just saw Glenn Youngkin's approval rating and how people felt about Virginia. that looks like a pretty good environment to be a Republican. Yeah, I mean, I think the New Jersey, Virginia is, like, I think to share Spamberger's margin is quite notable. But it's also just historically, this is what Virginia does, right? Every year of 2013, and what is this, it's 1975, the Republican Party that lost the previous presidential election wins the election. We've been flipping, you know, every year. But New Jersey, like, you really have something really important about New Jersey, which is, if you were mad about affordability based on your own...
like financial circumstances, theoretically, you should be really mad at the Democrats who've been in charge of Virginia for the last eight years. And then you have- Of New Jersey. Of New Jersey, yes. If you live in New Jersey, you should be, because in every election, every election is a changed election. It's why Democrats were pretty worried about Cheryl was winning the third, even in a Democratic state, winning the third election in a row was very hard. Yet, not only did you see Democrats turn out for a Democrat, which is notable and important, but you saw a, you know, based on exit polls, which we'll have all the caveats with them, but 7% of, in the exit polls, 7% of Trump 2024 voters voted for-
a Democrat, and that's even more voted for Cheryl. But what even more interesting about that to me is if you are voting in an off-year gubernatorial election in New Jersey, you're a pretty engaged political person. And so that, you know, I sort of think of this in concentric circles, right? You have off-year special election voters who are the most engaged of all. Then you go out one circle and you have the midterm election, which has some people who, you're still pretty engaged in politics, you vote in a midterm, but you're not, you know, you're not so dialed in that you're not missing the, you know, special bond election or city council election in your town. Then you have presidential election years, people who come in all the time.
And the fact that, like, these highly engaged voters who voted for Trump switched is, despite Democrats being in charge, I think is a pretty notable fact that tells us something about at least the political environment where it is in November. Exactly. Exactly. Where it sits right now. And, you know, I looked at this poll that came out over the weekend, the CBS poll. And to me, what would worry me the most as a Republican is not simply that Trump's approval rating on.
the economy is low. It's that when you ask voters, do you think Trump has anything to do with prices going up? And 65% say yes, including like a third of Republicans. That is a very tough place to be, right? So when Republicans talk about, well, we need to do a better job on the affordability, right? We need to tackle this head on. Part of the challenge is that they believe that the president himself and his policies have gotten us to this point. It was when you guys were in the White House.
you did have a certain amount of time in which people gave you a benefit of the doubt because they said, look, Obama didn't create this mess. This was there. He walked into it. You got some of that cushion. And I think Republicans started their initial reaction to why are we getting blamed for inflation when inflation isn't our fault is correct. You'd say we didn't start this fire. This was started before we came into office. We're dealing with the after effects of COVID, of the Biden policies and inflation that accompanied that. But voters.
think that you do, that Trump and the White House do have something to do with the rising cost of stuff, right? So how do you, you can't do the traditional, which I'll just blame it on the guys who came before me. So now you have to really figure out, all right, how do we tackle affordability in a way that voters believe is, one, actually working, and two, isn't just passing the buck. Yeah, the Obama comparison is really interesting because it was up until 2012, so we've been in office for three years at that point, that people still blame George W. Bush more than Obama for the state of the economy because there was this precipitating event of the financial crisis and the crash of Lehman Brothers and all that that happened before Obama was president. Everyone knew that. Trump had this gift wrap for him, right? Everyone blamed Biden for the economy. Biden's numbers on inflation were abysmal. Came in.
focused on a bunch of things that weren't inflation, and then did several high-profile announcements to raise people's prices, which is truly one of the more insane things you could possibly do politically. And when you see, you know, Navigator Research, the Democratic-aligned polling organization, do word clouds of what they know about Trump and what they hear. And tariffs is always like giant in the middle. It is the thing that people know, and they believe Trump's raising their costs. And it really is a pincer movement here for him because they think he raised their costs. They also think in the CBS poll, they ask people, what's the most important issue that you want Trump to focus on? Overwhelmingly, it's inflation. What do you think Trump is focusing on? It's like a fifth of voters say he's focusing on inflation the most.
And so he's both causing the problem and then being seen as not trying to solve the problem, which is why his numbers are now as bad as Biden's were right before the election on inflation. Right. And so if you're a Republican looking forward to 2026, you say, all right, so how can we get out of this pincer that we're in? And as you very well know, it is very difficult, even even pre that the Trump grip on the party. But it is very hard to run against your.
the party of the president in the White House in a midterm year and be successful. And we see it year after year, right? The Democrats who voted against Obamacare in 2010, they campaigned on that. See, I'm independent. I didn't vote with this Obamacare thing. Voters want to punish the party in power and you will be punished. The thing you can hope for is, yes.
those same people don't want to punish you as much because they like you for other reasons. And also your base turns up. So you depress your base when you try to distance yourself from the president. But I think in this case, this is why this health care debate has become so fascinating, right? Because in many ways, Trump is correct. He looks at the environment. He sees people are blaming him for high costs. He knows that this ACA extender would be one tangible piece of evidence to show I'm actually bringing costs down.
But he can't do it because Republicans in our Congress are like, we voted against Obamacare 60 times. Remember that? Remember how we overturned? And now you're asking us to extend it. But as a political move, if I'm a Republican in a swing district, yes, I would like to vote for something that I say, I actually am here to lower your costs of health care.
The Obamacare extension thing is interesting because, well, two things. One, Trump is making it much harder for himself by coming up with these crazy plans that basically are akin to repealing Obamacare, which is quite an unpopular move and one of the reasons why they lost so many seats in 2018. So he could just take the money on the table and just do the two-year or three-year extension, but that's not available. And this is where his lame duck status matters because if he was running for re-election in 2028 and he came and said, I need to do this, a rising tide lifts all boats, we got to do this, they would do it. But here he's not going to get, the swing Republicans, of which there aren't a ton, would like to vote for it, the base.
doesn't. It's like Trump is reelected. So absolutely not. They care about their own primary. And so you can't do the obvious easy thing, which is this is like the tariffs. Like it is insane that in an election, when affordability is the top issue, the Republicans refuse to open the government or, you know, unshut it down or whatever words you want to use for something that would have benefited them politically on the affordability issue. I mean, there was that polling memo from Tony Fabrizio, who's Trump's pollster from back in the summer, back in the day. Yeah. Yeah. Which basically said, like in the swing districts, the generic ballot would go to Democrats plus 15, which I'm a little skeptical of those numbers, but.
And I'm skeptical about who paid for that poll. But either way, Trump's own pollster believes this is very, very bad for them. And they can't fix the problem, which does make me think we'll get more deeper into the 2016 election in a second. But it does make me think that their best play is not going to be to solve the affordability problem. It's going to be hope and pray the economy gets somehow better. And the salience of that issue goes down and try to raise the salience of something else. This is correct. The equivalent of Trump in 2018, when the election about health care in Texas tried to make it about the caravan of MS-13 members, you know, marching on the border. And so I fully expect to see something like that as their that is I don't think it's likely successful play.
But it is probably they're more likely play 100 percent than trying to come up with some sort of trying to come up with. I mean, and again, you know, the the you know, what that issue is going to be. Look, if we had been talking at this point in 2021, there was no scenario in which Democrats were not going to lose lots and lots of seats in that midterm. Right. After what we saw in New Jersey and Virginia in those elections and a Democratic base that was so.
deeply demoralized and just checked out in a Republican base that was fired up and inflation hitting, which we knew was going to be the, you know, sort of real Achilles heel for Democrats. And then boom comes the Dobbs announcement in June. And that's where the race, right, where we went from it being all about inflation to, yes, inflation is still the number one issue, but now we also have this piece. So, I mean, you and I know we've got a long way to go in a year. So it's whether it's we, if there's nothing that is happening outside of the control of the two parties, i.e.
something that the Supreme Court does or natural disaster war. Yes, I would. You know, if you if you look at, again, that CBS poll, what I found interesting is even on the issue of immigration, just specifically, just as big picture way, do you approve or disapprove of what the president's doing in enforcement? Not just on keeping the border safe, but they specifically use the word the words like enforcement and dealing with illegal immigration. And he was only underwater by two or three points. And it's because.
Republicans support him 90-10 on that, whereas on affordability, he's still losing a third of Republicans on those issues. So independents still don't love how he's dealing with immigration, which is why it's not necessarily going to save those swing state or swing district Republicans. But if you're in a Republican enough district, right, a Trump 9-10 plus, that could be enough. Yeah, the turnout differential is enough to eat you over even if you're losing independence 30-70. Exactly, exactly. This message comes from the International Rescue Committee.
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to redistricting, right? So earlier this year, Trump sends out a truth. Texas immediately says they're going to redo their maps, pick up five seats. All of a sudden, other states, Missouri, Indiana, are starting to talk about how they're going to do it. Democrats are in a full state of panic that, you know, they're going to be able to rig themselves into at least...
permanent majority of sorts, right? We're just going to be, they're going to take the Republican, the slight Republican House advantage, we're going to make it much bigger. We're not going to, even at a good Democratic year, we weren't going to win the House. As we sit here today, a lot has happened. California has passed Prop 50. Some states have redistricted. Some Democratic states have talked about redistricting. Courts are involved. Where do you, where does the battle for the House through this redistricting process stand right now? Oof, okay, so. You don't have to go state by state. I'm not going to go state by state, but I think if we just put it in, I'll start really big and then we can go narrow. Right now.
My colleagues here at the Cook Political Report, Erin Covey, especially who's tracking this intently. And if you want to look at her redistricting tracker on our site, it's fantastic at cookpolitical.com. But right now she's projecting just if the Texas map, even if the Texas map is upheld, that Republicans gain just two to three seats. Does that include Florida? So what would happen if the new Texas map is upheld? So here's what's happening right now between Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, Missouri and Florida gets you, let's say.
you know, the best case scenario, two, three, four, five, six, that's like nine seats there, something like that, nine or 10 seats there. But then between California, Utah, and now Virginia, which could get you two seats. Now we're talking about, you know, Democrats being able to get five or seven seats. So that's where you net out the Republicans getting to. seats out there. A narrow advantage that would be very, I mean, it's very, very narrow. And so these numbers literally, Dan, like our tracker of how many seats gain or lose. Well, it started at Republicans likely to pick up as many as a dozen seats, which is where we started. It doesn't seats your point when this all first started. And it was this concept of California maybe having this ballot initiative to. OK, well, maybe now they'll net.
seven or eight seats. Okay, maybe they'll net five to six seats. Okay, maybe now it's four. Okay, now maybe it's, so we're definitely in the low single digits. What happens with Texas becomes really important. And then, you know, as I said, Virginia and Florida are the only two really outstanding states that, but they could also end up canceling each other out. If Virginia's passed and they get two seats out of that, and Florida has two seats.
Well, there you go. And what's interesting is the way some of these things have fallen, which is Utah, which is a Republican state. Democrats are going to pick up a seat there because of a court decision in a very Democratic district that's so Democratic that the guy who held it the last time probably can't win the primary. It's too moderate. It's too moderate for the district, which is a wild thing to say about Salt Lake City. And then Ohio. I think this speaks to Republicans' challenges here. Republicans in Ohio cut a bipartisan deal to protect themselves. And so they might pick up a little bit there, but they did not push. They got gerrymandered to the max. So that's interesting. And then Indiana, they're refusing to do it.
And I think it does, that to me tells me like two things, right? One is the reality of gerrymandering, as I said, partisan gerrymanders is there's real risk because there's like a simple mathematical fact that you have a static number of Republicans in the state. And then if you're trying, when you move them into other districts, you're making, you're taking some districts and taking them from Democratic to Republican, but you're taking Republican districts and making them less Republican. So in a good year, you know, the wave goes over the levy they've built. And so Republicans are seeing that.
They're not rolling to Texas. They don't necessarily do that. But like in Indiana and elsewhere, saying Trump's not going to be around. He's not going to be on the ballot ever again. Why would we put ourselves at risk here? And it has limited the playing field in a pretty interesting way. Yeah. And it's also, I mean, when I started covering politics, and I probably would, Dan, if you remember in the old days of redistricting, it really was an incumbent protection racket. Yes.
the individual members did have incredible influence because they were protecting their friends, they were protecting their own districts, and they would, to get a deal cut, would say, I'll protect yours, you protect mine, and here we go. It wasn't necessarily the best way of doing, I'm not advocating this is the best way of doing business, but they did have agency in this. And I think what we're seeing, and Kansas did the same, they rebuffed the president as well. What we're seeing in Kansas and Indiana is, we are red states, we get it, but we also have our own individual priorities that, as you said, are going to outlast Donald Trump. And whether it's something as small as, you know, I don't like the idea of taking whatever county and chopping it up five ways, right? In the hundred years of this, the county has never been chopped up before, and it should always have one representative, right? There are those things that still, we think all politics is national, but there is a very parochial part of politics that still exists. And especially if you're a state lawmaker, you think, I have, I'm thinking not just about, are we going to win or lose? Because in Kansas or in Indiana, like, you're going to be the majority party.
forever. It is what do we need to do beyond just winning and losing? So if you're a swing state where you're constantly, you're Pennsylvania and you're constantly thinking about that little edge you have and maybe swinging your state is different from, you know, if you're a deep red or a deep blue state. And that's why the Virginia ballot initiative is so interesting, too, because like California, this independent redistricting passed overwhelmingly when it was on the ballot. It's now part of the Constitution.
But are people willing in the state to say, I'm going to give up my local, what I felt was like a vote for something unique in my state in order to make a broader statement nationally? And I think Democrats have been more willing to do that. I'm also kind of impressed, quite frankly, to see. But Republicans, you're right, they gave up some of their territory, although they're not, they have not put themselves in really dangerous positions, right? They're not taking the kinds of risks like, oh, we're going to put you, you've gone from a Republican plus 20 to Republican plus two.
They do have new territory they're going to have to introduce themselves to, which no member wants to do that. They are comfortable in their district. So, yes, at the end of the day, I think there is the short term, which is, OK, let's say that Republicans end up netting a couple seats out of this, two, three seats, had their majority. So now Republicans have a six seat or the other way to think of it is Democrats need to instead winning just three seats to get a majority now need six or seven. But the longer term implications, I think this is goes to your point about, you know.
You redrew these lines, assuming a certain environment. What is it going to look like in a presidential year? What is it going to look like four years from now? And so we don't know that. And, you know, you have also really soured the public that already thought that this process is corrupt. Now they think it's just salt.
really looked at as pretty contemptuous. Yeah, it's going to be interesting. It's going to be a very busy year for Cook Political is when they have to redraw the districts again before the 2032 elections and how people handle that. How people handle that. And also, okay, just from a software update sort of thing, okay, we think about redistricting every 10 years and like, what do we need to have on the site? And what do we need to build? And how do we do? What?
We were not prepared to do that. I mean, Dave Wasserman needs nine years to recover every time we do this. Now we're redistricting every five years. We're only giving him, right. I mean, North Carolina's redistricting every cycle. Hasn't had a new map every cycle for like the last couple of cycles. Every cycle. Yeah. Since 1992. Yeah. The other thing that hangs over this conversation is the pending Supreme Court decision on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Yes, that's what I was doing on VRA. That's right. So Supreme Court, for people who have not been following this, if you're a Democrat, very, very alarming situation, is Supreme Court is reviewing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination.
racial lines. And the specific question is about whether majority minority districts and districts that are drawn to specifically include mostly Black voters in the South, but could also be Latino voters in the Southwest or wherever else, is unconstitutional if they were to, even though they just upheld this pretty recently, but if they were to strike that down, there would be a rash of redistricting that would happen again, mostly in the deep South. Mostly in the South. Because, you know, people was like Alabama. These states like Alabama, Mississippi, the Republicans win by 20 points and presidential electioneers have one or two Democratic districts because they have large, concentrated Black populations. They can read all the districts to divide those populations up and ensure there's no Democratic districts in the South.
That could happen before the 2026 midterms, but they'd have to move pretty quickly. Not likely. Not likely. They'd have to be a decision like now or January. Because you really have to do it before the primaries in March. How are you thinking about that? And have you guys done any math, any sort of like range of outcomes for what that would mean? Let's say it's for 2028 in terms of net gains. I know. So we have not done it here. I know Nate Cohn over at The New York Times has done a good look at that. And I think his was something like five seats that.
Republicans get of it. Now, Texas is an interesting story because in Texas, this Supreme Court fight is not, the case in front of the Supreme Court right now is constitutional. I know we have to like parse all of this, but the case there is a constitutional argument. versus the Voting Rights Act argument. So this would not, right now, what's happening in Texas is separate from this. However, you're right. This would definitely mean fewer seats in the South, Black seats in the South. So let's just say now, if Democrats were to win the House in 2026, and let's say they have an eight to 10 seat.
majority and VRA struck down. And now we go into 2030 with five or six fewer Democratic seats. You can see how the math now works going into the next election. But to me, what it really highlights to Dan is that this idea that the House... is going to ping pong every two years between the parties is something we have not really dealt with fully. You know, when I first came to Washington in the early 90s, Democrats had had control of the House, unbroken control of the House for 40 years. And Democrats lose it in 1994. Republicans hold it all the way to 2006.
Then after that, it just starts flipping pretty quickly, right? Democrats lost in 2010. We lost it again in 2020. And then now you can see Democrats get it back in 26. And then you go, oh, is it going to flip again in 30? So what does that mean for just a body in general? Like, what do you do when you are just constantly ping-ponging between majority and minority? Historically, at least in the last 30 years, a president comes in with the House, the Senate, and the White House, gets to do one really big thing, right? Bill Clinton gets to do his budget.
Obviously, for Obama, it's Obamacare. Trump gets to do the tax cut. And then this year, or whatever, Biden does Inflation Reduction Act. Trump does the big, beautiful bill, right? You use your majority. I call it sort of, it's like a smash and grab now is our politics. You've got a majority. You know it's only going to be for two years. And so you use it really to get one thing. Go in, you smash, you grab what you can. You lose.
Maybe you can come back four years later, two years later and do something else. But it's not a great way to do big things because really what we're doing is one party gets in control and uses that as their opportunity to fulfill the dreams of the base. They get one thing that they dreamed of to get done. They fulfill that one dream. But there's not like a, hey, let's think about the really big.
consequential issues that are impacting American society. Let's really tackle AI. Let's really tackle the disintegration of institutions and what that's going to mean. Let's really fundamentally think about this question of affordability. What does that mean in a world where, right, we've got more billionaires, but yet than ever, and the gap between rich and poor is bigger than ever.
I don't know that it's not it's not a great way to. And the thing that's really changed here is the way it used to work. As you said, you'd come in, you do your big thing, mostly on a party basis. You would lose the House or the Senate. The president would get reelected, then would do something big and bipartisan with the other side because the other party would be chagrined by the presidential loss. They feel like they should do some sort of compromising. And this all sort of fell apart after Obama won 2012 and Republican, the Republican House bailed on immigration. Like that was the exact model. You know, Obama wins by a bigger margin, they thought.
John Boehner stands up the next day and says, Obamacare is now the law of the land. Every Republican from Rupert Murdoch and Sean Hannity down says, we've got to do comprehensive immigration for him, passes the Senate, gets to the House, and dies in part because the House minority we've lost. The with-lost is primary over immigration. And then now we're just in this world. Also, there's this House pinging back and forth dynamic, but we also have had two one-term presidents in a row, which is not something we've had in a long time. Exactly. Yeah. So now we're just really pinging back and forth.
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Let's actually just pivot to the House writ large here. So we started this conversation about 2025. Democrats are super excited. Trump's numbers are in the toilet. Affordability is a top issue. Trump's numbers on affordability are in the toilet. You know, looking at the 2025 results, we're winning back Latinos. Things are feeling great for us. People on my side here feel great. They open up quick political. They read Amy Walter's latest column, which says, basically, Democrats are ascended, but we have a very low ceiling. So my question for you is, why are you such a buzzkill here?
Hey, let us have a moment. It's been a long year. Math is math. Math is math. So part of the reason we're ping-ponging back and forth, right, is that there are just so few swing districts and that the House is pretty evenly divided between seats that Kamala Harris carried and seats that Donald Trump carried. And there are very few crossover seats. So if you're in a Harris district, you're a Democrat. If you're in a Trump district, you're a Republican. And there are also very few seats that Trump won narrowly. Like usually after, especially this one, which was a close election, right? This wasn't a landslide in 2024, but there were only 14 districts.
that of the 222 that Republicans hold, only 14 of them are districts that Trump lost or won by less than five points. And that is just such a small number. It's like when you look at not to sort of, you know, make you go to PTSD land, but 2010, you know, there were so many, there were 48 Democrats in McCain districts in 2010, right? Because there were a bunch of districts that, you know, they... voted for John McCain for president, but the Democrat was able to hold on because, right, they were unique to that district. They were used to voting for Democrats there, even as they were voting for Republican for president. And Obama did better in those districts. Correct. That election is fascinating because that's one of the rare times where there were two wave elections in a row. Yes. 2006 was a wave election and 2008. And so you had all these people who won on the back of those two waves. Because normally you have a wave election in an off year. Then you have the presidential. The tide comes back in. You lose a bunch of seats. We just kept winning people. And so there was this huge list. And now.
That does not exist. That does not exist anymore. And the challenge then comes in. So that's 14, quote unquote, I won't call them easy seats, but those are the most fruitful to flip. So even if you win all of those, that's just a gain of 14 seats. And let's say you need six seats to win. So that gives and you don't lose any of your own. That gives you an eight seat majority. I mean, yeah, it's a narrow majority. So you could have a wave election, which would look like 2010, 2018.
in which the party outside of the White House wins almost all of the seats between zero and five and those seats won that are crossover seats and come up with a much smaller number. Now, to me, the big question that is, could we see a wave that is even bigger than that? And that I'm not seeing evidence of that yet, of one in which districts that Trump won by double digits start to go right, that there's a real collapse there because of. either because of the political environment or this idea that Trump was just so unique and so skilled at putting together a coalition that just can't hold without him on the top of the ticket. But this is where I'm going to go back to where we started, Dan, from the conversation, our conversation where we started about Virginia and what we learned from the off-year elections. Democrats had a great night at the legislative level, too. They picked up 13 seats at the state legislative level. But all of them were in districts that...
were basically Trump zero to five or were Harris districts. So even on a great night in Virginia, you say, oh my gosh, Abigail Spanberger wins by 15 points. They win all of the row races, the statewide races and pick up 13 seats. But they didn't win in districts that are red. In other words, they're winning all the swing districts, which is what you need to do to win an election. But what you're not doing is dipping into
these deep red areas. Those areas are going to stay red. They may be a little less red. And so it's not going to be the kind of election that, at least at this point that we're seeing, that you can say you're going to see big shifts that would make Republicans absolutely reassess either what they're doing or what they're saying or how they're thinking about their coalition. The other way I think about this is the Senate map is basically getting a win in order to win control of the senate democrats need to win in trump plus 10 states or more right and so winning in ohio winning in iowa winning in texas that's um if if they are winning there then they are going to be winning a 30 or more House seats too. Yeah. Looking at your data, it's like, so you have 14 Republicans in seats, either Harris won or Trump won by less than five points. Another 14 in Trump's districts that Trump won by five to 10 points, right? Which is, those are some possibly attainable, but hard. But the thing that really is stunning, and this does show why the House will ping pong back and forth and why the days of large majorities are gone, for now at least, is 187 of the Republicans are in districts that Trump won by more than 10 points in a year in which he won the popular vote by the smallest margin of any candidate since Al Gore in 2000. So this is not...
Obama 08 or Biden, you know, winning the popular vote by 7 million votes or whatever it was in 2020. This is an incredibly narrow popular vote win. And even under those scenarios, 187 of sitting Republicans feel that they are in no danger of possibly losing election, which does go back to the point about why they don't really care about extending the Obamacare tax credits because their only fear is losing. Most of them are ever going to lose as a primary. And so they're not really concerned about the other thing. And the reason we're in that position, is that a combination of polarization and gerrymandering or mostly polarization? How do we get there? Yeah, I do think it's a lot about...
But gerrymandering, too, that went and benefited one side or the other. But the fact that you just have so few people willing to give the other party the benefit of the doubt and split their ticket means that you're just not going to get these crossover kinds of districts that, when we were starting out in politics, were just so commonplace. And so you're right, if each party has... you know, 180 plus seats sitting in deep red, deep blue. We're going to fight over the same 30 seats every two cycles. And the only way that changes is either one, there is a big decoupling at some point. And it does feel as if, you know, this is to me the really great paradox of our time is that people are less aligned to party than ever.
Our politics is not as linear, meaning in terms of thinking about a scale of conservative to liberal. I think there's a recognition of voters being more heterodox on policy than politicians are. So there is this ability to sort of cobble together a coalition of voters that looks very different than what we... have seen in the last 30 years. And I'd add to that a decoupling as we've become less racially polarized. So it was like politics is a little bit detached from demographics in that sense. There we go. All of that should expand this playing field. Yeah. It expands it on the presidential level, but not at the House level. Not at the House level where you're able to draw these districts that take out any of the uncertainty, right?
In the Senate, too. Now what do we have? One Republican Susan Collins in a solid blue state and no Democrats in a solid red state, is it? Correct. Yeah. Yep. So Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, because they ping pong back and forth, you know, those are, right? How many other states have split delegation? Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. It's Maine. Maine's the other one. There we go. But we had that. Is that it? So it's just three? I think that's right. Then I can think of this off my head, yeah. Yeah.
That's pretty... Pretty dark, yes. It's dark for Democrats because we're very good at winning lots of electoral votes and not so good at winning lots of states. And so that really puts a ceiling. on the day, which we can get to, we can pivot to the Senate. Actually, before we pivot to the Senate, I do want to go back to just one thing on the House map. There was this Politico story the other day that was about Texas. And, you know, Texas, as we mentioned in this question, is the current redistricting gerrymandering map going to be tossed out and go back to the old map? But it had a bunch of Democrats from Texas and D.C. saying that they are optimistic about winning seats in Texas under the current map, Texas map, if it were to stay in place, the one that Trump wanted, because of the shift in the Latino vote they saw, particularly in New Jersey. Now, there's a lot of...
bloviating from the people in charge of winning the House and Senate on both sides at this point because you want donors and people to believe you have a chance to win. But there is this interesting dynamic in Texas, which is they did draw those maps, largely assuming that the 2024 gains with Trump-abled Latinos, particularly along the Rio Grande Valley, are, like, that that is, those are Republican gains, not Trump gains. And, you know, I do always point out that, according to Exit Postley's, Beto O'Rourke won Latinos against Greg Abbott the last time he was up in the midterm. And so there is this world in which they made this bet in Texas that Latinos were going to operate at a 2024 level, and they may not go forward. But looking at your guys' essential, I would say for everyone watching, essential race ratings at Cook Political, if you want to know where to donate your money, what races to watch, you should look at those race ratings. But I don't think you guys have any of those races in the toss-up or lean Republican category. Maybe one. Maybe Myra Flores, I think, maybe the one. Right. Now, that would be one, to your point. She fits into the Trump, again, this is under the map that is on pause, but is the redistricted map, is a Trump.
plus, I think it's like plus eight, nine, something, 10, something like that. OK, so that would be interesting. That is definitely one to keep an eye on, right? To say it's one thing. So I think there are two conversations when we're talking about Texas and Latinos. The first is Republicans said we can gain five seats with this map. That five seats depends on winning, knocking off two Democrats in South Texas based on, as you said, the performance of Donald Trump in that area. So you could argue that.
At the very least, Democrats are able to hold those two and Republicans come out of Texas winning three seats instead of five. The other is that you could look at, OK, a again, this is a Republican held seat, the 15th district and say, well, that also should be considered more competitive if these numbers with Latinos hold up across the country. And as we know, you know, the results in New Jersey are about. New Jersey, they may not translate into the Central Valley. Latinos are Latinos everywhere, and they're obviously not. So Rio Grande or San Antonio, it's like saying all women vote this way. It is very much so. We're not saying all Latinos are going to vote a similar way. But I do think that, and the folks over at the Equis project just put out their big survey of Latino voters, and their bottom line is their assumption.
is that the vote will look a lot more like it did in 2022 than it did in 2024. In other words, Democrats are gonna do better with Latinos, but it's not like, it won't look like it did in 2020. It won't look like it did pre, basically pre-Biden. We're not going back there. Yeah, 2016. Exactly. 2016 was the high watermark and we're not, their point is, we're not going back to that 20, at least right now they don't see it. Don't look at that as the baseline number that if Democrats don't hit that, they have failed. Look instead at.
how Democrats did in 2022. And I think that is, Texas is going to be a great place to see just where that number ends up. When we come back, more of my conversation with Amy Walter. But before we go, if you're someone who lives and dies with every single poll, is obsessed with what is happening in our politics, feels overwhelmed by all that's happening, I would highly encourage you to subscribe to my newsletter, The Message Box. I try to cut through the chaos in American politics, explain what's actually happening, give you real strategies to fight back against MAGA extremism, including where to donate your time and money and how to win arguments with your MAGA curious uncle.
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All right, let's go to the Senate real fast here. So the Democratic path to a Senate majority, which I think most people thought was off the table earlier this year, or pretty close to off the table. There has been a lot of optimism, I think measured optimism, from the people who don't have a very specific political interest in making people optimistic about it, that Democrats, we've been fortunate in Republican recruiting failures. Like, at the beginning of the year, we think Brian Kemp's running against John Ossoff. We think, you know, the governor of New Hampshire is running against what we thought would be Gene Shaheen at that point.
You know, Republicans can't recruit their best candidates. We get some really good recruiting wins in Roy Cooper and Sherrod Brown. But our path, so people know, is we got to defend open seats in Minnesota, Michigan, and New Hampshire. We have to defend John Osloff in Georgia, have to beat Susan Collins in Maine, win in North Carolina, which Susan Collins theoretically should be, for all the reasons we talked about, a very winnable race for us, although she has defied partisan dynamics before. have Roy Cooper win in a state that Trump won by a little, by a few points in 2020, where we haven't won a Senate race since 2008, I believe, was Kay Hagan was the last one, but have won statewide a couple of times now, Roy Cooper, Josh Stein, et cetera. And then we have to win two of the following four, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, or Alaska. And the big asterisk I put for Alaska is you need Mary Paltola to run for that. She was the statewide rep. Of those,
four, all of which Trump won by double digits, and all of which have been trending Republican over the last eight years here. Like, what is your assessment of the Democratic path? And if there is one, what do you think is the most viable path right now? Right. So the Ohio seems the next most vulnerable for Republicans, simply because you've got a very well-known and well-established brand in Sherrod Brown.
Republican isn't particularly well-known there. He's more of a traditional Republican. He kind of comes out of a Mike DeWine-style Republican, which in some ways you'd say, oh, well, that makes it a safer bet, right? Because if anybody remembers the last Senate race in the state, that was the Bernie Moreno race, which was a lot closer than people had expected against Sherrod Brown. There, of course, was J.D. Vance. There was a lot of hand-wringing by...
Republicans when he first ran about his campaign. They didn't think he was running a strong enough campaign. He wasn't a good fundraiser. So that there's not. I would say just notably underperformed every other Republican in the state by a fair amount, even if we didn't end up winning by. Exactly. And so there are two ways to look at that. One is even when you have candidates who don't run great campaigns as Republicans in the state, they're still able to win against well-known, well-established and well-funded Democrats. The other way to say it is yes, but you could also make the case that.
you know, the last two elections have been relatively decent ones for Republicans. And the last time that the environment was as weak as this for Republicans was 2018 and Sherrod Brown won in 2018 in Ohio. Of course, he was the incumbent then. But, you know, you also think about a place like Ohio and Go. I just don't see places where the Trump brand is receding enough to get you over the finish line.
Iowa to me is really fascinating because you've got a state where there are clear. implications. Really, in Iowa, you've got, there's been real consequences to Trump's tariff policy there, right? This is a farm economy, the soybean farmers and ranchers and cattle. And I just saw a tweet, I think it was today or yesterday, from Senator Grassley upset at an appointment to one of the bodies that HHS Secretary, RFK Jr. oversees, who wants to ban pesticides, which, again, just another blow to farmers in the state, right? They are just getting really
is pummeled by the policies of this administration. If you look at off your special elections in that state, Democrats have outperformed by significant amounts in Iowa. So it seems like there's some weakness there for Republicans. I think the hardest part for Iowa, and even Democrats will privately admit this as well, is as an open seat, it actually may be harder for them to win than if Joni Ernst were still there because she just had a lot of that baggage. Now, the one thing I'll say...
Ashley Henson, who is the Republican nominee, is a very strong candidate. She's a former TV reporter, so she's got some name IDs. She is very polished. and a very good campaigner. But she also has a voting record, right? She's not an outsider. You know, part of what made Joni earn such a great candidate when she won the seat in 2014 was she was known just, right? She was known as the castrating pig lady, right? For people who were not around 2014, she has a farming background. It was a veteran, but I believe she was a veteran, but also ran an ad about castrating pigs, which in a time before things went truly viral politically, this was an ad that everyone knew about and was quite excellent. Right.
That's been the last 11 years now. That's a castrating pig lady, yes. Right, that is the lady that does have to make, she'll make Washington squeal, right? So everybody got a little squeamish, so they're like, oof. But, so Hinson does not come in with the outsider-ness, right? She still will have to carry the baggage of all that's going on in Washington. So while I think she does not have some of the obvious weaknesses, and for Ernst, that was this last viral moment where at a town hall, she told folks who were worried about,
Medicare cuts and Medicaid cuts causing people to die. And then she said, well, you know, everyone's going to die. So I'm very, very intrigued by Iowa. There's a very big Democratic primary, though. And we have to see the caliber of Canada that comes out of that primary. Now, Texas, you know, the shorthand is, oh, well, if Paxton wins, that puts Texas in play. Here's the thing. And, you know, probably be talking about this for years for the next couple of years. But I also look at.
who's in solid. So Florida, there's really no effort being made by Democrats to win Florida. We know that Democrats haven't won Florida in a while. It's a tough state. It's an expensive state. But to not put Florida and Texas in play two years before a presidential election, we're like, if you're Democrats, you're looking at the electoral college map, going into 28 and then going into 32. Like, if you're not competing in those states, what, how are you going to, what are you doing? You know, right? Like, at some point, you can write off, you can say, all right, fine.
Ohio's not a swing state anymore. Iowa's not a swing state anymore. Fine, fine, fine. We're going to give up those ghosts. You can't also say, well, Florida, we're going to give up there. And Texas, it's so expensive, and it takes a lot of money to move, just a point. So we're just going to go all in on, you know, Georgia, North Carolina, sure. Yeah, Arizona, Nevada, great. But that's not enough, especially as the Midwest continues to.
to become not just more competitive and that blue wall gets smaller, but those states are literally shrinking. New York is going to have fewer electoral votes. This is the most important point. This is the thing. This is one of the things I worry about in the Democratic Party post the 2025 election is...
We have to think much bigger than how do we just win the majority in 2026, or even how we just win the White House in 2028, although those are high priorities for us, is they're going to redraw the maps after the 2030 census. The most likely scenario, as we sit here today, is that Florida, California is going to lose some seats. Texas is going to lose some seats. The blue wall is going to lose some seats. Florida and Texas are going to gain five to seven net electoral votes. And so the blue wall path no longer exists for us.
like that does not exist. And so we are going to have, and in the coalition, which we currently have, unless we can improve, we can actually make those gains we saw in 2025 Latino voters will not be sufficient to ever win a national election. And so we cannot see Florida and Texas going forward because what we have to, we have to believe the Democrats. can get back to something that looks like Obama's 2012 coalition with Latino voters and white voters, frankly. Because if you cannot do that, you cannot win. You can't win a national election. You cannot. The Republican electoral advantage is going to get so severe that we cannot do that. And so that is the argument for running vigorous Senate races in those states in 26, in 28, in 30. Even if you say, OK, so we've lost. And it is a lot of money. You're right. It's a lot of money to put into two states that literally just a million dollars gets you nothing.
Right. A million dollars in Iowa can actually get you something. So I get I get the math of that. I really, really do. And yet I also take your point that if you're not going to at least just say, let's just play here, let's see what we can do.
This is the, and nobody wants to do that because, right, you say, well, you spent way too much money on Florida and Texas. You didn't spend any money. You didn't spend enough in Ohio. And that's why we did it when this controlled the Senate, right? I think that is such myopic thinking because for two reasons. One, maybe we could spend less money in these other states where we are just basically running a bailout program for local television stations by running, like there is a, there is such diminishing returns, particularly in this media environment, to linear television advertising. And so we were just dumping money, mostly super-packed money, at a huge cost markup into these states with small media markets.
Like to what end? And also you can run vigorous races for less money now if you are good at communicating. Yeah, like poor Maine. How much more can you put into the state of Maine? Like there's just nothing else. Yes, it's going to be an absurd amount of money spent there, an absurd amount of money spent in Georgia, all these races. And it's diminishing returns because there's just this close-minded thinking about how to spend money in presidential campaigns where the only thing of true value is linear television. It's the only thing you can go to your donors and say, we bought this many ratings points and this commercial is going to run this many times during this football game. It just, it makes no sense, particularly at a time in which.
this is not my soapbox that I am every time I see a donor, but is if you are a younger person, 40 and under, you have, there are two elements here. One is you were raised your entire life to not believe ads. You lived in the, you, you, they were, you skip them, you fast forward them, you swipe them, you don't know them. They, your, your source for like, when you like, what is to me, the McDonald's I'm loving at commercial for people younger than me is an influencer saying I love McDonald's or whatever product I have. It's very different. The other thing is if you.
if you are a young person who does not watch sports, because the only way to really reach people right now is sporting events, then you have no way to reach them in a linear television ad because Netflix doesn't take political ads and TikTok doesn't take political ads. So like not 80% of the time that they're doing things, you're not, and most streaming television services do not take political ads. And so you just can't reach these people. And it is voters under 40 in 2024, we can reach voters under 45 in 2028, we can't reach voters under 50, we can't reach voters under 50 in 2032. Like this is the world. And so you just have to think more creatively.
We haven't talked about Zoran Mondani in this. I think people are over-reading the importance of his win, both as a positive and a negative, as to that house incentive term. But there is a lesson here, which is if you are good at content and you understand the media environment, you can dominate attention for much less money than you would spend. So if we could have, and there are some interesting candidates, particularly in Texas, who are good at attention, and particularly both Tallarico and Jasmine Crockett, if she would have run. We can talk about that. But there are people who could, there's a way in which you could.
spend less money and still win and at least spend less money and run vigorous races. And so like, and just, we have to expand the playing field or we're never like, it can't be that every single cycle we have to draw an inside straight to get to 51 seats. Like that is not a viable, that's not a viable. approach to a party with true governing ambitions. Like you can't win because you know what? You know what also sucks? The map missing. It always sucks for Democrats. Because it's not getting there. As we said at the beginning, there's nobody sitting. There's one Susan Collins. That's it. And we've got to be Dave McCormick and Ron Johnson. And then that's it. And then we've got to go to a state that Trump won by a lot to win. Like that is where it is. Yeah. And maybe the other seat in North Carolina, I guess. But that's still saying that the playing field for the Senate is the same.
five or six seats every single cycle. And that becomes limiting. But you're right. If you're thinking more broadly about how do you build an electoral college coalition, that electoral college coalition also is likely the one that's going to win you some sense. It's not going to necessarily win you in a state like Iowa, but it is one that you could take to Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, right? I mean, that is those booming, growing states. That's the
That's the next step. Latinos are the fastest growing population in the United States. You cannot be losing them. You're not going to win. You're going to win a math where we win a tiny percentage of white non-college voters, the largest population currently, and are losing ground with Latinos, the fastest growing population, is not one that wins. All right, real quick, because we're getting to the end here. There is an election coming up in a couple weeks in Tennessee. It's a special election in the 7th District where Mark Green retired for a variety of reasons in the middle of the cycle. This is a district that Trump won by like 21 or 22, I think. Democrats are...
Somewhat optimistic. Republicans seem quite concerned. Where do you think things stand in that race? And what are you looking for? What I'm looking for is the bigger question. I don't think Republicans lose this one. That would be a very, very big upset. It is. Is it in the realm of possibility? Sure. But as you said, it's a Trump 22 district. So the margin here is going to matter. I think if you're Republicans, you're really desperate to make sure that this is a double digit win. Right. Because it's one thing to say it's a Trump 22 district and we want it by 10.
It is not as dramatic as a Trump 22 district that we barely eked out. Because I think if you barely ek out a race in a Trump 22 district, if you're a Republican. running in 26 and you see those numbers. I mean, it's quite notable, by the way, that this is coming, that this election is coming right before the holidays. Well, right after one and then right before the other big holidays. Because we all know members go home over the holidays. They make a lot of decisions about what they're going to do in the next year. They sit down with family. They do the whole like, is my life what I want it to be? Do I really want to go through this again? And if you're coming in with, these are the following things you're dealing with already. You know, the whole health care thing we talked about, you look at the 2025 elections and
and what happened there. And then if there's a really close race in a district that Trump carried by 22 points where Republicans poured in money and they aren't ignoring this, they're actually playing here for real. What does that say to you if you're a vulnerable Republican or even potentially vulnerable or have a potentially competitive race? Do you want to go through with it? Do you want to come back? And do you have the sort of fire in your belly to go through a real race?
And there will be a lot of people who say, I don't think so. Not really. There's a bunch of people in that bubble that we talked about who won by eight points or 12 points who haven't probably won a real race in a long time. A lot of call time at the NRCC. They don't really want to campaign. They may be probably older because it's the United States Congress and everyone's older. But and they don't want to do it. And this is it's interesting because I think that's where it has the biggest impact. If it's, you know, it's not so much the winning and the losing. I mean, the losing, if Republicans would be like this is world ending for the moment. But.
even a very narrow win, it says you should not feel comfortable. And you got to get yourself in that plate, that headspace. If you're a member thinking about reelection, that this is not going to look like 2024 and it's not going to look like any other race maybe you've been in. Amy Walter, it is always so much fun to talk to you about politics. So fun. This has been great. Talking politics with you for a very, very long time now. And I highly recommend everyone check out the Cook Political Report. It is...
Absolutely. It's the Bible for people who follow politics very closely. It's how I track what's happening in the races. It's how I track what's happening in redistricting. Amy, you're no better person to have this conversation. Thank you. This has been really great. Thanks so much. Really appreciate it. Happy holidays to you and to everybody listening. By the time you listen to it, they will have had a happy holiday. Oh, I hope so. Yes, and I hope that the driving and the airport is doing okay. Or at least better because you get to hear us. There we go. Thank you. Very well done. Thank you, Amy. Bye. That's our show for today. Thanks to Amy Walter for joining. John, John, and Tommy will be back in your feeds on Tuesday.
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Longplay, our docuseries exploring the people and forces shaping the South, is back. Newsflash, the South is the new political epicenter of the country. Democrats are way on their heels in this region, but Republicans are going through their own reckoning in the South, too. We're in the final stretch of the midterms, and the political map has only gotten more competitive, with new states and districts emerging as potential flips. So we thought it was time to get back out on the road and take a closer look at what's actually happening on the ground. I'm Erin Haines, journalist and expert on all things Southern politics. And I'm Jennifer Palmieri, former White House Communications Director. Tune in on Mondays to Longplay Series on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
But you don't need to be a scientist. You just need to know what to do. Learn more at embridgegas.com slash safety.