Partisan Courts Sparked an Outbreak of Gerrymandering in the Confederacy. Democrats Should Still Be Optimistic about the Midterms.
An analysis of recent polling suggests the pro-democracy opposition to Trump's kleptocracy remains well positioned to re-capture at least the House - and possibly take control of the Senate too.
The Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most effective civil rights legislation in U.S. history, triggered a stampede by white Republican politicians to foist Jim Crow congressional districts on states across the South.
In the wake of the court’s April 29 decision, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee all raced effectively to erase Black and Democratic representation from their states’ House of Representatives district maps — while a court in Virginia tossed out a voter-approved redistricting plan that had been expected to boost the number of seats held by Democrats in that state’s delegation.
The sudden flurry of legal and political action represents a late rally by red-state Republicans in a national redistricting arms race launched by Donald Trump and his allies in Texas last year. As a political matter, it shifted the landscape just six months before a crucial midterm election that had been forecast to be a “blue wave” victory for Democrats.
“Trump and the GOP know they can’t win on the merits,” said Rep. Steve Cohen, who represents the only Black-majority district in Tennessee, which the Republican legislature just gerrymandered out of existence.
“So they’re emasculating the Voting Rights Act, changing the maps, and trying to take representation and power away from Black Americans to hang onto their majority. That’s what this is all about. It’s Jim Crow redistricting,” Cohen added.
At a time when Trump has neutered craven congressional Republicans, and enjoyed broad legal backing for his authoritarian project from the right-wing supermajority on the Supreme Court, Democrats are desperate to reclaim a shred of power in Washington by retaking the House — where the MAGA GOP holds only a slim three-seat edge — and adding seats in the Senate, where they are also in the minority.
Amid widespread outrage, bitterness and despair among Democrats and pro-democracy independents over the latest developments, however, the opposition to Trump’s radical agenda remains well-positioned for Nov. 3 election, for at least five key reasons:
Trump is extremely unpopular. A president’s party almost invariably loses congressional seats in the midterms, and the most reliable single predictor of how relatively well or poorly it performs has historically been job approval rating of the White House occupant during the first two years of his term.
Trump’s numbers are historically bad.
The New York Times tracking poll, which incorporates all major independent public opinion surveys, has shown his favorable rating below 40 percent for weeks, with the latest daily numbers pegging him at 38-to-59 percent favorable-to-unfavorable — a dreadful minus-21-point rating.
Some recent comparisons:
In 1994, when Republicans took control of the House by winning a then-record 54 seats, President Bill Clinton was also underwater, but by a much more modest 10 points — 42-to-52 percent, approve-disapprove, in a major CNN/USA Today pre-election poll.
In 2006, Democrats won back control of the House, capturing 31 seats in the midterm as President George W. Bush, damaged by the Iraq War, had job performance numbers similar to Trump’s — 38-to-58 percent, favorable-unfavorable, in the last Gallup poll before the election.
In 2010, President Barack Obama polled 45-to-55 percent, favorable-unfavorable — minus 10 points — as Republicans won 63 seats in a huge red-wave midterm election.
Democrats are still favored to win the House. Despite the wave of racial gerrymandering across the former Confederacy, political professionals following all 435 House races — as well as the political warfare over redistricting — still forecast a Democratic majority in November, if one that is significantly smaller than projected a few weeks ago.
The authoritative, nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which closely tracks congressional races district by district, and has updated its projections in real time with each new twist in the redistricting saga, reports that Republicans will net around half a dozen seats, but not many more, when the dust settles. Political reporter Erin Covey writes:
“We project that the likeliest scenario is Republicans netting around six to seven seats, following a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court on the Voting Rights Act and a ruling from the Supreme Court of Virginia overturning the state’s new map.
“Given that scenario, we still believe that Democrats are favored to win control of the House due to the poor national environment for the GOP. But they are no longer overwhelming favorites.”
More broadly, Amy Walter, the Cook Report’s publisher and editor-in-chief, assesses the new state of play this way:
“Republicans have gained a new structural advantage through redistricting. But the political environment continues to benefit Democrats…
“At best, the new Southern state maps, combined with those already completed in states like Texas and Missouri, simply lower the ceiling on projected Democratic gains.”
The Senate clearly is in play. At the beginning of the year, Democrats were favored to win the House but given virtually no chance of netting the four seats it would take to win control of the Senate, where Republicans now hold a 53-47 majority.
Trump’s growing unpopularity — driven by low marks voters give him on the economy - coupled with rising inflation, higher gas prices and widespread unhappiness with the war in Iran, has changed the political calculus. Recent polling shows Democrats have multiple opportunities that collectively could flip the Senate.
The top priority is to hold their incumbents’ seats in Georgia and Michigan, two states Trump won in 2024, where Democrats Jon Ossoff and Gary Peters, respectively, are running for reelection for the first time and will face well-financed challengers. Democrats also must hold an open seat in New Hampshire, which Rep. Chris Pappas is trying to retain after incumbent Jeanne Shaheen decided to retire.
The party’s best chance for a pickup is the open seat in North Carolina being vacated by Republican Thom Tillis, which former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper is favored to win.
Other key races in seats held by Republican incumbents:
Maine, where the perennially equivocal Susan Collins — who has survived politically even as the Pine Tree State has grown more Democratic — is being challenged by oyster fisherman Graham Platner, a controversial progressive and high-risk first-time candidate whose grassroots campaign already succeeded in pushing former Democratic Governor Janet Mills out of the primary contest.
Alaska, where Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan holds a structural advantage in a reliably red state, but former statewide Rep. Mary Peltola — with a record of crossover appeal in a state with ranked-choice voting — is running a strong, locally focused challenge.
Ohio, where appointed GOP incumbent Jon Husted holds a consistent, margin-of-error edge over former Senator Sherrod Brown, who is attempting a well-funded comeback.
Three other states are considered longshots but not out of reach: Iowa, Texas, and Nebraska, where Democrats quietly back independent Dan Osborn, who could conceivably knock off Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts in a true, wipeout blue-wave election.
Ironically, this effort could be aided by the Supreme Court’s voting rights decision, and by the Southern states rushing to pass racial gerrymanders in its wake, because it creates additional motivation for Democrats to turn out.
Dems are winning the generic ballot. Polling and data analyst Nate Silver tracks surveys measuring the generic congressional ballot — the collective opinion of voters about which party they prefer to control Congress — and reported this week that Democrats now lead Republicans by a significant margin:
“Today, the generic congressional ballot broke D+6 for the first time this cycle,” he wrote. “It’s currently at D+6.1, to be precise. That’s not a huge change from where it was last week (D+5.9), but still, Democrats are making slow but steady gains. Before April, the generic ballot had hovered around D+5.4 since the beginning of the year.”
“Democrats remain favored to retake the House in November,” Silver wrote in his latest “Silver Bulletin.”
Enthusiasm gap. A series of recent polls have shown Republicans lagging Democrats in measures of enthusiasm and motivation to vote in the upcoming election.
CNN’s Aaron Blake reports:
“A Washington Post-ABC News poll this week, for instance, showed 73% of Democrats said the upcoming election is more important than past midterms. But just 52% of Republicans said the same…
“Similarly, the most recent CNN poll from late March showed just 48% of Republicans agreed that their vote would be cast to ‘send a message that you support Donald Trump.’ That was far less than the 76% of Democrats who said their vote would be cast to send a message of opposition to Trump…
“Finally, a Marquette University Law School poll last month showed just 28% of Republicans and GOP-leaning independent voters said they were ‘very enthusiastic’ about voting in the midterms. That’s 19 points less than the number for Democrats and Democratic-leaning independent voters (47%).”
Bottom line. Pro-democracy voters are justified in fuming about the way right-wing justices and judges violated historic judicial norms of avoiding involvement in partisan matters shortly before elections (or, in the case of Louisiana, after voting had already begun).
While Republicans have modestly improved their political position through recent legal and political shenanigans, however, Democrats are still poised to take back some institutional power — if they run effective persuasion and turnout campaigns around the message that Trump’s unchecked power must be curbed.
Don’t forget to vote.
Excellent update, thank you JR!