Over the last day or so, a number of the big inside DC sheets have run pieces striking a skeptical note about the GOP’s 2025-26 redistricting — Axios and Politico, for examples. It’s not just that they maybe aren’t strong enough to withstand a Democratic wave (no gerrymanders are impregnable) but that they are fundamentally based on the assumption that the 2026 electorate would look basically like the 2024 electorate, as Axios put it. That’s not quite the same as saying “as popular as.” It’s more the shape of the electorate. And that’s why it’s not quite as silly as it might sound, though not wholly unsilly. And one example of this is that Republicans made a bet that things like the big Hispanic shift toward the GOP, especially in places like Texas and the Southwest, represented a kind of realignment as opposed to just a really bad year for Democrats.
To be clear, I don’t think anyone sees these switcheroos as “dummymanders” yet, where it actually turns out worse for the gerrymandering party than if they did nothing at all. Just that it may not end up providing that much advantage.
Obviously this all remains quite hypothetical. We don’t know what happens in November. The standard line is that “a lot can change.” That’s obviously true in a theoretical sense. Of course a lot can change. But in practical terms, I don’t think that’s quite right. There’s actually very little reason to believe much is going to change, because the key things underlying the GOP’s current unpopularity — prices, the Iran War and Donald Trump’s behavior — show almost no likelihood of changing. It’s more that there still remains a significant amount of uncertainty about what the situation is right now. As Charlie Cook put it in that post I wrote up last week, is it “bad, really bad, or truly horrible”? What we’re seeing at the moment is Republicans setting aside the happy talk and bravado, looking at the durability of the current dynamics and realizing that it is in fact really bad. I’m not sure it’s all really any worse for Republicans than most of us have figured. It’s more that DC has been behind the curve.
On that basic question of “bad, really bad, or truly horrible,” I don’t have a better idea than anyone else. On the basic question, I continue to think that the political class has not absorbed the depth of Donald Trump’s unpopularity, that it has seeped into areas where partisan polarization doesn’t usually allow it. But of course my hopes lean in that direction. So I’m skeptical of that too.
One thing that is interesting about this cycle is that, from one perspective, the Senate almost looks rosier for the Democrats than the House. To be clear, not in the sense that a Senate pick up is more likely. I don’t think anyone seriously thinks the Speaker of the House is going to be a Republican next year. I mean this more in the sense of possibilities, the “maybe it could happens” you start seeing on the map. The reason is simple: gerrymandering, or rather that the Senate doesn’t have it.
It still very much goes without saying that the Senate is permanently tilted toward small-population and generally rural states. In our current politics that tilt all goes to Republicans. But it’s not open to the fine-tuning that gerrymandering makes possible. Iowa is a very white and very rural state. But it’s still Iowa. You can’t just shave off some marginal parts and hand them to Illinois and grab some more rock-solid ones in Missouri or Nebraska or South Dakota. Doesn’t work that way. And that’s adding to the unpredictability as we move toward November.