What Dems Must Now Overcome to Win the House

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

The Tilted Playing Field

The impact of the redistricting decisions by the U.S. and Virginia supreme courts is beginning to get factored into analyses of the 2026 House elections, but let’s start with this top line: their effects on the Mid-Decade Redistricting War, since that sets the structural conditions on which the election will be run.

Just a few days ago, Democrats had edged into a small lead over Republicans, largely thanks to the Virginia redistricting. With the setback Friday in Virginia, the Republicans now have what is widely considered an 8-seat advantage over Democrats that could grow to as many 10 seats depending on how aggressively Republicans target majority-Black districts in Louisiana and Alabama.

Much of the discourse over the past few days immediately pivots to what the structural changes mean for the 2026 elections, with exhortations for Democrats to overcome their disadvantages by maximizing turnout or questioning whether these are true pickup opportunities for Republicans. Unfortunately, the GOP’s anti-majoritarian advantages often end up baked into people’s expectations in ways that obscure rather than illuminate. It’s as if we have come to accept the tilted playing field as normal and just try to build a team that’s fast enough to outrun the opponent if though they’re running uphill.

The assessments of which seats are pickups for redistricting purposes give us a good sense of what the baseline map is. It’s not the same as predicting election outcomes using the same map, but it’s a marker for the field of battle. And some of the structural changes are permanent or at least semi-permanent. Democrats can’t count on wave elections every cycle to overcome those structural disadvantages, and it wouldn’t be fair to expect them to. I’m reminded of the line about Ginger Rogers: She did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards in heels.

With one-a-decade redistricting now seeming to be a thing of the past, it’s important to keep separate scoring on the redistricting fight, which is likely to resume again ahead of the 2028 election, especially in blue states which didn’t have time to respond to Louisiana v. Callais this cycle.

How It Shakes Out for 2026

The analyses of prospects for winning control of the House in the November quickly get very technical, especially with the fluidity of the redistricting battle creating multiple scenarios to factor in. So I’m going give you a sampling of topline numbers and assessments.

• “To win the House, Democrats could need to win the House combined national popular vote by around four percentage points, according to our estimates,” Nate Cohn assesses.
• Leaning on the Cook Political Report, the NYT summarizes it as a 10-seat swing toward Republicans in just the past 10 days:

At the end of April, the Cook Political Report, which handicaps political races, listed 217 House seats as at least leaning Democratic — meaning the party would have needed to win just a single “tossup” race to seize the majority. As of Friday, Cook rated 208 seats as at least leaning Democratic — meaning the party would need to win 10 of the 18 “tossup” races.

• G. Elliott Morris goes deep into the numbers, projecting different scenarios, to come up with a GOP advantage that’s closer to +6 seats, with the potential loss of two more majority-Black seats in the South making it a +8 advantage for Republicans. Morris similarly calculates that Democrats will need to win the national popular vote by 3-4 points to win control of the House:

This does not mean that Democrats cannot win the House this November, only that they will have a more difficult time doing so. The recent gerrymandering in Florida and Tennessee, plus likely losses of Democratic seats in Alabama and Louisiana, gives Republicans a real shot at holding their majority, of which they had very little hope just a month ago.

This century has already witnessed Democrats twice win the popular vote but lose the presidency and get shellacked in the post-2010 census redistricting war. As Cohn observes: “If the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision and Mr. Trump’s mid-cycle redistricting campaign allowed Republicans to win the House while badly losing the national vote, it would be yet another blow to the credibility of American institutions during a time of bitter division.”

The Great Whitening: Southern Edition

Virginia

In the aftermath of the state Supreme Court decision voiding the voter referendum that approved the Democratic redistricting plan, the state’s Democratic attorney general told the court he will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Election law expert Rich Hasen calls it a “quixotic effort” since the decision was based on state not federal law. But, in an ironic twist, Virginia may press its case to the Supreme Court on a version of the independent state legislature theory most recently popularized by Republicans.

On the ground, potential House candidates scrambled to react to the changes to the Virginia map. “With the stroke of a pen in Richmond, some campaigns effectively went poof, other candidates suddenly were in far tougher districts and one went from on the verge of dropping out to gearing up for a long-shot battle in a deep-red part of the state,” the NYT reports.

In a phone call Saturday that included Virginia’s Democratic House members and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the lawmakers considered responses to the state Supreme Court decision that ranged from making do with the old map to a far-fetched proposal to lower the mandatory retirement age for state Supreme Court justices from 73 to 54, replace the existing court justices, and re-enact a new map.

Alabama

In light of Louisiana v. Callais, the state filed an emergency application on Friday asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow it to use a 2023 congressional district map with only one majority-Black district — even though the Roberts Court has already upheld the injunction that bars Alabama’s use of the map. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion “goes out of its way to purport to distinguish” Alabama from Louisiana, as law professor Steve Vladeck notes, but Alabama argues that the earlier court rulings against its preferred map are “irreconcilable” with Louisiana v. Callais.

Meanwhile, in an alarming sign of how far and quickly the Overton window is shifting, the speaker of the Alabama House in a Friday press conference appeared to call for the Supreme Court to “overturn the 14th Amendment.”

South Carolina

On a 3-2 party-line vote, a state legislative panel advanced legislation Friday to push back the state’s congressional primaries from June 9 to August 11 as state House Republicans set the stage to eliminate the sole majority-Black House district in a potential special session this summer.

Great Watch

I didn’t get a chance to watch this segment until this weekend, but civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill does a superb job of breaking down for laypeople the ruling in Louisiana v. Callais and the Supreme Court’s history of dismantling the Voting Rights Act:

Trump DOJ Watch

• CNN offers new details on the bogus “grand conspiracy” against Trump being investigated out of the Miami U.S. Attorney’s Office and why the career prosecutor leading the case was jettisoned in favor of Trump loyalist Joe diGenova, who has now ensconced himself in Ft. Pierce, where U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon presides.
• “More than a half-dozen prosecutors have been demoted or pushed out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia due to fallout from the Justice Department’s push to prosecute former FBI director James B. Comey, leaving a key prosecutorial office understaffed and weakened,” the WaPo reports.
• Former President Joe Biden is expected to challenge in court the Trump DOJ’s decision to release 70 hours of partially redacted audio recordings of interviews he conducted in 2017 with a ghostwriter for his memoir that were turned over to Special Counsel Robert Hur. The conservative Heritage Foundation sued last year to access the materials.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

• The FBI is in the preliminary stages of “investigating” the 2020 election in Wisconson, including interviewing a high-ranking state election official in recent days, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.
• Republicans who took leading roles in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election appear on track to win the GOP nominations for governor in several battleground states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the WaPo reports.

Lawless Boat Strike Death Toll: 192

A U.S. strike Friday on a suspected drug-smuggling boat killed two people — and left one survivor adrift at sea, fate still unknown — bringing the known death toll in the lawless Trump administration campaign to at least 192.

Quote of the Day

“Trump’s most lethal policy will almost surely be his 71 percent cut in humanitarian aid from 2024 to 2025. A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide in their first year. A recently published study in The Lancet, the British medical journal, forecast that at present rates the defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030, including 2.5 million children under the age of 5.”—Nicholas Kristof

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