Expanding the Map: Do Democrats have a better chance at getting the majority in the House or Senate?

How much does redistricting change the odds? How many red state Senate seats are in play?

(Credit: Duane Lempke, Creative Commons)

I don’t want to be insensitive, and I certainly don’t want to trigger anyone, but I sincerely wish that so many Democrats wouldn’t set their hair on fire so much of the time.

To win elections, you have to calmly assess your strengths and weaknesses and the other side’s strengths and weaknesses, and then methodically build a strategy that maximizes your chances for winning. Setting your hair on fire and crying out “OMG, we have no chance to win because of the latest mean thing the Republicans are doing to us” doesn’t move us forward in any way I can think of.

The House and Redistricting

So, yeah, the redistricting stuff is bad for us, and if the Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act (VRA), that will be bad, too – although in the latter case, there are still a lot of unknowns and it is not at all clear that they will rule in time for new maps to be drawn for the 2026 elections.

But Democrats need to keep a few key things in mind, even in the worst case scenarios:

1. Republican-run states are already gerrymandered a lot to help the Republicans, and every time you try to create more Republican districts you have to squeeze the ones you have already gerrymandered even more. If the Voting Rights Act is thrown out, and all those Black districts in the South have their Black voters distributed to other districts, you likely start turning a bunch of districts that used R+15 into R+8, or R+10, into R+5. In a good year for Democrats we can win some of those districts, and Democrats could have more opportunities to win than they have had in years.
   

2. Republicans are basing much of their gerrymandering on election results in 2024, I guess because they actually think there is a permanent Republican realignment. But presidential years have very different turnout patterns than midterms, and are based more on which party’s base voters are more fired up to turn out. There is very good reason to believe that our voters will be more motivated than Republican voters in 2026.
   

3. As part of this Republican plan to use 2024 as their basis for redistricting, they are assuming Hispanic voters will be voting Republican in just as high a percentage. That prospect seems unlikely given the ICE military-style raids arresting Hispanics based on their skin color and language, and then not giving them due process, and given that the economic trends that matter the most to Hispanics are not going in a good direction.
   
   Let me give you one example, from the Texas redistricting: Texas District 35 was one of the five new “Republican” districts. However, it is only R+5, and that +5 is based heavily on Hispanics voting just as Republican this election as the last one. And keep in mind that because this is a newly formed district, it is an open seat, so there’s no incumbent advantage. Democrats have a great candidate there named John Lira, and I believe we are well positioned to win this one.
   

4. Keep in mind that most midterm elections are pretty strong waves for the out party. The Republicans won 52 House seats in 1994, and 63 in 2010; the Democrats won 31 in 2006, and 40 in 2018. Democrats need to pick up only 4 seats next year, so even if redistricting means we are down an extra 12, 15, or even 20, we are still well within range of winning the House. Keep in mind as well that Nate Cohn says that even under the absolute worst case scenario on redistricting with the VRA struck down, Democrats would need to win the national House popular vote by a percentage of 5.1% to 6.1%; in 2018, we won by 6.7%.
   

The Senate and Red States

My friend the pollster Celinda Lake has a line she often uses in presentations which I like: “The conventional wisdom tends to be wrong about 100% of the time, plus or minus 5%”.

The conventional wisdom about the Senate tends to be wrong a lot.

One thing you hear every single cycle is that Democrats will say to each other, “The map is bad for us this cycle.” Folks, the map is always bad. The nature of the Senate, with small rural states each having two Senators, is by its very nature always biased against Democrats. And yet, since the turn of the century, as rural voters were moving ever more decisively against Democrats, we have been in control of the Senate 13 and a half years (the 2001-2 Senate term had Republicans in control for the first six months before Jim Jeffords from Vermont switched to the Democratic side) – more than half of the time.

So the conventional wisdom says it’s a bad map for Democrats and we have no chance to win the Senate back. But in a year where Trump’s approval rating is stuck around 40% – and even more importantly in a midterm, Republican voter enthusiasm is low – I think we have a very good chance at a strong Democratic year. In a strong Democratic year, races in red states look a lot more possible, and defending our vulnerable seats looks a lot more possible.

And there are some fascinating Senate races to watch. I outlined a few exciting challenger races in a column a couple of months ago, and things look even more promising today. All the messiness of the Maine primary aside, we will come out of that primary with a tested and credible candidate against Susan Collins, whose approval rating remains weak. Sherrod Brown and Roy Cooper are off to strong starts, and Independent candidate Dan Osborn is running even in the polls with billionaire incumbent Pete Ricketts. We still don’t know whether Mary Peltola is going to run for Senate in Alaska, but polls are showing it a dead even race. We still have three candidates in the Iowa primary for the open senate seat there, but Iowa’s economy is the worst in the country right now, and their electorate is one of the oldest in the country, making health care an even bigger issue there than nationally.

I would also add a couple of more recent developments in terms of Senate races this year.

In my August column, I was pessimistic about the Senate race in Texas, saying I didn’t think Allred’s bland message could carry him to a win. However, a new candidate has joined the field, James Talerico, and Talerico has a much better campaign strategy and message in my view. And polling shows the Senate race close against any of the Republicans running in their wild and bloody primary.

There is one other red state Senate race which seems like a possibility. In Mississippi, the Governor’s race last cycle was decided by only three points, and the Republican Senate incumbent, Cindy Hyde Smith, only won her first race by 4 points. MS, which has the biggest Black population of any in the country, about 38%, tends to have close races when there is a good Democratic candidate capable of getting the Black vote out. The leading MS candidate this time is Scott Colum, who has been elected multiple times in a Republican district for District Attorney. He is a very impressive candidate.

These are tough races in tough states, but with good candidates and a good Democratic year, some of these are going to be possible wins. If Peltola runs, and Gov Mills wins the ME primary, we would have 4 different candidates who have won statewide in Republican held seats, and one more who came very close in 2024, along with 3 other races where things look interesting. That’s a lot of opportunities in a cycle that might well be a good one for our side.

Learning to Win in Tough Places Again

To be a governing majority party in the winner-take-all electoral system we have, we are going to have to learn to win in redder than average districts and states. Is it unfair what the Republicans are doing with redistricting? Is it awful what the Supreme Court will probably do with the VRA? Is the Senate system unfair to the Democrats?

Yeah to all three, but we need to get over it and stop whining. Our job is to suck it up and figure out a way to win. Democrats did that in Georgia in 2020, getting Biden a win and winning two Senate seats to give us a trifecta that allowed us to pass all kinds of good legislation in 2021-2. Ruben Gallego figured out how to do it in Arizona in 2024, a bad year for Democrats in that state and everywhere else.

What we have to do is organize, with love at the center. We need to reach out to the working class voters who will determine whether we can win elections, and start talking to them about the issues that matter the most to them. We need to go into rural America and show those voters that we care about what they care about and will help them build better lives. And we need to have an economic agenda that appeals to working families and gets them back on our side. If we do those things, Democrats can start winning in red districts and states again, just like we did not that long ago.