By
Benjamin Hart,
staff editor at Intelligencer who joined New York in 2017
Last year, the Trump administration bulldozed yet another political norm when the president, encouraged by key advisers, pushed Texas to redistrict aggressively ahead of the 2026 midterms, as opposed to the usual practice of waiting until the next census. Texas complied, drawing several Democrats out of their districts and beginning a long battle over maps that would ricochet around the country. The Democratic response was led by California Governor Newsom, who spearheaded a voter referendum that allowed his state to redraw its maps in favor of Democrats. And after further Republican setbacks, it briefly seemed as though the party’s efforts had backfired, and that Democrats would emerge with the ultimate advantage. But late-in-the-game legal developments tilted the playing field back to the GOP. Then, the Supreme Court punctuated their advantage with a June ruling that severely weakened the Voting Rights Act, which almost immediately led to more Republican gains in the South.
So how much does this all matter for House control this year and beyond? Perhaps the best-qualified person to answer that question is Dave Wasserman, Senior Editor & Elections Analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. In an article last week, Wasserman wrote that after recent developments, the average House district’s PVI, or partisan voting index — which Cook defines as “how partisan a district or a state is compared to the nation as a whole” — had leaped from a one-point Republican advantage to a three-point cushion. I spoke with Wasserman about how he thinks November will play out, Democrats’ structural disadvantage over the next few years, and how the disease of gerrymandering might finally be cured.
