Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
To make sense of it all, we’re talking to Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the forecasting site Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Kyle, great to have you on.
Sargent: So the Fifty Plus One polling averages have Democrats up a clean eight points in the generic House ballot matchup. They have Trump’s approval down below 35 percent, a key threshold. Nate Silver’s website just declared this: “Democrats are in an excellent position to retake the House, and are also favored to retake the Senate.” Kyle, taking the Senate out of this, do you agree with Nate on the House there?
And a lot of us were kind of waiting to see what happened after Labor Day in terms of the polling. And the numbers, if anything, have gotten better for Democrats since then. And you know, maybe you see some rebound for Republicans a little bit, but the picture looks pretty bleak for them in the House, and increasingly maybe in the Senate too.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about Sabato’s Crystal Ball, your site, and how it right now ranks things. You guys have 16 Republican-held House seats as toss-ups, versus only four Democratic-held ones being toss-ups. You guys have another eight GOP-held seats as leans Democratic. So that’s at least 24 GOP-held seats that are quite gettable for Dems right now. Can you talk about that pool of seats and explain what that big picture means?
And I feel like our moves have generally been vindicated by some of the reporting. You know, Tom Kean in New Jersey Seven appears to be an underdog. He’s an underdog in our ratings. That’s just one of them. Another one is Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, which is Don Bacon’s seat. That’s one of few Harris-district Republican seats that the Republicans held in 2024. Don Bacon is retiring. That looks increasingly like a relatively safe Democratic pickup.
I don’t think that’s exactly where we’re going to land. I’d probably be right around 230 at this point, best guess. But that’s only kind of trended upward for me over the course of the cycle.
Kondik: You’ve got to remember that the most recent House elections have produced very small majorities. So just 222 to 213 for Democrats in 2020. Then it flipped, 222 to 213 for Republicans in 2022. That was followed by just 220 seats for the majority for Republicans in 2024. So we’ve been in a period of very closely contested House majorities.
But when Democrats are leading by eight or nine points on the House generic ballot, and you just see what’s going on in these individual House races—I think Republicans were hoping they could build a wall big enough to overcome a Democratic wave. That I don’t think has happened.
Kyle, in 2006, Republicans lost both chambers of Congress, including around thirty seats. If Republicans think that the situation could keep deteriorating to the point of something like that, it’s pretty striking, no?
And we also could be watching for that in the U.S. House, as Democrats are both defending some of their own incumbents in redistricted double-digit Trump seats, and also trying to flip some double-digit Trump seats. And they appear to have some opportunities to do that.
But at the same time, the national environment is so bad for Republicans that even as some of those types survive in some places, in other places, you know, Republicans go down in districts that are like Trump plus 10. Is that sort of what we could expect?
And then Mike Lawler in New York Seventeen, who’s in a narrow Harris seat. And he’s in, I think, basically a toss-up race. I think Fitzpatrick is still favored. And then, because of redistricting, you also have a handful of other seats that became Harris-district Republican seats but are going to flip, like a bunch of seats out in California, for instance.
Sargent: I just want to underscore the importance of that. You’re basically saying that if it’s a very good night for Democrats, it’s at least within the realm of possibility that Republicans have no House seats in districts that Kamala Harris won. Zero.
Sargent: So Kyle, to get a bit more specific about what this triage mode means for Republicans. They’re now pulling money out of a number of seats that are the easiest tier for Democrats to contest, and putting more money into outer-tier races that are much, much harder for Democrats to win—meaning those are now in danger, and they’re giving up on these low-tier seats.
Kondik: New Jersey Nine is a Democratic seat, but it is a Trump-won seat. That’s Nellie Pou’s district. That was a seat that swung—it’s heavily Latino, it’s like North Jersey—it swung pretty heavily to Republicans in 2024. Seems poised to swing back in 2026. And so I think Republicans are hoping to compete there, but it just never really developed.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you what really struck me as well, Kyle. Republicans just added more money to Kentucky’s Sixth District, which Trump won by 15 points.
Sargent: They need to send—meaning Republicans need to send—big-time reinforcements in to defend a Republican-held district that Trump won by 15 points.
And again, there are going to be some people who disapprove of the president but who vote Republican in their, you know, local House and Senate race. But you do see a big battlefield, and I think part of it is just the president’s approval rating being so low.
Kondik: Yeah, and that’s something that’s also been striking about the Senate races this year compared to 2018. Because if you go back and look at the exit polls of the big Senate races—you know, the Republicans did pretty well. I mean, they ended up coming out of that cycle with one extra seat. They had lost the Alabama special election in late 2017, but they came in with, I think it was, 52 in 2016, and they came out of the cycle with 53.
But even in some of the more competitive kind of battleground races—this time it looks like the president’s approval rating is underwater in Alaska, and Ohio, Texas, and Iowa, which are all, you know, double-digit Trump states, where Trump would have had positive approval, I think, in the 2018 context.
Kondik: I think that coming out of this election, they’re probably going to hold several double-digit Trump districts. I don’t have a great handle as to how many, but particularly—there are those, like, three South Texas House seats that Democrats already hold two of, Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez. Bobby Pulido is also trying to beat Monica De La Cruz in a Trump-plus-eighteen seat.
And you look around the map—like, what if they actually do win a Kentucky Six? Like, could they—you know, they did win a handful of those kinds of seats in 2018. I kind of wonder if they could actually get into double digits. That’s probably what it would take for them to get to 235 or more House seats.
Sargent: Just to sum this up in another way, you expect Democrats to pick up a number of Republican districts right now that are Trump plus seven, Trump plus eight, Trump plus nine, and then maybe a handful more that are Trump plus double digits, right? Is that the size of it?
Sargent: Well, here’s where it gets even worse for Trump. Congressman Tom Emmer, a senior Republican, just admitted to Axios that Republicans are not going to win all the seats they’ve redistricted for themselves in this cycle.
Kondik: Yeah, look. Republicans wanted to gain four net seats out of this new Florida gerrymander. We don’t really think they’re going to do that. And I think the one who’s probably best positioned to hang on is Jared Moskowitz, running in Florida 25.
And then Florida 22 is an open seat. You’ve got two relatively unknown candidates. The partisan top line is kind of similar to Florida 25, in that Trump won it by about 10 points, but Biden did narrowly carry it in 2020. So that’s another South Florida seat to watch.
Sargent: Well, just to sum this up, your best guess is Democrats finish the night with 230 House seats, and they have a shot at getting as high as 235 if it’s a very good night. Is that about right?
Sargent: Well, Kyle Kondik, it’s certainly interesting. Thanks so much for that big picture. It’s really great stuff.
Kondik: Thanks, Greg.
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