The New Yorker:

Nate Cohn, the New York Times’ chief political analyst, on a consequential Supreme Court case and why Republicans are registering so many new voters.

By Isaac Chotiner

Last month, the Texas legislature approved new congressional maps that are likely to give Republicans control of three to five more seats in the House of Representatives in next year’s midterm elections. In response, California Governor Gavin Newsom has advanced a ballot measure that would give voters in his state the chance to add several Democratic House members. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has pushed other Republican-led states to redraw their own maps. To talk about the implications of this gerrymandering tit for tat, I recently spoke by phone with Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst at the New York Times. (Cohn and I worked together at The New Republic, and remain friends.) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what Democrats might need to do to win the House in 2026, the Supreme Court case that could have a bigger impact on that election than any redistricting could, why Republicans keep making voter-registration gains, and how to understand Donald Trump’s level of popularity right now.

In your most recent piece, you write that the number of seats won by each party in the House of Representatives is likely to be fairly aligned with the House popular vote. I think that might surprise people, given how much we’ve been hearing about gerrymandering. So, why is that true?

For the map as it existed in the 2024 election, the party that won the most votes for the House was quite likely to win the most seats. That was not guaranteed. It obviously comes down to the exact results in a handful of districts that with the wrong candidates or just some plain bad luck could go either way. But fundamentally, if you won the popular vote, you would be favored to win. [The G.O.P. won the House popular vote by a couple of points, and currently has a small advantage in the chamber.] If that surprises you, don’t feel alarmed. There was a time as recently as ten years ago when the Democrats were at a significant disadvantage in the House of Representatives, when the Democrats could conceivably win the popular vote by five or six or seven or maybe even more percentage points and fail to win the chamber. That’s because the Republicans had gerrymandered the house in many critical swing states, such as Pennsylvania and Virginia.

But it was also because the Democrats were disproportionately concentrated in urban areas. They would run up the score in heavily blue districts but wouldn’t end up winning swing areas. All of that is less true now, and has been since 2016. Many Republican gerrymanders have been replaced by much more neutral maps, including in Pennsylvania and Virginia. And some blue states have been more vigorous about gerrymandering. But it’s also Democrats making big gains in the suburbs, where many competitive districts are situated, while losing ground in rural and urban areas, which are generally less competitive. So, as a result, they now do a better job of translating their votes into seats. And the map has generally been drawn in a way that’s more advantageous to them than it was a decade ago.

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