The U.S. House Districts To Watch In 2022
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Cross tab Twitter is really losing its mind at the moment over the New York Times Sienna poll that came out this morning. Yeah. Put it in the average. Put it in the average. Put it in the average, bros. The problem is, though, we don't have cross tab averages. So people... There's a reason for that. Because they're not reliable enough? I mean, you wouldn't want to like...

You know, you wouldn't want to give heroin away at like a AA meeting, you know? What? Tease that out for me just like a little bit more. I'm not sure what... We don't want to give the addicts the thing that they're addicted to. You know, you got to wean them off it.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. There are three weeks until Election Day, and Republicans have a 72% chance of winning the House, and Democrats have a 65% chance of keeping the Senate. Those odds have moved very slightly in Republicans' favor since the last time we talked. Today, we are going to zoom in on the race for the House.

The House can be a bit harder to wrap your head around than the Senate because there are somewhere in the range of 50 potentially competitive districts spread all across the country. We're going to spotlight a handful of bellwether districts to keep an eye on and talk about some of the broader dynamics at play. What types of districts are competitive? What are the issues being debated? Before that, though...

f*** this, I'm moving to Canada. That refrain has become something of a stereotype, particularly amongst liberals. And Google searches on how to move to Canada do actually spike based on political outcomes, like the Dobbs decision this summer.

But do people actually follow through? The idea of political migration came up on last week's podcast, in particular between liberal and conservative states. So today, we're going to try to get to the bottom of how common it really is. Here with me to discuss is Editor-in-Chief Nate Silver. Hey, Nate. Hey, everybody. Also here with us is politics and tech reporter Kaylee Rogers. Hey, Kaylee. Hey, how's it going? Good.

And also here with us is fellow at FiveThirtyEight, Zoha Kumar. Welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. It's great to have you on.

Thank you so much. I'm excited for my first time here. So a reminder, of course, that we have a live show in Washington, D.C. next week. It's on Tuesday, October 25th at 6th and I. There is a link in the show notes. And I should also say that you can get a remote ticket so you can watch from the comfort of your own home. Like I know my grandmother, Martha, will be doing. She's 89. She listens to the podcast. She sends me feedback about it and she will be

attending the FiveThirtyEight Politics live show from her living room. So you can too. But also it's going to be really fun to do in person. I know, Martha, she's fabulous. Galen, what do you call your grandmother? Grandma?

Shout out Grandma Martha. She's truly our toughest critic here on the Politics Podcast. But we're going to move on from Grandma Martha and let's talk about politically motivated migration. So last week on Model Talk, Nate and I got off on a tangent or two about the degree to which Americans are moving for political reasons and how that may be shaping the country's politics. And we're going to talk about that in a little bit.

And actually, in fact, Zoha wrote about this exact phenomenon for the website. So Zoha, you dug into the data to see if people ever actually follow through on their plans to move to Canada. You also explore other types of political migration within the country. But let's begin with the sort of classic threat. Do Americans move to Canada for political reasons?

Well, as it turns out, after the election of Donald Trump, where it was really common for people to be making these statements, we saw a slight uptick in new permanent residents in Canada coming from the US, but it was kind of only a few hundred. And ever since then, the numbers have kind of gone up, mostly plateaued. And then obviously, since COVID, the numbers have been down. So yes, people move. But at the end of the day, it's also difficult to attribute why people are moving. So I

Essentially, the answer is unknown, but there isn't a lot of data to suggest it is happening, if that makes sense. Yeah. And when we compare this to actual intention, you looked into how often people are Googling how to move to Canada or different data about polling on actual intention to move to Canada or move to another part of the country. How does that actual data compare the intention data compared to the data we have about the numbers of people moving?

Yeah, I don't know if I would call it intention data, but the interest data is definitely really high. According to a YouGov poll from January, about 40% of Americans say that they've ever considered leaving the US for good. And that number actually goes up quite a bit among Americans under 40, it's closer to 45%. And among people that self-identify as liberal, it's closer to 60%. So

So it's quite a big share of people that have said that they've considered leaving the U.S. for good, but the numbers don't really show that a lot of people have done so, at least when it comes to Canada. Kayleigh, I promised we weren't going to make you our resident Canada correspondent, but this was just too easy. From a Canadian perspective, how do you process this threat? Do you meet political migrants in Canada from America who will tell you, I moved here because of politics? Is that a common thing to encounter? Yeah.

I will, just quickly, I will say I like made a promise to myself last time I was on the podcast. I'm like, next time I come on the pod, I'm not going to talk about Canada. I'm not going to mention it. I sound too much like Phoebe from the Magic School Bus who's constantly talking about her old school. And then you come up with this subject that is like just...

Too relevant. So I have to comment. I will say, you know, the biggest sort of example of this that we have in Canada, there truly is kind of a generation of American expats in Canada who came in the 60s and 70s, either as actual draft Dodgers or just people who weren't drafted. Maybe they were older and weren't really at risk of that, but just were very against the war and felt that there was some

kind of community in Canada that they could be a part of. So we have these kind of like aging hippies in Canada who, it was a significant migration. There's, I think they estimated around 40,000 Americans came during that period as kind of part of that cohort. And so that is something that it's kind of, we're familiar with and we know of, but sort of,

younger than that. I don't know that I've ever encountered anybody who actually literally moved to Canada due to some kind of political changes in the United States. Also, just to point out that you can't just move to Canada. There is an immigration system in place. It's pretty robust. There's points you have to acquire and it's a whole process. You can't just walk across the border and set up shop.

Thank you for pointing that out. Yes, it is not that easy to actually follow through on the threat. I'm curious, though...

From a Canadian perspective, again, is there a similar threat in Canada? For example, do more conservative Canadians say, you know, screw this, the country is going too far in a leftward direction, I'm moving to the United States? Or, you know, maybe liberals say, I'm moving to Greenland, or something along like, is there some kind of analogy for Canada? Yeah.

There's definitely, there's a contingent of conservative Canadian who romanticizes the United States and would like to move or say they would like to move or they thought about moving. You know, there's also a lot of snowbirds who literally live in the United States at least half the year for the wonderful climate and possibly the political climate as well. I don't know. But again, I think it's sort of similar to the United States where it's sort of this idle threat that

doesn't actually amount to a huge trend of people actually moving. One thing I do see just covering more, you know, I cover some kind of extremism groups online and this idea of moving within the United States is a

common theme again, I don't know how much it actually amounts to literal migration but this idea of like conservatives online that say that they live in California and they want to move to the free state of Florida or the free state of Texas or something So I do see that kind of refrain as well It's definitely again, you know, the data I think tells a different story than the posts on social media. I

Okay, so now you're getting into what we were talking about last week, which is not leaving the actual country. And the barriers to immigration are pretty steep. And so even if people want to or feel like they have a stronger bond politically or socially to a different country, it's just not going to be that easy. However, in the United States, you know, granted you have the money to do so, you can just move across state lines. So Zoha, what does the data look like

there? Are people changing states based on their political beliefs? Well, I think what you just said about if you have the money to do so is such a huge point. I mean, moving is really expensive, and it requires a lot of upfront costs. And I think a lot of the reasons why people move up until now, based on kind of a lot of the IRS data that I looked at, and various researchers that I spoke with,

Basically, people move more for financial reasons at this point, whether it's lower cost of living, access to better jobs, proximity to family, things like that. It's not really necessarily politically minded right now or politically driven. I think we're seeing more shifts and shuffling like locally within certain metropolitan areas of southern cities, for example. But on the whole, there's not some like huge shift.

I don't think people are packing up and going just based off of their politics, at least not in droves. How do we go about breaking out why people are moving?

That is a good question. I mean, for starters, just to just to give some context, most Americans live pretty close to where they grew up. It's like it's quite, quite staggering. About 80% of young Americans, for example, live within 100 miles of where they grew up. And 58% live within 10 miles, which is, which is quite a bit. So we're not talking about the majority of Americans when we're talking about people moving, we're talking about, like, generally a subset. But what

When we talk about why people move, I mean, it's that is kind of what the issue is in terms of it's it's difficult to attribute all to politics. We're either sorry. I'm curious, Nate and Galen, were you guys surprised by that number of young people who don't move very far away from? I was shocked by just how significant like six, almost 60 percent of young Americans live within 10 miles of where they grew up. Yeah, I think it's like a class bubble thing, you know? Yeah, I wouldn't.

intuitively expect that. But if you're not having people go to like selective colleges and things like that, right, then you're much more anchored, I think, to the area where you grew up.

Yeah, I mean, I think I've seen this data before. It was used in analysis after Trump won in 2016 when the market for explanations of why Trump won the 2016 election was truly endless. And this was one of the data sets that people looked into that the further away from home people move, the likelier they were to have voted for a Democrat and vice versa.

And I think this does get at sort of class, access, worldview, things like that. I'm curious, Nate, because you brought it up last week, when talking about how people may be moving to Florida for political reasons and changing the politics of that state or, you know, moving out of California into nearby states like, say, Arizona or even Oregon, which is what you had mentioned.

How do we try to parse that out and get to the bottom of whether it's for political reasons or because just like it's expensive to live in California? I mean, look at the gas prices, look at the housing costs, things like that. I don't think you can totally separate that out, right? And if you're living in a place like New York that is very expensive, New York City in particular, you are selecting for certain lifestyle attributes and or public services at quite a big

in terms of cost of living, high taxes, and everything else. And then you sort because, hey, maybe I have a bunch of friends moving to place X, right, or leaving place Y. So, you know, whether people are like, hey, I like Ron DeSantis and I'm going to go move to Florida. There may not be that many of those people, but if they say, hey, Florida seems like the kind of place that

is friendly for people like me and my next door neighbor just bought a place in Florida. And this other guy I know down the block moved to Florida two years ago, then that can start to sort things out. But do you have data about recent migration in the United States that could sort of start shaping our politics in a different way? Look at COVID, right? You had quite a bit of migration, although in some cases accelerating existing trends, but you had big migration from blue states to

into red states, A, that could affect politics going forward, although I think not in the way that Democrats might expect. Which is what? Which is what, Nate? I mean, they might think, oh, OK, people from New York moved to Florida. Will that mean Florida will get bluer? No, because it's like not a randomly selected subsection of people from New York, right? People probably were fed up with

the lockdowns and the taxes and moved to Florida because they wanted a more YOLO lifestyle, I guess. Okay, so we have straight up leaving the country, we have moving between states, and we have moving within states as well, which is another aspect of the data that you looked into. So what did you find there? Yeah, I would say it's more common to move within a state

I don't know if it's for cultural political reasons. Again, like Nate said, it's like difficult to exactly parse out what's going on and you can't, you know, not everyone fills out a, why did you move like exit form when they leave the city? But I mean, I wish, but that, yeah, that would be really great for the sake of the article. Um,

But in general, there's like a lot more interesting data, I would say, like looking at those smaller scale moves. Like if you open up, you know, what's moving rate or how many people move between like, you know, New York City and Austin, like you're going to see things that you already kind of expected to see. But it's like, where do the people from Austin go is actually what I think ends up being a lot more interesting. And you see like more local reshuffling patterns happening either within Texas, like within the Austin area or people from Austin just going to other cities kind of in the region in general. Yeah.

It's kind of this interesting flow, I guess, of people being pushed out. I don't know if pushed out sounds so active, but ultimately those people are also going somewhere else, perhaps because they are what they're used to in the city that they were already in. That kind of landscape could be changing. Yeah, I think even, Nate, you brought up the idea of COVID migration. I think it seems more dramatic to be like, oh, New Yorkers are all moving to Florida now.

When in reality, we saw more migration just out to the suburbs and even maybe like sped up migration out to the suburbs around New York City than actually like moving to Miami and like opening a hedge fund or a venture capital firm, even though that was, you know, the stereotype. Right. Well, and work from home, you know, I think caused some people to realize that, hey, maybe New York City is not for me all along.

So, yeah, I mean, I guess we don't know how many of these shifts are permanent or temporary. But, you know, COVID was an interesting natural experiment, I suppose. But even beyond COVID, it doesn't seem like total happenstance that, you know, all these Democrats live in cities and all these Republicans live in rural areas and, you

Republicans tend more towards the exurbs and Democrats tend more towards the inner suburbs. Does that fact in and of itself suggest that people do move in order to be with people who are politically like them? Or is it that people's views are shaped by their surroundings? I'm sure it can be both, but like...

To a certain extent, we're like skeptical about this. We want to be rigorous and find the actual data. But when you zoom out and just look at the political geography of America, you see a very clear pattern in terms of political persuasions and where people live.

I think part of it is also no one necessarily packs up after one political event. And so a lot of these things are cumulative and happening over time. And so I think that's why the data is also difficult to look at, because something that happened five or six years ago, maybe something recent now is what's the straw that broke the camel's back. And so it's like a just addition of all of these things.

since that time, if that makes sense. So instead of people moving because of a certain election or a certain Supreme Court decision, it might be that kind of planted the seed of the idea, but nothing will end up happening for a long time. I don't think that if people are going to be moving after jobs, we've seen a lot of it yet. Like that's going to be a more long-term impact and something that necessarily can't be assessed so immediately after a decision or an election. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the reality is that people move for all kinds of reasons. And usually it's probably an amalgamation of a lot of things. You know, maybe you have a job offer in two different areas of the country, and one of them seems more appealing to you for six different reasons. And one of those reasons is it's more politically aligned with your personal beliefs. Like I don't, this actual, like I'm moving strictly because I want to live around people who vote the way I vote is probably a very slim option.

slice of the people moving. Oh, for sure. I mean, for most people, I think their number one consideration would be where do my friends and family live? I mean, I spent a lot of time in upstate New York, spent part of my life growing up in upstate New York. And there's a lot of people in upstate New York who are conservative and find the sort of relentless democratic leanings of the state to be annoying and they complain about and whatever, but actually leaving, leaving your family, leaving your job, leaving all of your friends and going somewhere based on your politics is

is a pretty severe and extreme thing to actually do. Absolutely. But also, I mean, we were talking a minute ago about people not moving far from home and the class considerations there. As someone who grew up in a small, rural, fairly conservative area, sometimes you have to move for those reasons as well. There's not as many job opportunities in a lot of places, and people are forced to leave friends and family because they need to make a living. There are considerations that...

might not be as obvious as like, you grew up here, your family's here, so you will stay here. Yeah, but nonetheless, people, I mean, I think maybe one of the best examples of this in history is the great migration of Black Americans to northern states. And then sort of the reverse great migration that we've talked about on this podcast of Black Americans moving down to sort of large southern cities.

So, Nate, back to the original question about the geographic sorting that we see in the U.S. Like, to what do we attribute those pretty stark geographic differences? I mean, lifestyle. And I mean, what we need is like we need a survey of domestic migrants. Otherwise, it's kind of speculative. You know, I just look at states like Florida that the politics differ from what you might expect based on demographics. Right. Like, I don't think you can explain that.

Florida's shift to the right, I mean, this very diverse coastal state, right, without people selecting to some degree based on politics there, because Florida's a state that gets a lot of migration from other parts of the country, or a state like Colorado that has also a lot of migration from other parts of the country. But when it comes to places that aren't even necessarily experiencing a lot of migration, because we see these patterns of blue cities, red rural areas,

even in places that have had relatively stagnant population growth. Is that people moving ultimately or having moved or do people align their views with the people around them? I mean, the kind of analogy where there has been more work done is with respect to people going to college or university. And I think the literature there is that mostly people are very liberal to begin with if they tend to go to elite colleges and not that those colleges make them more liberal. I think that's what

That literature tends to say. And then those people cluster in cities where there are like sort of jobs that require a college degree? Different fields tend to attract more college educated people or tend to attract people with a certain political leaning potentially. So yeah, I don't know if it's like, oh, you go to like the, you know, the food court and see all the diverse people.

ethnicities and all of a sudden you're not racist anymore. I don't think it's like that. I think it's more like you choose where to live based in part on which humanities you're willing to trade off or are willing to pay for. So all told, Zohar, where did you come down on this question after all of your research?

I think at the end of the day, I don't think that Americans move for political reasons immediately at this point in time. Obviously, you've mentioned there have been other points in history where people have done it, and maybe we're at a point where we could be seeing it increasingly, depending on if there are more events that spur more interest in leaving the country.

where someone currently lives. But I think for now, there are just too many other competing factors that are more important in terms of where someone already is living. The people that do move are just a minority. They're a small group of people. And so you might see some flashy stories that come out of all the tweets and all the buzz. But at the end of the day, I don't think that there's anything for now to suggest it's happening in these like massive ways as Twitter would have you believe.

Right. I mean, when it happens in a big way, the world finds out because people show up in different locations, like mass migration from South America, like mass migration from the Middle East, like mass migration out of Ukraine. You know, like you don't actually have to take a survey when you have the sort of big moment of...

either violence motivated, politically motivated, economically motivated migration in a way. So for now, it sounds like we're mostly talking about empty threats. Is that fair to say? I think that's fair to say. Yeah. I mean, even that, like I said, that wave of Americans that came in the 60s and 70s,

40,000 people meaningful in Canada, not really that meaningful in America to have a few tens of thousands of people leave. And that was one of the more, more significant, like trackable, uh, mass migrations due to political reasons. All right, everybody, if you had to, if you had to move, where would you move? If you had to leave the country, where would you go?

If I had to leave the country, I would move to Toronto because it's the easiest way to still basically live in America while not living in America. No one doesn't want to leave at all. I don't want to leave. For all of the reasons that I mentioned here, my family is here. My friends are here. My job is here. I don't want to leave. Oh.

All right. That was fun. People got to learn more about us than they actually probably wanted to know. But we're going to talk about the House now because there is an election that is only three weeks away. And we are going to do that with a different crew. So I'm going to say goodbye to all of you. Thank you, Kaylee, Zoha, and Nate for playing along today. Thanks, guys. Bye.

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When thinking about which party will control Congress next year, it's easier to put the Senate in perspective. After all, there are only four or five races that are really going to determine the outcome. In the House, though, while the number of competitive districts has decreased in recent decades, we're still talking about 50 or so districts where the contest will play out.

As the forecast stands today, Republicans have a 72% chance of winning the House, and Democrats, of course, have a 28% chance. So here with me to talk about why those odds are what they are and what the contests look like in the most competitive races is Senior Elections Analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Hey, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen. Also here with us is Senior Elections Analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Hey, Jeff. Hey, Galen. And also with us is FiveThirty Editor Maya Swidler. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Galen.

You've all been working on sort of covering the House races in detail. And so I want to get into the nitty gritty because I feel like they've just they've been given a short shrift so far. The Senate, like the sort of high profile statewide Senate races are so sexy. But really, ultimately, one whole chamber of Congress is going to be decided by these, you know, small 700000 person districts.

So we just to set the table, we talked about this before, but why do Republicans have a 72 percent chance of winning the House when Democrats are currently leading the generic ballot by a point? Nathaniel.

Well, Galen, Democrats' majority in the House is very slim. I believe five seats at last count, or if they lose, you know, they can lose five seats and then they lose the majority. And of course, historically in midterm years, that is what happens. In fact, the historical midterm seat loss is much bigger than that. So Democrats have basically no margin for error. As a reminder, they won the House popular vote by 17%.

I think, three points in 2020 in order to get that very narrow majority. So the maps are working against them. Of course, we've had redistricting since then, but that basically just kind of reconfirmed the Republican edge in how the districts are drawn. But more to the kind of immediate point, we and our forecast model do expect those polls to just edge better for Republicans.

You know, right now, the polling average, as you mentioned, Galen, for the generic congressional ballot is D plus one. But that's already kind of ticked down in recent weeks. We you kind of look at there was a new poll out today from The New York Times, Upshot and Siena College.

that was pretty good for republicans that had a three-point republican lead among likely voters and this is one of the best high quality polls out there um so the signs are starting to to be shown that maybe things are trending back toward republicans and of course again this is common in midterm years the president's party does tend to leech support as we get closer to election day so our forecast i think is expecting more like an r plus three environment although

That also factors into account the fact that Democrats have left many seats uncontested. So at the end of the day, though, you know, it looks like this is going to be a midterm year that leans a couple points toward Republicans. And of course, if Republicans are winning the House popular vote, given their advantages in terms of the maps and how narrow the Democratic majority is, it just looks more likely than not that Democrats will lose the House.

So we mentioned that Republicans need to pick up five seats in order to win the chamber. But the forecast actually spits out probabilities for winning different numbers of seats. Jeffrey, what's the range roughly for how many seats we expect Republicans to win?

Currently, it is between – basically Republicans have an 80 percent chance of winning between 210 and 243 seats. Now, obviously that includes some seat totals that would not give Republicans a majority. That's why Democrats actually have –

like a 28 in 100 chance currently of holding on to a majority. But most of that range, 218 to 243, would give Republicans a majority of some size. So that sort of breaking those numbers down tells you why Republicans are favored, at least in thinking ahead to what sort of gains we might see.

Okay, so 210 to 240-some. Those 30 districts or so, Maya, what are the districts within those 30 that we're most focused on in terms of determining the outcome? Yeah, so we published a piece this morning from Nathaniel about the 10 districts we're calling the tipping point districts, which is the district that is most likely to give the

The party that wins it balance control of the House. So those include Iowa's third, North Carolina's 13th, New York's 22nd. About a dozen or so that are very, very close in terms of partisan lean could go either way and will be important in determining control of the House.

Can you give me some sense, though, for a layperson or even just myself, what those 10 tipping point districts look like? You know, I know they're spread out all across the country and they all look a little bit different. But what if you had to describe the terrain on which this contest is being fought, what is it?

Yeah, a lot of them are open seats, seats that are either new districts because of redistricting or seats where the incumbent has decided not to run. On average, the 10 most likely tipping point districts have a partisan lean of R plus 2.7 or about three points, more Republican leaning as the country as a whole, meaning that in a Republican leaning year, we would expect them to go towards the GOP. But if the Democrats can hold on to one or two, that would be significant.

One thing that these districts overwhelmingly have in common is the eight out of the 10 most likely tipping point seats in my article are either suburban or exurban districts. And I think that obviously just reflects the fact that probably what people listening to this podcast already know is that cities vote blue, countryside votes red, and increasingly the only competitive areas in the country left with a few notable exceptions are

are suburban and exurban areas. So like some of the other places on that list are Colorado's 8th district, which is in the Denver suburbs. You have New Jersey's 7th district, which is in kind of the exurbs and suburbs of New York City and New Jersey. So yeah, so these are really the places as in 2018, as in 2020, where the majority is going to be won or lost.

In order to get a better sense of the places where this contest is playing out, I asked each of you to pick one district that you would like to know the results in each.

in advance of the election. So to say, if you knew the results in this district, you would have a pretty good sense of which party would ultimately win the House, or maybe you would have a sense of broader trends about the electorate or the election that you would love to know in advance. So we're going to go through and each of us has a district to spotlight and explain why it's so important

impactful or so illustrative of how the larger race might play out. I think one of you chose the absolute likeliest tipping point district and the other chose the second likeliest. And those two go back and forth all the time because, you know, there's so many districts and they all like a whole bunch of them have a pretty good shot of being the tipping point district. But who's on top today? Who chose the likeliest tipping point district? Looks like I did. All right, Jeff, take it away.

So North Carolina's 13th district, shift your gaze to the suburbs and exurbs south of Raleigh, North Carolina, and you will find this newly created seat. It didn't really have a predecessor. So it's an open seat race. There's no incumbent involved, which is

Historically, you would tend to get more of a sense of the impact of the national political environment on a seat where there's no incumbent because even to this day, there is a little bit of an incumbency advantage. So we would expect with no incumbent here that –

To some extent, the swings would reflect what's going on nationally. So you've got a race between Republican Beau Hines and Democrat Wiley Nickel. The fact that it's a suburban exurban seat is also a factor in why I picked it. But really, the biggest thing is that, to your point about it being like maybe the likeliest tipping point seat, it's also the median seat by our partisan lean metric out of all 435 seats.

So for that reason, it could also tell us a lot about what's going to happen. So if you lined up all 435 seats in a row from most Democratic to most Republican, you

It's smack dab in the middle. So it's a couple of points to the right of the country as a whole. And from a practical standpoint, its polls close at 7.30 p.m. Eastern on election night. So it's going to be one of the earliest competitive seats that we get results from. So I think- Good to keep in mind. Yeah, exactly. So like the long and short is that

If we're getting results there and the race looks very close in that district, I would take that as probably a decent sign for Democrats. I mean obviously one district is not the whole shebang, but –

If it is close, that could be a sign that like Democrats maybe aren't going to have a terrible night, although I would expect them to lose the House in most cases. But if Bo Hines, the Republican, is winning by a larger margin, you know, that might suggest that that Republicans are going to have a very good night. So that's that's another bonus to this seat. All right, Nathaniel, take us to the second likeliest tipping point district.

Yeah. I mean, I think Jeffrey did a very good job calling, uh, North Carolina's 13th district, the district he wants to know the results in. It is currently the most likely tipping point district, but in fairness to me on Friday, when Galen made us pick these districts, the most likely tipping point district was Iowa's third district, uh, which is still the second most likely tipping point. Um, and so that is going to be my, my choice today. Um,

It has basically the same characteristics as the North Carolina 13th. It also has a partisan lean of R plus 2.3, which is puts it, it's not literally the median seat, but it is basically right at the national median in terms of partisanship. You know, this is a race between a Democratic incumbent, Sidney Axne, and a Republican state Senator, Zach Nunn. So in that sense, it is kind of,

emblematic, I think. You know, Jeffrey had a good reason for picking an open seat, but I think that Republicans are going to have to beat some fairly tough Democratic incumbents in order to win the majority, or at least a sizable majority, I think. And so in that sense, I think having an incumbent is, you know, kind of

you know, you want to have the incumbent in that the district you're watching. In addition, the Republican candidate is he's like a local elected official. He's he's fairly strong. The kind of ads in this race have kind of tracked along the normal like lines. So like Axne has aired ads about abortion. None has aired ads about crime.

It's not kind of in race that's being fought over something kind of idiosyncratic and local. So in general, I just think this is a really good epitome of kind of your everyday America, you know, average Joe congressional district. And that's around Des Moines and like suburban Des Moines over towards western California.

Iowa. Yeah, that's a good point. This is also another suburban district. It includes Des Moines, a lot of its suburbs, including Dallas County, the fastest growing county in the state and the Des Moines exurbs, as well as a bunch of rural areas, but it is predominantly suburban. All right. You chose two very similar districts. Maya, you're going to shake things up a little bit here.

Just a little. Just a little. It's similar, the district I picked, in that it's a primarily suburban exurban district. I went with California's 27th congressional district. But it's a little different in that it leans Democratic. After redistricting, it's D plus 8. It's currently held by a Republican district.

Mike Garcia, who won it in a 2020 special election and then won the seat again for a full term later that year. And the Democrat that he beat in both of those elections is back for a third crack at the seat. I would consider this kind of a reach seat for Republicans in normal years. But if Mike Garcia is running pretty hot on election night, I'm

I think that would be notable for Republican performance in Southern California in particular. This seat is pretty interesting because it's currently the only congressional district in L.A. County that's currently held by a Republican. In 2020, Republicans successfully flipped back two seats that they had lost in 2018 in addition to this seat, which they had won back in a special election. So I'm curious if Mike Garcia can hold on to this and outrun Republicans throughout the state.

Okay, so I chose a district that is quite a bit different from the districts that all of you chose. It's still in the top 10 or so likeliest tipping point districts.

However, it is in the Rio Grande Valley. It's Texas's 15th district. And about 80% of the district's voting age population is Latino. So it's very different from the country's demographics on the whole. But the two questions that I really have going into these midterms are what happens in the sort of

upscale suburban districts that have been trending democratic since 2016? And what happens amongst Latino voters? And you all have spotlighted some relatively wealthy, relatively well-educated districts.

And so your districts are going to answer that question. This Rio Grande Valley district, I think, is going to help me answer some of the questions I have about the Latino vote. And because it has such a high percentage of Latino voters, you're going to be able to come to conclusions about how Latino voters are casting their ballots and turning out.

in a way that you can't in other districts where it may even be like 30% Latino, because on election night, in large part, you're not going to know, well, who was turning out, like you're not going to have voter verified surveys out election night. But in a district like this, you're going to get a good sense. And of course, what happened in 2020 is that Latino voters shifted eight points towards Trump in comparison to 2016.

Will this revert back to the mean? Oftentimes, these trends are not linear, so there will be a big shift and then some reversion back to the mean. So far, the polls suggest that there hasn't been a reversion back to the mean, that Republicans have kept their gains amongst Latino voters. And this is going to be a district that helps clarify that. In addition, once we know...

how this district votes, we might be able to apply some of those lessons to other races. I should say, as has been said a million times and remains to be true, the Latino vote is not monolithic. It really depends sort of like the country of origin, how long voters have been in the country. Of course, in the Rio Grande Valley, a lot of Latino voters, you know, have family who have been there longer than the border has been there. So those Latino voters may vote differently than Puerto Rican voters in New York or New Jersey or what have you. But

There have been still broad trends amongst the Latino vote, and you might be able to apply some of the lessons you learned from that district to other competitive races in, say, Nevada or Colorado or Arizona or even Florida. And so once I have those results, I can sort of start to make guesses. I should say that this district voted for Trump by about 2.8 points in 2020. It is about even according to our partisan metric, but

Our partisan metric has some advantages and some disadvantages. And when there's a fast realignment, as there has been, or coalitional shift, sometimes our partisan metric doesn't keep up with those changes. And so while we say that it's an even district, I think it does lean more Republican now. But once I get those results on election night, if I have them, so I...

you know, as this exercise says, I will be able to start to judge that. And just to say who is actually running here, it is an open seat. It's Republican Monica de la Cruz and Democrat Michelle Vallejo. So it's two Latinas running in an open district. The incumbent in this district, who was a Democrat, I think saw the writing on the wall, was like, oh, I don't know if this district is going to keep trending towards

is going to revert back towards Democrats and is actually now running in a different district himself. So again, as you said, Jeff, an open district will help give us some sense without an incumbent's sort of power on the ballot.

Yeah, Gail, and I agree that that's a really interesting district. I'm just not sure it's the district I would choose if I were trying to kind of predict control of the house, right? I'm not sure it's a good bellwether for a lot of the reasons that you said, because it is such a heavily Latino district, right? It is going to be very illustrative in that respect. I am so curious about whether it's going to revert at all back toward its kind of

ancestral democratic roots or whether it's going to continue to moving red to move red but in terms of you know the house like so many of the other districts that are going to control the house are are these you know whiter districts more suburban districts and i just think that is

If we could only know one district in order to protect the house, I think I would go with one of those districts instead of this relatively niche district. Nathaniel, I accept your challenge and would also say that for the sake of the game, I think...

The third likeliest tipping point district is New York's 22nd, which I actually know a lot about and I would be happy to talk about, but I don't know that it's all that different from the districts that have already been shut. I think it's probably a little more working class than Iowa's third and North Carolina's 13th. But let's actually dig a little bit more into what the campaigns look like here, what the issues look like and so on.

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Nathaniel, you mentioned a couple of the issues that are being debated in Iowa's third district. In some of the other districts that you mentioned, Jeff and Maya, what are the issues that the candidates are running on?

Well, much like Nathaniel's case, you also see in North Carolina's 13th district, Democrat Wiley Nickel running – recently running an ad basically attacking Bo Hines for his opposition to abortion rights. The ad features a woman talking about her experience having an abortion before Roe v. Wade and essentially the gist is Bo Hines wants to bring back that world.

Whereas Hines, one of his ads tries to talk about his rural roots and then – well, basically just tries to say he's going to push back against Joe Biden's agenda and work to create jobs and reduce inflation and the kinds of things we would expect a Republican to talk about. But I will say that some of these races also have sort of candidate-based attacks. Each campaign is trying to find –

potential vulnerabilities in the opposition, maybe something from their past that they can attack. And one of the sort of interesting things about this district is that Bo Hines, the Republican nominee, sort of went district shopping this cycle. North Carolina's redistricting process was messy and there were multiple maps that came out

And so at different points, Hines was running for a seat that was in the western part of the state or at least well west of Raleigh, more in the Winston-Salem area. But he ended up running here once the final map came around. And so there's been criticism of him for basically carpetbagging. Now, Nickel, the Democrat, he actually lives just outside the district. So Hines has tried to turn that around and basically make the case that –

Nichols got the same problem. So you see some of this kind of thing going on as well. Okay. So question. We saw the New York Times-Siena College polling come out today that Nathaniel mentioned. 44% of Americans say their prime issue is either the economy or inflation if you add those two numbers together. Then it drops down 5% and say abortion, 5% say immigration, 3% say crime.

you know, in an environment where people are thinking about inflation, the economy, whatever, like how much does it matter? Do these kinds of things that people campaign on matter? Like, Oh, this person's a carpetbagger. Like this person lives slightly outside the district. Like we have a, we do have a lever to pull for scandals when someone straight up cheats on their spouse or breaks the law or whatever. But these kinds of sort of like tit for tat things that do often come up, but ultimately have very little to do with how this person might actually vote in the house or

Does that shape an election in reality? I mean, I think it's tough to say that it has a big effect. But I think campaigns are – they tend to have certain things that they know might be reliable. So if you're a Republican in this environment, it's like attacking Biden on inflation, on immigration, or what have you.

Probably good things. But if they're trying to find something else, they're going to throw – kind of throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. So if you're trying to basically make the case that Bo Hines is not representative of the southern – South Raleigh suburbs and exurbs because he's not really from here, you're trying to get some independents who may not be tuning in to be like, huh, that's kind of disingenuous. And then they – maybe they consider Nickel who's like been a state senator representing the area for a while. So like –

So it's definitely not like big impact. I also think it means something different if you're a first time political candidate and you have the added challenge of introducing yourself to the people in your district. So if you're someone like Hines, who was a little on the younger side, who hasn't been a member of the state legislature, who has this added burden, this type of attack could be more effective than it would against someone like Nicol, who has been somewhat known to the voters and that he's been on many of their ballots before.

Yeah, we do know, of course, that candidate quality can factor into margins, you know, not by a ton. I think that predominantly it does come down to partisanship, but these kinds of things can feed, as well as like the scandal thing, right, Galen, can feed into this kind of catch-all variable of candidate quality.

It's the whole thing of, I mean, I don't know how we quantify this, but it's something that political operatives talk about all the time, which is defining your opponent, like define your opponent early. Maybe a quite famous example of this is Obama trying to define or Democrats in general trying to define Romney as this sort of like out of touch business elite, et cetera, et cetera, early in the campaign cycle that the folks who worked on Romney's campaign said they had a really difficult time shaking once it got down to election time.

Maya, you have also picked...

A more unique district. It's more Democratic than what we expect from a tipping point district. How is that playing in an environment where a Republican needs to make up ground against a Democrat? How is that playing out? Yeah. So the Democrat, Christy Smith, who was also a member of the California State Assembly representing that area prior to her initial run against Mike Garcia, has been running a pretty standard campaign. She's attacking Mike Garcia for voting to not certify some of the 2020 election results.

She's saying she'll protect access to abortion, which in a state like California is not

necessarily something that she needs to worry about. But Mike Garcia is really running against Biden and against the economy and trying to tie Smith to kind of like mainstream democratic thought, turn out his base. The environment is also a pretty big issue in this part of California. It's an area that has struggled with perhaps not active wildfires this year, but has kind of dealt with the fallout from them in the last couple of years. So both of them are

running on infrastructure essentially to improve the situation there.

Okay, so this is some good detailed information on a few of the most important house races. Let's zoom back out and talk about a couple trends that will help determine control of the house. One is retirements. We tracked retirements in 2018, and those helped foreshadow a blue wave. We're tracking retirements this year, and that matters because as we've said, incumbents do run a little ahead usually, all things being equal.

What do Democratic retirements look like this year and how is that shaping this? There are about 31. You know, a lot of those districts, there are some red-leaning districts. I think they're probably the most notable ones where the Democratic incumbent, possibly because they expected redistricting to do a number on their seat, or

or what have you, you have Democratic incumbents who are not defending these seats. And so that will make them even more likely to flip. So you've got, for instance, like in Florida, there was Charlie Crist's district in the Tampa Bay area became a lot redder in redistricting. So he might have lost anyway. But with him gone, it's very likely to fall into Republican hands.

Another district in the Orlando area or north of Orlando where Stephanie Murphy was, she's retired. That district got a lot redder in redistricting, so she might have lost anyway if she had run. But it just makes it even more likely that those seats are going to fall into GOP hands. And then you have also like –

So districts that have been – like those parts of the country have been trending to the right anyway. So even – not even really thinking about redistricting. For instance, in western Wisconsin, the Wisconsin 3rd District, longtime Representative Ron Kind decided to retire, and that has left a seat that he held for a long time even as it was trending to the right.

Now it's like I think under the new lines like R plus 8 or so. That's a seat that republicans are fairly likely to pick up. So it's basically left turf that maybe democrats were outperforming those baselines, those partisan baselines.

basically left them open for a fairly easy Republican capture, at least that's what it looks like. So that's, I would say that's like the main thing, but obviously redistricting does complicate some of this discussion. A theme that keeps coming up here is redistricting. And of course, all of these districts have been newly drawn after the 2020 census. And I think there's been some debate about just how much gerrymandering is going to shape this election. And

And just how much it leans sort of in one direction for another. So to give you an example, our friend of the podcast, Nate Cohn at the New York Times, wrote an article titled, Gerrymandering Isn't Giving Republicans the Advantage You Might Expect, and details that, okay, you need 218 seats to win a majority. It's a total of 220 seats that lean more Republican than the national popular vote in the last election. That is, you know, the lowest it's been in 30 years.

There are different ways to measure this, but is gerrymandering going to affect this election in a uniquely small way? I don't really think a uniquely small way. I mean, I think it's not it clearly hasn't put the House out of reach for Democrats. Right. But I mean, the bias is still there.

And, you know, there are several seats that obviously have been drawn out. I mean, the both parties have have drawn, you know, to make it harder for for the other party to win it. So Jeffrey mentioned the seats in Florida and a canonical example would be the Tennessee district around Nashville, where Republicans drew it from a safely blue seat to a safely red seat. And that also to the earlier point.

forced the retirement of the local Democratic representative. And that was clearly because of redistricting. You also have like a place like Ohio's 9th District, longtime representative Marcy Kaptur, Democrat. She's now running on significantly redder turf. She's running against a fairly flawed Republican candidate in J.R. Majewski, who attended the Stop the Steal rally on January 6th.

And so that has kind of kept the race competitive. But I think with generic candidates, you certainly expect, you know, Republicans to pick up that seat. And I think that a part of the reason why if you look at our forecast, actually, there's no kind of clear bias in the House. Right. It's basically like, according to the forecast, almost every time that Republicans win the House popular vote, they win the House. Almost every time the Democrats win the House popular vote, they win the House. But I think a lot of that is due to a

The fact that Democrats left a lot of seats uncontested. So that puts a little bit of a finger on the scale where the popular vote Democrats are going to get a lot fewer votes than they would have. And yet the seat breakdown will be the same. Right. Because they would have lost those districts anyway, probably. And then also Democrats have the power of incumbency, you know, slightly more than Republicans do. They have some of these powerful incumbents like a Marcy Kaptur, like a.

you know, Elaine Luria in Virginia or Alyssa Slotkin in Michigan, people who are going to work against that bias somewhat.

I should also mention, you know, as in kind of on the other on the flip side, you know, there are some Republican incumbents who are in for tougher races because of redistricting. Maya mentioned Mike Garcia, Yvette Harrell in New Mexico could be the victim of Democratic gerrymandering there. But Democrats just had fewer opportunities than Republicans to to kind of, you know, kick Republicans out unfairly.

And there are going to be a couple weird knockdown effects in individual states. Nathaniel just mentioned New Mexico. The Democrats gerrymandered the state so that they could possibly win all three seats instead of having a 2-1 split, as they currently do now. And in North Carolina, for example, five of the 14 House races don't have incumbents running in them. So there could be some funky outcomes in a couple of those.

Yeah, I mean I think also to Nathaniel's point, one of the impacts of redistricting in this cycle has been that on paper at least, there are fewer competitive seats than there were in 2020 or 2018 because both parties have – where they've had power over the redistricting process have sought for the most part to shore up –

their districts that they controlled that might be competitive while trying to, you know, as best they can group the opposite party's voters into, you know, as few districts as possible, but make them really red or really blue. You know, all this has reduced the number of seats that sort of fall between like D plus five and R plus five in our partisan lean rating. So in a way, it's like the map is narrower. All right. So this all comes together to...

Democrats having a 28% chance of holding the House and Republicans having a 72% chance of winning the House. Any closing thoughts as we leave our deep dive into notable tipping point House districts? I think it's worth reiterating that

The House is so narrowly contested in this election that Republicans only need to flip five net seats to take control. It's currently 222 Democrats to 213 Republicans. So Republicans, if they can win five net seats, they get 218 and have a majority. And the average shift in midterms since World War II is that the president's party loses 25 or 26 seats depending on the source. And it's

You know, so Republicans don't have to, you know, they have to get like a fifth of the average swing to to take control. So that's that's why the stakes for Democrats, like why it's going to be very tough, I think, for them to actually hold on to the House. All right. Well, let's leave things there. Thank you, Maya, Jeff and Nathaniel. Thanks, Galen. Thanks, Galen. Thanks as always, Galen.

My name is Galen Druk. Emily Vanesky is in the control room and is also our intern. Chadwick Matlin is our editorial director. And Ben Schelfefer is on video editing. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcast at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon. Bye.