The stakes are high; the battlefield is small

In next year's elections, don't expect much outside of the seven swing states.

After 47 years at The Washington Post, Dan Balz recently announced he is stepping back from his role as the paper’s top political reporter and columnist. Balz was a protégé of the revered David Broder, often called the dean of Washington political reporters. Both long represented political journalism at its finest.

In another loss, on Saturday Jules Witcover passed away at age 98. Witcover began covering politics in Washington in 1954 (when I was one year old). For decades, Witcover teamed up with Jack Germond to write a five-times-a-week column, initially based at the old Washington Star afternoon paper, which was a must-read for anyone serious about national politics. Jules also produced some of the best campaign books ever written, as well as a National Journal column beginning in the 1980s.

I bring this up not only to honor those two great scribes, but as a marker of just how much American politics has changed since they began their careers.

Gerrymandering has never been more effective and insidious than now. Few voters defect from their party anymore; 90 percent of voters are effectively locked-in. Combine that with far more audacious parties armed with sophisticated databases and software packages, and a shift in district lines can have pretty predictable results.

What’s more, the stakes over redistricting are now far greater than they ever could have been in the days of 60-, 80-, or even 135-seat House majorities, which the Democrats enjoyed during LBJ’s first full Congress as president.

Now the House is split between 219 Republicans and 212 Democrats, with four vacancies—three in Democratic districts, one in a Republican.

With almost 40 percent of all congressional seats in states that could see a redrawing of district lines, little can be definitively said. Not every single one of the 170 districts in Texas, California, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin will see dramatically changed lines; there are an infinite number of possible outcomes. Remember also that while New York cannot redraw its lines in time for 2026, it could in time for the presidential election year in 2028.

Those old days did produce some grandmasters in the dark arts of redistricting. Phillip Burton and his brother and fellow House Democrat, John Burton, teamed up with then-California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown in the 1980s to draw maps that, at least to Republicans, were diabolical. One district was purported to have 385 sides, which Phillip Burton referred to as “my contribution to modern art.”

A bit later, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas oversaw an equally barbaric redistricting in his state in favor of Republicans.

In the Senate, the two most important variables at this point are the decision by Gov. Janet Mills as to whether she will challenge Republican Susan Collins in Maine and what happens in Texas’s March 3 primary between GOP incumbent John Cornyn and state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Six years ago, Collins was badly outspent yet defeated state House Speaker Sara Gideon by 8.6 percentage points, 51 to 42 percent, a margin of 70,422 votes. That same night, Joe Biden carried the state by 9.1 percentage points, 53.1 to 44 percent, a margin of 74,302. Running 7 percentage points and more than 140,000 votes ahead of the top of the ticket is something that rarely happens anymore.

But Trump’s presidency has made life much tougher for Collins, who has the distinction of being the only member of the Senate to represent a state of the opposite partisan hue. With Sherrod Brown, Joe Manchin, and Jon Tester gone, no Democrats remain from red states. Collins is the only Republican left from a blue state. The line she has to walk is far narrower than it was for past moderate Republicans from New England; Trump makes it almost impossibly thin. No surprise that her job approval rating has fallen from six years ago.

But what Collins has going her way this time is that she now chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, which may not sound like a big deal to a lot of people, but in lightly populated and not particularly wealthy states, it is a very big deal. Ask West Virginians about the Robert Byrd era or Alaskans about when Sen. Ted Stevens held the committee’s gavel.

Maine Democrats do not have a deep bench. Rep. Jared Golden is seeking re-election in the tough 2nd District, but as a fairly conservative Democrat, he would have a hard time winning the statewide Democratic Senate primary. All of the other potentially plausible Democratic candidates are running for the open governorship; a general election for governor should be a lot easier for a Democrat than dislodging Collins. It seems about 50-50 on whether Mills runs. If she does, she might have an edge over Collins. But without Mills, it will be a long shot for Democrats.

Just as Democrats are on the edge of their seats about Mills’s decision in Maine, national GOP strategists have to be as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs over the Texas Senate primary. While the state may not be quite as Republican as it was a few years ago, the GOP does have a real advantage, meaning that the non-controversial Cornyn should be a cinch in a general election. But is the state red enough to cover some of Paxton’s personal, ethical, and political liabilities? Maybe yes, maybe no.

It is more than a little ironic that with the stakes in American politics so high these days, the battlefield is smaller than ever. Competitive races for the Senate, the presidency, and, to a lesser extent, governorships are now mostly confined to the seven purple swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The 24 solidly red and 19 solidly blue states are mostly bystanders. That’s part of what makes the Senate arithmetic so challenging for Democrats. With Maine the only Republican-held seat up in a blue state, and the open GOP-held seat North Carolina the only purple state up in 2026, that means Democrats have to defend their own purple seats in Georgia and Michigan, knock off Collins, win North Carolina, and still beat two Republicans in red states to score a four-seat net gain and a majority next year.

When was the last time an incumbent Republican lost a general election in one of those 24 states we now list as red? In 2008, Sen. Ted Stevens from Alaska was under indictment. He lost the general election to Mark Begich, even though the indictment was subsequently reversed due to gross prosecutorial misconduct. The last Democratic incumbent senator to lose a general election in a blue state was in 2014, when Mark Udall lost to Cory Gardner in Colorado.

The reality for Democrats is that their best chance of winning a Senate majority is to prevail in North Carolina and Maine this year, while defending Georgia and Michigan, then look to 2028, when they’ll try to win at least two out of these three: Sen. Ted Budd’s seat in North Carolina, Sen. Ron Johnson’s Wisconsin seat, and the White House.