Democrats enter Election Day with a 9-point lead on the generic congressional ballot, according to CNN’s Poll of Polls, an average of national surveys. The last time either party won the House popular vote by 10 points in a midterm was 1986. The maps Republicans drew to survive a margin like this are why Black voters have so much at stake tonight.
The arithmetic is short. Democrats need a net gain of three seats to take the House. In the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-47 majority, they need four. A poll lead is not a seat count, and a single average is not a trend: it says how the country leans, not who wins each district.
That is where redistricting comes in. Ten states have put new congressional lines in place over the past year, and under them Republicans are positioned to gain as many as 16 House seats, compared with six for Democrats, NBC News reports. Democratic gains come from California and Utah. Republican gains come from Texas, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Missouri and, since April, three Southern states.
Those three acted after the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling, which struck down Louisiana’s second majority-Black district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Louisiana’s one remaining majority-Black district now snakes from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. Alabama’s map is expected to cut the state’s Democratic-held seats from two to one. In Tennessee, lawmakers carved up the lone majority-Black district in Memphis and paired its voters with rural Republican areas; the state is likely to elect an all-Republican delegation.
An NPR analysis found at least 15 House districts across the South at risk of elimination, and reported that the ruling could produce the largest drop in Black representation in Congress on record. The previous record, set in 1877, was four districts. After the ruling, Rep. Yvette Clarke of New York, who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, said: “With this decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court has opened the door to a coordinated attack on Black voters across this country.”
Republicans say the old Louisiana lines used race as the deciding factor, which is what the Court agreed with. They also note that Democrats drew an aggressive map in California. That is true. But California’s map did not dismantle districts Black voters had won in the decades after the Voting Rights Act. The Southern maps did.
The Senate gives Democrats a second route around the maps, because statewide races cannot be gerrymandered. Republicans are defending seats in states Trump carried comfortably, and polling averages show Democratic candidates ahead or within reach in Maine, Ohio, North Carolina, Alaska, Texas and Kansas, with a close fight in Michigan. Polls miss, and several of those margins sit inside the error.
Tonight tests two things at once: whether a nine-point national lead can overcome lines drawn to blunt it, and whether Black voters in Memphis, New Orleans and Alabama’s Black Belt can still send one of their own to Congress. The first polls close at 6 p.m. Eastern, and the count in close House races could run past tonight.
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