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Why the Midterms Battleground Keeps Shrinking

15 0
15.05.2026

Democrats and Republicans spent much of the past year engaged in a gerrymandering competition. The race was to reshape the maps pushed into overtime by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which invited another round of Republican gerrymanders. As a result, the GOP could lose the national House popular vote by a significant margin and still hang onto control of the chamber.

That’s not the only reason Democrats are nervous about November, despite a big lead in generic congressional ballot polling (6.3 percent, according to Silver Bulletin’s averages) and Donald Trump’s terrible job-approval ratings. There just aren’t as many competitive U.S. House districts as there used to be, and gerrymandering is shrinking the battleground even more, as Politico reports:

In the states that have enacted new maps over the past year, the number of seats where the presidential margin was within 10 points in the 2024 election dropped from 28 to 22, according to a POLITICO analysis.It’s the continuation of a long trend: Previous rounds of gerrymandering over the last two decades have aggressively whittled away at battleground districts. …Before........

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