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Dave Wasserman, the senior editor and election analyst at the Cook Political Report, pinpointed the key group of voters that are likely going to determine the size of the blue wave this midterm cycle.
In an interview with Mediaite, the veteran election forecaster explained the impact of the unprecedented, GOP-initiated gerrymander battle that changed Congressional districts in some 10 states ahead of voting. Wasserman argued that given the fundamentals of the races this cycle, the gerrymander may not actually lead to the GOP netting more than a handful of seats (4 to 5) that the Democrats should have carried, but will have a much longer-lasting impact in terms of further cutting down the number of true swing districts in the country.
“If no boundaries had changed since 2024 and Democrats hypothetically won every seat more Democratic than a PVI score of R+3 — and nothing else — they would have ended up with 235 districts this fall – a 20-seat gain and the exact same number of seats they held after the 2018 ‘blue wave’ during Trump’s first term,” noted a Cook analysis from the summer, which added that in the 2026 map Democrats are instead forecasted to win 223 seats — meaning the GOP netted 12 seats with the gerrymander. Wasserman explained, however, the latest forecasting shows that number dropping.
Wasserman pointed to GOP efforts to nab seats in places like South Texas and argued that the data shows GOP “designs might not realize their intent,” as Donald Trump has lost many of the voters he won over in 2024, including Hispanics. Looking at specific demographic swings, Wasserman flagged what he calls the “doubly disenchanted” voters who explain the gap between Trump’s dismal approval rating and the Democrats’ far more modest lead on the generic Congressional ballot.
Wasserman explains these voters, who dislike Trump but remain unsold on fully embracing the Democrats, are going to determine just how good a night the Democrats have come November. He noted that this key group “hold some seemingly contradictory views on the issues” that make them even harder to nail down for election forecasters. “They’re very opposed to democratic socialism and AOC. They’re very opposed to Donald Trump, but a little less negative on JD Vance. But they also are not crazy about capitalism. They only favor, or have a positive view of, capitalism 58 to 38%,” he explained.
Wasserman also gave some tips for election night viewers and pinpointed the bellwether races to watch early in the night that will signal whether the blue wave is actually materializing or not.
Below is a full transcript of the interview, lightly edited for clarity:
Griffing: Dave, thank you so much for joining me. It’s a pleasure to talk to you.
Wasserman: Great to talk with you as well.
Griffing: I hope you’re hanging in there this final stretch.
Wasserman: I’ve almost seen enough, but not quite.
Griffing: We’re not there yet, if only. So the reason I really wanted to speak with you specifically is that Cook has really one of the definitive answers to one of the key questions this election cycle, which is: what is the likely impact of this unprecedented mid-decade redistricting battle that we’ve seen between the GOP and the Democrats? So it’s a bit of a complicated analysis, but I was hoping we could start with you explaining what exactly is the Cook Partisan Voter Index, which is kind of the data behind your analysis. I’m sure you’ll do a much better job of that than I will.
Wasserman: So the Cook PVI is a metric designed to assess just how much more Democratic or Republican a district or state is relative to the nation as a whole. And although there are many different races that go into a district’s or state’s DNA, whether it’s governor’s races or state legislative races, only presidential elections really allow for full comparison across the entire country. And so we use the last two presidential election cycles, and we weight the more recent election three times as great as the trailing election. And we measure each party’s major-party vote share against what they received nationally. And so, for example, in a district that is D plus five, if the Democrat took 51% nationally, we might expect them to take 56% of the vote in this district. Or if a district is R plus seven and Republicans have won 52% of the national vote, we might expect them to win 59% in that district.
Griffing: Kind of like a golf handicap for each district.
Wasserman: Correct. And what we’ve noticed is that over time, the number of swing districts, which we loosely define as districts between R plus five and D plus five in our index, has fallen by about half in the last 30 years. So that has reduced the amplitude of the swings that we see even when there are big shifts in public opinion. And the trading range of what’s competitive has further narrowed as we’ve seen a decrease in split-ticket voting. So whereas in past cycles there might’ve been upwards of a hundred competitive races, because you had a number of Democrats who were able to win in Republican-leaning areas and vice versa, today there’s far less of that. And so the true number of competitive races is only between 30 and 40 seats in most elections. Now, what we’ve seen this year is that the window of what’s competitive has shifted to the left, or actually to the right, into deeper red districts, as Democrats have made inroads.
Griffing: So you used the PVI for an analysis on how the redistricting has impacted a potential outcome. And in that analysis, you looked at if the entire electorate goes plus three, if I’m correct. And then you kind of compared a potential 2026 map to where 2024 would have been. And you had the GOP netting about 12 seats. Is that correct?
Wasserman: Yes, that’s correct, I believe.
Griffing: So could you dig into that a bit more for us? Where does that change really come from? And is it possible, if, let’s say, the blue wave is even bigger than we expected, could that actually hurt the Republicans at all, as they did lower their margins in some of these districts when they did the redistricting to, you know, gobble up Democrat-held seats?
Wasserman: I don’t think there are really many places that are at risk of backfiring where lines have been changed. There are several states where Republicans’ designs might not realize their intent. Take Texas, for example. Republicans drew a number of districts in South Texas that were based on the 2024 presidential results, when Donald Trump won a historic share of Hispanic voters. He carried a lot of, in fact, most of the heavily Hispanic counties in South Texas, and these are places that he lost three to one in some cases back in 2016. And yet those voters weren’t voting for Trump because they suddenly fell in love with him or suddenly were identifying as Republicans. They voted for him because they were nostalgic for what things cost in 2016, or, I’m sorry, during his first term, from 2017 to 2021. And those voters are now snapping back to Democrats. And so Democrats might end up holding three of the five seats that Republicans targeted to flip. And then the other factor was that Republicans passing this map in the summer of 2025 left enough time for Democrats in California to retaliate. And I’d argue that the map that Democrats passed in California, targeting five Republican seats, is even more effective than the one Republicans passed in Texas. So when I add up all the changes to district lines in the nine states that revised their boundaries, I believe Republicans have come out ahead by something like four to five seats versus what they otherwise would if the lines had remained unchanged. That’s not to say they’re going to hold the majority. That simply means that Democrats need to pick up a few more House seats than had the lines not changed in order to win the majority. The other factor here is you mentioned Republicans spreading their voters pretty thin. I can’t think of many districts where their outlook has materially gotten worse as a result of a map that they drew. There were opportunities for Republicans to put some seats on higher ground that they passed up. An example of that would be in the Tampa Bay area, where Republicans carved up Democrat Kathy Castor’s district. And now, not only is the Castor district at risk of staying blue, but there are several other Republican members in Tampa Bay whose positions did not get better in redistricting, remain about the same, and are still vulnerable.
Griffing: So kind of, all told, with the redistricting you think Republicans may have netted a handful of seats, but it’s not gonna really change the margin too much. The main impact was more that it really cut down on true swing districts. That’s the real outcome?
Wasserman: Correct. We estimate that the number of swing districts has fallen further to 78 seats out of 435, and that’s near an all-time low. Now, we’re not even seeing 78 seats that are competitive this cycle, because only a fraction of those races are competitive from year to year. Most of the seats that are even in the D plus five range are going to be safe Democratic holds this cycle.
Griffing: So, kind of shifting gears a little bit, polling in general in your business has kind of taken a hit in recent years, really since 2016 with Trump’s surprise win, which you correctly predicted, I noticed, in researching for this interview. Also, obviously 2024, there was kind of a feeling that maybe Republican votes were undercounted. And just kind of, how do you address some criticism, like Nate Silver was out there this [last] week saying that some of the forecasters are maybe being a little too cautious on the blue wave, which he’s really bullish about. Where are the weak spots in the polling?
Wasserman: Look, I think Nate’s criticism, and I should say he’s a friend, and others in his realm are our colleagues and friends, but the tension that we face as forecasters is that, look, we’ve known for a long time that the national environment is really, really bad for Republicans. However, we have often lacked the confirmatory data on a congressional district basis to be able to make judgments that certain races have deteriorated for Republicans. We think oftentimes it’s likely they have, but it’s not until we get to September and October that we have data that confirms that several of these Republican incumbents really are in trouble. So we tend to begin every election cycle pretty close to what happened in the last election cycle, and as we get more and more evidence, we shift our ratings. I think that’s exactly what has happened here, and I think more ratings will continue to shift in Democrats’ direction. That’s not to say that occasionally we don’t have robust internal debates here at the Cook Political Report about where races should be. I was always very skeptical, for example, that the New Hampshire Senate race was competitive, given that even though Sununu and Pappas have been close in the polls, the vast majority of undecided voters there have very negative opinions of the president’s job performance and are unlikely to go Republican at the end of the day.
Griffing: In the primaries, there were some polls that kind of garnered a lot of criticism, or some races where people felt the polling was off, especially in Michigan, in the Democratic primary there. Do you have any kind of sense of what went wrong there? Is that something to worry about, or those are just very intra-party dynamics that are hard to kind of get ahold of? Also, was it the internal polls? I know that was a big media talking point for a moment, the failed internal polls.
Wasserman: It’s actually possible that the polls were correct at the time they were taken. And we forget that polls are snapshots in time, and particularly in primaries, these races are very, very fluid, where you can have a lot of late deciders. We saw this in Wisconsin, where Francesca Hong was comfortably ahead in the polls, but it turned out that her market share in the mid-40s ended up being pretty close to her ultimate vote share, but the rest of the electorate consolidated behind David Crowley. In Michigan’s primary, most of the polls that were taken prior to the primary election showed Abdul El-Sayed ahead of Haley Stevens by a clear margin. However, there were a lot of undecided voters, and Gretchen Whitmer’s endorsement of Stevens late in the campaign probably brought a lot of Black and other Democratic primary voters into Stevens’ column. So it’s possible the race tightened up at the last minute. Now, there are big methodological challenges with polling right now. Low response rates are the biggest methodological challenge. And the fact is, angrier voters and hyper-engaged voters are more likely to answer a survey. Today, that’s Democrats. Now, what every pollster has to do is upweight elements of their sample that are underrepresented or have lower response rates to reflect what the pollster thinks the electorate will look like. And that means that every pollster is making a different assumption about who will and will not turn out that may or may not be accurate. And so that’s on the caution side. On the confidence side for polls, though, we have seen, in the Trump era, a pattern where polling in the midterms has been pretty close to the mark, especially relative to the underestimation of Republicans we’ve seen in years when Donald Trump is on the ballot. But in 2018 and 2022, the results were not far off from where polls said they would be, broadly speaking.
Griffing: That makes a lot of sense. Without Trump on the ballot, the issue of really gauging the Republican electorate is different, because they’re probably a little bit smaller. Just to kind of hit on your point of the races being fluid at the end, do you think there are any specific trends right now, as we get closer to Election Day, that the media is kind of sleeping on? Is there anything you see out there that’s really not breaking through in the narrative?
Wasserman: Well, what I’m focused on is the difference between Trump’s approval and Democrats’ lead on the generic congressional ballot, because in our tracker, Trump’s at 37% approval, 61% disapproval. That’s, yeah, it’s gone from bad to potentially catastrophic for Republicans. However, Democrats’ lead on the congressional ballot has not widened by as much as Trump’s net approval has fallen. So Democrats lead in the Silver Bulletin average, which is, in my view, as good as any, by around nine points, at 50 to 41. Well, a nine-point lead is only about a third of the net negative 24 that Trump’s at. So what explains that difference? Well, there are still an awful lot of voters out there who dislike the job Trump’s doing who are not yet sold on Democrats, and I call them the doubly disenchanted. And when we dove into our battleground districts poll and drilled down on that sub-segment, these are voters who are kind of Republican-leaning independents. They’re younger than the rest of the electorate. They’re a little less white than the rest of the electorate, and they hold some seemingly contradictory views on the issues. They’re very opposed to democratic socialism and AOC. They’re very opposed to Donald Trump, but a little less negative on JD Vance. But they also are not crazy about capitalism. They only favor, or have a positive view of, capitalism 58 to 38%. And they also favor Medicare for All, which I don’t think most of these voters really equate with a single-payer healthcare system.
Griffing: That’s a wild contradiction, for them to be so opposed to AOC [and capitalism].
Wasserman: Correct. And so try and square that circle. Those are the voters who are going to determine the size of this blue wave. And right now, it’s still fluid.
Griffing: So just kind of to wrap it up, Election Night is coming. First off, do you have any kind of advice for the casual media consumer for Election Night or for reading the polls going into it? And then, is there any particular race or races you think we should be following more closely?
Wasserman: There are a couple of bellwethers that I would watch early on Election Night to get a sense of how things are going. The two states I’m gonna be looking at first are Virginia and Florida. Each has three House races, or, in Florida’s case, like four, that are going to illustrate something. In Virginia, Democrats are in the best position to flip the Second District, where Jen Kiggans is the Republican incumbent. If that race doesn’t flip, then it’s going to be an unexpectedly good night for Republicans. The next district to watch is the First District, which is Rob Wittman, in the Richmond suburbs and Tidewater, Virginia. If that race flips, then Democrats are headed for a pretty clear House majority.
Griffing: Well, around what time do you think we would know Kiggans?
Wasserman: Yeah, I think around 7:45 or 8. Oh, right, it could be later, depending on when we get provisionals, which won’t be counted for a couple of days after the election. But some counties are faster than others when it comes to tabulating the mail-in ballots. Yeah, the long-shot race for Democrats in Virginia is the Fifth District, where Tom Perriello is running against John McGuire. If that race flips to Democrats, then it’s going to be, you know, really a huge night for the Democrats. Now, in Florida, I expect that Jared Moskowitz is going to hold on to the 25th District in the Boca Raton area, despite Republicans’ efforts to gerrymander him out. I also expect that Kathy Castor will have a good chance at holding the 14th District in Tampa. However, if Democrats also win the open 22nd District, which is in South Florida, then that would be a really good night for them. And if they beat Anna Paulina Luna in the 13th District in St. Pete, it would be a great night for Democrats. So those are just a few races we’re watching.
Griffing: Just tips, tips for the Election Night media consumer, or any tips on reading the polls going forward. I think that’s always something people ask about, is kind of, you know, how do you navigate, you know, the constant horse race?
Wasserman: My advice is, don’t get too carried away by any one poll. Yeah, but also, look at the third-party vote share in some of these places, because most of these key Senate races have a Libertarian or someone else on the ballot. In the case of Alaska, there are four candidates on the general election ballot, including one Democrat and three Republicans. That is part of the reason why Mary Peltola is at an advantage in this election format. However, I expect that the third-party vote share will mostly collapse by Election Day and that some of those votes could revert back to the Republican column, given that a lot of these voters are Trump disapprovers who would still prefer Republicans control Congress rather than Democrats. They’re just kind of in this third-party parking place right now. And so if you see a Democrat ahead in a red state, 48 to 44, and the Libertarians taking three or four and the rest undecided, I don’t really consider the Democrat to be a strong favorite. I think that’s about what they would need to do to be on track to win by the barest possible margin in that race. That’s a pattern we’ve seen year after year, regardless of whether it’s a favorable year to Democrats or not.
Griffing: The Kansas race isn’t quite what it seems, I feel like.
Wasserman: Right. Well, there is a chance that this race elects a Democrat for the first time since 1932, but Republicans have gone in and tried to save Roger Marshall, and the numbers are in their favor in Kansas when it comes to the fundamentals. If I had to pick one exclamation point race in either chamber that would really sum up how big a wave it would be, Kansas would be my Senate pick. On the House side, I think it would be the North Country of New York. No one’s really talked about Elise Stefanik’s district being all that competitive of a race. Republicans have a growing open-seat problem as we head into October, because there are a bunch of places where Republicans have nominated exotic and potentially problematic candidates. This is one of them. Their nominee, Anthony Constantino, runs a pro-Trump sticker business. He has wrapped himself in the president to a degree that very few House candidates do, in some cases literally. And he has boasted of his chiseled physique on his campaign website. This is not exactly a guy who oozes modesty. And Democrats have a dairy farmer who’s running for that seat, who’s polling competitively in several data sets. So I’d watch that race. And I also would caution that the places that have the biggest potential to swing towards Democrats from 2024 are the places where Donald Trump made the most progress between, you know, when he first came on the scene politically and 2024. So we’re seeing the most Democratic growth in the places where the most reversion to what used to be is possible. And in that sense, it’s kind of back to the future. So South Texas, the North Country of New York, Iowa, Ohio. So those are key places to watch. And incidentally, we’re not seeing as much drop-off in Democrats’ support among the Whole Foods crowd of college-educated suburbanites, because Trump was already pretty unpopular there to begin with.
Griffing: That’s interesting. I definitely think the media is sleeping on Elise Stefanik’s old seat. It’s not really something you hear a lot about, so that’s a great one to watch. Dave, thank you so much for all your wisdom and insights and for speaking with me. I really appreciate it.
Wasserman: Thanks, Alex. Thank you.
The post Top Election Expert Dave Wasserman Tells Mediaite Whether Trump’s Redistricting Push Helped the GOP at All first appeared on Mediaite.
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