Not even the Blue Wall might save Dems in 2032
Texas maps official, redistricting retribution, the center isn’t what you think, 76% reject Cracker Barrel rebrand, Harris voters icing Trump-voting family members, high turnout = Dems lose
No. 373 | August 29th, 2025
👫 Demographics
With red states expected to gain 7 congressional seats after the 2030 Census and blue states projected to lose that amount, the Electoral College will likely tilt away from Democrats in the next decade. If this comes to pass, the Democrats could win every Blue Wall state and still lose.
Yes, but… Projections made in the 2010s about 2020 didn’t hold up perfectly. The lineup of red, blue, and battleground states might change. And the red lean of the Electoral College was even bigger in 2016 and 2020 than it would be under such a map.
🗺 Redistricting
Texas’ new Congressional maps are now in place. DecisionDeskHQ has a breakdown of the seats Republicans are looking to flip.
Support for tit-for-tat gerrymandering has risen, with support among Democrats rising 22 points in the last three weeks.
📊 Public Opinion
Kristen Soltis Anderson brings the Echelon quadrants to the pages of the New York Times, writing that 75% of American voters categorize themselves as neither “strong conservative” nor “strong liberal” and suggests a reimagining of the American political center.
As a pollster, I am often asked to help explain political reality to audiences of leaders across a range of sectors. I take a bit of pleasure in the following exercise: I pose a simple question to the audience. “Show of hands: How many of you think of yourselves as socially more progressive, but maybe fiscally more conservative?” Inevitably, a healthy share — if not a majority — of the room’s hands go up. When they think of themselves as centrists or moderates, I find this is often the archetype on their minds.
Then I break the bad news: Only 5 percent of American voters feel the same way.
One good use for AI in polling: conducting one-on-one interviews with respondents at scale. More than 75% of participants in an OpenResearch online survey chose to chat with a bot, spending a median of 16 minutes answering AI-generated follow-up questions and providing researchers with comprehensive, nuanced answers.
As Cracker Barrel returns to their iconic logo, 76% of respondents to a YouGov survey say they preferred the old design, and by a 5-to-1 margin, Cracker Barrel diners said they were less likely to patronize the chain due to the new look.
Harris voters are nearly four times as likely as Trump voters to say it’s acceptable to cut off family members over differing political views.
🔬 Academia
A new paper finds that Waymo’s autonomous vehicles experience 86% less serious injuries and 79% less injuries overall than cars with human drivers.
🗽NYC Mayor
In theory, more moderate candidates should be able to pool their support to defeat Zohran Mamdani. Geoffrey Skelley looks at why this is quite difficult to do in practice.
Adams is toxically unpopular, Sliwa is a Republican, and Cuomo is well… Cuomo. Writes Skelley:
Tied into their low favorability numbers, each alternative has clear shortcomings. Cuomo resigned from the governorship in 2021 in the face of multiple sexual harassment allegations. Furthermore, his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic as governor continues to affect views of Cuomo, particularly the deaths of many nursing home patients around the state.
Adams has dealt with multiple corruption allegations and scandals. Although federal authorities ultimately dropped charges against Adams, the mayor had faced indictments over allegations of bribery, fraud, and conspiracy. Many advisers in Adams’s inner circle now face charges or allegations for similar actions. In some cases, the stories border on farce: Just last week, an Adams associate attempted to hand a reporter a potato chip bag stuffed with money.
Although Sliwa has the fewest scandal marks against him of Mamdani’s opponents, he suffers from another problem: He’s a Republican in dark-blue New York City. Sliwa won 28% as the Republican standard-bearer against Adams in 2021, so it’s difficult to see him building substantially on that showing. And for all the talk about the gains President Donald Trump made across his hometown in last year’s presidential election — absolutely a significant shift — Gotham remains a solidly Democratic locale.
🇺🇲 2024
Cooperative Election Study data reveals that Trump held a 4-point advantage among non-voters in the 2024 election, signalling a significant shift of nonvoters away from the Democratic party.
Yglesias is blunt about the new reality: “When people don’t vote, Democrats win” — and suggests a bipartisan deal might be had on Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting.
Trump hates mail-in voting because he’s embraced various conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Democrats like mail-in voting in part because of a principled desire to make voting easier, but also because of their belief that making voting easier and boosting turnout will be good for them electorally. That latter claim probably isn’t true anymore. I’m not going to say that Democrats should cynically go out of their way to make voting inconvenient. But if Democrats take the House in 2026, they’ll find themselves needing to engage in bipartisan dealmaking. If you end up needing to give Trump a win on something in a horse-trade, why not give him a win on something like this?
Crystal Ball looks at the big shift right in the Midwest since 2004.
🔵 The Democrats
Charlotte Swasey has a rejoinder to the Adam Bonica piece from last week on Democratic ScamPAC fundraising. While sympathetic to the idea that there are some bad actors scamming seniors, it doesn’t necessarily follow from the age distribution of donors to various committees that there’s anything amiss. “Generic” Dems without progressive creds only have older donors. Progressive Democrats with a national brand have a bimodal age distribution: they have older donors, but also have very young donors. That’s a function of the progressives having a national brand and appeal to younger donors.
