No. 410 | July 31, 2026
🗺 How redistricting is shaping 2026
It’s a theme that we’ve returned to again and again: only a handful of seats will decide control of Congress and with this year’s re-redistricting, districts have been purposefully engineered to reduce the number of seats Republicans need to spend money defending.
Cook Political’s new PVI ratings are out showing relatively safe Republican districts (R+5 or more) as an all-time high, Democratic safe seats inching up, and swing seats plummeting. As we’ve said before, it’s not about taking Democratic seats and making them Republican. It’s about taking swing seats and making them Republican. But swing seats aren’t fully dead yet: Realignment post-2020 increased the number of competitive districts; swing seats in the Cook formulation were at an all-time low after 2018. But they did take a hit with this redistricting cycle, plunging them near Trump 1.0 lows.
One response to redistricting was that Black voter turnout surged in Southern…
