The vanishing battleground
From 239-196 to 222-113, Reform UK's conquest, the phones killing the future, collapsing reading scores, occupational bubbles, DDHQ precinct maps, auto-judgmental maps, World Cup around the corner
No. 402 | May 22, 2026
🗳️ Here’s just how much gerrymandering has wiped out competitive seats
I keep making the point that gerrymandering isn’t just about winning seats for your party. It’s also about taking competitive seats off the board. Now with South Carolina wrapping up its redraw, we’ll soon be able to close the books on the 2026 redistricting wars and know where the dust has settled.
Redistricting alone won’t be enough to protect the Republican House majority, but a new interactive visual from The Intersection shows exactly how valuable the redistricting campaign has been in narrowing the playing field. The tipping point seat in the House (based on 2024 presidential vote) moved from Trump +3.1 AZ-1 to Trump +5.1 PA-10. If the election were being held today, Republicans would be favored to lose either one. But Democrats doing 4 points better nationally than in the tipping point seat would yield them a meager five extra seats. Under this scenario, where a Democratic wave crests in Trump +9 districts, they’d earn a slim 222-213 majority.1 Under the old district lines, winning everything up to Trump +9 would have gotten them a 239-196 majority, for a swing of 17 seats. While the median seat has moved 9 seats in a Republican direction, the real story may be double that number of incumbents that redistricting protected. That matters enormously in any campaign to win back the House in 2028.
What you see above is a subset of more competitive districts. Zooming out, you clearly see the hole in the chart where you’d expect the most vulnerable GOP districts to be. The gray line shows you the seat breakdown as it was in 2024, and the empty space below it are 13 vulnerable districts in this category taken off the board.
It wasn’t like this in 2018, when Democrats had plenty of offensive opportunities on the way to a 40-seat gain. That year, Democrats swept seats up to Trump +6 in 2016. That would barely be enough this year. Because Trump won the popular vote in 2024, there are likely more soft targets, meaning Democrats could reach Trump +9 or 10 seats. Republicans are hoping it’s not more than Trump +9 — their Hindenburg Line — because just a couple of points beyond that lie about a dozen Republican-held seats.
Need an expert for your conference or fly-in to break down the midterms or the latest trends in politics, demographics, and AI? Visit my public speaking page or get in touch directly.
🇬🇧 Reform isn’t going away anytime soon
The right-wing populist Reform swept the local UK elections last week, leading to more calls for Labour PM Keir Starmer to step down. But the story is not just Reform’s rise, but how old major parties have been cannibalized from all sides. The Economist’s Owen Winter shows this in an A+ data visualization. Two variables explain electoral performance in the UK: people in a professional/managerial job (basically education) and age. Reform has stolen political territory from both the Tories and Labour by unifying lower-education older voters. The Tories have been reduced to older upper-class rut adjacent to the Lib Dems. And Labour has also seen a huge part of their coalition shorn off by the Greens among younger voters.
Overall, Reform saw a gain of almost 50 points in lower-education wards.
📱 Are phones literally killing the future?
In the most buzzed-about piece of data journalism in a long time, John Burn-Murdoch makes a compelling case that the fall in birth rates (🔒) may be attributable to the introduction of the smartphone.
Perhaps not coincidentally, reading scores for 3rd graders to 8th graders have dramatically declined since 2015. In some states, scores have dropped an entire grade level. The biggest outlier: the Magnolia State and its Mississippi
👷 Who’s in an occupational bubble?
Verdant Labs has run the numbers on the most Democratic and Republican occupations based on donor data. There aren’t that many Republican union organizers, arts administrators, English processors or film editors, and there aren’t that many Democratic miners, oil workers, petroleum engineers, or roofers. Overall, the most Democratic occupations are in more of a bubble than the most Republican ones, with all 25 of the most Democratic jobs on the list more lopsided than even the most Republican professions.
🗺️ New map alerts
DDHQ Votes is out with presidential election results by precinct since 2020.
The most overindexing words in New York Times stories about states since 2000 — a nice way to automate judgmental maps.
If North America were divided into regions of 1 million people each.
⚽ World Cup teams quantified
Nate Silver is out with his PELE ratings of the World Cup contenders, built from a mix of match results, player ages, and player market values.
This assumes Democrats win all seats bluer than Trump +9 and Republicans all seats redder than that. Things are never this neat in reality, but this number holds if Republicans and Democrats win an equal number of seats on the “wrong” side of the line.