STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
In this year's election, the presidential campaign gets the most attention, but it matters a lot who controls Congress. Yesterday on MORNING EDITION, we had a look at the Senate map, which favors Republicans this fall. Now we have an assessment of the race for the House of Representatives, where Republicans are trying to grow their majority or at least hang on.
Erin Covey joins us now to get up to speed. She edits coverage of the House for the Cook Political Report, and she used to work for NPR's MORNING EDITION. Welcome back.
ERIN COVEY: Hi, Steve. Thanks for having me on.
INSKEEP: Glad you could join us. Let's begin here with the numbers - 435 members of the House of Representatives. How closely divided is that chamber right now?
COVEY: So currently, Republicans have a four-seat majority in the House. That's an incredibly narrow majority. And so Democrats would only need a net gain of four seats in order to reach the 218 seats to take back the majority themselves. But the House battleground is really confined to a couple of dozen seats spread across the country. And many of these seats are narrowly divided, and it is not clear which party holds an advantage. And so overall, when we're looking at control of the House in 2025, we really believe this is going to be a pure toss-up.
INSKEEP: Wow. So you're saying only about a couple dozen seats across the country are competitive, meaning that everywhere else - in more than 400 of the seats - there's not a real competition, maybe not even an opponent for the incumbent.
COVEY: That is correct. And, you know, we've seen overall the number of competitive House districts declining over the last couple of districts, so this is not a huge surprise. But even compared to the 2022 House battlegrounds, I think both parties are fighting over a pretty small terrain. And it's also interesting that this terrain largely does not overlap with the presidential battleground and the Senate battleground. A lot of these competitive districts are in New York, California, Michigan - well, that is a presidential battleground. But places like New Jersey, Oregon - these are places that are not used to having super-competitive races.
INSKEEP: Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm remembering in 2022, there was a theory that Democrats, who very narrowly lost the House in 2022, could have held on if they had only done a better job in a single state, New York state, where they lost several close races. Republicans managed to elect some problematic candidates. George Santos comes to mind. Do Democrats have a chance to correct that from their point of view or change that in 2024?
COVEY: They do have a chance, and they have a much better chance, we believe, now that Kamala Harris is at the top of the ticket. So before the switch at the top of the ticket, Biden was trailing in a lot of these districts relative to where he was at in 2020. So Republicans are sitting in certain districts that Biden won by double digits in 2020 across California and New York. But in many of those districts, we saw in district-level polling that he was tied with Trump or even trailing him. So that was a pretty significant drop.
And the danger there was that for members of the House, it is really difficult to separate yourself from the national party and to outperform the top of the ticket. Only 16 districts in Congress voted one way at the congressional level and the other way at the presidential level. And so if Biden was trailing by this much compared to where he was at in 2020, it was going to make it very difficult for Democrats to take back the House.
Now that Harris is at the top of the ticket, we have seen district-level polling from both parties. A lot of it is private, unfortunately, but we are seeing that Harris is matching or at least coming close to where Biden was at in 2020, which makes Democrats' path to the House, which largely runs through California and New York, a lot more straightforward.
INSKEEP: You know, as a layman, I'll look at polling averages, and I have noticed that in the generic ballot polling question, where you ask people in national surveys, which party would you rather control Congress? - Democrats have pulled a couple of points ahead. Does that necessarily translate into Democrats taking control of the House?
COVEY: Well, not necessarily. The generic ballot is helpful when we're just looking at the national environment, so particularly in midterm cycles, when we don't have a presidential race. It's just helpful to get a pulse check on where the country is at as a whole. But these races are in specific districts, and the presidential results in these districts are the ones that are going to matter the most.
INSKEEP: And do Republicans have a structural advantage overall in the way that the districts have been drawn - in the same way that, as we heard yesterday, Republicans have an advantage this year as to which particular states are up for election?
COVEY: They do have an advantage, and that's largely because they control the redistricting processes in a lot of states - more states than Democrats. And so that gives them a bit of a structural advantage. There is also a bit of an advantage because Democrats have clustered in more urban districts, and Republicans are spread out over more rural districts. So overall, we're just looking at the number of districts and which - how many favor Republicans versus how many favor Democrats relative to the national population. There is an advantage there for Republicans.
INSKEEP: OK, really close and dramatic congressional races coming this fall, which will determine - whoever is president - determine what laws they can get passed or not, whether they're investigated and how - many other things. Erin Covey of Cook Political Report, thanks so much.
COVEY: Thanks. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
