The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 9 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Today we’re checking in on the state of play in the battle for the House of Representatives. New reporting indicates that Republicans have entered into a triage stage, meaning they’re giving up on some seats as all but lost, while urgently sending reinforcements to other ones that should be safe. These leaks are growing more humiliating for Trump, as they’re depicting a political environment that’s sharply deteriorating even as Trump keeps insisting his own numbers are better than ever. On top of that, the polling averages and the forecasts continue to trend toward Democrats.
To make sense of it all, we’re talking to Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the forecasting site Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Kyle, great to have you on.
Kyle Kondik: Hey, Greg.
Sargent: So the Fifty Plus One polling averages have Democrats up a clean eight points in the generic House ballot matchup. They have Trump’s approval down below 35 percent, a key threshold. Nate Silver’s website just declared this: “Democrats are in an excellent position to retake the House, and are also favored to retake the Senate.” Kyle, taking the Senate out of this, do you agree with Nate on the House there?
Kondik: Yeah, I do. You know, we’ll see where the ultimate seat gain lands, but things look very good for Democrats in the House. I mean, really, I think Democrats have been favored in the House the whole cycle. Redistricting added a curveball into all of that, although I think even at their worst point, the Democrats were still favored in the House.
And a lot of us were kind of waiting to see what happened after Labor Day in terms of the polling. And the numbers, if anything, have gotten better for Democrats since then. And you know, maybe you see some rebound for Republicans a little bit, but the picture looks pretty bleak for them in the House, and increasingly maybe in the Senate too.
Although I guess I personally don’t see a clear favorite in the Senate. I know that some of the sort of poll-based forecasts do. I’m not quite ready to go there yet, but it’s undeniable the numbers have been getting better.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about Sabato’s Crystal Ball, your site, and how it right now ranks things. You guys have 16 Republican-held House seats as toss-ups, versus only four Democratic-held ones being toss-ups. You guys have another eight GOP-held seats as leans Democratic. So that’s at least 24 GOP-held seats that are quite gettable for Dems right now. Can you talk about that pool of seats and explain what that big picture means?
Kondik: Yeah. Look, I think, you know, again, particularly after Labor Day, we’ve been kind of steadily moving races toward the Democrats, sort of as we pick up on, you know, micro-level factors, but also in acknowledgment of what the macro, the big-picture factors are.
And I feel like our moves have generally been vindicated by some of the reporting. You know, Tom Kean in New Jersey Seven appears to be an underdog. He’s an underdog in our ratings. That’s just one of them. Another one is Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, which is Don Bacon’s seat. That’s one of few Harris-district Republican seats that the Republicans held in 2024. Don Bacon is retiring. That looks increasingly like a relatively safe Democratic pickup.
So again, there’s just been a lot of movement, to the point where I think for much of the cycle we were thinking maybe the Democrats are in the 220s. It is easier to imagine them getting into 230s now, I think.
I don’t think that’s exactly where we’re going to land. I’d probably be right around 230 at this point, best guess. But that’s only kind of trended upward for me over the course of the cycle.
Sargent: Well, I will say 230 is actually pretty striking, given that during the whole battle over redistricting, the mid-cycle redistricting efforts, the gerrymandering that Republicans did, it was really starting to look as if the Democratic gain would be much more trimmed. Democrats really sort of had to trim their sails. That was sort of the prevailing take. But 230, you’re getting up into wave territory, right?
Kondik: You’ve got to remember that the most recent House elections have produced very small majorities. So just 222 to 213 for Democrats in 2020. Then it flipped, 222 to 213 for Republicans in 2022. That was followed by just 220 seats for the majority for Republicans in 2024. So we’ve been in a period of very closely contested House majorities.
And the House map did get better for Republicans through the net effects of all the gerrymandering and redistricting that happened. And if this was a closely contested national election, you could see a world in which the Republican advantage on the House map that they have now, that that would have saved the House majority for them when otherwise maybe Democrats would win it.
But when Democrats are leading by eight or nine points on the House generic ballot, and you just see what’s going on in these individual House races—I think Republicans were hoping they could build a wall big enough to overcome a Democratic wave. That I don’t think has happened.
Sargent: Well, Republicans agree with you. Politico reports that Republicans are leaking that they’ve now entered into triage mode. Before we get to the details, I just want to read some quotes. One Republican operative tells Politico there are, “fires everywhere.” Another GOP operative says this: “If the bottom continues falling out like it has been, this will be worse than 2006.”
Kyle, in 2006, Republicans lost both chambers of Congress, including around thirty seats. If Republicans think that the situation could keep deteriorating to the point of something like that, it’s pretty striking, no?
Kondik: Yeah. And it’s also worth remembering that Democrats did really well in 2006. They won the Senate and the House, unlike 2018. But part of the dynamic in 2006 is that there actually were a number of swing-district Republican survivors. So like Jim Gerlach and Chris Shays—some old names from the past. Republicans had kind of blue-leaning or purple seats. But Democrats made it up because they won in some pretty red-leaning territory. And that’s what we’re watching for in the Senate.
And we also could be watching for that in the U.S. House, as Democrats are both defending some of their own incumbents in redistricted double-digit Trump seats, and also trying to flip some double-digit Trump seats. And they appear to have some opportunities to do that.
Sargent: And it seems like some of these dynamics are in place right now. You’ve got certain types of Republican survivor types still out there, like Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania, right? Maybe someone like him hangs on.
But at the same time, the national environment is so bad for Republicans that even as some of those types survive in some places, in other places, you know, Republicans go down in districts that are like Trump plus 10. Is that sort of what we could expect?
Kondik: Yeah. I’m going to be publishing something a little bit after this podcast comes out about, you know, the possibility that there may be no Harris-district Republicans left. There were only three in 2024. Brian Fitzpatrick is one of them. We mentioned the open seat, Nebraska Two—that’s another one.
And then Mike Lawler in New York Seventeen, who’s in a narrow Harris seat. And he’s in, I think, basically a toss-up race. I think Fitzpatrick is still favored. And then, because of redistricting, you also have a handful of other seats that became Harris-district Republican seats but are going to flip, like a bunch of seats out in California, for instance.
But even in the bad years for the president’s party, like 2018, there still were three Clinton-district Republicans, including Fitzpatrick back then too, who survived. So it would be historically odd for there to be no Harris-district Republicans. And again, I don’t think we’re quite going to get there, but it may be that there’s only one or two left.
Sargent: I just want to underscore the importance of that. You’re basically saying that if it’s a very good night for Democrats, it’s at least within the realm of possibility that Republicans have no House seats in districts that Kamala Harris won. Zero.
Kondik: That’s right. That’s right. Again, Fitzpatrick is the toughest one there. And again, I still think he’s favored.
Sargent: So Kyle, to get a bit more specific about what this triage mode means for Republicans. They’re now pulling money out of a number of seats that are the easiest tier for Democrats to contest, and putting more money into outer-tier races that are much, much harder for Democrats to win—meaning those are now in danger, and they’re giving up on these low-tier seats.
A couple of examples. National Republicans just cut their spending to Nebraska’s Second District. They’ve pulled out of New Jersey’s Ninth District. What do you make of those shifts?
Kondik: New Jersey Nine is a Democratic seat, but it is a Trump-won seat. That’s Nellie Pou’s district. That was a seat that swung—it’s heavily Latino, it’s like North Jersey—it swung pretty heavily to Republicans in 2024. Seems poised to swing back in 2026. And so I think Republicans are hoping to compete there, but it just never really developed.
And then Nebraska Two, we talked about, as a seat that’s, you know, historically it’s pretty hard for—you know, if the president’s party has an open seat in a hostile midterm that the other party won for president, that’s a seat that they generally will end up losing.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you what really struck me as well, Kyle. Republicans just added more money to Kentucky’s Sixth District, which Trump won by 15 points.
Kondik: It is interesting that that race is now kind of more on the battlefield. We have it as leans Republican. So we still favor the Republicans there, but we had it as likely as of, I think, a few weeks ago. And the outside spending is kind of telling that it’s a pretty hot race.
Sargent: They need to send—meaning Republicans need to send—big-time reinforcements in to defend a Republican-held district that Trump won by 15 points.
Kondik: Yeah. And look, think about this too. The president’s approval rating is maybe twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two points underwater, maybe more, maybe less, depending on the poll you look at. A district that Trump won by fifteen—in 2018, his approval rating probably would have been positive in a district like that. Maybe just narrowly, but because his net approval was about minus ten around the time of the 2018 election. Minus twenty, his approval is probably underwater in a Kentucky Six.
And again, there are going to be some people who disapprove of the president but who vote Republican in their, you know, local House and Senate race. But you do see a big battlefield, and I think part of it is just the president’s approval rating being so low.
Sargent: And we’re seeing him underwater in states where he won by double digits as well.
Kondik: Yeah, and that’s something that’s also been striking about the Senate races this year compared to 2018. Because if you go back and look at the exit polls of the big Senate races—you know, the Republicans did pretty well. I mean, they ended up coming out of that cycle with one extra seat. They had lost the Alabama special election in late 2017, but they came in with, I think it was, 52 in 2016, and they came out of the cycle with 53.
And if you look at the exit polling in those big Senate races, Trump’s approval was usually positive in the key races. I mean, particularly in like a North Dakota or an Indiana or Missouri, that Republicans flipped.
But even in some of the more competitive kind of battleground races—this time it looks like the president’s approval rating is underwater in Alaska, and Ohio, Texas, and Iowa, which are all, you know, double-digit Trump states, where Trump would have had positive approval, I think, in the 2018 context.
Sargent: Well, can you step back and sum up the big picture right now? How deep into red territory are Democrats plausibly and credibly reaching right now? What tier of seats do you think they’re going to flip a number of? Is there some way to get a handle on this in a kind of postcard way?
Kondik: I think that coming out of this election, they’re probably going to hold several double-digit Trump districts. I don’t have a great handle as to how many, but particularly—there are those, like, three South Texas House seats that Democrats already hold two of, Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez. Bobby Pulido is also trying to beat Monica De La Cruz in a Trump-plus-eighteen seat.
And it seems like those kind of Latino-heavy districts are the ones that are going to swing, like, really strongly to the Democrats, more so than some other places. But that hypothetically could be three right there.
And you look around the map—like, what if they actually do win a Kentucky Six? Like, could they—you know, they did win a handful of those kinds of seats in 2018. I kind of wonder if they could actually get into double digits. That’s probably what it would take for them to get to 235 or more House seats.
But again, the environment is just pretty lousy for Republicans. Again, it doesn’t have to be that way. And you know, maybe there is something systematic about the polling that could be underestimating Republicans. But you take the numbers at face value, they’re just pretty poor for Republicans.
Sargent: Just to sum this up in another way, you expect Democrats to pick up a number of Republican districts right now that are Trump plus seven, Trump plus eight, Trump plus nine, and then maybe a handful more that are Trump plus double digits, right? Is that the size of it?
Kondik: Yeah. And again, it wouldn’t surprise me if ultimately the Democrats kind of stall out a few points short in, like, a Kentucky Six or something. Or, you know, maybe some of the other—Montana One is another one that they sometimes talk about. It’s another open seat. But the possibility exists to win a few of those seats anyway.
Sargent: Well, here’s where it gets even worse for Trump. Congressman Tom Emmer, a senior Republican, just admitted to Axios that Republicans are not going to win all the seats they’ve redistricted for themselves in this cycle.
Your outfit, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, is about to make some more ratings changes this week. I understand you guys will move Florida’s 25th District from toss-up to lean Democratic, and Florida’s 22nd District from lean Republican to toss-up. Those are two Dem-held seats in Florida that Republicans had hoped to flip. Those are your coming changes, right? Can you explain why you’re making these changes, and what their bigger significance is?
Kondik: Yeah, look. Republicans wanted to gain four net seats out of this new Florida gerrymander. We don’t really think they’re going to do that. And I think the one who’s probably best positioned to hang on is Jared Moskowitz, running in Florida 25.
Moskowitz, unlike many Democrats, is fairly pro-Israel. Florida 25 is roughly 25 percent Jewish. He’s probably a pretty good fit for that district. It was Trump plus nine, but it also voted for Biden by five. And so there is some old Democratic DNA there that Moskowitz could maybe kind of re-put-together in a much better year for Democrats. And so we’re going to have that one as leans Democratic. It’s some rating changes that we’re making soon.
And then Florida 22 is an open seat. You’ve got two relatively unknown candidates. The partisan top line is kind of similar to Florida 25, in that Trump won it by about 10 points, but Biden did narrowly carry it in 2020. So that’s another South Florida seat to watch.
And then Kathy Castor in Florida Fourteen. That’s still a toss-up. That’s a Trump-plus-ten-ish district in Tampa. Castor’s been around for a long time. Her mom is also a big fixture in Tampa-area politics. The mayor of Tampa’s last name is Castor, even though they’re not related. So there’s a lot of Castors down there in Tampa. But that also looks like a race that Democrats might be able to salvage in this environment.
Sargent: Well, just to sum this up, your best guess is Democrats finish the night with 230 House seats, and they have a shot at getting as high as 235 if it’s a very good night. Is that about right?
Kondik: Yeah, I think that’s right. That would be about where I would land right now, in sort of the 230-ish, maybe a little below, maybe a little above. And again, in my own assessments, that’s been kind of steadily growing just a little bit over time.
Sargent: Well, Kyle Kondik, it’s certainly interesting. Thanks so much for that big picture. It’s really great stuff.
Kondik: Thanks, Greg.