The Media Got Last Week Wrong
Democrats took a hit. They're still in the driver's seat. Here's what the numbers actually say — and why Republicans should be more worried than they're letting on.
If you’re a Democrat like me, last week felt like a jab in the gut. If you’re a Republican, it felt like a party.
The Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act1 combined with a state court overturning2 the Democrats’ attempt to counter-gerrymander in Virginia seemed like a withering 1-2 combo.
But really, it’s MAGA world that got a little punch drunk.
The true story is that the past week has been a small setback for Dems, but they’re still very much in the driver’s seat and still highly likely to take control of the U.S. House in November. In the larger view, the past week is doing the Republican Party no favors at all—it’s actually sinking them ever deeper into the Trump trap.
Take a deep breath there, media
Contrast two stories in Politico in recent days. After the SCOTUS ruling, under the headline “GOP midterm warnings mount” we got this very balanced takeaway:
The Supreme Court just handed Republicans a win in the redistricting wars — but they’re still facing gale-force headwinds in the charge toward the midterms.
But after the Virginia ruling, it was a pileup of giddy quotes from GOP strategists:
Republicans are taking a victory lap. “HUGE WIN,” one GOP strategist texted Playbook.“ It’s a great sign going into the midterms,” another told Playbook in an interview. “Today, Democrats are looking at potentially a net loss of double digits in seats heading into this fall’s elections,” Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz said in a statement.3
It was the same in headlines everywhere (there was a lot of blowing: USA Today called it “a seismic blow to Democrats,” the New York Times called it a “huge blow,” and Reuters went with plain-old “blow.”) So, if you felt an urge to take an edible, Xanax, and Pepto-Bismol at the same time, you’re not alone.
But (as is evident below) a quick look at the actual math doesn’t line up with this conclusion at all. What’s really driving the coverage is just the usual heavy dose of horse race journalism driven by the way news media are incentivized to cover elections.
There’s a great scene in the movie The Shipping News that captures the dynamic perfectly. A newspaper editor explains to the main character, a new reporter, how to write a headline about a cloudy day: “Imminent storm threatens village.” The reporter asks, but what if no storm comes. The editor says: “Village spared from deadly storm.”
As someone who’s worked in media for outlets like AlterNet, Raw Story, Washington Monthly, and Newsweek, I can tell you that if I pitched my editors a story that basically said “new judicial rulings don’t change much about the midterms” I wouldn’t get very far.
The story the numbers actually tell
The first, balanced Politico story was actually about right: last week’s judicial rulings represented a modest Republican win at a time when they are facing gale-force headwinds. They move the needle. Just not as much as the media and Republicans wanted to make it seem.
For example, Nate Silver pointed out that the result in Virginia has less impact than at first blush—the Democratic map was widely portrayed as providing a four-seat Democratic pick up, but applying actual win probabilities in those races set it at more like two or three.
Nate Cohn in the New York Times also adds incredibly useful numbers. Before these rulings, Cohn estimated that across the country, Democrats would need to win the total popular vote for the House by 2.5 percentage points in order to win control. That could rise to just under 4 points if there’s further redistricting in Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina.
But as of today, depending on the pollster, the generic ballot is showing voters preferring Democrats by 6-8 points. And history shows that this far out, the generic ballot is not only fairly predictive of the final national result, but also that it almost always moves against the party that controls the White House in midterm elections as we get down to the wire.4
If you want more analysis giving the full picture of where we are, and much more about why the wind is very much still at Democrats’ backs, watch my video conversation with Cliff Schecter:
Considering Trump’s galactically awful approval ratings, the ongoing chaos and cost burdens that he keeps splattering on voters’ heads, and the recent evidence of polling and special election turnout (for more on this and why people are also underselling Democrats’ likelihood of taking the Senate, see my recent article), it seems unlikely that Republicans are going to turn things around—unless there’s a truly dramatic change in the political environment.
Elections are not static. They’re thermostatic. People react to new information.
Not to mention that people may be overestimating the impact of the Voting Rights Act ruling because elections are not static. They’re thermostatic. People react to new information.
The Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies looked at reactions to voter ID laws and voter suppression messaging, and found that they resulted in measurable voter mobilization, especially among older Black voters. MIT’s election lab found the same thing: that when more obstacles were put in front of voters, it increased their desire to vote. Over and over, we’ve seen the pattern that when voters—particularly Black voters who have had to endure a horrendous history of voter suppression—feel that their rights are being taken away, they tend to react with higher determination.
The bottom line is that it’s completely fair and accurate to say that the pathway for Democrats got a bit narrower last week. On the other hand, on Polymarket5 on May 1 Democrats were given an 84% chance of winning the house. Now it’s 79%. Not a seismic blow.
The long term Republican trap just got worse
One of the underappreciated aspects of the Republican push for aggressive gerrymandering is that it created the breeding ground for Trump and today’s MAGA reality. I wrote about this in Newsweek last year, laying out exactly how it happened:
For Republicans, gerrymandering helped drive the MAGA-fication of the party. To achieve the 2010 backlash that would fuel their predatory gerrymandering scheme, Republican leaders engineered an angry populist movement—the Tea Party. That Frankenstein’s monster came alive and helped Republicans shellack Democrats in the 2010 midterms, but then escaped lab containment. Feuds between Tea Party-aligned activists and establishment Republicans roiled the party in 2012 and sank them in 2014, leaving the party rudderless, confused, and ripe for Trump’s takeover. Then the Trump faction became a force inside America’s gerrymandered districts. Since his endorsement was seen as the critical factor in winning Republican primaries, and with almost all Republicans districts being “ultra-safe,” the majority of state and U.S. House elected officials became Trump acolytes. Trump’s gerrymandering-enabled leveraged buyout of the Republican Party—and now the U.S. government—means his faction of MAGA Republicans (which represents only 16 percent of Americans) gets to drive a radical agenda that the majority of us oppose.
Trump’s successful destruction of the careers of five Republican State Senators last Tuesday—Republicans who dared oppose his redistricting demands—and replacement with MAGA primary contenders, was the latest notch on the gerrymandering belt, and may have been a short-term MAGA victory.
But by perpetuating this same pattern of driving the GOP toward only being able to sustain MAGA candidates, it was actually a long-term Republican loss. The same is true of the VRA ruling, the Virginia ruling, and all of the gerrymandering that is now unfolding. It is a Pyrrhic victory, sending Republicans out onto an ever narrower ledge, with their only lifeline held at the other end in the hands of one old, vindictive, and highly erratic man.
None of this is to sugarcoat what was clearly a challenging and demoralizing week. But the truth is, the pathway ahead remains clear, and it remains promising for the Democrats.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04/29/us/supreme-court-voting-rights
https://apnews.com/article/virginia-democrats-redistricting-congress-supreme-court-ceb7d76e5a39ac87e67cb165f5447835
Yes, running a straight statement from a Trump flak with a totally invented number in it and no pushback or explanatory context like “this conclusion is contradicted by most current prediction models and polling” is journalistic malpractice.
I have deep misgivings about citing prediction markets as evidence of anything. However, in this case, the mention seems relevant because people are taking all the information available and betting on the outcome, and it shows that market perceptions have not significantly changed after last week.