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I’m away but alas staying in touch with political news at home, and thought I would check in with one of the best public opinion quants about where we stand right now …

TRANSCRIPT: Paul Krugman in Conversation with G. Elliott Morris

(recorded 5/13/26)

Paul Krugman: Hi everyone. Returning today to G. Elliott Morris, my favorite polling and public opinion analyst. We’ve had an eventful time with redistricting and there’s a lot of stuff going on, so we’ll see where this goes. The big news is, of course, the Court leaving Democrats stunned by overruling the referendum with Virginia redistricting, which now gives Republicans a substantial lead. You’ve been doing some analysis. How should we think about how this changes November?

G. Elliott Morris: Yeah. Big picture is: as long as Democrats are still winning the popular vote by four points, they’re still taking back the House of Representatives. A lot has changed over the last three weeks. First, the Supreme Court has invalidated section two of the Voting Rights Act. This was the portion of the law that prevented state legislatures or other state bodies from diluting the power of black voters.

Krugman: Right.

Morris: This, of course, matters for our partisan calculations, because black representatives in the South tend to be Democrats. Now the Supreme Court has said states can divvy up their votes. Republican-led states in the South, including Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana, have since passed, or are about to pass, maps that will take away three Democrats at least, and potentially five. So that is quite a few seats. On top of that, there has been other redistricting news. Virginia voters had passed a constitutional amendment to adopt a Democratic gerrymander that has been struck down. So Democrats in Virginia are going back to their old map, and they will lose two seats because of that—two seats that they would have otherwise gained. So, if you’re catching up on the math here, that’s three seats lost from the Democrats. It would have only been one; now it’s three.

But then we have redistricting in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri. If you add up all of those Republican states, they have taken away about 13 seats from the Democrats, and Democrats have gained only five or so out of California, the only state they have really redistricted. If you add up all this, then Democrats are down about six seats from the gerrymandering wars that Donald Trump started last year. And that could be potentially decisive in a close race.

Krugman: My very informal impression was that prior to all of this stuff, the kind of Republican bias of the voting was largely gone, and that the House majorities tended to more or less reflect the popular vote. But now we’re in a situation where we’re back with probably the biggest ever Republican lean there.

Morris: Yeah. So the 2024 congressional map was technically still biased toward the Republicans. If in a perfectly average year with perfectly average candidates—and that is the big “if”—if 2024 had been rerun, we would have expected Democrats to lose the majority of seats, even if they had won the popular vote by about a point. The big benefit in 2024 was that recruitment by Democrats in close seats was really, really good. So they beat expectations. But if you rerun it, it still would have been slightly biased towards Republicans. Now we’re at around a Republican bias of four points, which is close to the bias right after the 2010 redistricting. What happened in 2012? So this is pretty bad. We’re getting to the point where the structural bias in