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    Democrats’ Departures Narrow Path to Holding the House Majority

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    WASHINGTON — Hurrying from the House floor to a waiting car on a recent afternoon, Representative Cheri Bustos, Democrat of Illinois, rattled off an exhaustive analysis of her conservative-leaning district in one minute flat, listing the number of family-owned farms in the area and landing on the argument her party believes could save their House majority: that the Republican running for the seat has “extreme views on women’s health issues.”It is that message discipline and deep knowledge of her western Illinois constituency that has allowed Ms. Bustos to win election five times in a district that has recently leaned conservative, supporting former President Donald J. Trump both times he ran for president.The problem for Democrats is that Ms. Bustos is not running for re-election. She is one of more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers in competitive districts who have said they will depart Congress after this year, leaving less experienced, relatively lesser-known candidates to fight it out with a Republican to keep their seats.In a midterm election cycle in which Democrats’ majority is at stake, the rash of retirements has complicated their efforts to hold the House, even as the political terrain has shifted in their favor in recent weeks in a surge of enthusiasm around protecting abortion rights. Instead of battle-tested incumbents, first-time candidates without the inherent advantages of incumbency — name recognition, experience and fund-raising networks — are defending the districts.Political handicappers expect at least six open seats alone — some of them skewed conservative by redistricting — to swing into Republican control, in Wisconsin, Texas, Arizona, Michigan and Florida. Republicans need a net gain of just five seats to win back the majority.Elsewhere around the country, Democrats may be able to hang on to their open seats, but the incumbent exodus will make doing so more costly, leaving less money for the party to fight it out in other competitive races.“There is a challenge that comes with these retirements,” Tim Persico, the executive director of House Democrats’ campaign arm, said in an interview. “It just means there are some places where we wouldn’t be spending money where we do have to invest a little bit more. But it’s really a resource challenge. It’s not a ‘We can’t win’ sort of thing.”Representative Ron Kind, left, has “run out of gas” after 13 terms in the House.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWhen House Democrats announced their retirements last year, the political terrain for the party looked bleak. Dreading the prospect of fighting their way out of bruising re-election battles only to be relegated to the backbenches of the minority in an increasingly toxic institution, party veterans headed for the exits, opting to retire or run for higher office.But the political winds shifted after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, giving Democrats hope that they could stem a Republican wave. The nonpartisan analysts at the Cook Political Report downgraded its projected outlook for Republican gains last month from 15 to 30 seats to 10 to 20 seats in a post titled, “Red Wave Looks More Like a Ripple.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Inflation Concerns Persist: In the six-month primary season that has just ended, several issues have risen and fallen, but nothing has dislodged inflation and the economy from the top of voters’ minds.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate candidate in Georgia claimed his business donated 15 percent of its profits to charities. Three of the four groups named as recipients say they didn’t receive money.North Carolina Senate Race: Are Democrats about to get their hearts broken again? The contest between Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, and her G.O.P. opponent, Representative Ted Budd, seems close enough to raise their hopes.Echoing Trump: Six G.O.P. nominees for governor and the Senate in critical midterm states, all backed by former President Donald J. Trump, would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.That has left some Democrats privately lamenting the retirements, noting that their party could have cemented some tough seats on the map had their incumbents decided to run for re-election.“There’s no guarantee that the Democratic incumbents who are not running again would have won in 2022 because some of them represent some Republican-leaning areas,” said Nathan Gonzales, a longtime election analyst and the publisher of Inside Elections, a political newsletter. “But they would have started from a stronger place and probably would receive a bit more help because they are sitting members of Congress who are currently on the Hill making policy.”Representative Ron Kind, for example, was widely considered the only Democrat who could hold his seat in rural western Wisconsin. He announced his retirement in August 2021, telling reporters that after 13 terms in office holding down a conservative-leaning district that he had “run out of gas.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“I had to face a serious job review every two years for 26 years,” Mr. Kind said.And in Texas, Representative Vicente Gonzalez changed seats in an effort to run in a friendlier district, vacating his newly drawn South Texas seat and leaving it open to a bitter primary contest to replace him. Ultimately, his moderate would-be successor was defeated by an unabashed progressive, potentially making the seat even more difficult for Democrats to hold.Republicans claim credit for helping to orchestrate the retirements. The Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with House Republican leaders, began advertising early against Democratic incumbents in competitive districts, offering a preview of the political attacks they would face in the midterms in an effort to goad them into leaving Congress. The strategy, said the group’s president, Dan Conston, “paid dividends.”G.K. Butterfield will be departing after 18 years in Congress.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images“Many of the best offense opportunities in the House this cycle are open seats because we’ve erased all of the incumbents’ natural advantages like resources and voter familiarity,” Mr. Conston said. “Democrats are already walking away from key open seats, and this is inevitably the first group they’ll cut off.”Democrats argue that they recruited candidates to succeed the retiring incumbents who are already well-known in their communities, pointing to Eric Sorensen, the former television meteorologist who is running for Ms. Bustos’s seat, and Don Davis, a state senator and former mayor who is running in northeastern North Carolina to replace Representative G.K. Butterfield, who is departing after 18 years in Congress.Mr. Sorensen, for example, has sought to emphasize his nearly two decades on local television news, making that credential the centerpiece of his first television ad.“Neighbors look out for each other, keep each other safe,” Mr. Sorensen says in a voice-over as a clip of him giving the weather report flashes on the screen. He adds: “As your meteorologist, I helped you prepare for your day. And being born and raised here, I know how special this place is.”And they plan to lean heavily into painting Republicans as out of step with their districts on abortion rights, an issue that has mobilized independent voters and women across the country.“The benefit of running against Republicans is that they continuously nominate the extreme of the extremes for some of these seats,” Mr. Persico said. “That makes holding onto them that much more likely.”But Republican candidates in several key races in open tossup seats — especially those running for Congress a second time — have significantly out-raised their Democratic counterparts, many of whom only recently emerged from competitive primary races.That dynamic — what Mr. Persico referred to as a “resource challenge” — means that those candidates may end up relying more heavily on outside groups, such as the party’s political action committee, to finance their contests, setting up tough decisions for Democrats about where to spread a finite pool of money as House Republicans’ super PAC continues to post fund-raising records.When Ms. Bustos prevailed in 2020, she raised more than twice as much money as her Republican opponent, bringing in about $5 million to Esther Joy King’s $2 million haul, and in the last days of the race, House Democrats’ PAC dumped $1 million into television ads against Ms. King, in a sign of just how close the contest was.This year, Ms. King has a sizable cash advantage over Mr. Sorensen, raising just over $3 million to Mr. Sorensen’s $500,000. She had $1.8 million on hand versus Mr. Sorensen’s $115,000, according to the latest publicly available campaign report, filed at the end of June. (Mr. Sorensen won his six-way primary just two days before the report was filed; Ms. Bustos said later that more recent filings would show that he had a “very good fund-raising quarter.”)In Mr. Kind’s district in Wisconsin, Derrick Van Orden, a former Navy SEAL who attended the Stop the Steal rally and was on the Capitol grounds during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, has out-raised Democratic State Senator Brad Pfaff, $4,428,105 to $720,637, according to data from July.Such races historically have presented “headaches” for both parties, said Steve Israel, a former Democratic congressman from New York who led the party’s House campaign efforts in 2012 and 2014.“In terms of calculating how you win the majority, or retain the majority, second-guessing is not a factor,” Mr. Israel said. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You have to be ready. You can never look back.” More

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      Map by Map, G.O.P. Chips Away at Black Democrats’ Power

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      Black elected officials in several states, from Congress down to the counties, have been drawn out of their districts this year or face headwinds to hold onto their seats.More than 30 years ago, Robert Reives Sr. marched into a meeting of his county government in Sanford, N.C., with a demand: Create a predominantly Black district in the county, which was 23 percent Black at the time but had no Black representation, or face a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act.The county commission refused, and Mr. Reives prepared to sue. But after the county settled and redrew its districts, he was elected in 1990 as Lee County’s first Black commissioner, a post he has held comfortably ever since.Until this year.Republicans, newly in power and in control of the redrawing of county maps, extended the district to the northeast, adding more rural and suburban white voters to the mostly rural district southwest of Raleigh and effectively diluting the influence of its Black voters. Mr. Reives, who is still the county’s only Black commissioner, fears he will now lose his seat.“They all have the same objective,” he said in an interview, referring to local Republican officials. “To get me out of the seat.”Mr. Reives is one of a growing number of Black elected officials across the country — ranging from members of Congress to county commissioners — who have been drawn out of their districts, placed in newly competitive districts or bundled into new districts where they must vie against incumbents from their own party.Almost all of the affected lawmakers are Democrats, and most of the mapmakers are white Republicans. The G.O.P. is currently seeking to widen its advantage in states including North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia and Texas, and because partisan gerrymandering has long been difficult to disentangle from racial gerrymandering, proving the motive can be troublesome.But the effect remains the same: less political power for communities of color.The pattern has grown more pronounced during this year’s redistricting cycle, the first since the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and allowed jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination to pass election laws and draw political maps without approval from the Justice Department.How Maps Reshape American PoliticsWe answer your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.“Let’s call it a five-alarm fire,” G.K. Butterfield, a Black congressman from North Carolina, said of the current round of congressional redistricting. He is retiring next year after Republicans removed Pitt County, which is about 35 percent Black, from his district.“I just didn’t see it coming,” he said in an interview. “I did not believe that they would go to that extreme.”Redistricting at a GlanceEvery 10 years, each state in the U.S is required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional and state legislative districts in a process known as redistricting.Redistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.Breaking Down Texas’s Map: How redistricting efforts in Texas are working to make Republican districts even more red.G.O.P.’s Heavy Edge: Republicans are poised to capture enough seats to take the House in 2022, thanks to gerrymandering alone.Legal Options Dwindle: Persuading judges to undo skewed political maps was never easy. A shifting judicial landscape is making it harder.A former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Mr. Butterfield said fellow Black members of Congress were increasingly worried about the new Republican-drawn maps. “We are all rattled,” he said.In addition to Mr. Butterfield, four Black state senators in North Carolina, five Black members of the state House of Representatives and several Black county officials have had their districts altered in ways that could cost them their seats. Nearly 24 hours after the maps were passed, civil rights groups sued the state.Representative G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina said he was retiring next year after Republicans removed Pitt County, which is 35 percent Black, from his district.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesAcross the country, the precise number of elected officials of color who have had their districts changed in such ways is difficult to pinpoint. The New York Times identified more than two dozen of these officials, but there are probably significantly more in county and municipal districts. And whose seats are vulnerable or safe depends on a variety of factors, including the political environment at the time of elections.But the number of Black legislators being drawn out of their districts outpaces that of recent redistricting cycles, when voting rights groups frequently found themselves in court trying to preserve existing majority-minority districts as often as they sought to create new ones.“Without a doubt it’s worse than it was in any recent decade,” said Leah Aden, a deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. “We have so much to contend with and it’s all happening very quickly.”Republicans, who have vastly more control over redistricting nationally than Democrats do, defend their maps as legal and fair, giving a range of reasons.Kirk Smith, the Republican chairman of Lee County’s board of commissioners, said that “to say only a person of a certain racial or ethnic group can represent only a person of the same racial or ethnic group has all the trappings of ethnocentric racism.”In North Carolina and elsewhere, Republicans say that their new maps are race-blind, meaning officials used no racial data in designing the maps and therefore could not have drawn racially discriminatory districts because they had no idea where communities of color were.“During the 2011 redistricting process, legislators considered race when drawing districts,” Ralph Hise, a Republican state senator in North Carolina, said in a statement. Through a spokesperson, he declined to answer specific questions, citing pending litigation.His statement continued: “We were then sued for considering race and ordered to draw new districts. So during this process, legislators did not use any racial data when drawing districts, and we’re now being sued for not considering race.”In other states, mapmakers have declined to add new districts with majorities of people of color even though the populations of minority residents have boomed. In Texas, where the population has increased by four million since the 2010 redistricting cycle, people of color account for more than 95 percent of the growth, but the State Legislature drew two new congressional seats with majority-white populations.And in states like Alabama and South Carolina, Republican map drawers are continuing a decades-long tradition of packing nearly all of the Black voting-age population into a single congressional district, despite arguments from voters to create two separate districts. In Louisiana, Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said on Thursday that the Republican-controlled State Legislature should draw a second majority-Black House district.Allison Riggs, a co-executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a civil rights group, said that the gerrymandering was “really an attack on Black voters, and the Black representatives are the visible outcome of that.”Efforts to curb racial gerrymandering have been hampered by a 2019 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that partisan gerrymandering could not be challenged in federal court.Though the court did leave intact Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial gerrymandering, it offered no concrete guidance on how to distinguish between a partisan gerrymander and a racial gerrymander when the result was both, such as in heavily Democratic Black communities.Understand How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More