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this is david wasserman from cook political report house editor he is here to talk about swing districts. how do you define a swing district?

>> a district that has a partisan score that tends to produce the most competitive races and we have tracked those for 25 years. we just came out with an archive at cook political.com for every congress back to 1997. the number of swing districts have fallen from 164 to just 82. that is attributed to a combination of voters, a polarization between urban and rural parts of the country and photos moving to neighborhoods where people agree with their values and redistricting and the tendency of parties gerrymandering and the republicans have had the advantage and they have increased safety republican seats whereas recalculating the scores to reflect election results. as far as how they compute the scores to determine the redistricting. we look at the presidential race for every 435 districts and we take the difference between that district and the national result. a district with the score the vote for the republican candidate, we put them against a district that got 53% of the vote. we use -- we rated 75% of the score for the presidential election. >> swing states are down to 80 plus, what is it mean for those competing in those states for offices? >> it has an impact on the competitive structures that members of congress need for passing votes. it used to be votes. it used to be that 164 swing districts was greater then the number of soundly democratic or republican districts. now, that is less than 20% of the house. over 80% of the members of congress are elected from districts where the primary is tantamount to an election. the overwhelming share of legislatures are playing to a primary base because their only threat would come from someone

who is further right or further left than you are. this is meant that most of the competition is now in states that have maps that were drawn in a more neutral manner not bipartisan legislatures trying to maximize their advantage. there are 13 states that were mapped to the most most recent cycles that were drawn by a nonpartisan commission or a court. the balance in the house is going to come down to states like california, arizona, new york. could you go back to see is that because of everything you're saying on the swing states or

what's going on at large? >> we had competitive races in 2022 tracked well with the number of seats that we have in our range as -- we would expect that around that same number of seats will be competitive this next time around. keep in mind there are 18 republicans that hold seats the joe biden carried in 2020. there are five democrats that hold seats that donald trump in those will be at the top of the target list the next time around.

part of that is that republicans despite underperforming what history might have suggested they should do in the midterms, they managed to do quite well in california and new york. in new york state alone, you have six republicans who represent democrat seats in the past they only had two. democrats see their route back to house majority running through those six seats in new york, seven in california and other states. part of the challenge for democrats is that republicans could go back and redraw maps and other states. at the same time, democrats pick up seats in north carolina and ohio last fall republicans took back control of the state supreme court and that is important because state supreme court's were the ones to invalidated the republican gerrymandering is the last time around. if these new

state supreme courts agree in my legislatures to go back to revisit those lines in the middle of the decade that could give republicans an additional five seats in the house and doubled their cushion considering they sit on a narrow majority. >> that's just for the house, you don't see anything happening on the local level or does it impact local elections to? >> this trends across the board. we see a decline in the number of swing states, swing districts, swing counties and neighborhoods. take counties where we haven't seen the boundaries of the county's change in recent decades and yet in 1992, 60 1% of american voters lived in -- only 38 percent of voters in 1992 cast

balance in landslide counties. today that number is 58%. we have seen americans live in communities that are political homogenous and that it was is a result of polarization. we have seen democrats doing better and better with those who have college degrees and they tend to cluster in urban and suburban settings. you have seen a hollowing out for democrats in more rural parts of the country like kentucky. this is coal country in eastern kentucky. that is when we first came out with our index in 1997. today, it is the second most republican district in the country.

>> david wasserman is here, with the cook report quickly remind people of what that is? >> it analyzes house, gubernatorial and state elections. i have been covering house races for the past 15 years and we meet with candidates. we talk with consultants and ad makers and each party. we talk with party committees who spend a lot of money and we also take a quantitative, analytical approach to demographic trends and try to balance and calibrate these factors into our outlook of which party is likely to do well in each seat.

tonight a hearing on flood insurance in america. testimony before house financial services subcommittee. watch on c-span. you can also watch on our free mobile video app. >> friday watch the nra leadership forum live from indianapolis. the event is hosted with speeches by the nra ceo a former vice president mike pence. you will also hear from 2024 presidential candidates. live coverage of the nra leadership forum live at 2 p.m. eastern on c-span, c-span now, or online at c-span.org.