Because the party out of power almost always does well in midterm elections, Democrats should be cruising toward a comfortable performance in the fall. And public sentiment has steadily drifted away from President Trump — and, by proxy, Republicans — amid an unpopular war with Iran, high gas prices and discontent with the president’s handling of the economy.

But public sentiment matters only so much in elections. The way congressional maps are drawn can have an enormous impact on which party is favored to win. Over the last year, Republicans have created a structural advantage by redrawing maps to carve out more safe red territory.

The data from the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan group that analyzes elections, lays bare this tug-of-war for House control.

Of the 88 revisions the Cook Political Report has made to race ratings since February 2025, two-thirds of them shifted toward Democrats. Yet most of the races in which Republicans gained ground were not because they won over voters, but because they redrew district lines. Four out of every five shifts in Republicans’ favor were the result of partisan redistricting.

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of the shifts.

The Cook Political Report typically revises its race ratings for a wide variety of reasons. Polling numbers change. Strong challengers emerge. Incumbents decide to retire. The results of primary and special elections change the political landscape. Revisions from these factors often inch a race modestly along the rating spectrum, shifting it to be slightly more competitive or slightly less so.

Redistricting, which has affected nearly half of all revisions so far this cycle, has rewritten these rules. In many cases, seats have shifted suddenly from safely Democratic seats to safely Republican, vaulting them from one end of the rating spectrum to the other and bypassing the competitive middle entirely.

Midterm elections in the last two decades have been largely seen as a referendum on the party that controls the White House. It remains to be seen if the gains the G.O.P. has built into the electoral map will be enough to overcome the Democrats’ environmental advantage.

“We still view Democrats as favorites — strong favorites — to retake control of the House of Representatives in November,” said Matthew Klein, an analyst at the Cook Political Report who focuses on the House and governors’ races. “But certainly Republicans have built a bit more of a firewall than they had at this time last year.”

A day after Graham Platner became the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, a woman took to social media to allege that she briefly dated Platner in 2021, recounting stories of having met him on the Tinder dating app, his infidelity and how Platner’s story about his infamous Nazi tattoo had changed over time.

“I am stepping forward as a person who has experienced lying and manipulation by his hand to lend my voice to what is a growing number of women who have been wronged by this man in one way or another,” a female streamer with the X handle, 420mercymain69, wrote in a long X statement on Thursday.

“It is hideous,” the woman, who claimed she was attracted to Platner’s Tinder profile because he was “hot and he was a leftist,” said in her X statement.

The new details add another layer to Platner’s allegedly deceptive conduct towards romantic partners and grows the pile of scandals that have trailed his campaign.

SENATE CANDIDATE GRAHAM PLATNER SENT EXPLICIT TEXTS TO MULTIPLE WOMEN WHILE MARRIED, WIFE SAYS: REPORT

Platner, who officially became the Democratic nominee to challenge incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, earlier this week, has grappled with his resurfaced past — receiving criticism for making off-color remarks on sexual abuse, race and terror and allegedly threatening behavior toward women.

According to 420mercymain69, a native of Maryland who considered herself a “well-informed leftist,” the two of them started talking on Tinder in Feb. 2021 and started dating until mid-July 2021.

When approached about his Totenkopf tattoo, a symbol used by the Nazi SS, the author claims Platner said that he had gotten it in ignorance but that he had kept it as a reminder that the U.S. were “the bad guys” in many parts of the world.

“A sob story of monumental proportions that only further solidified my perception of his ideology,” the author remembered.

“But surprisingly enough not the one he gave to the people of Maine,” she continued. “And I do mean genuinely surprising because from the moment he announced his campaign, that is exactly what I expected to hear when the truth inevitably came out.”

DEMOCRATIC MAINE SENATE CANDIDATE GRAHAM PLATNER CONFRONTED BY MS NOW HOST ABOUT TATTOO CONTROVERSY

When the tattoo surfaced late last year, he had said he wasn’t familiar with its Nazi associations.

“Graham’s repeatedly said he picked a skull-and-crossbones tattoo off a wall in Croatia to commemorate surviving Ramadi and his friends who were killed there,” a spokesperson from the Platner campaign told Fox News. “Graham has also since covered up the tattoo, and answered countless questions about it.”

“Unlike Susan Collins, who refuses to take questions on her disastrous vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, gut rural hospitals, and supported every foreign war of the last thirty years,” the spokesperson continued.

Aside from the tattoo, 420mercymain69 also accused Platner of several instances of relational infidelity.

Platner and the post’s author parted ways after she discovered from a mutual friend that he was allegedly seeing someone else while the two were still dating.

“He was talking about a woman he had blown it with, saying she was ‘the love of his life.’ I was naïve and probably a little too starry-eyed from my own good, but as a person who had only been on a handful of dates with him and f—– around a bit, I was smart enough to know he wasn’t talking about me,” the woman claimed.

“I took the hint,” she continued.

She claimed that, after leaving the relationship, she discovered Platner had been engaged to a woman named “Jen” when the two began conversing.

She was also told that Platner was allegedly cheating on her with a third woman.

“She had walked in on him having sex with another person at a wedding they were at in D.C. That mutual friend also advised that he was trying to repair things with this woman and asked me if I was going to seek her out to tell her,” she said on X.

In summarizing her experience, which was reportedly confirmed by The New York Post, the author said she did not intend to derail Platner’s campaign, but that she shared concerns about his character. Fox News Digital could not independently confirm the claims from the alleged ex-girlfriend.

PLATNER SUPPORTER KHANNA CALLS SENATE HOPEFUL’S PAST RELATIONSHIPS ‘TOXIC,’ BUT SAYS HE DESERVES ‘REDEMPTION’

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“There will be more information that comes out,” she claimed.

“If I were a Maine voter seeing the things I’m seeing, I wouldn’t have voted for him, personal experience notwithstanding, because I do not trust him. Why, after all that has come out, would I?”

“People that I have admired are brushing this off, discounting women’s experiences, attacking other journalists,or allowing people in their comment sections to do so. Especially with regard to domestic violence. It is hideous,” she concluded.

On election night, Santa Ana City Council member Jessie Lopez found herself in third place, far behind fellow Democratic council colleague David Penaloza and Republican business owner Mayra Ruiz in the race to represent Orange County’s 68th Assembly District.

Tearful supporters at a California Working Families Party shindig at the Mission Control bar and arcade in downtown Santa Ana hugged Lopez, gifted her flowers and wished her well.

If the 37-year-old was sad, she didn’t show it. Lopez had seen this game play out before.

In 2023, the councilmember decisively beat back a recall attempt funded by Santa Ana’s police union and apartment owners who didn’t like her unabashedly progressive views in a city where centrist Democrats have dominated politics for decades and lefty ones were long ostracized.

I wrote a column shortly after, heralding Lopez’s overwhelming victory as a new era for Latino politics in Orange County, where Latinos make up a third of the population but still wield little power.

Lopez spent the next three years along with her fellow progressive Santa Ana council members shoring up the city’s rent control policies and its immigrant defense fund. Nevertheless, few gave Lopez a chance in her assembly race.

Penaloza — who declined to vote when the council deadlocked on whether to cancel Lopez’s recall election — had the backing of the Orange County and California Democratic Party establishment, from current 68th District Assemblymember Avelino Valencia (who’s running to represent the 34th Senate District) to Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas to Katie Porter, a former Orange County congresswoman who ran unsuccessfully for governor this year.

Penaloza’s campaign mailers and video ads were so ubiquitous these past few weeks that they filled up my mailbox and interrupted my binging of Hulu’s “Vanderpump Villa.”

So did anti-Lopez mailers and commercials, funded by nearly $2.7 million in independent expenditures. Yet Lopez once again beat back her well-funded opposition.

As of Wednesday evening, the latest Orange County Registrar of Voters election results had her in second place — less than 1,000 votes away from Penaloza.

“Voters proved that while money can influence politics, it can’t buy community support,” Lopez said this week as she unsuccessfully tried to enjoy tacos and guacamole at Lola Gaspar in downtown Santa Ana, where well-wishers kept calling her or congratulating the candidate in person. “This race is about the future of California — whether we answer to corporations and insiders or to the hard-working people we’re elected to serve.”

With Orange County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento easily winning reelection and Unite Here Local 11 co-president Ada Briceño currently coming up short in her bid to represent the 67th Assembly District, which includes parts of Los Angeles County, Lopez may be the sole O.C. Latino progressive running in November for a seat beyond the local level.

Expect Lopez versus Penaloza to become a referendum on whether the leftward trend of Latino voters in Orange County continues — or whether its center holds.

“I’ve chosen my side,” Lopez told me. “I’m proud to stand with working people.”

Then she excused herself — someone else wanted to say what’s up.