SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
We have just four weeks to go until midterm Election Day, yet more than a million people have already cast their ballots, and more than a billion dollars in political ads are planned across key House and Senate contests.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #1: Jon Husted is fighting big insurance.
UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #2: Jim Desmond supported Trump's tariffs and war.
UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #3: Housing, the power bill and insurance premiums through the roof.
PFEIFFER: NPR's Stephen Fowler has been following the money and the electoral map, and he joins us now. Hi, Stephen.
STEPHEN FOWLER, BYLINE: Hey there.
PFEIFFER: So a month out from Election Day, if you had to describe the landscape of the midterms in a single word, what would that word be?
FOWLER: Chaos. It's a midterm election of a second-term president who's deeply unpopular with voters, with a foreign war that's contributed to high domestic high prices and whose other policy priorities aren't being well received. I mean, history points to the party in power losing seats in the House and Senate. Majorities are narrow enough on paper that Democrats could take control of both chambers, but the Democratic Party isn't popular either. Republicans have an unprecedented cash advantage they're using in key races, and redistricting wars have changed the lines for about 1 in 10 potential voters. It's basically like one big game of whack-a-mole, with each day there being even more moles popping up and even more expensive mallets doing the whacking.
PFEIFFER: All right. Let's talk about some of those expensive mallets, as you put it. When you think about the races that are the most competitive, what can you tell us about those?
FOWLER: We don't have a crystal ball to see inside election results in November, but sitting here at my desk, I'm looking at decisions made by both parties that show what they're trying to cook up in this last month. The first thing I want to flag is a decision made by Republican super PACs to pull millions of dollars from North Carolina Senate race. Polls have consistently shown Democratic former Governor Roy Cooper ahead, so this signals a decision to sort of triage that race and redirect money to more competitive Senate races that Republicans hope to hold onto to keep their majority. And over the weekend, we did indeed see that money invested into another competitive race.
PFEIFFER: Stephen, based on your reporting, I want to get your assessment of which Republican races you think need the extra cash. If we look at the Cook Political Report, it lists seven toss-up seats, including the ones in Texas and Ohio, which you reported are quite expensive.
FOWLER: It's not there.
PFEIFFER: Not Texas. Not Ohio. I'm thinking Maine or Alaska?
FOWLER: Nope. And it's not Michigan or Iowa, either. It's Kansas - a state where President Trump won by 16 points in 2024. It's just a sign of the environment we're in and how worried Republicans are.
PFEIFFER: And that has to please Democrats. So what are they doing as far as signaling with their money and their messaging?
FOWLER: Just this week, the Democratic House campaign arm added six districts to its red-to-blue target list of flips. It's now up to 46 seats. A lot of it's aspirational and stretches into places that Trump won by double digits, like a House district in Little Rock, Arkansas, for example. At the same time, though, Republicans have invested considerable money in some of these places, too, to boost their candidates and attack Democrats, as polls show this combination potentially of a super-charged Democratic turnout, independents backing the Democrats and a meaningful amount of Republicans staying home.
PFEIFFER: We know not to put too much faith in polls. We know anything could happen between now and November 3. What else will you be watching for amid, as you described, the chaos of this cycle?
FOWLER: The polling snapshots in time that we've seen of likely voters suggest a potentially big blue wave in a month. But the big asterisk caveat here is that we don't know yet if likely translates to actual voter. As in-person voting gets underway in more places - early voting - we'll pretty quickly get a sense of where that energy is, especially in states like Texas, North Carolina and Georgia, where I'm based, where the majority of people cast their ballots before Election Day. It also makes the money moves more important to watch because there's a lot of races where last-minute spending or campaigning decisions may come too late to change the momentum.
PFEIFFER: That's NPR's Stephen Fowler in Atlanta. Thanks, Stephen.
FOWLER: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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