How an Indiana and a Minnesota district explain the 2020 House battlefield

Redistricting is just around the corner, but already the House battlefield doesn’t look like what it did less than a decade ago. 

Demographic shifts have led to partisan realignments — accelerated in some places by President Donald Trump — and that’s created a different map than existed in 2012, when the current congressional lines in most states first went into effect.  

Democrats targeted — and won — Minnesota’s 8th District that year, reclaiming an ancestrally blue seat that had slipped into GOP hands in 2010. But the rural, working-class district swung to Trump in 2016, and after losing the seat last fall, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee hasn’t even put it on its target list for 2020.

The opposite demographic shift is at play in Indiana, with younger, more moderate voters moving out of Indianapolis into the suburbs. For the first time, the DCCC is targeting the state’s 5th District, a longtime GOP stronghold. That’s a big change from 2012 when the seat wasn’t on the radar for Indiana Democrats.

Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales puts both of these seats in the GOP column, with the Indiana race rated Solid Republican and the Minnesota race rated Likely Republican. Not everyone in the Democratic Party thinks Minnesota’s 8th is out of reach in 2020, or conversely, that GOP Rep. Susan W. Brooks is truly vulnerable in Indiana’s 5th.