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Election Day is in a few weeks, but for millions of Americans, early voting in the presidential and downballot races is already under way. Over the next 19 days, how people vote in dozens of swing districts will determine which party takes control of the House of Representatives.

The race for the House looks like “a true toss-up,” my colleague Russell Berman, who covers politics, told me. (He also noted that the Democrats he’s spoken with lately are “cautiously optimistic”—and some actually seem “a touch more confident about retaking the House than winning the presidency.”) To take back control, Democrats need to pick up four seats from Republicans.

Abortion is a key issue that could determine the balance of power in the House, Russell explained, in large part because many of the most important races are happening in suburban areas where significant numbers of college-educated women are expected to turn out. Still, it’s unclear whether that issue will actually mobilize blue-state voters who have perceived less of a threat to abortion access. Immigration policy could also come into play; some Democrats are striking a more hawkish tone on the border, Russell said, following a strategy that helped Representative Tom Suozzi win George Santos’s former seat in a special election on Long Island earlier this year.

Below are five competitive House races that we’re keeping an eye on.

***

New York’s Seventeenth District

New York is famously a Democratic stronghold. But in the 2022 midterms, Republicans’ sweep of the state’s most competitive House races was a key factor that contributed to the Democrats losing control of the House. Now, just north of New York City in a district where 80,000 more Democrats than Republicans are registered, Republican Mike Lawler is trying to defend his seat against former Representative Mondaire Jones in a close race that may help tip the House.

Lawler, who is framing himself as a moderate Republican, has worked to tie Jones to the embattled Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and he’s tried to haunt Jones with his old progressive stances from 2020, when he won a House seat in the Seventeenth District. Democrats have spotlighted Lawler’s abortion views—he opposes abortion except in cases of rape or incest, though he does not back a national ban—as a weakness in his campaign. Immigration has been another point of contention because of the recent influx of migrants in New York; both candidates have swiped at each other’s record on the border.

Pennsylvania’s Tenth District

In Pennsylvania, a must-win swing state for the presidential candidates, a race between a MAGA Republican and a former news anchor could affect the balance of power in the House. Republican Representative Scott Perry is fighting to hold onto his seat against a challenge from Janelle Stelson, who became a local celebrity thanks to her decades on air. In a recent dispatch from the district, Russell described Perry as “the most vulnerable Trump loyalist in the House,” in part because of his baggage related to January 6 (he reportedly tried to install an attorney general who would help Trump stay in power).

Stelson carries little political baggage as a longtime news anchor and first-time candidate. A former registered Republican and self-identified centrist, she has taken a stronger stance on immigration than many Democrats, and she declined to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris until recently. But she’s largely aligned with her party on abortion: Stelson has said that the overturning of Roe v. Wade fueled her decision to run as a Democrat, and Perry recently said that he wouldn’t rule out voting for a national abortion ban.

Washington’s Third District

A rematch will take place between Joe Kent, a MAGA loyalist who has denied the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a vulnerable Democrat who won in an upset in 2022. That the Trump-backed Kent, rather than the district’s more moderate Republican incumbent, ran (and lost) in the district in 2022 was a “self-inflicted wound” that was “emblematic of how poor Republican choices and MAGA purity tests hurt the party in races up and down the ticket,” my colleague David Graham wrote at the time.

Washington’s Third District is a primarily rural area that voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. In the House, Perez sometimes crosses the aisle to vote with Republicans on certain issues, including student-loan-debt relief, raising the ire of party loyalists. In July, she went where few Democrats did: Shortly after President Joe Biden withdrew from the race, she released a statement that appeared to cast doubt on his fitness to serve the rest of his term.

Arizona’s First District

Republican Representative David Schweikert, who is seeking his eighth term in the House, is running against Democrat Amish Shah, an ER physician turned state representative. Arizona’s First District, with its large share of college-educated suburban voters, is considered a bellwether district in a state that could determine the outcome of the presidential election.

Republicans have framed Shah as “an extreme liberal,” sympathetic to socialism and raising taxes in a race where taxes and border security are key issues. But abortion is also top of mind for many voters—a measure that would codify the right to abortion in Arizona will be on the state’s November ballot—and Schweikert repeatedly co-sponsored a bill that would have banned nearly all abortions nationwide.

California’s Forty-Seventh District

California, like New York, is sure to go to Harris in the presidential race. But across the state, a handful of House races remain highly competitive. In Orange County’s affluent Forty-Seventh District, Democratic State Senator Dave Min and the Republican attorney Scott Baugh are facing off in a tight race that both parties have identified as a key target to win in 2024. The two candidates are vying to take over the seat currently occupied by Democratic Representative Katie Porter, who opted to run instead for the late Senator Dianne Feinstein’s seat (a bid that failed in part because a tech-backed campaign spent $10 million attacking Porter for being insufficiently crypto-friendly).

The number of registered Democrats and Republicans in the district is nearly equal, and Orange County’s growing Asian American and Latino populations have helped shift left the area once known as a conservative bastion. Min and Baugh will likely need to court the vote of independents to win, with a focus on the local issues including the economy and crime.

Related:

Seven Senate races to watch The New York race that could tip the House

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Israel has won the war, Franklin Foer writes. Can it win the peace? Ron Brownstein: Kamala Harris’s closing argument Donald Trump’s roomful of suspiciously friendly women Mike Pence is haunting this election.

Today’s News

Israeli forces killed Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s top leader, in southern Gaza, officials confirmed today. A grand jury in Georgia indicted the 14-year-old Apalachee High School shooter and his father on murder charges for a mass shooting last month that left four people dead. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed yesterday to pay $880 million to 1,353 victims of clergy sexual abuse, the largest single child-sex-abuse settlement involving a single Catholic archdiocese.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Eleanor Roosevelt was ahead of her time, Helen Lewis writes. The beloved first lady was as visible as her husband in the White House. Work in Progress: On the whole, Democrats are pro-EV and Republicans are not, Matteo Wong writes. Partisanship only partly explains the difference.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic

A Calculator’s Most Important Button Has Been Removed

By Ian Bogost

I worry that the calculator we’ve known and loved is not long for this Earth. This month, when I upgraded my iPhone to the latest operating system, iOS 18, it came with a refreshed Calculator app. The update offered some improvements! I appreciated the vertical orientation of its scientific mode, because turning your phone sideways is so 2009; the continuing display of each operation (e.g., 217 ÷ 4 + 8) on the screen until I asked for the result; the unit-conversion mode, because I will never know what a centimeter is. But there also was a startling omission: The calculator’s “C” button—the one that clears input—was gone. The “C” itself had been cleared.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

On the last Monday of each month, Lori Gottlieb answers a reader’s question about a problem, big or small, in the “Dear Therapist” newsletter. This month, she is inviting readers to submit questions related to Thanksgiving.

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On a rainy Saturday late last month, Mondaire Jones was doing his best to convince a crowd of supporters that his campaign was going great. “We’ve got so much momentum in this race,” Jones said. “It has been an incredible week.”

It was a tough sell—not only for the dozens of Democrats listening to Jones in Bedford, New York, but also for the many others who have spent millions of dollars to help him defeat a first-term Republican, Representative Mike Lawler, and win back a district he gave up two years ago. The suburbs surrounding New York City have become a central battleground in the fight for Congress, and Jones’s race against Lawler is among the most competitive in the country—one that could determine which party controls the House next year.

Democrats need a net gain of four seats to win the majority, and New York has four of the country’s most vulnerable Republicans, who are all newly representing districts that Joe Biden carried easily in 2020. Yet the traditionally blue bastion is proving to be rough terrain for Democratic candidates, who must distance themselves from the deeply unpopular Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City’s recently indicted mayor, Eric Adams.

[Read: Don’t assume that Eric Adams is going anywhere]

Jones’s curious claim to momentum was based on a poll his campaign released that had him trailing Lawler by four points—not exactly a strong showing in a district that has 80,000 more Democrats than Republicans. As for his incredible week: It began with him apologizing to Hochul for telling a reporter that he didn’t want his state’s governor to be “some, like, little bitch.” Jones said he was not referring to Hochul and told me that his comments were “taken out of context.” (Jones’s prospects did brighten the following week, when it was Lawler’s turn to apologize after The New York Times uncovered photos of the Republican wearing blackface in college as part of a Michael Jackson Halloween costume.)

Democrats are hoping that the enthusiasm Kamala Harris’s campaign has generated will help them reverse the gains Republicans made in New York in 2022. Hochul’s victory that year was so underwhelming—she won by fewer than seven points, a margin that her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in his three elections—that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed her performance for costing Democrats the House.

Pelosi’s successor as Democratic leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, has prioritized the purple districts in his home state as he seeks to become the nation’s first Black speaker. But Democrats’ prospects in New York aren’t looking much better than they did two years ago. Hochul’s approval ratings have sunk to new lows, and the federal corruption charges against Adams—who runs the city where many of Jones’s would-be constituents work—won’t help. Polls show Harris beating Donald Trump by fewer than 15 points statewide; in 2020, Biden won by 23.

Lawler has hammered Jones on the same issues that helped get him elected two years ago—the high cost of living and the influx of migrants straining local government resources—while appealing to the district’s large Jewish community by championing Israel and criticizing pro-Palestinian campus protesters. He’s supporting Trump for president while vowing to stand up to him—at least more than most Republicans have. (He’s refused, for example, to parrot the former president’s 2020 election lies.) “I’m not going to be bullied by anybody,” Lawler told me.

Key to the Democrats’ strategy against Lawler—as with many Republicans—is abortion. Party strategists believe that after the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, GOP candidates fared better in blue states such as New York and California because voters there did not see a legitimate threat to abortion rights. Hoping to spur greater turnout, state Democrats have placed a measure on the ballot this year that would further enshrine abortion rights into New York law, and they’re warning that victories by Lawler and other swing-district Republicans could empower the GOP to enact a national ban. “I think people see the threat. They’re taking it much more seriously,” says Jann Mirchandani, the local Democratic chair in Yorktown, a closely divided town in New York’s Hudson Valley. But she wasn’t sure if Lawler could be beaten. “It’s going to be tight.”

Jones’s first stint in Congress was cut short, in part, by an electoral game of musical chairs. Because New York’s population growth had flatlined, the state lost a seat in 2022, two years after his election. In response, a newly vulnerable senior Democrat, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, decided to run in Jones’s district, so the freshman moved to Brooklyn in hopes of holding on to office there. He didn’t make it out of the primary, and then a few months later, Lawler beat Maloney by only about 1,800 votes.

To try to reclaim the seat he once held, Jones is shedding some of his past progressivism. He’s renounced his support for defunding the police and no longer champions Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. His biggest break with the left came in June, when he endorsed George Latimer, the primary opponent of Jones’s former colleague, Representative Jamaal Bowman, a member of the left-wing “Squad,” because of Bowman’s criticism of Israel after October 7. In retaliation, the progressives’ campaign PAC rescinded its endorsement of Jones. When I asked him whether he would try to rejoin the Congressional Progressive Caucus if he won in November—he was a member of the group during his first go-round in the House—he said he didn’t know. But he told me he was planning to join the more moderate and business-friendly New Democrat Coalition. Do you still identify as a progressive? I asked. “I am a pragmatic, pro-Israel progressive.”

[Read: Why Jamaal Bowman lost]

Jones’s rift with the left has hurt him in other ways as well. Lawler and Jones are the only candidates actively campaigning in their district, but they won’t be the only people on the November ballot. A relative unknown named Anthony Frascone stunned Democrats by beating out Jones for the nomination of the left-leaning Working Families Party after earning just 287 votes.

Democrats say they were the victims of a dirty trick by the GOP, pointing to two seeming coincidences. Frascone, a former registered Republican, has ties to powerful conservatives in the district, including his longtime lawyer, who serves as a county chair. And, as Gothamist reported, nearly 200 voters registered with the party in conservative Rockland County just days before the deadline. Few residents are eligible to vote in the WFP primary, which typically rubber-stamps the Democratic candidate. So when Frascone got on the ballot at the last minute, the Jones campaign didn’t have many supporters it could even attempt to turn out.

If it was a ploy by Republicans, it worked brilliantly. In a close race, Frascone might siphon enough votes from Jones for Lawler to win. “The combination of the surprise primary and us having a very public fracture with Mondaire created a perfect storm,” Ana María Archila, a co-director of the New York Working Families Party, told me.

Now the WFP has the awkward task of telling supporters not to vote for its nominee. Meanwhile, state Democrats are suing to get Frascone off the ballot, and the Jones campaign is devoting time and money to ensuring that a ghost candidate won’t cost his party a crucial House seat. A poll released yesterday by Emerson College found Lawler ahead of Jones, 45–44, with Frascone taking three percent of the vote, suggesting that he could play the role of spoiler.

Lawler told me he had nothing to do with Frascone’s candidacy. “He has no ties to me,” he said. “If Mondaire couldn’t win a Working Families Party primary with 500 voters, that’s on him.”

Democrats appear to be in a stronger position in other New York swing districts. Representative Brandon Williams, a first-term Republican, is seen as a slight underdog to retain his seat around Syracuse after Democrats redrew his district in 2022. In a Long Island district that Biden carried by double digits, the Democrat Laura Gillen’s campaign got a boost when The New York Times reported that her opponent, Representative Anthony D’Esposito, had given congressional jobs to both his lover and the daughter of the woman he was cheating on. Farther upstate, in New York’s Nineteenth District, which is currently the most expensive House race in the country, an early-September poll by a Republican-leaning firm found that the GOP incumbent, Representative Marc Molinaro, was three points behind his Democratic challenger, with a larger group of voters undecided.

Elsewhere on Long Island, Representative Tom Suozzi is favored to win again after his special-election victory in February, when he flipped a GOP-held seat by talking tough on the border and assailing Republicans for blocking a bipartisan immigration bill at Trump’s behest—a message that Democrats from Harris on down are adopting this fall.

But Suozzi also benefited from his being the only race on the ballot; Democrats bused in canvassers from across the New York metropolitan area to knock on doors for his campaign, and he won by nearly eight points. Now the same organizations that powered Suozzi’s win are trying to convince party activists and volunteers that their local elections are just as important as the one for the White House. “One of those races gets more attention than the other, but it turns out that Kamala Harris is going to need a Democratic Congress,” Jones told the supporters gathered at the event I attended in Bedford.

[Read: What Tom Suozzi’s win means for Democrats]

I met two Democrats there who said they would vote for Jones but not canvass for him. One of them, Joe Simonetti, said he was still “deeply, deeply, deeply disappointed” by Jones’s effort to unseat a Black progressive in Bowman. “I just can’t get out there with full-throated support,” Simonetti, a retired social worker, said. Roger Savitt, a 70-year-old retiree and former Republican, told me that he was hoping to get on a bus to Pennsylvania to volunteer for Harris for a day. Why not knock on doors for Jones too? I asked. Savitt had nothing against Jones, he said, but “I have a less strong view of the congressional race.”

Indeed, part of Jones’s dilemma is that some Democrats in the district have a grudging admiration for Lawler. “Lawler’s done a halfway-decent job,” Rocco Pozzi, a Democratic commissioner in Westchester County, told me. “But we need to get the majority back.” A former political consultant, Lawler is visible both in the community and on cable news, where he tries to position himself as a reasonable voice amid the warring factions in Congress. “You have seen him on Morning Joe, where he never gets asked tough questions,” Jones complained to the Bedford crowd at one point.

As their party embraced Trump, moderate Republicans in blue states have occasionally found a receptive audience among Democrats looking to reward politicians willing to criticize their own party. In Vermont, the Republican Phil Scott has for years been among the nation’s most popular governors. Massachusetts twice elected the moderate Republican Charlie Baker as governor, and in Maine, Senator Susan Collins won reelection in 2020 even as Biden easily carried the state.

Lawler is eyeing that same path to statewide office in New York; if he wins reelection, he told me, he might run for governor against Hochul in 2026. “It’s certainly something I’ll look at,” Lawler said.

Yet despite his image, Lawler is more conservative than the Republicans who have demonstrated cross-party appeal in nearby Democratic strongholds. Although he has vowed to vote against a national abortion ban, he opposes the procedure except in cases of rape or incest and told me he would not vote with Democrats to restore Roe v. Wade. Lawler also said he’d vote against the bipartisan immigration bill that Harris has promised to pass if elected.

Those positions offer openings for Jones, who needs the Democrats that still dominate the district to recognize the importance of his race to the national balance of power. Lawler isn’t making it easy for him. A couple days after Jones’s rally in Bedford, I saw Lawler speak a few miles northwest in Yorktown at a commemoration of the October 7 attacks. The event wasn’t partisan, and Lawler spoke for only a few minutes, but attendees in the largely Jewish audience came away impressed.

Nancy Anton, a 68-year-old retired teacher and artist, said she had “definitely” been planning to vote for Jones before she came, but now she was leaning the other way. She supports Harris for president and wants Jeffries to be speaker, she told me, but she might vote for Lawler anyway. “I’m hoping in these other districts the Democrats win so we retake the House,” Anton said. I asked her if she’d have any regrets come November if a Lawler victory allowed Republicans to retain the majority. “Oh yes,” she replied. “That’s a terrifying thought.”

For years, Donald Trump has taken seemingly every opportunity to attack electric vehicles. They will cause a “bloodbath” for the auto industry, he told Ohio crowds in March. “The damn things don’t go far enough, and they’re too expensive,” he declared last September. EVs are a “ridiculous Green New Deal crusade,” he said a few months earlier. “Where do I get a charge, darling?” he mocked in 2019.

But of late, the former president hasn’t quite sounded like his usual self. At the Republican National Convention in July, Trump said he is “all for electric [vehicles]. They have their application.” At a rally on Long Island last month, he brought up EVs during a winding rant. “I think they’re incredible,” he said of the cars, twice. To hear Trump tell it, the flip came at the bidding of Tesla CEO Elon Musk: “I’m for electric cars—I have to be,” he said in August, “because Elon endorsed me very strongly.” Not that Trump is unambiguously praising plug-in vehicles: He still opposes incentives to boost EV sales, which he repeated at his Long Island rally. The crowd erupted in cheers.

In America, driving green remains a blue phenomenon. Many Republicans in Congress have rejected EVs, with one senator calling them “left-wing lunacy” and part of Democrats’ “blind faith in the climate religion.” The GOP rank and file is also anti-EV. In 2022, roughly half of new EVs in America were registered in the deepest-blue counties, according to a recent analysis from UC Berkeley. That likely hasn’t changed since: A Pew survey conducted this May found that 45 percent of Democrats are at least somewhat likely to buy an EV the next time they purchase a vehicle, compared with 13 percent of Republicans.

If anyone can persuade Republican EV skeptics, it should be Trump—when he talks, his party listens. During the pandemic, his support for unproven COVID therapies was linked to increased interest in and purchases of those medications; his followers have rushed to buy his Trump-branded NFTs, watches, sneakers. But when it comes to EVs, Trump’s apparent change of heart might not be enough to spur many Republicans to go electric: His followers’ beliefs may be too complex and deep-rooted for Trump himself to overturn.

EVs were destined for the culture wars. “When we buy a car, the model and the brand that we choose also represents a statement to our neighbors, to the public, of who we are,” Loren McDonald, an EV consultant, told me. Like the Toyota Prius in years prior, zero-emission electric cars are an easy target for Republicans who have long railed against climate change, suggesting that it’s not real, or not human-caused, or not a serious threat. EVs have been “construed as an environmental and liberal object,” Nicole Sintov, an environmental psychologist at Ohio State University who studies EV adoption, told me. Her research suggests that the cars’ perceived links to environmental benefits, social responsibility, and technological innovation might attract Democrats to them. Meanwhile, most people “don’t want to be seen doing things that their out-group does,” Sintov said, which could turn Republicans away from EVs.

Republicans’ hesitance to drive an EV is remarkably strong and sustained. The Berkeley analysis, for instance, found that the partisan divide in new EV registrations showed up in not only 2022, but also 2021, and 2020, and every year since 2012, when the analysis began. It remains even after controlling for income and other pragmatic factors that might motivate or dissuade people from buying an EV, Lucas Davis, a Berkeley economist and one of the authors, told me.

All of this suggests that Trump’s flip-flop has at least the potential to “go a long way toward boosting favorability” of electric cars among Republicans, Joe Sacks, the executive director of the EV Politics Project, an advocacy group aiming to get Republicans to purchase EVs, told me. If you squint, there are already signs of changing opinions, perhaps brought on more so by Musk than the former president. After Musk’s own public swing to the far right, a majority of Republicans say he is a good ambassador for EVs, according to the EV Politics Project’s polling. Tucker Carlson began a recent review of the Tesla Cybertruck by saying that “the global-warming cult is going to force us all to drive electric vehicles,” but admitted, at the end, that it was fun to get behind the wheel. Adin Ross, an internet personality popular with young right-leaning men, recently gave Trump a Cybertruck with a custom vinyl wrap of the former president raising his fist moments after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. “I think it’s incredible,” Trump reacted.

But ideology might not account entirely for Republican opposition to EVs. The other explanation for the partisan gap is that material concerns with EVs—such as their cost, range, or limited charging infrastructure—happen to be a bigger issue for Republican voters than for Democrats. The bluest areas, for instance, tend to have high incomes, gasoline taxes, and population density, all of which might encourage EV purchases. EVs typically have higher sticker prices than their gas-powered counterparts, and in urban areas, people generally have to drive less, ameliorating some of the “range anxiety” that has dogged electric cars. Consider California, which accounts for more than a third of EVs in the U.S. Climate-conscious liberals in San Francisco may be seeking out EVs, but that’s not the whole story. The state government has heavily promoted driving electric, public chargers are abundant, and California has the highest gas prices in the country.

The opposite is true in many red states. For instance, many Republicans live in the South and Upper Midwest, especially in more rural areas. That might appear to account for the low EV sales in these areas, but residents also might have longer commutes, pay less for gas, and live in a public-charging desert, McDonald told me. California has more than 47,000 public charging stations, or 1.2 stations per 1,000 people; South Dakota has 265 public chargers, or less than 0.3 per 1,000 residents. “If you part all of the politics, at the end of the day I think the nonpolitical things are going to outweigh people’s decisions,” he said. “Can I afford it? Does it fit my lifestyle? Do I have access to charging?” In relatively conservative Orange County, California, 27 percent of new passenger vehicles sold this year were fully electric—higher than statewide, and higher than the adjacent, far bluer Los Angeles County.

Indeed, after the Berkeley researchers adjusted for pragmatic considerations, for instance, the statistical correlation between political ideology and new EV registrations remained strong, but decreased by 30 percent. Various other research concurs that political discord isn’t the only thing behind EVs’ partisan divide: In her own analyses, Sintov wrote to me over email, the effect of political affiliation on EV attitudes was on par with that of “perceived maintenance and fuel costs, charging convenience, and income.” McDonald’s own research has found that fuel costs and income are stronger predictors than political views. In other words, partisanship could be the “icing on the cake” for someone’s decision, McDonald said, rather than the single reason Democrats are going electric and Republicans are not.

From the climate’s perspective, Trump’s EV waffling is certainly better than the alternative. But his new tack on EVs is unclear, and it doesn’t speak to conservatives’ specific concerns, whether pragmatic or ideological. As a result, Trump is unlikely to change many minds, Jon Krosnick, a social psychologist at Stanford who researches public opinions on climate change, told me. Teslas are a “great product,” Trump has said, but not a good fit for many, perhaps even most, Americans. He’s “all for” EVs, except that they’re ruining America’s economy. “Voters who are casually observing this are pretty confused about where he is, because it is inconsistent,” Sacks said. But they know where the rest of the party firmly stands: Gas cars are better.

Perhaps most consequential about Trump’s EV comments is what the former president hasn’t changed his mind on. By continuing to say that he wants to repeal the Biden administration’s EV incentives, Trump could further entrench EV skeptics of all political persuasions. The best way to persuade Republicans to buy a Tesla or a Ford F-150 Lightning might simply be to make doing so easier and cheaper: offering tax credits, building public charging stations, training mechanics to fix these new cars. Should he win, Trump just might do the opposite.