If you want to know the actual trajectory of the 2024 races, all you need to do is monitor the state of play in two congressional districts: PA-8 and NE-2.
Ahead of next week’s presidential debate, pundits are clenching bare knuckles around polls, including the release of the FiveThirtyEight forecast, showing Biden and Trump in a functional tie.
Ignore it all. If you want to know the actual trajectory of the 2024 presidential, Senate and House races, all you need to do is monitor the state of play in two congressional districts: Pennsylvania's eighth and Nebraska's second.
In Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District, Rep. Matt Cartwright (D) will try to stave off Republican challenger Rob Bresnahan. Cartwright is a moderate Democrat running in a rematch against a rich, election-denying businessman in a heartland district that includes President Biden’s own birthplace of Scranton. Biden has framed the entire election around this contrast of “Scranton values or Mar-a-Lago values.”
As Cartwright’s fortunes go, so will Biden’s in Pennsylvania. And without the Keystone State, Biden’s path to reelection would require a miracle.
Cartwright faces an uphill climb in a district that leans Republican by 4 points, according to Cook Political Report. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost the district by 8 points, but Biden narrowed the margin in the district to 3 points in his 2020 statewide victory. For Biden to win the state again, he must stay tightly competitive with Trump in Republican-leaning, swingy Pennsylvania districts like the eighth.
The eighth district is also at the epicenter of broader Democratic ambitions to take back the House and keep the Senate. For Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to become Speaker, Democrats must protect their frontline incumbents and flip the 11 toss-up seats currently held by the GOP. For Democrats to keep control of the Senate (with a brutally tough map), Sen. Bob Casey (D) must win his reelection bid in Pennsylvania.
According to a recent Marist poll, Casey is currently running ahead of Biden and beating GOP challenger Dave McCormick by 6 points, whereas Biden trails Trump by 2. Casey must run strongly in the eighth district — and the better any of Biden, Casey or Cartwright’s individual campaigns perform there, the better they will all do. For Pennsylvania Democrats, a rising tide on the Lackawanna River lifts all boats.
In Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, State Sen. Tony Vargas (D) will try to flip Rep. Don Bacon’s (R) seat. It’s a purple district, rated “even” by Cook Political Report, carried by Trump in 2016 and by Biden in 2020. Beyond the pressing need of House Democrats to pick up competitive seats like NE-2, Biden desperately needs to win here due to an Electoral College math problem.
Nebraska allocates two of its electoral votes based upon the statewide winner, but it also allocates one electoral vote to the winner of each of its three congressional districts. This election, Biden’s slumping polls indicate that he’s likely to see some losses among the swing states he managed to add to win in 2020, making the sole electoral vote of the Nebraska 2nd a potentially critical one for the president.
Picture this: On election night, the networks call Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin for Biden — while Trump manages to flip Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. Democrats rejoice over a second Biden term — except that viewers at home soon learn that Biden has lost NE-2, leaving him and Trump in a 269-269 Electoral College tie! The presidential election would then be thrown to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation gets a single vote. With Republicans likely to control more House delegations than Democrats, Donald Trump would return to the Oval Office.
So Biden needs Nebraska's second district to win reelection.
Perhaps even more important than these two districts is Biden's need to appeal successfully to the independent-minded voters that Vargas and Cartwright are currently trying to win over to the Democratic Party. In an election likely to come down to an even tighter margin than four years ago, the future of the country will be decided by these increasingly rare swing voters.
From here to Election Day, we’ll be inundated by the usual endless stream of nationwide polls, armchair punditry and electoral astrology that Americans have become addicted to. But when the dust settles, the only information you will need in order to conclude who won the 2024 election will be the results of Pennsylvania's 8th and Nebraska's 2nd Congressional District. For the next five months, they are the center of the political universe.
Steve Israel represented New York in the U.S. House of Representatives over eight terms and was chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2011 to 2015. Follow him @RepSteveIsrael.
