US midterms: With deep-red states now in play, could blue wave redraw America's political landscape?

And we turn now to another horse race, the U.S., where the midterms campaign is in the home stretch with just four days to go before polling day on Tuesday. Former presidential candidate Kamala Harris rallied Democrats in Georgia on Thursday. U.S. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, canceled weekend rallies planned in Iowa and Kansas, opting instead to hold remote tele-rallies that his party said could reach more voters. Polls show the Republicans are facing an uphill battle to hold on to their congressional majorities, with Democrats looking likely to win control of the House of Representatives and potentially even the Senate. For some analysis on the race, we can bring in Richard Johnson, a lecturer on U.S. politics at Queen Mary University of London. Richard, it's good to have you. Thanks, as always, for taking the time to speak with us. Good to be with you. Democrats are leading nationwide by as many as 11 points, according to some polls, even though national polls don't mean very much in this kind of race. But do you think we are headed for that so-called blue wave? I think we can say that we probably are. I mean, there's always a chance in polling that there's a polling miss. And if there's a large systematic miss in one direction, then that could erode the kind of predictions that we're looking at. But at the moment, the polls are looking really, really good for Democrats. I mean, just to give you an example, yesterday, CNN came out with some polling in... Texas that had James Tallarico six points ahead of Ken Paxton. That was the best polling result at this stage in a Texas Senate election since 1988, when Lloyd Benston was the Democratic senator for Texas. And when I dug into those polling figures, I found some really interesting points. One is Ken Paxton, the Republican, is extremely unpopular. He's sub... 29% in his favorability, minus 29%. And the Latino vote was the one that was most interesting to me. 63% of Latinos said they'd vote for the Democrat, Tallarico. Just 29% said they'd vote for Ken Paxton. And to give you context, Trump won the Texas Latino vote two years ago. He got 55% of the Texas Latino vote. So there's been a huge swing among that population. And when you go down and look at these, what... were swing states but are now becoming lean democratic states. You're seeing some Trump voters peeling away, not that many, but you are seeing some Trump peel away. You'll see huge unity and enthusiasm among Democrats and you'll see the independents. It's tilting quite strongly in the Democratic direction. So you put all that together, and that's very favorable news for Democrats. I think the Democrats could gain as many as eight seats in the Senate, which the last time they did that was the day that Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. Wow. So, yeah, Texas, as you mentioned, one of those major states, formerly quite red, that now has suddenly become a swing state. What are some of the other places, races in particular, even, that you're most interested to see the results from? So I'm interested in some of these states that if you'd asked me six months ago, certainly a year ago, I would have just said they're not going to be in play at all. The two states you mentioned in your opener earlier that Donald Trump is now not going to this weekend, Iowa and Kansas, the MS now polling average puts them both as dead heat, 46-46 in both states. The Democrat and Republican both have 46 polling average. That's extraordinary. No one was really thinking about these states. In South Carolina, Lindsey Graham's seat now held by his sister Darlene, the Democrat is now. Pulling up. And I think when you start to see, if you think of a horse race, people like to talk about US politics, if it is at this stage a dead heat, but the Democrats coming up from behind and going faster, then actually you put your money on the Democrat maintaining that momentum until the end. Now, I think it'd be absolutely extraordinary if the Democrats won South Carolina. I'm not saying it's going to happen. But there are now indicators that that state is in play. I mean, some people are even talking about Mississippi being in play. On the other hand, there are a couple of states like Michigan and Maine, which the Democrats are ahead and they look like they're going to win. But under this climate, you'd probably expect them to be ahead much further. But that has to do in some respects with what we like to call candidate quality. Yeah. I actually want to talk about the race in Michigan. It's one of the ones I'm most interested in. A Senate candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, for the Democrats, he kind of represents the left wing of the party, but some say he sort of put off a lot of Jewish voters who tend to vote heavily Democratic because of his vocal criticism of Israel. How is that race and others like it, how are they shaping the future of the Democratic Party? Yeah. So if you look at that race at the moment, it's looking good for Abdul El-Sayed. The CNN poll yesterday had that race at 49% for him and 42% for the Republican Mike Rogers. But just to give some context that that's basically the same as Talerico is polling against Paxton in Texas. And you probably wouldn't say that you would expect the Democrat in Michigan to be polling in the exact same as the Democrat in Texas. And when you dig down into that, the... Issue, or one of the issues for Abdul El-Sayed is that he's not getting the independent vote quite as strongly as some of the other Democratic candidates elsewhere in the country. And there's also concern about, you mentioned Jewish voters, and that electorate is shifting to the Republicans. But another significant Democratic electorate is the African American electorate. And that That electorate has not been quite as enthusiastic for him. And why might that be? Well, actually, black voters as a whole, obviously there's a huge amount of variation among black voters, but black voters as a whole are a more conservative, ideologically conservative electorate now relative to, say, white Democrats. As white Democrats have become more college educated, they've tended to become more... Left-leaning, so they're more supportive of a candidate like Abdul El-Sayed. The African-American electorate, again, there's diversity, of course, within that, but tends to be a more working-class, blue-collar electorate, and that tends to be a more sort of ideologically, I wouldn't even say conservative, more moderate electorate, and they haven't been too keen on him. So there's been a lot of focus in Michigan in trying to mobilize black voters to come out and support the Democratic nominee. I also want to ask you about Alaska, because the Trump administration has preemptively sued the state to block them from certifying the Senate results because another candidate has an almost identical name to the Republican candidate, Dan Sullivan. And the New York Times actually published an investigation this week alleging that the Democrats worked out how to recruit that other Dan Sullivan to run in order to intentionally confuse voters. So I'm curious what you make of it, because on the one hand, this sort of raises concerns that Donald Trump is not going to accept losing this election. It seems like that is a rather underhanded move from the part of Democrats. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say that it's an honest move to do. It's not unheard of in American political history. Back when John F. Kennedy first stood for the U.S. House of Representatives, his dad, Joe Kennedy, recruited two Italians with the same name in order to split the Italian vote in his district to help. Kennedy basically come up through the middle with the support of the Irish-American vote in the Democratic primary. Not an endorsement of that tactic, but it looks like the New York Times reporting was pretty extraordinary. I was reading it yesterday, and it does seem like Democratic operatives were involved in looking for all the Dan Sullivans in Alaska and then finding one who was prepared to stand. It's an odd state to have this tactic, though. Because Alaska is one of the very few states in the United States that uses what Americans call ranked-choice voting, what in Britain we call the alternative vote, preferential voting, one, two, three. So in Alaska, almost uniquely in the U.S. and in this particular Senate. set of elections, people can vote for both Dan Sullivans. They can put a number one for Dan Sullivan and a number two for Dan Sullivan. And that should mean that their votes would be redistributed to the correct Dan Sullivan if the voting goes to further round. So it's not like I'm kind of surprised that the Democrats did this in Alaska. If they were to do it anywhere, you would have thought they would have done it in some other state. Maybe they thought in Alaska, it's so far away, people aren't paying that much attention. Alaska also has a kind of jungle primary, as they call it. So that adds a layer of confusion. So I think for Mary Peltola, what she wants to do, she wants to have a clear and unambiguous victory to avoid any legal problems. problems because I think actually the Trump administration is going to make use of this New York Times report now. I don't think it'll go anywhere, but it is very unhelpful for the Patola campaign in the final stretch of this Alaska Senate race. All right. Well, keep an eye on what happens in Alaska and across the country. It's going to be a very, very interesting day, a Tuesday to Wednesday. Thank you so much again, Richard Johnson, for bringing us your insight. That's Richard Johnson, a lecturer in U.S. politics at Queen Mary University of London.