“Every now and then, while talking to officials in the Oval Office, with friends over dinner, or on the patio at Mar a Lago, President Trump pauses and muses aloud about a subject quietly captivating the Republican Party,” the New York Times reports.

“What do you think? JD or Marco?”

“According to multiple people close to the president, Mr. Trump asks advisers who they prefer, before frequently musing that he should just have Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio run together on the same presidential ticket in 2028.”

New York Times: “The whiplash for the Virginia Democrats running for Congress was swift and intense after the state Supreme Court struck down the new congressional map proposed in February to flip four Republican-held seats.”

“With the stroke of a pen in Richmond, some campaigns effectively went poof, other candidates suddenly were in far tougher districts and one went from on the verge of dropping out to gearing up for a long-shot battle in a deep-red part of the state.
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“Rarely have so many fully formed campaigns gone off the rails at once. The court’s shock decision on Friday dashed Democratic hopes of providing some balance to Republican-run states that have been eliminating Democratic seats since Texas kicked off a nationwide fight last year.”

“Political figures who took leading roles in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election appear on track to win the Republican Party’s nomination for governor in several of the country’s biggest battleground states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin,” the Washington Post reports.

“Their prominence shows how President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen have become an article of faith within the Republican Party, more than five years after he lost to Joe Biden. And it means victories in this year’s midterm elections would give Trump supporters who were central to his efforts to overturn the election key oversight roles in the 2028 presidential election, for which states hold main authority.”

Nate Cohn: “If everything stays as is — and with Alabama, South Carolina and Louisiana enacting new maps — Republicans will obtain a significant structural advantage. To win the House, Democrats could need to win the House combined national popular vote by around four percentage points, according to our estimates.”

“A four-point structural advantage wouldn’t be enough to make the Republicans favorites to win the House, but it gives them a real shot at it. In polling averages, Democrats lead by six points on the so-called generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they’ll support for Congress. But if Republicans make gains between now and November or pull off enough victories in key races, they could have a chance to retain control of the House even while losing the national vote by a significant margin.”

“A different way to consider the Republican advantage is to look at the kinds of seats they would need to win. Here, the most popular measure is the median congressional district — the district that would serve as a tipping point for House control. By this measure — after the Southern states redraw their maps — the median district will have voted for Mr. Trump by 5.5 points in 2024, or about four points more Republican than his 1.5-point margin in the 2024 national popular vote.”

I joined John Ellis on the News Items podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about the state of American politics.

We talked about Donald Trump’s sinking approval numbers, Democratic momentum heading into the midterms, the races that could determine control of the Senate and the political backlash building around AI data centers.

We also looked ahead to the future of the Republican party after Trump — and whether someone not yet on the radar could define the 2028 presidential race.

The discussion was part campaign analysis, part media conversation and part political shop talk. You can listen here: