New Orleans        US off-year elections are often little more than an exercise in reading tea leaves.  Hardcore political junkies pay a lot more attention to them than others, because it’s a sales and promotion event for the pros trying to gear up for bigger bucks in the midterms.

This one is a little more interesting.  There are two governor’s races, one in New Jersey, often reliably Democratic, but not always, and another in Viriginia, which was most recently Republican.  Democrats have hopes in the state of lovers, and Republicans have dreams for suburbanites in Jersey.  Until recently, Democrats looked good-to-go in both, but some polls indicate a tightening race.

And, then, there’s New York City, where it’s Democrats running against Democrats calling themselves Independents or whatever.  This time the winner of the Democratic primary, over the former governor still refusing to let go, is not just a Democrat, but a Democratic Socialist.  My goodness, does Mamdani have them in a panic.  National party leaders aren’t sure whether to claim him or disown him.  Trump is calling him, wrongly, a commie, and threatening to freeze as much federal money to the city as he can get away with, if Mamdani wins, as expected.  Socialism, whatever-ism, what’s really important and interesting in this race is how Mamdani has centered his campaign on affordability.  With Trump’s mishandling of the economy and tariffs, along with his tax breaks for the rich his new slogan of not “make America great,” but “pain to the people,” that could be a winner politically in races high and low.

Another important sidebar to this off-year season is the push from state to state on redistricting, or more accurately, gerrymandering.  Red state governors heeded Trump’s call to give him more seats to try and keep control of the House of Representatives, and some blue state Democratic governors have responded in kind.  It’s actually on the ballot in a big fight in California pitting one current Democratic governor against as former Republican one.

There was an interesting piece in the Times in the Science section, rather than the main section, where politics normally goes to die buried in thousands of words and opinions. The piece was about the math behind it all and something called “recombination” referring to a “class of redistricting algorithms developed by Dr. [Moon] Duchin and her team” from Harvard.  Remember all the stories about the Texas Republican gerrymandering master who died on the job a couple of cycles ago, allowing his daughter to tell all about the scandal and deliberateness of the enterprise.  Duchin is someone pushing back from the other side.

There’s really nothing good about gerrymandering, and it perverts any semblance of democracy and one person, one vote in a level playing field.  This is a spit fight where no matter who the winner is, in the long run, we all lose.