AMNA NAWAZ: To help us understand where the races for House and Senate stand we turn now to our Politics Monday duo.

That is Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.

Great to see you both.

TAMARA KEITH, National Public Radio: Hello.

AMY WALTER, The Cook Political Report: Great to be here.

AMNA NAWAZ: One week to go.

Here we go.

Let's start with the temperature check on the House.

as both of you have been reporting Democrats' chances of winning control, Amy, look to be very good.

The big question is how big of a majority.

You probably saw House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, obviously, say in a recent interview the idea that Democrats could win a 230-seat majority is ridiculous or hilarious and nonsense were his words.

What are you seeing at The Cook Political Report?

AMY WALTER: Yes, I mean, there was a point probably a year ago when that did seem absolutely ridiculous, the thought that Democrats could gain up to 230 seats.

Today, our prediction of The Cook Political Report is that the range of pickups for Democrats is somewhere between 227 and 237.

The reason things have changed so dramatically in a year, and, again, a year that didn't just feature Republican seats that are in danger, more Republican seats in danger, but Democratic seats that were redrawn by Republicans to be more vulnerable for Democrats have also not necessarily panned out.

AMNA NAWAZ: Yes.

AMY WALTER: So you put those two things together and really the big drag, of course, in all of this is the president.

AMY WALTER: The war in Iran, rising gas prices has put seats in play that wouldn't traditionally be put in play, seats that the president carried by, in some cases, 10 points or more.

Tam, you look more deeply.

We thought -- Republicans, rather, thought that mid-decade redistricting would help to protect some of those losses.

Will it?

TAMARA KEITH: Yes, the mid-decade redistricting was supposed to be a firewall.

There were 15 districts that were made more Republican, tilted to favor Republicans.

In looking at those races now, you actually have about two-thirds of them that are not at all a sure thing for Republicans.

These were supposed to be sure things, and it hasn't worked out that way, in part because the lines were drawn based on a high watermark of support for President Trump in the 2024 election.

Latino voters, young voters, a bunch of voter groups have moved away from, soured on the president and his party.

And then you also had a lot of incumbents who were drawn out of their districts or they were trying to draw them out of their districts.

They stuck around to fight, and they have all the advantages of incumbency, those Democratic incumbents.

So it really just hasn't worked out.

One Democrat said this could be a dummymander, instead of a gerrymander, quite confidently said that.

A Republican who declined to go on the record, but who is working on these House races, said that, oh, no, the redistricting was not meant to make outcomes.

It was just meant to make more battlefields, which is definitely not the level of confidence they were expressing even just a few months ago.

AMNA NAWAZ: Let's take a quick look at the Senate before we move on.

Amy, as you know, in the Senate, your recent polling shows that Democratic candidates are leading in some states where the president won by double digits in 2024, and includes Ohio and Texas and Iowa.

AMY WALTER: Yes.

AMNA NAWAZ: A week out, how it's look?

AMY WALTER: A week out, again, this wasn't supposed to be where things ended up, the fact that we have those three states and states like Kansas actually in play, a state the president also won by double digits.

It is the same story in both the House and the Senate.

The infrastructure that Republican, the advantage that they had was supposed to protect them from a difficult environment, because in most midterm elections, the most vulnerable seats, even in big wave years, the most vulnerable seats are the seats that the president narrowly carried the election before or lost.

There just weren't that many of those in the Senate or the House.

But you combine the president's low approval ratings, low enthusiasm from Republicans, clearly, the money is going into these races, so Republicans are seeing the same things that Democrats are.

The institutional sort of structural advantages have eroded and the environment has become a much bigger predictor in where these races are going.

AMNA NAWAZ: I mean, the fact the president is in Mississippi tonight, what does that say to you, Tam?

TAMARA KEITH: Well, and not just that the president is going there, but also that Republicans are spending money there.

Republicans are essentially spending money in places where the incumbents didn't expect to have a competitive race at all, maybe didn't even have much of a campaign put together, and now they're facing these real competitive races.

I mean, Mississippi is what one would call a stretch for Democrats, certainly, but it is something where you have seen top surrogates going in there to campaign and it's getting a lot of attention all of a sudden here at the very end.

AMNA NAWAZ: Well, the president took his closing message on the road over the weekend.

He stopped in Florida and Georgia and Michigan, and has now become -- as typical, he sort of veered off script, not really focused on the number one issue of affordability.

In some of these remarks are about to play.

He disparaged people from other nations.

He commented on the rapper Nicki Minaj's body as she was campaigning with him, and he also commented on the winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

Take a listen, and there is some tough language in this.

DONALD TRUMP, President of the United States: Libya, Yemen, Haiti, Somalia, remember I -- remember what I call them?

Shithouse countries.

(CHEERING) DONALD TRUMP: Remember the heat I took?

By the way, I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before, Nicki Minaj.

DONALD TRUMP: That's hard to miss.

And it was announced and it was gotten by a woman that nobody ever heard of.

I said, what about me?

Do they do two of them?

(LAUGHTER) DONALD TRUMP: Think of it.

I settled -- so I'm not in love with Norway.

Frankly, Norway sucks.

AMNA NAWAZ: The president also posted this 1,300-word rant on TRUTH Social about late-night TV host Bill Maher, calling him a loser.

Tam, what kind of closing message is this?

And who is this for?

TAMARA KEITH: Oh, his eye is very much on the ball.

No, there has been polling over months and months and months, and we continue to see it, where voters say they feel like the president isn't focused on the things that matter to them the most.

And when he is talking about ballrooms and talking about butts, he is not talking about the things that matter to people the most.

However, he is putting on a show.

And you kind of have to remember these rallies in that context.

This is a two-hour weave-filled show that is part comedy routine, part body humor, part campaign message.

And so there are campaign messages in there.

There are messages about things that he's going to do for each and every state he visits, economic proposals.

And then there's talk about the senator from Ohio's butt.

And he doesn't just talk about it in Ohio.

He's talking about it in every state, because it is a show.

I talk to voters at these rallies who are like, I just don't know if I'm going to get to see him in person again, just like you would about a comedian or a rock band that's nearing the end of its shelf date.

AMY WALTER: Yes.

AMNA NAWAZ: Amy... AMY WALTER: This is not designed to win over swing voters, these rallies.

They are for the people who are in the audience and designed to get the response that they got.

In many cases, he gets a laugh in one of them.

Then he takes it on the road for a laugh at the next one.

So, again, traditionally a president with a 38 percent approval rating would not be out stumping and going on the road.

Most Republicans would say, you know what, that's great.

Why don't you just stay over there in the White House?

We will talk about our own race here at home and try to distance ourselves from that.

That's not what this president likes to do.

AMNA NAWAZ: Before we go, Tam, I just want to get your take on the president's continued efforts to preemptively legally challenge and also exert more federal control over some of these state-administered elections.

I want to share the news that just late today there was a court, an appeals court, in California that ruled against him in his effort to try to block some 20,000 ballots that the president says were sent to noncitizens.

There are other legal challenges at play as well.

How concerned are experts that this could actually, the sowing of doubt, have an impact on elections?

TAMARA KEITH: Yes, I mean, this will not be the end of these legal cases.

The -- we can fully expect that the Justice Department and Republicans will continue to try through the courts to exert power over elections.

Elections are state-run, state-administered.

The law, the Constitution is pretty clear on that.

That doesn't mean that this won't continue, that this might not be a pretext for something more.

We won't know until we get there.

But, yes, election law experts consider most of these cases to not -- these lawsuits to not be particularly serious legally, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't sow doubt about the election among voters or create concern about what they might find at the polling place.

AMNA NAWAZ: Tamara Keith, Amy Walter, great to see you both.

Thank you.

AMY WALTER: You're welcome.