Your choice of where to cast a ballot could make or break the political landscape of an entire congressional district, as The Escape Home has reported.
If this sounds dramatic, simply look at projections that show razor-thin margins in the 2024 House races. If you’re a dual homeowner — with one property in a high-stakes, toss-up district and another in a safely decided area — you hold a unique power. With just a few clicks, you could ensure that your vote lands where it matters most, potentially tipping the balance in a close race.
The Escape Home spoke with Charles Simon, co-founder of MoveIndigo, about what to know about your voting power as a second homeowner.
MoveIndigo is a nonprofit organization that helps Democrats who are moving “discover desirable and vibrant communities where they can be game-changers at the ballot box,” according to their website.
But it’s a strategy that any voter who owns two homes can use regardless of party.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The Escape Home: What do you see as the relationship between housing and the elections?
Charles Simon: MoveIndigo is not really focused on specific policy proposals, but we are super interested in the broader question that you’re asking, which is the relationship between elections and people’s real estate choices, for example.
The [local] strategy is really focused on educating people who have two homes — one that’s in a toss-up district and one that’s not in a toss-up district — and letting them know that, based on real estate reality, they have the opportunity to be real difference makers in the election. And that, if they’re not already registered where they have a home in a toss-up district, it takes literally three minutes to register there.
Then all of a sudden, you have this chance to be a real change-maker, because the margins in those toss-up districts were small in 2022 and are expected to be really small again. So if your new vote is one of 1,000 that is going to determine who controls that district, all of a sudden you are wielding more power as a voter than if you are in a district where the margin of victory is 100,000, let’s say.
So there’s a really interesting intersection between elections and real estate there, because people get a chance to make this choice.
The beauty is that, even though there are many fewer toss-up districts around the country than there used to be, because this country has become much more polarized, there are still probably around 30 incredible toss-up districts.
If you’re a little bit strategic, you can, at the same time, make a real estate choice that takes you to a place where your vote is going to be super impactful. Sometimes it’s just a matter of one mile in one direction, or one mile in the other direction, where you’re living in a district where your vote is super impactful, or living in a district where it’s not so impactful at all.
The Escape Home: How can people find out if one of their residences is in a toss-up district?
Charles Simon: If people go to our website, which is moveindigo.org, we’ve curated a list of all of the toss-up districts around the country with little descriptions of those districts and a little bit of information about the politics in those districts. You can filter based on different criteria that you have.
We’ve tried to make it super easy so you can go in there and say, ‘I want a district that has this particular type of climate,’ or ‘I want a district that has these types of livability criteria.’ You can put that in and then our engine will produce recommendations for you. Or you could just search for all of those toss-up districts as you like.
The Escape Home: How and when do you determine which are toss-up districts?
Charles Simon: There’s lots of really smart people out there who are crunching the numbers all the time. They’re looking at polls. They’re also looking at who the candidates are. They’re looking at all sorts of different dynamics.
One of the resources that we use a lot — it’s not the only resource that we use, but we use it a lot — is the Cook Political Report. This is all they do. They’re constantly analyzing races, presidential, U.S. Senate, U.S. House, governors. Then, as the dynamics change, Cook will often change their ratings as well, so they’re constantly monitoring.
The Escape Home: What can you say to readers about just the importance of their congress member to determine what the future of this country will look like?
Charles Simon: That really is what has inspired us to create MoveIndigo and do our work. Here’s a statistic that blew my mind: If you just look at the House of Representatives in 2022, some of the people making predictions said, ‘oh, there’s going to be a big red wave, and Republicans are going to sweep up 30 or 40 seats and have a margin of like 30 or 40.’
But in fact, they ended up with a margin of five seats — now it’s even less, because George Santos got kicked out, and there have been a couple of other resignations and stuff.
So what’s the importance of each individual member of the House of Representatives? They’re incredibly important. Because if the margin is just three or four seats, every single person — how they decide to vote on a given key policy issue — is going to have enormous influence. If the margin is 30 seats or 40 seats, then OK, it doesn’t matter as much.
But when it’s three or four, it’s hugely significant. What’s really interesting is, like I said, in 2022 when the Republicans won, they had a margin of five seats, just five seats, which is a super, super tiny majority.
What’s really fascinating is, if you look at those five closest seats, the total difference was about 7,000 votes. Which means, in our country of about 330 million people, control of the House of Representatives turned on the votes of just 7,000 people, which is pretty mind-boggling.
If you look at the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, pretty much every piece of legislation that is getting passed now is only getting passed because he is required to negotiate with the Democrats, because otherwise he can’t get legislation passed.So it’s just an indication of how important every single member of the House of Representatives is, and how much influence they have, especially when the margins are so close.
The Escape Home: You spoke about the 2022 margins, but these margins are also estimated to be just as close this year?
Charles Simon: We don’t know for sure what’s going to happen. But if you look at the Cook Political Report, you’ll see that the expectations are that it’s going to be extremely close once again.That’s why it makes a huge difference where you’re going to vote.
The Escape Home: Is there anything else you think readers who happen to be either considering a second home or who are homeowners should know?
Charles Simon: The real moral of the story is every single vote counts.
So it’s easy to say, ‘oh, it doesn’t really matter, there’s so many people. But the truth is, all you have to do is look at recent history and you realize that every single vote counts. And you, as the person who’s making a choice about where to move or a choice about where to vote, you have enormous influence. If you make a choice that says, ‘I’m going to vote for my second home,’ you can be one of a very small number of people that’s going to decide who wins.
If you’re choosing where to live, the same thing is true. You can choose to live in a place where you can have your cake and eat it too — it meets all the criteria that you have, and your vote is going to be hugely impactful. So even though sometimes it seems like, ‘oh, my vote is a drop in the bucket,’ we know that’s actually not true. Your vote can be super, super impactful.