Very few of our polls get released anymore but one got leaked to a St. Louis TV station yesterday and it’s a great microcosm of what’s going on out there.

Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District voted for Trump by 8 points and last elected a Democrat in 1990. The Cook Political Report rates it as ‘Likely Republican,’ meaning there are 248 other seats they think Democrats will win in the House before they win that one.

This week we found Democratic challenger Fred Wellman leading 7 term Republican incumbent Ann Wagner 46-45 there.

Missouri Republicans tried to do a mid decade gerrymander and it got struck down by the courts.

What their effort to cheat achieved though was sending Democratic energy off the charts. Wellman is up 53-43 among those voters who are ‘very excited’ to vote this year while Wagner is dependent on the unexcited voters she leads 48-32 with actually turning out just to make it close.

We are seeing this backlash against gerrymandering all over the map. Republicans are going to lose many of the new seats they created for themselves in Florida and Texas.

Something else our MO-2 poll speaks to is what a good job Democratic leadership did with candidate recruitment this year.

Wellman’s net favorability is 23 points better than Wagner’s. There’s a lot of Republican districts like that where Democrats ended up with a clear candidate quality advantage. I know a lot of people get frustrated with Hakeem Jeffries and with Chuck Schumer on the Senate side but I really think the campaign operations at least are very well run.

At the end of the day the biggest factor is Trump. A quarter of his voters in MO-2 no longer support him and that has his approval rating at a net -14 despite his lopsided win there two years ago.

This district is still very much a toss up and could go either way. But the fact we’re even talking about it speaks volumes.