TALLADEGA, Ala. (AP) — Points leader Kyle Larson needs to recover from a major stumble in the NASCAR Chase, and Talladega Superspeedway seems an unlikely rebound spot for the defending Cup Series champion.
The mammoth 2.66-mile oval and its massive crashes have plagued Larson throughout his career. A last-place finish in the April 26 race at Talladega lowered his average finish there to 22nd over 23 starts, second-worst on the circuit behind Iowa Speedway (where he has only three starts).
But as Larson clings to a five-point lead over Christopher Bell with three races remaining, 500 miles of white-knuckle racing Sunday at the longest and most treacherous track in NASCAR somehow seems enticing.
“As bad as my results are here, I still look at it as an opportunity, for sure, to get out here and have a shot to win,” Larson said Saturday before qualifying. “I feel like we all know every single car in the field, maybe aside from a couple, have a shot to win if things go a certain way. So yeah, I look at it as an opportunity. We’ve been up front at the end of the races. I’m more confident here than I am at Phoenix.”
A 34th-place finish at Phoenix Raceway brought an abrupt halt to Larson’s dream start to the Chase, the 10-race closing stretch that determines the champion.
The Hendrick Motorsports star had built a comfortable 49-point margin with a Chase-record average finish of 2.83 through the first six races, but five drivers are within 44 points after Phoenix: Bell, Chase Briscoe, Denny Hamlin, Ryan Blaney and Joey Logano. Phoenix winner Tyler Reddick is also in striking distance at 56 points behind.
The prospects for Larson earning his third title seem considerably dimmer heading into one of NASCAR's three drafting superspeedways — where drivers run inches apart at 200 mph, and a slight bobble can trigger a large pileup.
At Atlanta, Daytona and Talladega, Larson has a series-worst average finish of 30.6. In 58 career starts on drafting tracks, Larson has never won — the longest superspeedway drought among active drivers.
To snap the skid Sunday, he will need the assistance of drafting partners to push his No. 5 Chevrolet to the front. Larson believes that help will come from his three teammates and the other 16 Chevy drivers in the 40-car field.
“Just having the awareness of where we’re at in our situation,” said Larson, the only Chevy driver with a realistic shot at the championship. “I’m not asking for people to go out of their way or move over or anything like that. I think just the awareness is always good, which I feel like there’s been that throughout the Chase already. It’s been going on for a handful of weeks where I feel like I’ve been cut a lot of breaks from other Chevy cars, which has been much appreciated.
“But on the Talladega side of things, it’s always easy to have a plan, but it’s always difficult to replicate your plan on the racetrack.”
Bell, Hamlin and Briscoe race Toyotas for Joe Gibbs Racing, which could make it trickier to show drafting deference to a teammate while racing for the title.
“You’re probably not going to cut each other a break,” Briscoe said. “I feel like this place is super hard just to have a plan and have that plan actually come together.”
Talladega is undeniably the wild card of the Chase. The track has featured three consecutive last-lap passes for the win, and last fall’s race produced the most lead changes (77) and leaders (27) in more than 15 years.
“The best way we can help him is to be competitive and be in the mix,” two-time Talladega winner Chase Elliott said of Larson, his Hendrick teammate. “Because as soon as you have a bad day, the strength in numbers slowly dissipates, and then you could potentially leave him on an island of not having any help at the end of the race. Being in position to have a shot to win is ultimately the best way to help him.”
In removing his name from Most Popular Driver Award balloting out of respect for the late Kyle Busch, Elliott said he was inspired by his father.
Bill Elliott won the award a record 16 times but bowed out of consideration in 2001 to allow his fans to vote for Dale Earnhardt after the seven-time champion was killed in a Daytona 500 crash.
“I just always thought that was a really cool and admirable nod to one of his biggest rivals,” Chase Elliott said. “I certainly thought about that some and also about what Kyle meant to my career and just the relationship we had. And just how much noise I think our fans have made for him. He certainly embraced that villain role, and maybe people totally didn’t like him, but they sure did make a lot of noise for him.”
Carson Hocevar, whose popularity has soared since his first career victory at Talladega six months ago, has been encouraging his fans to vote for Busch, who died in May from sepsis caused by severe pneumonia.
“Kyle was the most popular driver at one point,” Hocevar said. “A driver that was probably super hated and not appreciated enough. He’s super appreciated now, and it just feels right.”
Blaney, a three-time Talladega winner, is a +800 favorite Sunday, followed by Penske teammate Logano (+1100), also a three-time winner. … Brad Keselowski (+1400) leads active drivers with six wins at Talladega. He has three runner-up finishes since his last victory there in April 2021. … It’s been six years since the Talladega winner also led the most laps in the race.
AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing
Kyle Larson steers through Turn 4 during a NASCAR Cup Series auto race, Sunday, Oct. 11, 2026, in Concord, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Kelley)
Kyle Larson (5) leads Austin Dillon on the 12th lap during a NASCAR Cup Series auto race Sunday, Oct. 18, 2026, in Avondale, Ariz. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri)
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — In 2022, Democrat Wiley Nickel ran as a moderate and narrowly won North Carolina's 13th Congressional District by about 9,000 votes. Two years later, the current congressman, Republican Brad Knott, ran as a conservative and coasted into the U.S. House by more than 70,000 votes.
Voters didn't change their minds. Politicians changed their voters.
The Republican-controlled legislature redrew the state's congressional map to transform what was one of the last remaining swing districts in the South to a safe GOP seat. Lawmakers split the rectangular 13th District into an hourglass shape that carved out Democratic voters in Raleigh and replaced them with a swath of rural counties reaching up to the Virginia border.
Swing seats, meaning districts that a presidential candidate won by 5 percentage points or fewer in the previous election, are disappearing from the national map. For decades after World War II, the number of competitive seats in the House slowly eroded as the United States grew more polarized, voters were less likely to split their ticket between parties and people moved closer to like-minded neighbors, creating Democratic strongholds in urban areas and Republican ones across rural America.
That decline accelerated over the past year after Republican President Donald Trump sparked a partisan redistricting battle. The number of swing districts fell from 45 to 37. There were 96 House seats that fit the modern definition of a swing seat in 1964, according to one count from the 1970s, when the shrinking number of such districts was first noted.
That means the overwhelming majority of House seats are effectively won in primaries, with the support of only a fraction of voters who usually are at the extreme ideological end of their party.
Nickel saw the impact firsthand during his lone term in Washington.
“The biggest divide I found in Congress wasn’t Democrat versus Republican, it was safe seats versus competitive seats,” Nickel said. “When your focus is on running a campaign where you talk to every single voter, you look at things differently and your focus is on solving problems.”
Unite America, an organization pushing alternatives to party primaries, calculated that 87% of the representatives elected to the House in 2024 were chosen by 7% of the country’s voters.
“Voters don’t have any way of holding Congress responsible, except for a narrow window of swing districts,” Nick Troiano, the group's executive director, said in an interview, adding that he expects things to get worse in November. “The least competitive election of our lifetimes will lead to the least accountable and least representative Congress of our lifetimes.”
Republicans are hoping the smaller number of competitive seats puts a low ceiling on what Democrats can win on Nov. 3.
“Both sides are fighting over a narrow House battlefield,” said Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Campaign. “It's a knife fight in a dark alley.”
The alley may be widening this year, but it still is an alley.
Democrats have expanded their political targets, given the unpopular war with Iran and voters angry about high prices. Both parties are spending on campaigns in Republican areas that normally would not be competitive.
Even in what is shaping up as a difficult political environment, however, Republicans are protected by the limited number of seats in play.
“Even if there's the kind of swing we got in 2006, there's not going to be 40 seats changing hands. There's going to be 20 seats changing hands,” said Ian Shapiro, a Yale political scientist.
There is a long-standing debate among academics as to how much of the decline can be blamed on partisan-motivated redistricting, known as gerrymandering, and how much on Americans' increasing proclivity to live among like-minded people who vote the same way. Multiple studieshave found that without partisan gerrymandering, the House would have about double the number of competitive seats it has now.
One thing most agree on is that the diminishment of competitive seats leads to greater polarization because legislators are only beholden to primary voters.
“It produces more alienation because Congress doesn’t do anything besides investigations and positioning,” Shapiro said.
Nickel decided not to run for reelection after studying election returns going back to 2016 and finding that no Democratic incumbent had held on in a seat where Trump took 55% or more of the vote. Trump received 58% of the vote in the new district.
Nickel, who had introduced a bill to require all states to use a nonpartisan redistricting system, said at first he would run for U.S. Senate because statewide seats cannot be gerrymandered. But when former Gov. Roy Cooper announced he was running for the Democratic nomination, Nickel switched to run for district attorney of Wake County, the deeply Democratic county that was largely cut out of the 13th District.
Nickel won the Democratic primary and will take office in January. No Republican ran.
That highlights how North Carolina, and the country, have effectively become segregated by political party.
“If you just draw big blocks around a state, you're going to get noncompetitive districts because we are so polarized,” said Joshua Huder, a political scientist at Georgetown University.
Only 15% of North Carolina's voting precincts could be classified as politically competitive, according to Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College in North Carolina.
“For the average North Carolinian, depending on where they live, if they drive an hour in any direction they will be in a very different North Carolina than they live in,” he said.
That certainly is the case traversing from the old 13th District to the new one. From the office towers, cafes and gourmet restaurants of central Raleigh that were part of the competitive 13th District, it is about a 90-minute drive north through the subdivisions and soybean and tobacco farms that are the heart of the new, conservative one.
Here, few are talking about the congressional race. While plenty express dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, they see no reason to vote for anyone other than a Republican.
“It's just what I've always been,” said Linda Long, 62, a Republican in the town of Roxboro who works at the local Walmart.
George Scott, a retired architectural engineer in Franklinton, viscerally dislikes Trump but also is a lifelong Republican and expects to keep voting that way.
“It's just one person,” Scott, 75, said of the president.
This is what Paul Barringer is up against.
The Democratic nominee against Knott hopes for an upset in a year when even Republican members in safe seats like the 13th District are running scared. Neither Knott's office nor his campaign responded to a request for an interview.
On a recent evening, Barringer drove his 2011 Toyota Land Cruiser, with his two dogs in back, to the home of Mary Blank, who heads the chapter of the liberal group Indivisible in Johnston County, a fast-growing, conservative-leaning area just outside Raleigh.
Barringer, a former healthcare lawyer who returned from Maryland to the tree farm in the district where he grew up to care for his ailing mother, said he was previously a Republican but switched parties to run, hoping he could attract voters of all stripes.
“I think people are disgruntled about things that are happening,” Barringer said. “They want people who will find ways to work together.”
On the house's back porch, he was greeted rapturously by a self-admitted political minority of liberals in the conservative area. At one point, Barringer reminisced about the grueling task of curing tobacco and asked everyone who had undergone that rural North Carolina rite of passage to raise a hand. No one did.
“We're all transplants!” one woman called out.
There was palpable excitement, especially after Barringer noted that national Democrats had put the seat on a list of ones to watch for a possible upset. Blank, a retired 73-year-old social studies teacher from New Jersey, said that gave her hope, but she was realistic about the local dynamic.
“I've been saying all along I don't think Paul can win,” Blank said.
Linwood Parker agrees. “They're blowing smoke,” Parker, the 78-year-old mayor of Four Oaks, a town 26 miles south of Blank's house, said of Democrats' hopes they could win the district.
Parker is a lifelong Republican who knows well that gerrymandering is a decades-old tradition in North Carolina. Democrats used to do it ruthlessly to maintain their control of the legislature and the congressional delegation until they lost power in the 2010 wave. Now Republicans are the ones who bend the maps to benefit their party.
Parker approves even though he said he is no fan of gerrymandering, or the polarization that has eaten away at bipartisan trust in society.
“Redistricting is just one of the levers that when Republicans, when they are in control, have to touch,” Parker said. “Otherwise it's like saying, when we play this baseball game, we're going to have three outs, we'll give you two.”
A rural crossroads in Franklin County with a couple of political signs is seen, Oct. 8, 2026, in Louisburg, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Ramey)
A lone sign for Brad Knott, the Republican nominee running for North Carolina's 13th Congressional District, sits on a street corner, Oct. 8, 2026, in Clayton, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Ramey)
Former Rep. Wiley Nickel, D-N.C., poses for a portrait in downtown Raleigh on Oct. 8, 2026, in Raleigh, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Ramey)
Paul Barringer, the Democratic nominee running for North Carolina's 13th Congressional District, speaks with voters at a campaign event, Oct. 8, 2026, in Garner, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Ramey)
Paul Barringer, the Democratic nominee running for North Carolina's 13th Congressional District, poses for a photo with his dogs, Billie and Penny, on Oct. 8, 2026, in Garner, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Ramey)
