President Donald Trump’s gerrymandering war has never looked riskier for his party.
Prodded by Trump, Republicans earlier this year launched an audacious plan to entrench their congressional majority by redrawing House-district maps to squeeze out Democrats—anywhere and everywhere they could. The gambit was an exercise in political power and, coming outside of the traditional decennial redistricting process, without precedent in modern history.
Yet if Democrats feared not long ago that they would be locked out of a House majority, their decisive victories across the country last night have made them, arguably, the favorites heading into next year’s midterm elections.
In California, an overwhelming majority voted to redistrict, essentially canceling out the five House seats that Republicans had thought they gained through redistricting in Texas over the summer. The GOP’s steep losses farther east cast even more doubt on the wisdom of its redistricting push. Voters repudiated Republicans virtually across the board, handing Democrats convincing victories for the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, important judicial and legislative races in Pennsylvania, and, for the first time in two decades, a pair of statewide elections in Georgia. In Virginia, the breadth of the Democrats’ win gave them their largest majority in the state House of Delegates since 1989.
For Democrats, the results were reminiscent of—and in many cases stronger than—the victories they posted during the 2017 elections, in Trump’s first term, which presaged the wave that delivered them the House majority a year later. Even if the GOP’s gerrymandering advantage nets the party a few additional seats, Democrats will have a narrower gap to overcome next year than they did eight years ago.
Among the constituencies that swung the hardest toward Democrats yesterday were Latinos, who helped power Trump’s presidential win last year and were key to the GOP’s redrawn congressional map in Texas. The Republicans’ chances of flipping five additional House seats there rest in part on their holding Trump’s gains among Latino voters. That was a questionable assumption from the start, the longtime GOP strategist Mike Madrid told me. It appears even shakier in light of Tuesday’s election results; in New Jersey, for example, the state’s three most heavily Latino counties moved sharply back to the left after swinging toward Trump in 2024.
“None of this is good for Republicans. It’s all their own doing, though,” Madrid said. Latinos in Texas border towns may vote differently in 2026 than Latinos in New Jersey did this year. But the anti-GOP shift in this week’s elections could boost the Democrats’ chances of winning two and possibly three of the five Texas seats that Republicans redrew in their favor, Madrid told me. It could also open up even more opportunities for Democrats, because to create the additional red-leaning seats, Republicans had to cut into previously safe GOP districts. “The problem is they’re spreading their other districts thin as they’re getting greedy,” Madrid said.
Yesterday’s election results could complicate both parties’ plans to escalate their gerrymandering tit-for-tat across the country. In addition to their Texas effort, Republicans have enacted newly drawn congressional maps in Missouri and North Carolina that could yield them an additional House seat in each state. Florida legislators are eyeing a gerrymander that could boost the GOP’s chances in multiple seats, although the state’s significant proportion of Latino voters could pose similar redistricting challenges for Republicans there as those in Texas saw.
Internal opposition, however, has slowed the GOP’s drive elsewhere. Ohio Republicans cut a deal with Democrats on revised districts that are more favorable for the GOP but not nearly as aggressive as some party leaders had advocated for. In Indiana, Republicans remain short of the votes they would need in the state legislature to gerrymander both of its House Democrats out of their seats, despite an intense pressure campaign from the White House. And just as polls were closing in eastern states last night, Kansas Republicans announced that they lacked support to call a special legislative session to redraw the House seat of Representative Sharice Davids, the lone Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation.
Some Democrats, meanwhile, were emboldened by the success of California’s Proposition 50, the ballot measure devised by Governor Gavin Newsom that temporarily redraws the state congressional map to target five Republican-held House seats and strengthen five additional swing districts represented by Democrats. With 75 percent of precincts reporting today, the referendum was leading by more than 25 points. (Republicans immediately filed a lawsuit to block the new California maps, as they had promised to do if Prop 50 passed.) The GOP’s “biggest strategy for trying to steal the 2026 election is falling apart before their eyes,” Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, told reporters on a conference call trumpeting the party’s electoral wins.
Even before Democrats swept Virginia’s elections last night, the party’s state legislative majorities began a two-year process to gerrymander two or three Republicans out of their House seats in the 2026 elections. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has pushed Democratic leaders in Illinois and Maryland to similarly redraw their state’s congressional maps. But the effort has met resistance from some Democratic lawmakers.
In Maryland, the state Senate president, Bill Ferguson, used the party’s electoral success yesterday to argue against an attempt to draw a new map that would likely give Democrats all eight of its House seats. (Republicans currently hold one.) “Tonight’s resounding Democratic victory shows we don’t need to rig the system to win,” Ferguson wrote on X. His comment earned a sharp rebuttal from his counterpart in neighboring Virginia, the state Senate president pro tempore, L. Louise Lucas. “Get our victory in Virginia out of your mouth while you echo MAGA talking points,” she posted this afternoon. “Grow a pair and stand up to this President. This is just embarrassing.”
Martin said he hoped Tuesday’s election results, and especially the Prop 50 vote in California, would “send a chilling effect to Republicans” who are trying to gerrymander more states. “It’s not going to net you enough seats to guarantee that you’re going to control the U.S. House next year,” he said. “So knock it off now.”
There was no signal from Republicans that they planned to abandon their efforts. Although Trump voiced disappointment in the election results, other party leaders dismissed them. “There’s no surprises. What happened last night was blue states and blue cities voted blue,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters outside the Capitol. “Off-year elections are not indicative of what’s to come.” (The speaker had a different interpretation of the off-year elections four years ago, when they went the GOP’s way: “RED WAVE is coming,” Johnson posted then.)
One GOP strategist, who was granted anonymity to candidly assess the party’s performance, told me that yesterday’s results were “a wake-up call.” But the strategist said Republicans remained “full-steam ahead” on their redistricting push in Florida.
Madrid said the elections should send each party a message on redistricting. Republicans should “pause and stop and contemplate. Say, ‘Wait a second. Maybe we made a mistake here.’” At the same time, Democrats should understand, he said, that they can win elections at the ballot box without sacrificing the moral high ground on gerrymandering. Madrid wasn’t optimistic, however: “There’s a lesson for both parties in this, and neither one of them will learn it.”
Great Job Russell Berman & the Team @ The Atlantic Source link for sharing this story.
