Tuesday’s election results have given Democrats a boost of confidence about their party’s ability to win control of Congress next year. And that momentum shift might affect calculations on both sides of the aisle, as unprecedented redistricting efforts play out in states across the country.
At least two states had votes with direct bearing on Democratic redistricting. In California, Proposition 50, the ballot measure allowing state lawmakers to counter redistricting efforts by Republicans in other states and draw a new congressional map with five pick-up opportunities for Democrats, passed by more than 27 percentage points. And Virginia, where Democrats increased their majority in the House of Delegates, is now likely to seek voter approval for a redrawn map that could net Democrats as many as three additional seats.
But Tuesday’s results might also prompt Republicans to rethink the wisdom of creating aggressive new maps that would eliminate Democratic districts – but also dilute heavily Republican ones – in order to create more districts that lean Republican. If the Democratic turnout energy and vote margins seen in this week’s elections are an early glimpse of next year’s midterms, then Republicans’ efforts to redraw themselves into a more secure House majority might not go as planned.
Why We Wrote This
Some Republicans might grow wary of creating pickup opportunities that make some GOP seats slightly less safe; others might feel more motivated now to redraw lines. Democrats could feel emboldened to push for redistricting in states beyond California, or perhaps conclude they can win without it.
“Republicans are pursuing a highly risky strategy on redistricting,” wrote former Republican and independent congressman Justin Amash of Michigan, in a post on X. “By diluting the GOP base, you are less likely to win any given seat, so the worst time to redraw is during a strong [Democratic] cycle.”
Experts say Republicans appear unlikely to wind up creating a “dummymander” – the term for when a party redraws a map too aggressively and it backfires, allowing the other party to win seats. In Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, the four states where legislators have already redrawn maps to add a total of nine new GOP-leaning districts, Republicans probably won’t end up with worse outcomes than if they had not redistricted at all.
But they might end up winning fewer of these new districts than they had hoped, says David Wasserman, senior elections analyst for the Cook Political Report. And other states that have faced White House pressure to redistrict, such as Indiana, Florida, and Kansas, might now be dissuaded from doing so. Incumbent Republicans in districts that President Donald Trump won by 20 points might be looking at new districts where Mr. Trump’s margin of victory was in the low double digits – still an uphill climb for a Democratic challenger but not an impossible one in a wave election. And they might not be willing to cut it that close.
“Even that might not be agreeable to Republicans under these circumstances,” says Mr. Wasserman. “Republicans might tread more carefully.”
Competitive districts in Texas
Congressional maps are typically redrawn every 10 years, following the release of updated population estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau. But an unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting effort took off this past summer after Mr. Trump urged Texas Republicans to create five more GOP-leaning districts.
Texas passed its new map in August, following a walkout by Democratic legislators, who decamped to Chicago in protest for about two weeks before returning home. And while the new map definitely gives Republicans an advantage, not all of Texas’ newly gerrymandered seats are locks for the GOP – especially if Democratic turnout is high.
Two of the five newly drawn congressional districts are solidly Republican: the 9th and 32nd. The latter went from a district that voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris by a 24-point margin in 2024 to a district that Mr. Trump would have won by 18 points.
Then there is the new 35th District, which was redrawn without parts of Austin and instead now expands into the rural and suburban areas southeast of San Antonio. The district had voted for Ms. Harris by 34 points in 2024, but under its new boundaries would have gone for Mr. Trump by 10 points. “If Democrats find a good candidate, that’s not an impossible seat to win,” says Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
Finally, there are the 34th and 28th Districts in South Texas. Currently represented by Democratic Reps. Vincente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar, respectively, these are districts that Mr. Trump won in 2024 by five and seven points. Under the redrawn lines, Mr. Trump’s margin of victory in both would have been about 10 points, according to Cook Political Report calculations.
But there’s no guarantee that the Republican candidate in any of these districts next year will perform nearly as well as Mr. Trump did in 2024. In the last two districts in particular, the president saw some of his biggest swings in the country because of gains he made among Latinos, who make up 83 to 90% of the voters there. And Tuesday’s election results suggest those gains might not hold. In New Jersey’s gubernatorial race, seen as a test of Mr. Trump’s standing among Latino voters, Democrat Mikie Sherrill more than doubled Ms. Harris’ 2024 margins in majority-Hispanic cities.
“Some of the Republican gains with Latinos will last, but not all of them,” says Mr. Kondik, suggesting that these two districts could be “more defendable” after this week’s results. “In 2018, the Democrats did win a handful of seats Trump had won by double digits, and I think it’s quite possible they will next year, and Cuellar or Gonzalez could survive.”
More motivated to redraw lines
The fate of these Texas districts, as well as those in other Southern states, might also be impacted by the Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling on a challenge to the Voting Rights Act. Passed during the Civil Rights era to ensure equal access to the ballot box, the law also prohibits electoral practices that dilute the votes of minority communities, such that they are effectively locked out of power. Texas’ new map immediately triggered accusations of Voting Rights Act violations, because the new districts break up Latino communities. But if the court finds it unconstitutional to intentionally create majority-minority districts, Republicans could redraw as many as a dozen seats in their favor across the South.
Some analysts suggest the GOP might be more motivated to pursue mid-cycle redistricting in the wake of Tuesday’s results. Democratic victories across the board could make Republicans feel “more desperate,” says Mr. Kondik, and conclude that gerrymandering might be their only chance to keep control of the House. At a news conference on Thursday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana mentioned redistricting as a reason he still feels bullish about his party’s ability to maintain control of the lower chamber.
But Democrats could be more motivated as well.
Virginia, where Democrats flipped 13 seats in the House of Delegates, appears ready to follow California’s lead in redrawing its maps, adding two or possibly three Democratic seats to counter Republican efforts. The newly elected House of Delegates needs to approve the move before a constitutional amendment is presented to voters.
Still, others appear to be drawing different conclusions from Tuesday’s election results. The president of the Maryland state Senate posted on X that this week’s sweeping victories demonstrate that Democrats can win without needing to “rig the system.”
On Tuesday, the Republican speaker in Kansas announced he didn’t have the votes to call a special session to address redistricting, though the matter could still be addressed later.
“A lot of people are looking for a reason to stop” the redistricting arms race, says Julia Vaughn, executive director at Common Cause Indiana, an anti-gerrymandering organization. While Indiana legislators are a “cautious bunch” and have been wary of the White House’s pressure to redraw the state’s two Democratic districts from blue to red, she says, Republicans there are set to consider new maps during the first two weeks of December.
Still, Ms. Vaughn predicts they’ll think carefully in the wake of Tuesday’s results.
In trying to eliminate Democratic seats, “they could overplay their hand and make life more difficult for Republican incumbents in other parts of the state. … Tuesday will cause that kind of thinking to weigh on the minds of folks here,” she says. “It’s a balloon here in Indiana. You squeeze it and the [Democratic] voters have to come out somewhere.”
