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President Donald Trump marched the nation into a historic redistricting arms race with his brazen move to get red states to draw as many new GOP-leaning districts as possible. Already, more states have voluntarily redrawn their congressional maps in the middle of a decade than had done so in the last half-century combined. And it was an arms race the GOP was always likely to win, given the power dynamics involved. But four months into the battle, the GOP’s gains are looking relatively muted. Indeed, it’s looking like Trump’s move could be much more damaging to democracy — by normalizing these kinds of bare-knuckle political tactics for years to come — than to the Democratic Party in 2026. Appropriately enough for the Trump era, the biggest victim here could wind up being our political norms. While much remains to be determined, Democrats have benefited from a series of positive developments in recent weeks. The big one, of course, was the easy passage last week of a California ballot measure that allows the party to draw five new Democratic-leaning districts in that state. Gov. Gavin Newsom launched that effort to offset the GOP’s gains in Texas, the state where Trump and the GOP started this war. And California voters overwhelmingly agreed (65%-35%) that retaliation was warranted. Democrats have also benefited from a new compromise map in Ohio that wasn’t as bad for them as it could have been, along with the reluctance of Republicans in some red states to heed Trump’s call to squeeze every district they can out of the process. The election results last week were also positive for Democrats in a few subtler ways. For one, Democrats greatly expanded their advantage in the Virginia House of Delegates and swept the state’s executive offices, which should help them press forward with drawing more Democratic-leaning districts. For two, the big swings toward Democrats from the 2024 elections might give Republicans pause about trying to draw too many more favorable districts. The more you draw, after all, the more it spreads your voters thin and risks your districts getting swept up in a wave election for the other side. (Want an example of how that can work? See: the 1894 election.) “Tonight is such a blowout so far that I wonder if it gives some Rs pause about redistricting in states that are still pondering it,” Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics said on X on election night. And then came perhaps the most pleasant surprise of all for Democrats, on Monday in Utah. A federal judge threw out a Republican-drawn map and adopted an alternate one that gave Democrats a new safely blue seat in Salt Lake City. So where does all this leave us? CNN’s elections team has a great new tracker where you can monitor it all. All told, Republicans have added an estimated nine new GOP targets in Texas, Ohio, North Carolina and Missouri, while Democrats have added about six in California and Utah. The big questions from here are what happens in Florida and Virginia, where each side could gain three or more seats — Republicans in the former and Democrats in the latter. And seats could be in play for one side or the other in Indiana and Kansas (for Republicans) and Illinois and Maryland (for Democrats). We don’t yet know how that will shake out. Legal challenges loom over some of the states that have already moved or could move. Another major question is whether the Supreme Court opens the door to even more aggressive gerrymandering by striking down part of the Voting Rights Act — a move that could completely change the game in the South and give Republicans a major advantage. That would likely impact elections held after 2026. But it’s entirely possible that, for 2026, Republicans could wind up netting about three to five seats total from this exercise. That’s where we’d be if every other state that’s in play actually followed through. And the GOP’s gains could be even less than that when you factor in how competitive some of these seats could be in a Democratic-leaning election, as the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman notes. For instance, Democrats’ gains with Hispanic voters in last week’s elections make the Texas GOP’s hopes of winning two of the five new Republican-leaning districts look more tenuous. The GOP was banking on maintaining Trump’s big gains with Hispanic voters in 2024, but that’s looking like a not-so-great bet right now. And if the GOP nets only three to five seats, that’s likely to have negligible impact on who controls the House after the 2026 elections. That’s because the party that doesn’t hold the White House usually wins lots of seats in midterm elections — more than enough to cover the difference. Without any redistricting changes, Democrats need to flip three seats. A GOP gain of three to five seats would stretch that to Democrats needing to flip between six and eight seats. The opposition party has failed to win that many seats only nine times since the Civil War, and not once since 2002, according to data from the Brookings Institution. Throw Trump’s significant unpopularity on top of that, and it appears unlikely that his redistricting gambit will ultimately do what he wanted: prevent Democrats from controlling the House for the president’s two final years in office. But what Trump will have done is saddle the country with a new political reality in which each side is tempted to redraw districts whenever it’s advantageous and we get fewer and fewer competitive districts, as Kondik wrote last week.
