Assessing national redistricting fight as midterm vote begins

Donald Trump has never been one to play by the rules.

Whether it’s coercing entrepreneurs as a real estate developer, defying court orders he doesn’t like as president, or leveraging the Oval Office to vastly inflate his family’s fortune, Trump’s guiding principle can be boiled down to a simple, unwavering calculation: What’s in it for me?

Trump is not a student of history. He is notoriously allergic to books. But he knows enough to know that midterm elections like November’s have, with few exceptions, been disastrous for the party that holds the presidency.

With control of the House—and Trump’s virtually unchecked authority—hanging by a thin thread, he correctly reasoned that Republicans were almost certain to lose power this fall unless something unusual happened.

So he actually broke the rules.

Normally, redrawing of the nation’s congressional districts occurs every 10 years, following the census and taking into account demographic changes over the previous decade. Instead, Trump convinced Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to reject the state’s political map and reshape congressional lines to eliminate Democrats and increase the Republican Party’s chances of winning up to five more House seats.

The intention was to create some breathing room, as Democrats only need three seats to take control of the House.

In relatively short order, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, responded with a partisan gerrymander of his own. He rallied voters to pass a tit-for-tat ballot measure, Proposition 50, which overhauled the state’s political map to eliminate Republicans and boost Democrats’ chances of winning up to five more seats.

Then came the flood.

In more than a dozen states, lawmakers have looked for ways to change their congressional maps to elevate their candidates, stick them to the other party and gain seats in the House in November.

Some of these efforts are continuing, notably in Virginia where, as in California, voters are being asked to amend the state Constitution to allow majority Democrats to redraw their political lines before the midterms. Special elections are scheduled for April 21.

But as the first runoffs of 2026 take place on Tuesday – in Arkansas, North Carolina and Texas – the broad contours of the House map have become clearer, along with the outcome of all these partisan machinations. The likely result is a nationwide partisan swing of less than a handful of seats.

The independent, nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which has a strong track record of election predictions going back decades, said the most likely outcome was failure. “At the end of the day,” said Erin Covey, who analyzes House races for the Cook Report, “it really doesn’t benefit either party.”

GOOD.

It was a lot of time and energy wasted.

Let’s take a quick look at the map and the calculations, knowing that, of course, there are no electoral guarantees.

In Texas, for example, the new House districts were drawn under the assumption that Latinos would support Republican candidates in the same high percentages as they had supported Trump in 2024. But that has become much less certain, given the backlash against his draconian immigration enforcement policies; Many polls show a significant decline in Latino support for the president, which could hurt Republican candidates down the ballot.

But suppose the Texas Republicans get five seats as hoped and the California Democrats get the five seats they hand-crafted. The result would not be a net change.

Elsewhere, in the best-case scenario for each party, a gain of four Democratic seats in the House of Representatives in Virginia would be offset by a gain of four Republican seats in the House of Representatives in Florida.

That leaves a few partisan gains here and there. A combined Republican victory of about four seats in Ohio, North Carolina and Missouri could be largely offset by Democratic gains of one seat each in New York, Maryland and Utah.

(The latter result is not the result of grand legislative scams, but rather of a judge throwing out the hand-picked map adopted by Utah Republicans, who ignored a voter-approved ballot measure intended to prevent such brutal partisanship. A newly created district, contained entirely in Democratic-leaning Salt Lake County, appears certain to go the Democrats’ way in November.)

In short, it is easy to characterize the political efforts of Trump, Abbott, Newsom and others as much sound and fury producing, ultimately, little or nothing.

But this is not necessarily the case.

The campaign around Proposition 50 gave Newsom a huge political boost, strengthening his standing with Democrats, significantly raising his profile across the country and, notably for his 2028 presidential hopes, helping the governor build a major fundraising base nationally.

In crimson Indiana, Republicans refused to buckle under enormous pressure from Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other party leaders, rejecting efforts to redraw the state’s congressional map and give the Republican Party a hold on all nine House seats. This shows that even Trump’s Svengali-style hold on his party has its limits.

But the greatest impact is also the most corrosive.

By redrawing political lines to predetermine the outcome of House races, politicians have rendered many of their constituents irrelevant and obsolete. Millions of Democrats in Texas, Republicans in California, and supporters in other states have been disenfranchised and their voices silenced. Their ballots were twisted and canceled.

In short, politicians – starting with Trump – have extended a big middle finger to a large part of the American electorate.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many voters despise politicians and our political system?