How Redistricting and the Fate of the Voting Rights Act Might (Not) Impact the Midterms

Midterm elections are often viewed by voters as a referendum on the performance of the current presidential administration. In recent history, this has resulted in almost consistent party defeat in the White House – and big losses – in the US House and Senate.

But the second Trump administration is far from typical, and as 2026 approaches, several factors make it considerably harder than usual to know what to expect in November.

The administration’s months-long redistricting crusade — an overt attempt to predetermine the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections — along with the ongoing Supreme Court lawsuit that could weaken the Voting Rights Act have added a significant level of uncertainty to the usually much simpler question of which party will hold the upper hand in a critical election year.

The Gerrymandering Push is not quite working

For months now, Trump and his allies have been engaged in an unprecedented campaign to pressure red states across the country to redraw the congressional map to favor Republicans. While the pressure campaign initially appeared to be a success, with early victories in Texas, North Carolina and Missouri, it has faltered in recent months, facing a series of setbacks that call into question the effectiveness of the effort as a whole.

“I think when this started, Republicans were hoping to create a gerrymandering advantage so large that it could withstand a surge,” Kyle Kondik, editor of the University of Virginia’s Sabato Crystal Ball, told TPM. “And that didn’t happen.”

Most importantly, Indiana Senate Republicans defied the Trump administration in December and rejected a proposed new map that, if approved, likely would have removed Indiana Democrats from representation in the House of Representatives.

Michael Li, senior adviser to the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, added that although “in states that are very heavily structured, the maps are very unfair — especially to voters of color” — redistricting “may not have a big effect nationally, because everything sort of offsets each other.”

“The Democrats fought back very ingeniously, in a way that a lot of people didn’t think they could do, especially in California,” Li told TPM.

California’s new Democratic districts and Texas and Missouri’s new Republican districts are exacerbating another trend sparked by the redistricting rush: the decline in the number of swing districts.

Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the Center for Election Research, noted that in general, there simply aren’t many districts that Republicans can win that are “swingable.”

“There aren’t a lot of competitive districts, either before this last mid-decade redistricting cycle or since some states implemented new maps,” Burden said. “Regardless, there just aren’t that many districts that are really up for grabs. »

And more recently, Florida has also entered the redistricting battle.

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis announced earlier this month that he would call a special session in April to draw new maps.

While it’s true that Florida’s new congressional maps will likely give Republicans a marginal advantage, experts told TPM that, too, may not be significant enough to ignore the impact of historical trends — especially when compared to other Democratic-controlled blue states that can still draw new maps, like Virginia.

“Even if Florida Republicans succeed in redistricting, Democrats still have an advantage nationally,” Burden said. “The historical pattern, compounded by Trump’s low approval ratings and the nation’s poor economic performance, suggests that Democrats will pick up additional seats. Efforts in Florida could slightly blunt the effect in that state if they are careful not to spread their supporters too thin and give incumbents too much uncharted territory.”

The Supreme Court puts its thumb on the scale

The Supreme Court has, and perhaps still has, a say in the success of Trump’s crusade. In December, he gave the green light to Texas’ new maps. Applying the same logic, he should also greenlight Democratic efforts, like California’s. But it’s not yet a sure thing.

But an even more important decision from the Supreme Court is coming: the justices have been considering since October whether to leave in place a provision of the Voting Rights Act that allows minority voters to challenge racist voting maps in court. The question, which the Court is hearing for the second time, arose following a Louisiana redistricting case. The decision – coming from a court notoriously hostile to the Voting Rights Act – could be disastrous for the representation of communities of color across the country.

In addition to weakening the Voting Rights Act, this decision could have a significant impact on the midterm elections.

“The big unknown is what the Supreme Court does in Louisiana v. Callais…and whether, when that opinion is issued, the states will have enough time to use it as justification for redrawing the maps,” Li told TPM. “And there may or may not be, it really depends on when the Supreme Court issues its opinion.”

He said that if the Court’s opinion were issued in May or June — when the Court would issue many important, non-urgent decisions — there might not be enough time to make changes in most areas, because the midterm cycle would have already started by then.

Li added that even if the ruling came sooner, it would still be difficult for most states to respond to it quickly enough for it to have any real impact in the midterms.

But he cautions that “the election cycle is still very early…there’s still a lot of politics to be done and a lot of redistricting potentially to be done.”

On top of all this, Li told TPM that he thought the Supreme Court’s decision in this case was “unlikely to be a binary decision.”

“I think a lot of people would say the Court is likely to say ‘the Voting Rights Act is acceptable in certain circumstances, but we limit the circumstances in which it is acceptable.’ And this, of course, complicates the task of States,” he told TPM. “They will have to resolve this, on a case-by-case basis, through litigation.”

Li added that even if the Supreme Court issued its decision in the Callais case in early 2026 and a state also managed to obtain a new map – based on the Supreme Court’s decision – through its legislative process relatively early in the year, that map would still be subject to legal challenges, litigation that would also have to happen before Election Day for the map to be used in 2026.

All of this suggests that a move further scaling back the Voting Rights Act poses far more danger to voters in 2028 than in this year’s midterms.

The outsized impact of historical trends

Looking ahead to 2026, election scholars and analysts surveyed by TPM point out that the historical trend of the president’s party losing House seats in midterm elections could prove to be the most important factor in determining the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections – more impactful than last year’s gerrymandering crusade, more impactful than Republican efforts to redistrict further in 2026, and more impacting, at least in the short-term electoral sense, only further eviscerations. of the Voting Rights Act.

“I think the most important thing is the historical trend, which is that the president’s party tends to lose seats in midterm elections,” Burden told TPM. “Typically, in the postwar period, there are about two dozen seats that swing between the in-party and the outgoing party. So if 2026 comes anywhere near that, Democrats would easily get a majority in the House.”

David Paleologos, director of the Center for Political Research at Suffolk University, also noted the unlikelihood that the midterm elections will defy this historical trend.

“Challenging pronounced historical trends is as difficult as Sisyphus rolling a huge boulder up a steep hill, only to watch it roll back down,” Palaiologos noted.