President Donald Trump’s push to shore up the GOP’s House majority through gerrymandering ahead of the 2026 elections has sparked a cycle of escalation and potential retaliation across multiple states that could upend next year’s midterms. It is also producing a long-overdue reconsideration among Democrats of gerrymandering itself, after years of unilaterally disarming on the issue.
Trump began the frenzy this summer when he successfully persuaded the state of Texas to hold a special session to redraw its congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterms. While states are required to redraw their legislative maps after each census every 10 years, there is no legal barrier to redrawing them more frequently. Trump hopes to gain as many as five additional GOP-favored seats from the Lone Star State.
California Governor Gavin Newsom was the first prominent Democrat to call for retaliatory moves to offset the gerrymander. (As I noted last week, there are still a few hurdles that could make it harder for the nation’s most populous state to act quickly enough to redraw its seats before next fall’s election.) That move broke with decades of Democrats’ professed opposition to gerrymandering, which led them to pass redistricting reforms in many Democratic-led states.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, whose state faces fewer impediments to gerrymandering than most others, hosted a group of Texas Democratic lawmakers last week in what some took as a signal that Illinois would retaliate if Republicans go forward with their plans. New York Governor Kathy Hochul also took her first steps toward support for retaliatory redistricting in public remarks last week.
“All’s fair in love and war,” she told an audience in Buffalo, according to Politico. “We’re following the rules. We do redistricting every 10 years. But if there’s other states violating the rules and are trying to give themselves an advantage, all I’ll say is, I’m going to look at it closely with [House Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries.” Jeffries, who represents a New York district, is reportedly holding discussions with House Democrats and various state governors.
Even some Republican-led states beyond Texas are now considering further steps. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said last week that his state’s legislature could take a second look at its congressional maps, claiming that Florida got a “raw deal” from the reapportionment of seats after the 2020 census. Missouri’s state lawmakers are also reportedly receiving direct pressure from Trump to eliminate the state’s fifth congressional district, a Democratic stronghold in the eastern half of Kansas City that last elected a Republican in 1946.
In the Texas saga, the White House has tried to come up with a pretext to justify the unusual maneuver. Earlier this month, Trump appointees at the Justice Department formally urged the state of Texas to redraw its congressional districts, citing a recent ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that narrowed who could bring racial gerrymandering claims under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. DOJ identified four districts in particular that it thought should be redrawn; all four were won by Democrats in the most recent House election.
Legal conservatives have increasingly treated remedies to racial gerrymandering as indistinguishable from racial gerrymandering itself, so it is unsurprising that the department made this recommendation to Texas. The Supreme Court announced in June that it would rehear a racial gerrymandering case in the upcoming term that begins in October, likely for that same reason. Rehearing the case will give the justices an opportunity to squarely decide whether a key provision in the Voting Rights Act can be used by federal courts to remedy racial gerrymandering claims.
But there is an inescapable whiff of opportunism and desperation on the administration’s part as well. Despite Trump’s victory in 2024, the GOP majority in the House actually narrowed by two seats. Republicans hold the chamber by a threadbare margin of 219 seats to the Democrats’ 212. (Four seats are vacant.) The incumbent president’s party also traditionally loses seats in the midterms: Democrats, for example, flipped 41 seats and captured the House in 2018.
To blunt that effect, Trump reportedly pressured Texas’s congressional delegation and the state’s GOP leaders over the last few weeks to support a mid-decade redistricting push to reduce the number of Democratic seats in the state. The state’s voters sent 25 Republicans and 13 Democrats to Congress in its House delegation in 2024. Texas Governor Greg Abbott eventually agreed to call a special session to redraw the maps.
In some ways, the GOP is constrained by its own success here. The party’s aggressiveness with gerrymandering after the 2010 midterms already wiped out most of the potential Democratic seats in the Midwest and South. A Pew Research Center analysis in 2024 found that fewer than one in 10 House seats would actually be competitive in that year’s election. For most Americans, the primaries actually decide who will represent them in Congress.
Because Republican-led states tend to be less populous, there are few options for gerrymandering-driven gains at this point. The GOP holds a majority of seats in 30 of the states’ House delegations. Twelve of those states, including four with a single congressional district, did not elect a single Democratic representative to the House last year. Only Texas and four other states—Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio—also have four or more Democratic seats in their House delegation.
Why do those five states still have Democratic seats at all? While gerrymandering can easily be used to keep one party in power, it is a lot harder to wield it to exclude the other party from power altogether. One reason that Texas Republicans were reluctant to squeeze more GOP seats out of their congressional map is that each additional seat raises the likelihood that it will backfire altogether.
Gerrymandering typically works by “packing” and “cracking” one party’s voters into different districts. Congressional districts are constitutionally required to be as equal in population as possible to one another. In a 10-district state where the electorate is 60 percent Republican and 40 percent Democratic, for example, lawmakers might try to pack as many of the Democrats into one or two districts as possible. Any Democrats that can’t fit in them would be distributed among the other districts so they can’t form a majority anywhere else. A 60–40 split in overall votes then becomes an 8–2 split in representation.
This approach works pretty well if the map drawers can ensure that the Republican majorities in the other four districts won’t be diluted by the inclusion of more Democratic voters. Texas’s population growth and political geography makes that a formidable challenge. If the Texas legislature shifts too many Democratic voters into GOP-favored districts, then it could find far more seats imperiled by a backlash election than if it focused on keeping the margins that it already had. Political scientists refer to this phenomenon, quite fittingly, as a “dummymander.”
Democrats cannot simply hope that the Republicans will gerrymander themselves out of power, of course. As I’ve noted before, the GOP already effectively gerrymandered itself into power at the national level over the past decade, and Republican-led states now face far fewer legal constraints than Democratic-led ones when redrawing their legislative maps, thanks to blue-state reforms over the years. It is understandable that Democrats are reluctant to abandon their stated opposition to gerrymandering after decades of hoping to find a state-by-state solution to the problem. Trump’s ham-fisted efforts to eliminate any electoral opposition to himself next year should overcome whatever remaining hesitation they might have.