President Trump’s big bet on redrawing House maps to lock in a Republican edge instead helped Democrats reclaim the chamber. His push prodded at least eight GOP-led states into mid-decade redistricting designed to squeeze out as many as 16 Democratic seats, but not a single targeted Democratic incumbent lost on Tuesday, the Hill reports. Instead, new lines fractured conservative strongholds and forced Republican incumbents into unfamiliar territory in places like Texas, North Carolina, and Ohio. Democrats flipped multiple Republican seats, including districts Trump easily carried in 2024.
The Republican redistricting push “simply did not anticipate” an electorate that swung toward House Democrats by around 13 points, the New York Times reports. Only one of the five redrawn districts in Texas went to a Republican, while Democrats flipped two other seats in the state. In Florida, redistricting failed to add Republican seats. In Ohio, it may have cost the party two seats.
“Donald Trump and Republicans poked the bear, and they got mauled,” says John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “There’s no way to look at this cycle and not see that the scheme to gerrymander the country was a complete and utter catastrophe.” Analysts say Republicans who changed voting maps treated groups that swung toward the party in 2020 and 2024, including Hispanic voters in Texas, as a permanent new part of the party’s base, which backfired when those groups swung toward Democrats this year.
The biggest failure may have been in North Carolina, where Republicans redrew the map this year for the second time in three years. It was designed to secure 11 seats for Republicans, leaving Democrats with three, the News & Observer reports. Instead, with a few close races still to be called, the delegation appears likely to change from ten Republicans and four Democrats to four Republicans and ten Democrats. Analysts say Republicans aiming for the maximum number of wins spread themselves too thin. Another factor that thwarted GOP-led redistricting was a big jump in Black turnout, partly in response to a Supreme Court ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act, the Atlantic reports. Alabama’s new map, made possible by the ruling, aimed to unseat Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures, but he ended up winning his redrawn district by more than 7 points. In California, meanwhile, Democrats gained seats from their own redistricting push. “We made clear last year, when this corrupt effort to rig the midterm elections by gerrymandering congressional maps in red states all across the country began, that Republicans might start this redistricting and gerrymandering battle, but Democrats were going to finish it,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Wednesday. “And last night, that’s exactly what happened.”