{"id":199335,"date":"2026-03-01T14:10:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-01T14:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/199335\/"},"modified":"2026-03-01T14:10:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T14:10:10","slug":"assessing-national-redistricting-fight-as-midterm-vote-begins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/199335\/","title":{"rendered":"Assessing national redistricting fight as midterm vote begins"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Donald Trump has never been one to play by the rules<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Whether it\u2019s stiffing contractors as a real estate developer<\/a>, defying court orders <\/a>he doesn\u2019t like as president or leveraging the Oval Office to vastly inflate his family\u2019s fortune<\/a>, Trump\u2019s guiding principle can be distilled to a simple, unswerving calculation: What\u2019s in it for me<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Trump is no student of history. He\u2019s famously allergic to books. But he knows enough to know that midterm elections<\/a> like the one in November have, with few exceptions, been ugly for the party holding the presidency<\/a>.<\/p>\n

With control of the House \u2014 and Trump\u2019s virtually unchecked authority <\/a>\u2014 dangling by a gossamer thread, he reckoned correctly that Republicans were all but certain to lose power this fall<\/a> unless something unusual happened.<\/p>\n

So he effectively broke the rules.<\/p>\n

Normally, the redrawing of the country\u2019s congressional districts takes place once every 10 years<\/a>, following the census and accounting for population changes over the previous decade. Instead, Trump prevailed upon the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott<\/a>, to throw out the state\u2019s political map and refashion congressional lines to wipe out Democrats<\/a> and boost GOP chances of winning as many as five additional House seats. <\/p>\n

The intention was to create a bit of breathing room, as Democrats need a gain of just three seats to seize control of the House.<\/p>\n

In relatively short order, California\u2019s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom<\/a>, responded with his own partisan gerrymander<\/a>. He rallied voters to pass a tit-for-tat ballot measure, Proposition 50<\/a>, which revised the state\u2019s political map to wipe out Republicans and boost Democratic prospects of winning as many as five additional seats.<\/p>\n

Then came the deluge.<\/p>\n

In more than a dozen states, lawmakers looked at ways<\/a> to tinker with their congressional maps to lift their candidates, stick it to the other party<\/a> and gain House seats in November. <\/p>\n

Some of those efforts continue, including in Virginia where, as in California, voters are being asked<\/a> to amend the state Constitution to let majority Democrats redraw political lines ahead of the midterm. A special election is set for April 21.<\/p>\n

But as the first ballots of 2026 are cast on Tuesday \u2014 in Arkansas, North Carolina and Texas \u2014 the broad contours of the House map have become clearer, along with the result of all those partisan machinations. The likely upshot is a nationwide partisan shift of fewer than a handful of seats.<\/p>\n

The independent, nonpartisan Cook Political Report<\/a>, which has a sterling decades-long record of election forecasting, said the most probable outcome is a wash. \u201cAt the end of the day,\u201d said Erin Covey, who analyzes House races for the Cook Report, \u201cthis doesn\u2019t really benefit either party in a real way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well. <\/p>\n

That was a lot of wasted time and energy.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take a quick spin through the map and the math, knowing that, of course, there are no election guarantees.<\/p>\n

In Texas, for instance, new House districts were drawn assuming Latinos would back Republican candidates by the same large percentage they supported Trump<\/a> in 2024. But that\u2019s become much less certain, given the backlash against his draconian immigration enforcement<\/a> policies; numerous polls show a significant falloff in Latino support<\/a> for the president, which could hurt GOP candidates up and down the ballot.<\/p>\n

But suppose Texas Republicans gain five seats as hoped for and California Democrats pick up the five seats they\u2019ve hand-crafted. The result would be no net change.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, under the best case for each party, a gain of four Democratic House seats in Virginia would be offset by a gain of four Republican House seats in Florida.<\/p>\n

That leaves a smattering of partisan gains here and there. A combined pickup of four or so Republican seats in Ohio, North Carolina<\/a> and Missouri<\/a> could be mostly offset by Democratic gains of a seat apiece in New York, Maryland and Utah.<\/p>\n

(The latter is not a result of legislative high jinks, but rather a judge throwing out the gerrymandered map<\/a> passed by Utah Republicans, who ignored a voter-approved ballot measure intended to prevent such heavy-handed partisanship. A newly created district<\/a>, contained entirely within Democratic-leaning Salt Lake County, seems certain to go Democrats\u2019 way in November.)<\/p>\n

In short, it\u2019s easy to characterize the political exertions of Trump, Abbott, Newsom and others as so much sound and fury producing, at bottom, little to nothing.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not necessarily so.<\/p>\n

The campaign surrounding Proposition 50 delivered a huge political boost to Newsom<\/a>, shoring up his standing with Democrats, significantly raising his profile across the country and, not least for his 2028 presidential hopes<\/a>, helping the governor build a significant nationwide fundraising base.<\/p>\n

In crimson-colored Indiana, Republicans refused to buckle<\/a> under tremendous pressure from Trump, Vice President JD Vance<\/a> and other party leaders, rejecting an effort to redraw the state\u2019s congressional map and give the GOP a hold on all nine House seats. That showed even Trump\u2019s Svengali-like hold on his party has its limits.<\/p>\n

But the biggest impact is also the most corrosive.<\/p>\n

By redrawing political lines to predetermine the outcome of House races, politicians rendered many of their voters irrelevant and obsolete. Millions of Democrats in Texas, Republicans in California and partisans in other states have been effectively disenfranchised<\/a>, their voices rendered mute. Their ballots spindled and nullified.<\/p>\n

In short, the politicians \u2014 starting with Trump \u2014 extended a big middle finger to a large portion of the American electorate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Is it any wonder, then, so many voters hold politicians <\/a>and our political system in contempt<\/a>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump has never been one to play by the rules. Whether it\u2019s stiffing contractors as a real…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[7,26699,1751,536,38710,457,39555,48,52,51,47,50,49,24696,4763,1748,19297,225,564,1522,8843],"class_list":{"0":"post-199335","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-congressional-map","10":"tag-democrats","11":"tag-donald-trump","12":"tag-gain","13":"tag-gavin-newsom","14":"tag-house-seat","15":"tag-la","16":"tag-la-headlines","17":"tag-la-news","18":"tag-los-angeles","19":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","20":"tag-los-angeles-news","21":"tag-party","22":"tag-politician","23":"tag-republicans","24":"tag-seat","25":"tag-state","26":"tag-texas","27":"tag-voter","28":"tag-way"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}