How Republicans are trying to redistrict their way to a majority

Vox

5 days ago

We're more than a year out from the 2026 midterm elections, but the Republican Party is already starting to position itself for what will likely be a difficult election cycle.
Texas lawmakers have an unusual plan to redraw their maps early and eke out as many as five more likely Republican seats in the House of Representatives — and California Gov. Gavin Newsom is promising to respond by doing the same thing in California.
To find out more, I asked my colleague Christian Paz, who wrote about these efforts last week. We sat down to chat about his reporting for Vox's daily newsletter, Today, Explained, and our conversation is below. You can also sign up for the newsletter here for more conversations like this.
What are Republicans trying to do ahead of the 2026 midterms?
Ahead of the 2026 midterms, when parties in power tend to lose seats in Congress, there is an expectation that Trump, who has a tiny two-seat majority in the House, could lose that majority, which would effectively render him a lame duck for the second half of his second term. In response, Trump has been pushing for Texas state Republicans to take advantage of the fact that the legislature in Texas controls redistricting and to redraw the maps in Texas in the middle of the decade, when it is not usually the norm.
Republicans could gain about five seats that are less competitive than the current map makes it out to be — essentially dividing up Democratic districts, mixing them with some Republican-leaning voters, and carving out five more seats that presumably Republicans would then win and be able to keep their majority in the House.
Are there other states looking to do this, too?
There are a handful of other states. At the moment, there is redistricting happening in Ohio as a result of court challenges in the past, and the new maps that are being redrawn would render about three more Republican seats out of Ohio. The other state is Missouri, which would render one more Republican seat.
In response, the question has been, Can Democrats do this, too? The reason this is happening is because these are states where 1) Republicans have total control of government, and 2) the legislature still has power over drawing maps, or there are legal quirks requiring redistricting. Democrats are much more limited on this front because of the states that have Democratic trifectas, the majority of them don't give the power to redraw districts to the legislature. They give it to independent commissions or to bipartisan commissions, or their constitutions have stricter bans on redistricting early.
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With that being said, Gavin Newsom is threatening to add more Democratic seats in California. How does he want to make that happen?
His plan is a little vague. A lot of the Democratic response seems to be a form of mutually assured destruction — the main idea here is to say that you're going to do the same thing and hope to scare Republicans out of doing this. And the idea Gavin Newsom has proposed is putting a measure on the ballot in an upcoming election, having a statewide referendum to either approve new maps or permanently change the way that the state does its redistricting.
The idea there is to create five to seven more Democratic seats in California, which seems like a pretty tall order. It's possible that the state is already pretty maxed out.
Can Democrats conceivably wring enough seats out of their redistrictable states to match the GOP?
The other obvious seats that are out there are states like Oregon, Washington, and Colorado, which conceivably could all produce one to two more Democratic seats. There's always New York, too, and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who met with Democratic state lawmakers from Texas last week, has said that he's open to the idea as well.
Republicans seem to be all in for this plan. Democrats aren't so sure. Tell me about that.
The issue here is that Democrats, because they have tended to be the folks who argued against gerrymandering and this kind of politically motivated redistricting, acknowledge that it's not normal to do this. They acknowledge that maybe the rules are changing, but redistricting opens them up to charges of hypocrisy or descending to the same level as Republicans.
But many Democrats are saying, you know, We're running out of options. Democratic voters want us to do something. That's been the rallying cry from the party base to party leadership over the last year, and this is a pretty substantive plan to do that. But then what happens in the next five years? What happens in 10 years? Is this just going to become something that states do whenever they notice that their national party is in danger of losing a majority or losing a political advantage? Does that then diminish trust in the political system as a whole? Does that raise even more questions about accountability and transparency that were the point of trying to have independent redistricting to begin with?
In previous midterms, you've seen much bigger swings than five or even 10 seats, so it's very possible that this shaves the margins for Republicans, but doesn't end up swinging control of the House in 2026, right?
Yes. This could either be another 2018 'blue wave' situation, where even if Republicans redistrict, they would lose the majority anyway. Or it could be a 2022-style midterm, where you have mixed results — Democrats are able to flip some Senate seats, but Republicans are actually able to uphold or expand their House majority by small margins.
And the reason I bring that last point up is because this is another point that some critics on both sides are making. By trying to gerrymander things even more, you're making assumptions about what voters you have in your column, and given how much various parts of the electorate have swung…Black and Latino voters have swung toward the Republicans. Could they be swinging away from them this time around? Are you making an assumption as a Republican that you have a lot of a certain kind of voter, and then making a district slightly less safe because you're trying to shovel voters into a new district that you're creating?
It creates questions about same effect in California: If you try to max out even more districts, are you accidentally making some of your other districts more competitive than they have to be, and in that case, will you end up having to spend even more money and resources on races that weren't competitive before, but now are because you're trying to marginally make another seat less competitive?
There's a lot of inherent assumptions being made about what the electorate will look like next year. And again, one thing that's really easy to forget — and this is true for the parties, too, and I haven't really seen this discussed — is that in the Trump era, you have two different electorates. You have different electorates that turn out in midterms versus general elections. Sometimes it can be drastically different and much more Democratically aligned than you expect, and that ends up leading to overperformance, like in 2018 or 2022.