How Republicans Lost The Gerrymandering War

At the urging of President Trump, Republican legislators spent the better part of a year trying to fortify their House majority against an expected midterm onslaught from Democrats. They surgically redrew congressional districts in their favor, with the goal of making it almost impossible for Democrats to win in Republican-controlled states. On Tuesday night, however, the wall that Republicans had gerrymandered for themselves collapsed into dust.

Republicans are poised to lose nearly all of the seats that they remapped and are likely to lose many more that blue-state Democrats redrew in response. Targeted Democratic incumbents who were thought to be doomed under the new maps prevailed in Florida, Ohio, and Alabama. In Texas, where Trump launched his gerrymandering blitz, a pair of candidates—Bobby Pulido and Johnny Garcia—benefitted from a sharp swing left among Latino voters to win seats that were redrawn.

Nowhere did the president’s aggression backfire more clearly than in the purple state of North Carolina. Previous rounds of GOP gerrymandering had already given Republicans control of 10 out of the state’s 14 U.S. House seats. But they wanted more, and last year, the party’s majorities in the North Carolina legislature created new lines aimed at forcing Representative Don Davis out of the state’s largely rural First Congressional District. To make Davis’s seat redder—Trump would have carried this new constituency by 12 points had it been in place in 2024—lawmakers had to pull Republican voters from other districts, cutting into their advantage elsewhere.

Davis won his race on Tuesday, but that was the least of the GOP’s problems in North Carolina: With most ballots counted, Republicans are on the verge of losing five of their original House seats, and they held only narrow leads in four others. Democrats were virtually assured of controlling a majority of the delegation and came within several thousand votes of sweeping all 14 districts.

The Republican redistricting nationwide was no match for a landslide that has Democrats projected to claim as many as 255 House seats—a gain of more than 40 districts, which would be far greater than forecasters had predicted. Analysts pointed to two factors that spoiled the GOP’s gerrymanders. First, Black-voter turnout surged in reaction to both Trump-administration policies and the Supreme Court’s decision to gut a key section of the Voting Rights Act. That ruling spurred Republicans in southern states to redraw additional seats that the VRA had kept intact for majority-Black communities. “It galvanized the Democratic opposition,” former Attorney General Eric Holder, who now runs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, told us. LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of the advocacy group Black Voters Matter Fund, put it another way: “I call it the great Blacklash.”

In Alabama, a new Republican-drawn map—which was made possible by the Supreme Court decision—reduced the number of Black voters in the district held by Representative Shomari Figures, making him one of the most vulnerable Democratic incumbents in the country. But Figures won reelection by more than seven points, buoyed in part by a large Black-voter turnout. In the majority-Black Montgomery County, turnout was up 38 percentage points compared with 2022. “We had the deck stacked against us,” Figures told supporters last night. He pointed to the civil-rights activist Sheyann Webb-Christburg, who, at age 9, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march. “Seeing what has happened to the Voting Rights Act means a little something different to her,” Figures said. “This is for you,” he told Webb-Christburg.

In Texas, GOP legislators who redrew the state’s U.S. House map, under pressure from Trump, based their new lines in part on gains that Republicans had made with Latino voters over several cycles, including significant swings toward Trump in 2020 and 2024. That calculation proved unwise, the GOP strategist Mike Madrid told us. Democrats won four of the five seats that the Texas legislature had gerrymandered. Republicans had treated Latino voters as a new and enduring part of their base, carving out districts in the same way that Democrats have used the Black voting bloc to maximize their own political power. “That doesn’t work with Latinos, and that’s what Republicans just found out,” Madrid said.

Republicans admitted to having few regrets about the redistricting war they launched and lost. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis defended his push to redraw the state’s U.S. House map even though it appeared that every seat would remain in the hands of Democrats. “We had 20 Republicans going into the election. We have 20 Republicans in our congressional delegation now. So it is what it is,” DeSantis told reporters. Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, told us that redistricting helped the party stave off even steeper losses nationally. The new maps, he said, were not to blame for the GOP’s shellacking. “You place a bet [and] you hope that they deliver,” Kincaid said. But, he added, “map drawers do not have the ability to control the national environment.”

[Read: The fight-club rule on gerrymandering]

The question now is whether the parties will seek an escalation in the gerrymandering wars or declare a truce. Until recently, Trump had shown no signs of wanting to back off. Earlier this year, he targeted Republican legislators in the few states where the GOP had bucked his push to redistrict. But after Tuesday, it is the Democrats who will likely have more opportunities to press their advantage. Their sweeps of state legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota could allow them to redraw maps in their favor for future elections.

Will they, we asked Holder, even if Republicans hold off? “I don’t think so,” he replied, urging Democrats instead to renew their push for a nationwide ban on partisan gerrymandering.

The Democrats who will soon run Congress, however, might have other ideas. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader who is in line to become speaker, reminded reporters Wednesday that although Republicans might have started this gerrymandering tit for tat, “we were going to finish it, and last night, that’s exactly what happened.” When a reporter asked Jeffries whether Democrats would rule out their own unilateral moves to redistrict now that they will have a sizable House majority, he declined to do so. “They messed around,” Jeffries said, “and now they’re going to find out.”