Republicans Might Still Lose Half The Seats They Gerrymandered To Flip

Republicans' are growing increasingly worried their mid-decade gerrymandering push isn’t going to save their House majority.

The norm-breaking plan hatched by the White House last summer to draw new maps to protect the party from an unfavorable midterm environment is not on track to bear the fruits they hoped it would. Two months out from Election Day, Republicans are sweating races they thought they would win comfortably when they redrew district boundaries, according to conversations with a dozen Republican strategists on Friday.

Republicans did win the midterm mapmaking war and will likely net at least six seats via gerrymandering — but that’s less than half the number they’d initially hoped when they began the ambitious project over a year ago. That’s largely due to the same political environment threatening GOP seats once thought safe across the map, with President Donald Trump’s approval rating hovering in the high-30s as the unpopular war in Iran continues to affect Americans’ pocketbooks.

Seats designed to be safe in Texas, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina are all still surprisingly competitive, leaving Republicans looking at smaller gains that came from southern state redraws. And on Friday, the Missouri Supreme Court delivered another blow when it blocked a one-seat GOP gerrymander from taking effect this year unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes.

Adam Kincaid, president of the National Republican Redistricting Trust and the cartographer of Texas’ redraw, said the mid-decade gerrymandering push still made 10 House districts more favorable for the GOP — but can’t guarantee an outcome.

“Redistricting is construction, not sales,” Kincaid said in an interview Friday. “The other thing I tell people all the time is ‘politics is not the Field of Dreams.’ Just because you build it doesn't mean they're going to come.”

And those redraws took effort and political capital that could have been spent elsewhere.

“Imagine if we had spent all of the time and energy and resources that have been spent on this redistricting war and instead focused on something like making life more affordable for Americans,” said Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-Calif.), who left the GOP after his district was redrawn by Democrats in California and who has proposed a bill that has been blocked by leaders of both parties to end mid-decade redistricting.

Republicans redrew maps in eight states — Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama — while Democrats only pulled off a gerrymander in California. (They got another seat from a Utah court decision but had their Virginia gerrymander blocked in court.) In a less hostile political environment, that could have netted the GOP more than a dozen seats.

But they’re not all looking so solid. Texas Republicans are growing increasingly worried that newly drawn Latino-heavy seats Trump carried by double digits in 2024 are looking shaky, and the five-seat net they’d hoped out of the state looks increasingly unrealistic by the day.“The Texas redistricting effort will for sure yield a two-seat gain, and more than likely yield a three-seat gain,” said Alfredo Rodriguez, a Dallas-based Republican strategist. “Picking up five seats will be difficult considering the environment and headwinds Republicans face this cycle.”In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis looks very much alive in a tough seat redrawn by the GOP to take him out.

And Florida’s new gerrymander isn’t looking bulletproof, either, with Democratic Reps. Darren Soto, Kathy Castor and Jared Moskowitz running hard to hold onto newly red-leaning territory.

“Those are all going to be competitive races for sure,” Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis said last week in Tampa. “I think if this were 2022 and these guys were running those races, we’d win all four — no question, slam dunk. This year, they’re winnable, but I think it’s going to require some effort.”

Republicans took a more clear-cut blow on Thursday, when the Missouri Supreme Court erased a map gutting Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s seat. The U.S. Supreme Court could still undo part of that decision ahead of November, and Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, has said the state will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to do so.

Some Republicans are bullish they will win that appeal, including Kincaid, but others are skeptical. A Missouri GOP strategist working on congressional campaigns, granted anonymity to speak candidly, called the appeal a “hail mary pass.”

In response to a request for comment to the White House, Republican National Committee spokesperson Ally Triolo said lambasted the Missouri decision as “reckless and wrong.”

Republicans’ safest pickups remain in the South after Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama redrew their maps following the Supreme Court’s limiting of the Voting Rights Act, and Republicans responded by splitting safely blue, heavily Black districts to make them unwinnable for Democrats. National Republicans argue the whole thing was worth it and will still lead to gains for the GOP, adding that Democrats’ California gerrymander left competitive seats, too.

The NRCC has long been bullish that redistricting will help them maintain their razor-thin House majority. In a memo obtained by POLITICO earlier this summer, the committee argued that redistricting has created “structural dynamics [that] favor Republicans” by shrinking the number of competitive seats across the map.

They point to extensive data that shows Democrats historically performing poorly in a host of the seats that were redrawn this year — including three in California and several in Texas and Florida. For example, their data shows that the newly drawn Texas 35th District has never been carried by a Democrat in any race, even though the party is targeting it in November. “The naysayers and bedwetters fail to recognize that Democrats promised the moon in California, and instead they’re being forced to fight tooth and nail across deep-red territory in states like Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Make Marinella said in a statement.

Not all Republicans are feeling as optimistic. Ohio GOP strategist Bob Clegg said the deal Republicans made with Democrats on the state’s redistricting commission to approve a more moderate gerrymander over a map that could have effectively flipped three districts means Republicans are having to use resources to compete in Ohio that could be spent elsewhere. (Rep. Max Miller’s ongoing personal scandals aren’t helping in his seat, either.)

“When the national political environment's not in your favor, you gotta spend a lot of money in these races,” Clegg said. “Now the question here in Ohio is, are we a red enough state that we can survive that?”

Gary Fineout and Samuel Benson contributed to this report.