The Blue Wave Swamped Trump’s Redistricting Wall

President Donald Trump went all-in on an unprecedented mid-decade redistricting push to protect the GOP’s House majority. The blue wave washed right over it.

In a normal year, Republicans' multi-state push to redraw seats should have handed them as many as a dozen extra seats. But in a historically large wave year — Democrats are on pace to win the national popular vote by roughly a 13-point margin — Republicans ended up netting just two seats.

In Texas, Republicans who kicked off the national fight thought they could pick up five more House seats with their new map. Instead, they won just one. In Tennessee, their gerrymander netted one seat — but they’re also on track to lose another deep-red seat that surprisingly flipped. The party's only clear win is in Louisiana, where they’ll likely gain a seat in a race that is headed to a runoff.

“Calling it a dummymander is generous. This was more like moron-mandering,” said one frustrated Texas Republican strategist who, like others in this report, was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “We went for five seats, won none, killed an incumbent, and handed Democrats a reason to turn out. Was living with [Democratic Rep.] Henry Cuellar really that hard?”

Florida Republicans redrew their map to make four more seats ripe for a flip.

“If we pick up one seat, one would argue it's successful,” GOP Rep. Randy Fine said of his state’s redrawn map Tuesday night shortly after polls closed. “You know, it's one more than we would have had.”

But when the dust cleared, it looks like they didn’t even manage that. Assuming no close races change hands, the state produced a net-zero gain for Republicans — and they barely avoided losing a number of other seats there. Rep. Darren Soto (D-Fla.) seems poised to hang on to a seat Republicans drew to favor Trump by 17 points, though it has not been called by the Associated Press.

One Florida House Republican said the overall effort “absolutely” backfired, calling it a “rough night for sure.”

North Carolina was one of the biggest disasters for the party. The GOP redrew an earlier gerrymander to try to oust Democratic Rep. Don Davis. But he appears to have won anyway, partly due to a blowout Senate race for Democrats — and Republicans are on track to lose six other seats, including National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson’s. Those losses aren’t all directly tied to last year’s redraw, but they are a stark example of the expansiveness of the blue wave.

Ohio Republicans, too, did not make any gains despite a more favorable map that they thought would flip them two seats as the top of the ticket dragged them down.

The lack of gains from redistricting reveals the extent to which Republicans underestimated the sheer frustration from voters of the party in power. And it raises questions about whether Trump and his political operation should have focused their efforts on resolving voters’ concerns instead of whipping votes in state legislatures last year, a handful of which rebuked them — and whether the efforts helped supercharge Democratic turnout in the impacted states as the issue became a national cause celebre for the left.

Leaders of the effort staunchly defended the redistricting push on Wednesday, saying it lessened losses and will likely help them in future years.

“If Republicans had not gone on offense and done this, we would have lost even more seats in the House,” said Adam Kincaid, who leads the National Republican Redistricting Trust and drew Texas’ gerrymander last year. “We were able to protect a few seats that we otherwise would have not gotten.”

“Without redistricting,” Kincaid added, “there probably aren't any other pickups in the country. Three of the four are going to be redistricting seats.”

That assessment is accurate. Republicans are only on track to flip one House seat, in Maine, that they didn’t redraw last year. And some GOP operatives remain bullish the gerrymanders will benefit the party in future elections — even if they were initially taken up to maintain Republicans’ grip on Washington this cycle.

"In a good year we'll get those seats, so it doesn't matter,” said Ohio GOP strategist Bob Clegg.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis argued in a post on social media that — while there were no gains — his state’s redraw prevented two losses that would have occurred under the old map. But Republicans’ gerrymandering push was met by California Democrats, who redrew their state and are on track to pick up all five of their targeted seats.

California Republicans were confronting the prospect of holding just four out of 52 House seats statewide in a state with 5.7 million registered Republican voters. That near-extinction was a direct result of Proposition 50, the gerrymandering campaign that Gov. Gavin Newsom and national Democrats launched to counter the Texas redraw.

That outcome is “a disaster for the Republican Party,” said Dave Gilliard, a Republican consultant who has worked for numerous California House candidates. “Obviously, Trump picked a fight he couldn't win.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who ran point for California’s House delegation on the redraw, said Republicans in Texas underestimated how precipitously Trump’s standing could plunge.

“They assumed that people along the U.S.-Mexico border who were upset — and I think correctly — about the chaos that occurred along the border would stick by right-wing Republicans who criticized them,” Lofgren said in an interview. “That was not the right decision.”

The White House — which was behind last year’s redistricting push — declined to comment, instead referring POLITICO to the RNC. The RNC did not respond to a request for comment.

“This was a 1 in 100 year event,” said a Trump political team official who supported redistricting. “It's a wave election — I don't think redistricting made the difference.”

The GOP’s redistricting losses already seem to be reverberating into 2028. Just one day after an electoral romp, Republican-led states that were expected to undertake a redraw before the critical presidential election are pulling back.

Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp announced Wednesday that his state would not move forward with lame-duck redistricting, a sign that some in the party are ready to move on.

“The voters of our state have spoken,” Kemp said in a statement. “I will not be calling a special session of the Georgia General Assembly in order to curtail executive branch powers or debate redistricting changes.”

Other Republican leaders in southern states like South Carolina and Mississippi have not yet announced any intention to redraw ahead of 2028, though it’s still very possible they will take it up. But Missouri voters also rejected a GOP effort to gerrymander their maps.

Meanwhile, Democrats are prepared to go on offense again in 2028. Maryland voters approved a measure that allows Democrats to redraw their state, while incoming Wisconsin Assembly Democratic Majority Leader Greta Neubauer said Wednesday that with their newfound unified control of the state "we are going to consider congressional redistricting” to undo a GOP-backed gerrymander that’s currently in place.

John Bisognano, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said Democrats “will need to take action” if Republicans move forward with gerrymanders ahead of 2028.

And he boasted of fending off Republicans this time.

“[Trump] presented a plan that was to gerrymander the country as much as he possibly could and create a 20-seat firewall so large that no wave could overcome it,” Bisognano said. “And the American people rejected that as a path forward so catastrophically that we found ourselves here in an extinction event instead of a simple wave.”

Aaron Pellish, Jeremy B. White, Samuel Benson and Mia McCarthy contributed to this report.