Republicans are trying to cheat their way to a House victory. Will it work?
I guesstimate how new congressional maps in TX and CA, plus likely gerrymanders in several other states, will impact Democrats in the 2026 midterms
On Wednesday, August 20, Republican lawmakers in the Texas House forced through a new congressional map that will likely decrease the number of Lone Star Democrats elected to the U.S. House by 3-5 members in next year's midterms. Republican state Rep. Todd Hunter, who drafted the new map, said, “The underlying goal of this plan is straightforward: improve Republican political performance."
After Republicans passed the map, President Donald Trump wrote on his social media website that he wants to get rid of mail-in voting and pushed Republicans to change even more maps so that they can pick up "100 more seats." The president is using his power as party leader to pressure legislators in Indiana, Florida, Missouri, and Ohio to pass their own gerrymandered plans. Many are now invited to the White House to hear from the president directly.
Then on Thursday, August 21, Democratic Governor of California Gavin Newsom signed a law calling for a November special election where voters will get to approve a new map that counteracts the GOP rigging in Texas. If passed by voters, it will shift 3-5 seats from Republican to Democrat. According to the AP, the Republican minority leader in the California House, James Gallagher, said that Texas was wrong to pass its new map because it would cause a race to the bottom for representation: "You move forward fighting fire with fire, and what happens? You burn it all down."
Gallagher is right. Both the Texas and California maps are examples of partisan gerrymandering, but Texas started it. Republican lawmakers and the president decided to put a partisan power grab above democracy. They decided that representatives in Texas should pick their voters, rather than voters picking their representatives. We are living in the consequences of that choice: a spiral away from fair elections and equality of representation.
This Chart of the Week is ultimately going to answer the question of how these new maps will affect next year’s elections. But first, I want to share my perspective on the gerrymanders themselves.
Gerrymandering is cheating
Let me begin with a more personal perspective. In college, I studied survey research (“polling”) and political science. Apart from covering public opinion, I have also been writing about the fairness of different electoral systems for most of my career. This background has informed a belief system that values fairness — namely, proportionality in votes and seats — over other features of electoral systems.
Compared to other systems, our electoral system — where representatives are elected in districts — is highly inefficient at translating votes to seats. Over the long term, groups of voters that are more geographically dispersed end up winning more seats than they are entitled to based on their share of the vote, exerting a gravitational pull away from the benchmark fairness of true proportional representation.
But things get much, much worse when politicians are in charge of that system. America’s single-winner districts are not only inefficient and a relic of an archaic Constitution that has not evolved alongside our understanding of the math of representation, but uniquely bad in that they offer so much latitude for legislators to abuse the system and advantage themselves. Since Democrats are already disadvantaged by the districts themselves (they are packed into cities and easy to “crack” apart into several seats, or “pack” into one district), systematic partisan gerrymandering is a borderline existential threat to fair competition. Republicans also control more state governments, given that this bias against Democrats also affects state legislatures, increasing their success at gerrymandering.
So suffice it to say, while I welcome informed disagreement over ideological and political matters, when it comes to the rules of our elections I have little patience for partisan fuckery.
The way I see it, these mid-decade Republican gerrymanders — which came after President Donald Trump requested the map in Texas in June — are essentially cheating. What else would you call it? While congressional districts are typically redrawn only once per decade following the Census — a practice that has been the norm for hundreds of years — we are now seeing an unprecedented wave of mid-decade redistricting orchestrated at the highest levels of government for the express purpose of systematically advantaging one party.
And while there is nothing strictly illegal about it, redrawing district borders outside of the regularly scheduled timeline (which is right after each new Census), at the behest of the president asking you for more members, reeks of rigging. It represents a fundamental violation of the democratic principles that electoral boundaries should be stable and predictable, not subject to manipulation whenever one party sees political advantage, and that voters should have a connection to their representatives. It is a violation of the spirit of fairness and legitimate competition inherent in our republic's founding documents.
Partisan gerrymandering is a trampling of the principle of one person, one vote, and a dangerous step toward uncompetitive elections. Given Trump’s “100 seats” comment, I imagine that if he had his choice, the rigging wouldn't stop until the Republicans accomplished permanent one-party rule in America. I've written why I see his gerrymanders as part of a bigger project of undermining free and fair elections in the U.S., and a slow but steady creeping toward what political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism.”
I acknowledge that this is a pretty bleak outlook. But I think I am right to be pessimistic, and have been right about this for a while. Check the date of this article, or this one, or this one, and the claims I make in them. Not to toot my own horn, but I think it’s both pretty accurate and early, compared to the competition. The best hope is that people wake up to these problems and support legislation amending the way our federal elections work under the Constitution’s Elections Clause. My ideal fix is open-list proportional representation, with the acknowledgment that I’d probably have to settle for something less Scandinavian and more American.
But let’s talk about the elections all these gerrymanders are about. With Republicans currently holding just a narrow majority in the House, gaining a few seats could very well prevent Democrats from winning back control next November. So today, I wanted to do some math to answer the question: If Republicans get all the gerrymanders they're pushing for, how will Democrats' odds of taking back the House in 2026 be affected? And what if Democrats manage to hold some of the seats being gerrymandered, despite the gerrymandering?
The answer is below the fold, in this week's Chart of the Week.
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Democrats can overcome GOP gerrymanders with a small popular-vote victory
I've assembled a crack team of redistricting expert friends to ask what they think is going to happen in each state that has already or is likely to redraw its congressional lines before November 2026. According to them, the best case for Democrats is something that looks like the following changes in seat control in each state:
Republicans gain 3 seats in TX
Democrats gain 5 seats in CA
R+1 in IN
R+1 in OH
R+3 in FL
R+1 in MO
Total R+4
And the worst-case scenario for Democrats looks maybe like this:
R+5 in TX
D+3 in CA
R+1 in IN
R+2 in OH
R+3 in FL
R+1 in MO
Total R+9
These are just guesses since we don't know what the maps in all these states look like, but I trust the judgment of my experts and the general neighborhood of their estimates. In terms of caveats, note that we are not accounting for any changes in maps that may come if the Supreme Court strikes down the section of the Voting Rights Act that mandates majority-minority districts in some states. If that happens, we could see a deluge of Democratic seats due to map redrawing all over the South, including seats like MO-01 and TN-09. "All bets are off" if that happens, I'm told.
But if you take these changes in seat totals and then plug them into a computer program that projects the number of seats Democrats would win under each map, given different margins in the House popular vote, you get the following figure. This tells you, for each of our 3 scenarios (2024, best-case Dem, and worst-case Dem), the number of seats Democrats would win if they increased or decreased their vote margins uniformly across all seats.
For example, under the 2024 map, Democrats would likely have won control of the House even while losing the national popular vote by 1.5 percentage points. That's because Republicans won 3 seats by less than 1.1 percentage points, and they'd flip to Democrats if you decrease the Republican popular vote margin from +2.6 to +1.5.
But now, if you take 4 or 9 seats away from the Democrats, they have to win the popular vote in order to win control of Congress. In the worst-case simulation where Democrats lose 9 seats due to partisan gerrymandering across the country, they would not recover their current number of seats (215) until they won the popular vote by 0.3 points — a 2.9-point shift from 2024. And they'd need to win the popular vote by 1.3 points to win the majority of seats in the House.
In all three scenarios, Democrats are pretty likely to win the majority if they win by their current 3.3-point margin in the generic ballot, according to our average:
Of course, this is a crude estimate. It doesn't take into account changing nominees in the district, changes in demographic voting patterns (such as a disproportionate backlash against Trump among Latinos), or other factors. But it's a decent estimate that can help you calibrate your expectations based on the upcoming changes to these maps.
The bottom line is that while Republican gerrymandering efforts could make Democrats' path to retaking the House more difficult in 2026, they're not insurmountable. Even in the worst-case scenario where Democrats lose 9 seats to partisan redistricting, they would still have a realistic chance of winning the majority if they can maintain their current polling advantage or capitalize on potential anti-Trump sentiment in the midterms.
However, these gerrymanders represent a troubling escalation in the arms race over congressional maps, one that ultimately weakens democratic representation regardless of which party benefits. The real losers in this process are American voters, who deserve districts drawn fairly rather than manipulated for partisan gain.
For more, here's a good roundup of all the redistricting news from my friends at The Downballot.
Repigs will of course do anything (and by that I mean Stalin- or Hitler- grade anything, including political violence by cronies and maga-adjacents / sturmabteilungen and weaponizing government institutions) to stay in power. This is no longer about winning elections, it's an existential struggle. While it was obvious in 2024, voters did not see this coming.
Republican state Rep. Todd Hunter, who drafted the new map, said, “The underlying goal of this plan is straightforward: improve Republican political performance."-----Cheating is cheating! Karma will come for you Todd Hunter....and your R colleagues too! Thanks Elliott for the new phrase..." I have little patience for partisan fuckery." Partisan fuckery should be added to Webster!