When President Trump set out to force a gerrymander in Texas that would help Republicans keep control of the closely divided House, he argued it was a simple matter of fairness.
“We are entitled to five more seats,” the president said this month.
He got what he wanted from Texas, where the governor on Friday signed a redistricting plan. But the consequences may not be so simple.
With California Democrats immediately retaliating with their own re-engineering that could potentially swing up to five seats in the opposite direction, a redistricting arms race is quickly spreading across the country. That has become a major headache for incumbent members of Congress in both parties, who are concerned about changes to districts they have spent years — some of them decades — figuring out how to win.
On paper, the changes that have been approved or are under discussion could potentially give Republicans a leg up of six to seven seats in what is expected to be an uphill fight to keep control of the House. But redistricting can deliver unpredictable results, and it is uncertain whether this one will ultimately pan out the way either party hopes.
What is clear is that it has created confusion in the already volatile battle for congressional power, with no clear outcome guaranteed for Republicans or Democrats.
“They’re clearly counting on Democrats not forcefully responding,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said in an interview. “We are going to release righteous hellfire on them until the cheating scheme ends.”
Some Republicans believe it never should have started.
“The simplest solution here is just to say, ‘Enough is enough, and let’s not do that in any state,’” said Representative Kevin Kiley of California, who is one of five Republican members of Congress in the state at risk of losing their seats if voters approve Democrats’ redistricting plan this fall.
“It’s a pretty tortured logic to say we ought to do something worse because they’re doing something bad,” Mr. Kiley said of California Democrats’ plan, which aims to counter Texas Republicans’ partisan redistricting effort. “That being said, I don’t like what’s going on in Texas. I don’t think that should be happening anywhere.”
Newly drawn maps mean a lot more work for incumbent lawmakers. When the borders of their districts change, they have to start from scratch, introducing themselves to voters who do not know them. They can also lose dependable donors, as well as key landmarks and companies that were defining characteristics of their districts. A differently drawn district can change the way lawmakers vote. In a worst-case scenario, they can face a new primary challenge from an enterprising candidate who might suddenly see an opening to move up the political ladder.
In short, incumbents typically hate redistricting, even when it does not mean they are going to lose their seats. Texas Republicans in Congress initially were cool to the idea, worrying that it could backfire. Republicans in Indiana have been similarly skeptical.
The party is also targeting Missouri and Ohio for potential redistricting, while Democratic governors in Illinois, New York and New Jersey are considering responding in kind.
“It increases uncertainty,” said Kareem Crayton, a democracy expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It is disruptive by nature, and when districts can get drawn and redrawn, it leads to a lot of chaos.”
It is not clear all the disruption will yield the results Mr. Trump is looking for. Historically, gerrymandering has depressed turnout. In a midterm election cycle, when turnout is already lower than in a presidential year, it could change who participates in the election at all.
And about a year out from the midterm balloting, early indicators point to a political advantage for Democrats in the race for the House because of the unpopularity of Mr. Trump’s policies. According to data compiled by The Downballot, Democrats are overperforming by 15.5 percentage points in special elections this year compared with former Vice President Kamala Harris’s performance in the same places in 2024.
To put that in perspective, in special elections before the 2018 midterms, Democrats beat Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign numbers by 6 percentage points. They took control of Congress that year.
The redistricting push Mr. Trump has undertaken would produce “a net Republican gain, but perhaps not sufficient to safeguard their majority given the political environment,” said David Wasserman, an election expert with the Cook Political Report. “No party would be pursuing this if they felt great about their chances of holding their majority.”
The effects of the changes are already being felt by incumbents in both parties around the country. In California, three Democrats — Representatives Jared Huffman, Mike Thompson and Robert Garcia — are preparing to run for re-election in districts that will be 50 percent new to them.
In an interview, Mr. Huffman tried to put a positive spin on the new rural areas that have been added to his district.
“I look at it as a fun challenge,” he said, conceding that the new counties were “a little deeper red than the ones I have. I will try to make it hard for them to hate me.”
Mr. Huffman said Democratic leaders had discussed with him the potential changes to his district as they pursued the retaliatory redistricting to counter Texas’ plan.
“A lot of members were ready to take one for the team,” he said. “I was ready to do what they needed.”
But some Republicans have no interest in absorbing more political risk.
Publicly and privately, Mr. Kiley, whose district now includes the suburbs of Sacramento, has been pressing Speaker Mike Johnson to bring to the floor legislation to prohibit mid-decade redistricting across the country. He is even threatening to circumvent leadership and try to force a vote on his bill through a discharge petition, which allows any member who enlists the support of a majority of the House to secure a vote on his legislation. Mr. Kiley said his measure would be widely supported by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, because all incumbents detest redistricting.
“I have talked to him several times,” he said of the speaker. “They need to show leadership. This is chaos that’s going to cascade across the country concerning our institution.”
Mr. Kiley said in a follow-up interview on MSNBC that “even our own members in states that might in some theoretical way, mathematical way stand to benefit from new maps, they don’t like what’s going on either.”
Mr. Johnson, who has made it his business to do whatever Mr. Trump wants, has said little on the matter during the long August break. In interviews on the subject, he has said it is not his place to get involved.
“It’s the purview of the states,” Mr. Johnson said in an appearance on Tony Perkins’s podcast, where he is a regular guest. “It’s their prerogative.”
Mr. Jeffries responded that “it’s extraordinary to us that they appear to be willing to throw their incumbent members overboard just to satisfy the whims of Donald Trump, even though the scheme will ultimately fail.”
He added: “There is no circumstance where they can mathematically gerrymander their way to victory in 2026. They know it, we know it — the only person who doesn’t seem to know it is Donald Trump.”
This particular cascading battle is creating more uncertainty than usual for incumbents, because it is occurring in the middle of a decade — five years after the last census.
“Five years out, it’s an open question as to whether the numbers they are asking you to live with are actually the numbers on the ground,” Mr. Crayton said.
Still, Mr. Trump is pressuring state lawmakers to get on board with his redistricting wishes. In Indiana, his political network has even threatened primary challenges against Republicans who do not support the push.
In Texas, at least, Republican incumbents have mostly been spared too much turmoil and have gone along with the redistricting plans. Many Democratic districts in the state had low rates of citizenship and turnout, meaning they could be parceled out to surrounding districts without major electoral consequences.
Still, while those Republicans may not be at risk of losing their seats, they may need to recalibrate their stances to districts that have changed under their feet.
“They’re going to be in a different ecosystem than they were, and they’re going to have to be different people,” said John Bisognano, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
There could also still be opportunity for Democrats in two newly drawn districts in the Rio Grande region of South Texas. Both voted for Mr. Trump by 10 points in the 2024 presidential election, but could conceivably vote for a Democrat in a midterm when the president is not on the ballot and local races have shown huge swings away from Republican lawmakers.
Democrats expect to benefit from a potential shift among Latino voters. A recent national poll showed that about a quarter of Hispanic voters who supported Mr. Trump in November said they were disappointed or “outright regret” voting for him. The survey, conducted by Equis, concluded that there were “continued signs of potential defection from the Republican camp in 2026.”
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times. She writes features and profiles, with a recent focus on House Republican leadership.
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