Republicans are eight seats closer to keeping control of the House since President Donald Trump pushed state lawmakers to redraw congressional maps, steepening the Democrats’ climb toward reclaiming any hold on federal power in November.
Democrats are still exploring whether any long-shot legal moves could save their redistricting attempt in Virginia after the state’s high court on Friday overturned last month’s referendum to approve it. Democrats and their allies are still challenging new maps in Florida and Missouri. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) insisted Friday his party will still win the chamber.
But Democrats were confronting the reality that Trump succeeded in tilting the playing field to the GOP’s advantage. Eric Holder, a former attorney general leading the Democrats’ redistricting drive, said Republicans were trying “to steal the 2026 midterm election.”
Just two weeks ago, Democrats had fought to a draw, with Virginia’s referendum adding four new left-leaning seats and some Republicans questioning whether the arms race was worth it. Then last week, Florida Republicans adopted a redrawn map hoping to turn four more districts red, and the Supreme Court opened the door for Republicans to do the same in several other Southern states.
“The critics of the White House spiked the football a little too early,” said Alex Pfeiffer, a Republican operative and former senior official in the Trump White House. “The map is more favorable to us now.”
Not all the new districts are locked down. Democrats still expect to pick up two seats on Virginia’s old map, and they remain bullish that two incumbents in Ohio and two more in Florida can outrun the partisan makeup of their districts, especially in a year when most voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy and the war in Iran. They’re also counting on Latino voters who supported Trump in 2024 to swing back to Democrats this year, which could flip red seats in South Texas.
Even so, Democrats will have to dig deep into Trump territory to win districts he carried by double digits in 2024. Anticipating that the range of competitive seats was shrinking, national Democrats started the cycle aiming to expand the battlefield by recruiting candidates who could run in places they haven’t recently contested.
But the party was less ready to respond in kind to Republican state lawmakers who ditched the custom of redistricting once a decade based on the census and instead adopted new maps again, starting with Texas last year. Democrats were limited by earlier state drives to reduce partisan gerrymandering through independent commissions.
Such commissions prevented Democrats from having a chance to engineer new maps in Colorado and New York in time for November’s midterms. They are now looking to amend the state constitutions ahead of the 2028 elections so they can establish new maps.
“While Republicans have been ruthless, Democrats have been trying to play by the rules,” said Tré Easton, vice president for public policy at the Searchlight Institute, a Democratic think tank. “And that just does not work.”
In California, Democrats led by Gov. Gavin Newsom got voters to agree to temporarily suspend the state’s commission and approve a map giving them more House seats. They persuaded voters in Virginia to do the same, but the state’s high court rejected the new map in Friday’s decision.
In Illinois and Maryland, Democrats balked at new maps, as Republicans did in Indiana. After the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling, Republicans took steps to eliminate Democratic seats in Alabama and South Carolina, but it’s not yet clear whether they will succeed.
Florida lawmakers were debating Gov. Ron DeSantis’s new map when the court announced its decision. Democrats and their allies have sued under a provision of the state constitution that bars maps that were drawn for partisan advantage or to protect incumbents. Voters approved that part of the state constitution in 2010 by a wide margin, but DeSantis’s attorneys argued it’s no longer in effect because of the recent Voting Rights Act decision.
The legal challenges to the latest map could go to the Florida Supreme Court, where DeSantis has appointed six of the seven justices.
As it stands now, Democrats have drawn five seats in their favor in California and gotten improved lines for one seat through litigation in Utah. Republicans have redrawn five Democratic-held seats to lean right in Texas and increased their advantage in two Ohio seats, one North Carolina seat, one Missouri district, four Florida districts and one Tennessee seat. Louisiana Republicans are planning to add one or two more.
“Lord grant me humility,” James Blair, the Trump political adviser behind the redistricting drive, said Friday on X after the Virginia ruling.
Courts could give Democrats more seats for 2028, but that is less likely after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision weakening the Voting Rights Act. In Wisconsin, Democrats have faced setbacks in recent redistricting litigation but hope to get a case to the state Supreme Court, where liberals hold a majority, before the 2028 elections.
Democrats are also focused on trying to win control of more statehouses this fall so they can adopt new maps for 2028. They hope to win full control of state governments in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. A victory in Michigan might not give them much opportunity to draw a new map because of that state’s redistricting commission.
State legislative races get far less attention than congressional races. But they often see an influx of cash every 10 years, because that’s historically when states draw new congressional districts. The fight over the past year shows redistricting matters all the time, and Democrats must make statehouse races a priority all the time, said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which is focused on winning more legislative chambers.
“The urgency is real,” she said. “This is no longer a once-in-a-decade conversation. If you care about federal power, state legislatures do not only matter in 2030. They matter now and they matter every single election.”
Liz Goodwin contributed to this report.
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