Democrats are fast losing the gerrymandering wars.
Despite President Donald Trump’s unpopularity and polling showing voters favor Democrats to control Congress next year, Republicans could hold their narrow House majority in November because they’ve tipped the scales before a single vote has been cast.
This could be the new reality of congressional and state elections, warn political analysts. Here’s what’s going on.
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How Republicans are winning the gerrymandering wars
Once largely behind the scenes and happening only once every decade, gerrymandering is now out in the open. Politicians redrawing congressional district lines to essentially pick their own voters is a major factor determining control of the House in November.
Republicans are fighting to maintain a narrow majority in the House, and last year, Trump pushed Republican lawmakers in Texas and as many states as he could to redraw congressional lines, explicitly saying it was to help Republicans keep control of the House. (It had been rare but not illegal for state lawmakers to draw congressional districts in the middle of a decade.)
Democrats pushed back with their own aggressive, partisan gerrymanders in California and Virginia. They had fought Republicans to about a draw — until two major court decisions over the past two weeks turned their fortunes upside down.
Virginia’s plan to eliminate as many as four Republican congressional districts got thrown out by the state’s top court before it could go into effect.
And conservative justices on the Supreme Court made it easier to gerrymander based on race. Now, Republican lawmakers in the South are racing to draw maps that break up Black and other minority voters to add Republican seats. States including Tennessee and Alabama are making new maps that spread Black voters into more Republican-leaning districts, and both states may no longer have a single congressional district likely to elect a Democrat. Louisiana’s governor suspended the state’s primaries so Republicans could draw new districts.
Republicans are pretty much guaranteed a couple of extra seats over Democrats now, calculated Lou Jacobson, chief author of the Almanac of American Politics 2026.
But voters could still narrowly tip the House to Democratic control. “The American people see that Republicans have been trying to rig the system because they know they are losing across the country,” Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Washington), the chair of House Democrats’ campaign arm, told NOTUS. “They’re not winning in the hearts and minds of the American people.”
Democrats face a long road to fight back
Democrats are looking at what they can do for 2028, when there will be a presidential race alongside control of Congress on the ballot. House Democratic leaders are developing a plan to push Democratic-held states to gerrymander as aggressively as possible by then, so they could try to create a dozen or more new seats, CNN reports.
In most states, state lawmakers handle the drawing of congressional districts every decade when there is a new Census. But redrawing districts before every election to maximize political gains could be the new normal.
Republicans have long favored aggressive gerrymandering, while many Democratic states have handed the process over to nonpartisan commissions. That will change, say Democratic leaders.
“The days of Democrats unilaterally disarming are over,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) told CNN, “particularly given how high the stakes are.”
Some courts have forced Republican states to hand over redistricting to third parties after finding lawmakers didn’t give Black voters enough of a chance to elect their own representatives. But after the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, Republicans have much more freedom to draw maps benefiting them. This week, conservatives on the Supreme Court cleared the way for Alabama Republicans to get rid of the only majority-Black district in the state despite years of court rulings preventing Republicans from drawing their own maps until 2030.
This week, South Carolina Republicans rejected drawing a new map that would have eliminated the only Democratic-held congressional district in the state. A Republican leader there warned that it could backfire on their party — but there could be new pressure to act in 2028.
It’s hard to see how this arms race ends
In theory, Congress could pass a law mandating that states draw electoral districts that reflect the state’s split in the presidential election. (Virginia’s vote, for example, is roughly split between Republicans and Democrats in presidential elections, so its 11 congressional districts would reflect that. Tennessee, rather than having zero Democratic-leaning districts, would have three out of its nine.)
While that may seem more fair, it’s a heavy ask from lawmakers. Many got to Congress or their state legislatures by running and winning in gerrymandered districts. (The number of truly competitive congressional districts is exceedingly rare.)
And these new gerrymandering wars Trump started only magnify those problems, said Jacobson.
“You have people who will be new House members now who have zero incentive to go back to the old pattern,” he said. “If California deserves 17 less seats for Democrats, who will those 17 members be who fall on their swords and say, ‘Okay, I will give up my seat?’” he said. “So you’re basically baking this gerrymandering in for a long time now.”
The post The gerrymandering wars are here to stay appeared first on Washington Post.
