Trying to shore up their congressional advantage, Republicans may have instead given Democrats another opportunity to pick up a valuable House seat next fall.
This isn’t a newsletter about Texas, where an off-year redistricting battle began at President Trump’s behest; or California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom’s corresponding effort to persuade voters to gerrymander California’s congressional map in favor of Democrats has spurred one of the most closely watched elections of the fall.
Today, I’m looking at a long-simmering redistricting battle in Utah that has flown more under the radar — but that could also have big implications for next year’s midterm elections.
A fight out West
Since the summer, President Trump and his aides have turned to redistricting as a keystone of their political strategy in the midterms and beyond. They have pressured lawmakers in states like Texas, Indiana and Missouri, urging them to shoehorn more safe Republican seats into their congressional maps any way they can.
But a fight playing out now in Utah that predates the president’s push shows how redistricting can get complicated — and potentially backfire — even when it seems like one party holds all the cards.
The story starts in 2021, when Utah Republicans drew themselves four safe seats, even though just three years earlier voters had called for independently drawn maps. A lawsuit ensued. And on Monday, in response to a judge’s order, Utah’s Republican-controlled state legislature passed a new congressional map that appeared to give Democrats their best chance in years to capture at least one of the state’s four House districts.
The current map — the one Republicans drew in 2021 — divides deep-blue Salt Lake City across all four districts, creating four seats currently held by Republicans. The new one splits the Salt Lake City area across two districts.
By doing it this way, rather than grouping most of Salt Lake City into one Democratic stronghold and creating three safely Republican seats, Republicans have an opportunity to maintain control of all four House seats next year.
But they have also risked creating a so-called dummymander — a gerrymandered map that backfires against the party it’s intended to favor. Republicans drew two light-red districts — one more competitive than the other — that could both potentially flip toward Democrats in a year that strongly favors them.
Along with two safe Republican seats, the new map, which must still be signed by Gov. Spencer Cox and approved by a judge, creates one district that Trump won by about seven percentage points last year, and another district that Trump won by about 2 points.
Democrats would probably still begin as underdogs in both races. But if the voters who turn out next year are spurred by backlash to Trump and his policies,
“Democrats could conceivably win two of the four districts,” said Dave Wasserman, the senior elections analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
The winding journey to a new map
The new map is the result of a lawsuit brought by a coalition of centrist groups after state lawmakers drew up their map in 2021, overriding a 2018 ballot initiative that created an independent redistricting commission. The centrist groups, including Mormon Women for Ethical Government, prevailed in August, when a judge ordered the legislature to redraw Utah’s congressional map. Though Republicans continue to fight that decision, they also moved ahead with the mandated redistricting in the legislature.
The new map lawmakers approved on Monday was supported by the state Republican Party, and was considered the least favorable toward Democrats of the half-dozen under consideration. Democrats themselves voted against the map, arguing that it still unfairly carved up the Salt Lake City area.
Still, Robert Axson, the chair of the Utah Republican Party, acknowledged that it was “absolutely” possible that Democrats could find two pickup opportunities, depending on the political environment and the candidates who run for the seats.
“It’s going to be a little bit more difficult to fight in multiple areas,” Axson said.
Some early analysis suggests that both districts could be an uphill climb for Democrats, partly because down-ballot Republican candidates in Utah have fared better with voters than Trump in recent years. Doug Owens, a Democratic state representative, said that a fair application of various anti-gerrymandering tests should have resulted in a map that kept most of Salt Lake City together, yielding a district Democrats were likely to win.
“And yet,” he said, “they have come up with five maps that did not have a competitive Democratic district.”
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit have also taken issue with the new map, arguing that it does not comply with the ballot initiative enshrining an independent redistricting process. They have submitted two of their own proposed maps, and the judge will rule on which map to enact by Nov. 10. (Both maps would create a Democratic-leaning seat in the Salt Lake City area.)
No matter which map is chosen, Democrats will have a better shot at flipping at least one Utah seat blue than they have since 2018. And they will most likely field a strong candidate: Ben McAdams, the former Democratic congressman who flipped a House seat in 2018 and lost re-election two years later.
McAdams is expected to announce a comeback bid in November, according to a person familiar with his thinking.
IN HIS WORDS
Threatening Chicago’s leaders
Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers! Governor Pritzker also!
— President Trump, Truth Social, Oct. 8
President Trump on Wednesday escalated his campaign of retribution against those he perceives as political enemies, calling for the imprisonment of two Democrats, Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago and Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, who have opposed his deployment of troops to the deep-blue city.
Both Democrats said in social media posts that they would not pull back. “This is not the first time Trump has tried to have a Black man unjustly arrested,” Johnson said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Pritzker, who is seizing on the events in Chicago to issue a call for action to the nation, said, “Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power. What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?”
— Luke Broadwater
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One Number
58 percent
That’s the share of Democrats who said they think the United States is in danger of failing as a nation, according to a new Times/Siena poll. Ruth Igielnik, The Times’s polling editor, has more.
Democrats are distraught.
Nearly 60 percent of Democrats now say that the country is in danger of failing as a nation, up from just 16 percent of Democrats who said the same in October of last year.
Roughly one-third of independent voters and 6 percent of Republicans agree.
Among those who feel the country is about to collapse, there are common themes in what they identify as the most important problem facing the nation: Donald Trump, Republicans and the state of democracy.
It is not uncommon for the party out of power to feel this way. During President Joe Biden’s time in office, a majority of Republicans said they felt the country was on the verge of failure.
The share of voters, overall, who are concerned that the country is in danger of failure has gone down slightly since last year. Just before the 2024 election, 37 percent of voters said the country was on the verge of failure; that number has dropped slightly, to 33 percent.
ONE LAST THING
A leading candidate for governor in California goes viral for the wrong reasons
Former Representative Katie Porter of California, one of the leading Democratic candidates in the state’s wide-open governor’s race, made headlines yesterday when a video clip of a surprisingly contentious interview she did with a CBS News affiliate in Sacramento began making the rounds.
Asked by a reporter what she would say to the state’s voters who backed Trump last year, Porter scoffed at the question, asking, “How would I need them in order to win?” Later in the three-minute clip, Porter seemed to grow exasperated by the reporter’s follow-up questions, at one point looking to someone off-camera and trying to end the interview. “I don’t want to keep doing this — I’m going to call it,” she said.
When my colleague Laurel Rosenhall asked a spokesman for Porter for comment, he said the interview continued for another 20 minutes after that exchange.
“I don’t want to have an unhappy experience with you, and I don’t want this all on camera,” Porter said at one point during the interview.
Ruth Igielnik and Jacob Reber contributed to this newsletter.
Kellen Browning is a Times political reporter based in San Francisco.
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