Politicians in several states have sought since the last election to change House district lines to give partisan advantage to either Republicans or Democrats. But with the Nov. 3 midterms looming, it’s far from clear that those efforts will produce the desired outcome.
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The rush in some states to create new districts started last year when President Donald Trump – concerned about a Democratic midterm wave triggering a House takeover – urged Texas lawmakers to carve out five seats that would give Republicans a more favorable edge. Normally, House and state legislative districts are changed every 10 years after the census.
California followed with a voter referendum that approved five potential Democratic gains. Florida also approved a new map hoping to flip four Democratic seats toward the GOP. Other states followed, with varying degrees of success, but Republicans did gain favorable new maps in seven states.
At least that’s how it appeared. In Texas and Florida, for example, The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter said several of the seats Republicans changed voted for Trump in 2024 by about 10 percentage points. But this is not 2024, and in these new districts former President Joe Biden would have won by about 3 percentage points in 2020.
“Seats drawn today may not perform as line drawers would hope,” Walter said in a recent National Conference of State Legislatures report.
“You think the election will be the same as the last one,” said Erik Nisbet, professor of policy analysis and communication at Northwestern University. “We’re finding that is not the case.”
The new district lines are done through a process critics call gerrymandering, in which the maps are drawn specifically for partisan or racial purposes. This takes place in two main ways: “packing,” which concentrates voters of the opposite party in lopsided districts, and “cracking,” which spreads opposing voters across several districts to dilute their voting power.
The upshot is that most political observers say Democrats will take over the House majority in 2027, easily gaining more than the net of four pickups needed to overcome the current Republican majority. The Kalshi prediction market gives Democrats an 80% likelihood of attaining the House majority.
“Republicans’ path to keeping control of the House has all but evaporated,” wrote Erin Covey of The Cook Political Report.
Democrats, Covey wrote, are now favored in 220 districts – enough for a majority in the 435-member House – Republicans in 198, and 17 are rated as toss-ups.
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Trump’s deep unpopularity – driven by persistent inflation, the Iran war and crackdown on illegal immigration – has led to changes in voter demographics, Nisbet said. Hispanics in general strongly supported Trump in 2024, but the immigration issue and high costs have driven them away from the GOP.
“On immigration, a lot of people in the Latino community think there was overreach, friends and neighbors aggressively arrested,” Nisbet said. “It was so extreme it alienated some of the support he had before.”
That trend has impacted how some of the redrawn House districts might perform, especially in Hispanic areas such as South Florida and South Texas that went for Trump in 2024.
Another factor driving the new House maps is an April ruling by the Supreme Court in a Louisiana case changing how part of the Voting Rights Act is interpreted. That led to new maps in Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama that established more Republican-leaning seats, often at the expense of Black voters.
Still, redistricting in the middle of the decade failed in Indiana, Maryland and South Carolina. Utah and Ohio do have new maps, but they were based on court rulings and state laws. They are expected to elect an additional Republican in Ohio and an additional Democrat in Utah.
Tim Storey, CEO of the National Conference of State Legislatures, said in the organization’s report that the way House districts are drawn is not always the deciding issue.
“Districts matter a lot, and in some cases are all but insurmountable,” Storey said. “But other factors still count, like the quality of the candidate and the campaign, the amount of effort put into door-knocking local or state legislative races, and the temperament of the voters.”
In a final note, the word gerrymandering comes from Elbridge Gerry, Massachusetts governor and vice president, who wanted lawmakers in his state to create districts favoring his party. One cartoon portrayed the map as shaped like a salamander, and the two names combined stuck.
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