Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Last week, Virginia voters narrowly passed a state constitutional amendment allowing Democratic legislators to rewrite the congressional maps, which may flip as many as four U.S. House seats. After this highly consequential vote, there’s bipartisan agreement that the gerrymandering war Donald Trump launched last summer was a bad idea. Aside from all the money diverted into map wars and the intraparty tensions that arose from unsettling congressional incumbents, it’s now clear that Trump’s hope of dramatically shifting the national landscape to ensure that Republicans maintain control of the U.S. House has failed.
In a few Republican-controlled states (notably Indiana and South Carolina), local lawmakers bucked pressure from national GOP leaders to redraw their maps. In another, Utah, state courts decided a Republican-written map violated anti-gerrymandering laws and awarded Democrats a new seat. In still another, Ohio, Republican lawmakers fearful of exposing their own incumbents to greater competition pulled their punches a bit and made the effect of their gerrymander ambiguous. And most of all, Trump’s power grab gave Democrats an excuse to execute their own big-time gerrymanders in California (likely netting five House seats) and finally in Virginia.
But while Trump’s dreams of rigging the midterms by rigging maps clearly did not work, Republicans could wind up with a marginal advantage overall, depending on a few remaining variables.
Florida offers the GOP one more opportunity to swipe House seats during a special legislative session called by Governor Ron DeSantis for April 28, despite a state constitutional provision banning intentional partisan gerrymandering. On April 27, DeSantis unveiled a proposed map that shows how aggressive he intends to be, as NPR reports:
The governor’s office released a map Monday morning showing red and blue districts indicating that, if adopted, it would create 24 Republican-leaning and four Democratic-leaning districts. Currently, the state is represented by 20 Republicans and seven Democrats, with one other seat becoming vacant recently following a Democratic lawmaker’s resignation.
There’s not much question DeSantis’s plan will be litigated in the courts, but the governor does have a pretty compliant state judiciary.
There are a couple of other cookies on the plate. A GOP gerrymander in Missouri that flipped one Democratic House seat is being challenged via a proposed ballot initiative that could overturn it in November. At this point it’s unclear whether it can qualify for the ballot. Of great importance down the road, but perhaps mattering a bit this year, is a potential U.S. Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act guarantees for adequate minority representation in Congress and state legislatures. This could decimate majority-Black congressional districts in the South over time and could, if it happens right away, even give Alabama and Louisiana the opportunity to hastily redraw 2026 maps to flip one district each.
But the biggest variable is the size of the national Democratic wave this November. If it’s really large, it could flip some previously safe Republican districts made more vulnerable by changes in the maps that shifted GOP voters to newly targeted Democratic districts. That’s what sometimes makes an ostensibly clever gerrymander turn into a “dummymander” that backfires.
Putting aside that possibility — and also the chance that maps will still change in Missouri, Alabama, or Louisiana — the current balance sheet, per the New York Times, is Democratic gains of five seats in California, two to four seats in Virginia, and one seat in Utah, with Republican gains of five seats in Texas, one to two seats in Ohio, one seat each in Missouri and North Carolina, and one to five seats in Florida. In total, that gives us a range from one net seat gain for Democrats all the way to six net seat gains for Republicans. That upper range of GOP gains is probably a reach, and again, the odds remain very high that Democrats will flip control of the House in any event.
So was the juice from Trump’s gerrymandering crusade worth the squeeze? Probably not, but it reminded both parties that this is a man who will bend rules for the sheer hellacious fun of it.
