Ten months after President Donald Trump pressed Texas Republicans to redraw their congressional map to help secure more GOP seats in the midterm elections, the nationwide redistricting war could end up yielding either a small GOP advantage or, as it stands now, a small Democratic gain.
With Virginia voters opting to redraw their map Tuesday, Democrats are on course to pick up four seats in the commonwealth, as long as the map survives legal challenges. A circuit judge on Wednesday blocked the state from certifying the congressional map, ruling that the voter referendum was unconstitutional.
Virginia’s Democratic Attorney General Jay Jones has already vowed to file an appeal.
While the new map will have to survive legal challenges, Democrats may have mitigated the impact of GOP gains in other states that redrew their maps, such as Texas, North Carolina and Ohio, when you add in Democratic pickups in California from its new map.
The whole exercise raises an important question: Was this push to redraw maps in the middle of the decennial process really worth it?
When MS NOW asked Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., chair of the House GOP’s campaign arm, that question, he did not exactly offer a ringing endorsement of the redistricting war.
“Not for me to decide that,” Hudson said. “Wasn’t my decision.”
Other Republicans were decidedly more blunt, with some suggesting they wished Republicans had not started this fight.
Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, the former head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, made it clear he was not thrilled to see his state shake up its map, telling MS NOW, “No one cared to listen to the delegation.”
Asked if he wished the president had not requested that Texas redraw its map given what followed, Sessions left it at, “The president will live with the results.”
And Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., told Politico on Wednesday, “It was a mistake to go down this road.”
“The problem is, at the end of the day, whatever party wins, we all have to govern,” he said. “It’s harder to do when we’ve eroded our constituents’ trust in our democracy and the fairness of our elections — which is what mid-cycle redistricting does.”
The national redistricting fight began last summer, when Trump demanded Republicans in the Texas Statehouse redraw their congressional lines to help pick up an additional five seats in the House — in a pinkish state where the map was already gerrymandered in the GOP’s favor, 25-13. Republicans in Texas eventually complied with the president’s demands, drawing a map where the intended breakdown is 30-8, in a state where former Vice President Kamala Harris won 42% of the vote in 2024.
California, where the map was already gerrymandered in Democrats’ favor, 43-9, decided to retaliate. After putting the question to voters, the state voted to redraw the map further in Democrats’ favor, with the intention of picking up another five seats. Soon after, other states got into the game, looking to undo the effect of California’s redistricting effort. But on Tuesday, Virginia Democrats succeeded in passing a voter referendum to redraw its lines, with the intended breakdown being 10 Democratic House seats and one Republican.
While Florida may still get in on the battle and functionally give Republicans a slight advantage on the mid-decade redistricting battle, Democrats appear to be winning the gerrymandering game — at least for the moment. And that fact has vulnerable Republicans wondering whether either party should have gone down this road.
Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., told MS NOW he does not believe “this tit-for-tat is especially beneficial to anybody in the end.”
“When everything is said and done, it’ll probably be a net wash,” he said.
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., argued the math of which party comes out ahead is “irrelevant,” because mid-decade redistricting like this is “terrible policy.”
“We should be un-gerrymandering every district, not gerrymandering every district in America,” he said. “It’s crazy.”
And Senate Minority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said these are the “kinds of outcomes you’re going to run into” when “you go down the path of starting to do these things mid-decade.”
“States are, depending on who’s in power, going to try and work the maps to their advantage,” he said.
Some Republicans shied away from casting any blame on the president for setting this gerrymandering battle in motion.
Instead, many accused Democrats of starting this fight — specifically pointing to a previous redistricting feud in New York during the 2022 and 2024 elections cycles.
Rep. John McGuire, R-Va., who called the results of Tuesday’s election in Virginia “illegal and unconstitutional,” told MS NOW, “It did not start in Texas. It started in New York, by Democrats.”
Lawler echoed that sentiment, arguing that because the 2022 congressional map in New York “wasn’t good enough” for Democratic leaders, “they filed a lawsuit, came back, and won four seats as a result” in 2024.
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Many of the lessons either party will learn from this exercise will depend on Florida, where state lawmakers are set to meet next week to consider their potential new map. But illustrating the unease among Republicans about redistricting, not all GOP lawmakers in the Florida delegation are cheering on an effort to squeeze out more Republican seats, which could weaken a number of their districts and leave many susceptible to a Democratic challenger — particularly in a wave election.
Rep. Maria Salazar, R-Fla., who represents parts of Miami, said she likes her current district as it is.
“I think I’m doing well,” she said. “I’m representing them well, I think.”
But she remained deferential to Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla.
“If the governor of the state of Florida and the legislature believes differently, who am I to say?” she said.
Still, in an interview with Politico last month, Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., urged caution.
“I think the legislature needs to be very cognizant of the fact that if they get too aggressive,” he said, “you could put incumbent members at risk.”
Earlier this week, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., was asked by NOTUS what he thought of the redistricting war. Issa, a longtime Republican who decided not to run in 2018 as a blue wave gathered over the midterms during Trump’s first term, came back to Congress in 2021.
With his purple-ish district turned blue during this latest redistricting, Issa is one of the GOP casualties of the gerrymandering war. He looked at running in Texas, in one of the new districts Republicans had drawn, but ultimately decided he would not seek another term in Congress.
“There’s the obvious question of, is it ever a mistake to start a war?” Issa said Tuesday before the Virginia vote. “I don’t know.”
For their part, Congressional Democrats have dismissed Republican complaints that the 10 to 1 map in Virginia is unfair — even as some grapple with their own disdain for gerrymandering.
Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va., who backed the creation of a bipartisan redistricting commission in Virginia in 2020, told MS NOW he has reached the conclusion that the GOP is “only going to join us in supporting non-partisan redistricting when they learn that — best case — they’re going to fight to a draw.”
So far, Walkinshaw said, Republicans have concluded that “gerrymandering is in their interest politically, that’s why they oppose our national ban on partisan gerrymandering. We’ve got to show them that it’s no longer in their interest.”
And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, D-N.Y., reaction to the GOP complaints was to mimic a baby.
“Wah wah wah,” she said.
“Democrats have attempted and asked Republicans for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering, and for 10 years, Republicans have said no,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Republicans have fought for partisan gerrymanders across the United States of America, and these are the rules that they have set.”
Jack Fitzpatrick and Nora McKee contributed to this report.
Kevin Frey is a congressional reporter for MS NOW.