Everywhere you look, the MAGA coalition that propelled Donald Trump back into the Oval Office is fracturing. The president’s poll numbers are plummeting across key demographics and dragging down congressional Republicans hoping to keep their jobs in November. Two weeks ago, the outlook for the GOP was looking especially grim, with predictions showing the House would almost surely be lost in the midterms and Republicans hanging on to the Senate by a thread.
Then, in the span of about 10 days, everything shifted. The redistricting war Trump had begun, which had been looking like Napoleon’s doomed invasion of Russia, suddenly swung back in Republicans’ favor. The U.S. Supreme Court opened the door to a rush of racial redistricting across the South, and Virginia’s Supreme Court reversed Democrats’ gains in Virginia. The resulting Republican gerrymandering is acting as a superglue binding the GOP’s splintering hopes for surviving the midterms, but that gerrymandering leaves the party as fragile as ever in the long-term and destined to fall apart once Democrats can fully respond in kind.
Republican gerrymandering is acting as a superglue binding the GOP’s splintering hopes for surviving the midterms
The prevailing assumption for November’s elections was that Republicans would find themselves “cooked,” as one White House official recently told MS NOW. The factions that make up the MAGA base have all found things they don’t love about the administration. There’s the Make America Healthy Again crowd’s dismay that a weed killer hasn’t been banned, the anti-war isolationists’ anger at Trump’s Iran war and the anti-immigration wing’s furor that mass deportations are lagging.
Among so-called “normie” Republicans, as GOP pollster Kristen Solis Anderson called them in a recent New York Times op-ed, the sentiment isn’t much better. These voters, who fall outside the MAGA and ‘Never Trump” camps, are more concerned about rising gas prices than the owning the libs with internet memes. And the inflation numbers released Tuesday underscore that economic pain the White House has caused with its tariffs and its war with Iran. More troubling, wages are not keeping up with price increases, people are putting in more hours working and borrowing more.
The incumbent party traditionally suffers midterm losses, and Trump and his lackeys’ nonchalance toward voters’ struggles should be the kiss of death. The saving grace has been the gerrymandering that is warping the electorate even as the first primaries have started. The Supreme Court has allowed Louisiana, Alabama and other states to gut the majority-minority districts that the Voting Rights Act once protected. Virginia’s state Supreme Court, meanwhile, cast aside multiple gains for Democrats when it rolled back the new congressional map voters approved.
The rush of redistricting has left an all-time low number of competitive House seats, which increases the importance of GOP primaries compared to the general election. This, in turn, means that the most devoted parts of the Republican base will continue to be the driving factor in congressional races. Even if they’re disappointed in the administration, these primary voters will still be seeking out extreme candidates who are more concerned about earning Trump’s endorsement than how they may fare in a general election.
The redistricting war has also strengthened Trump’s control over the party in ways that defy his polling numbers and lame duck status. Most of the Indiana state lawmakers who stood in the way of his push to gerrymander their state lost their primaries last week. Incumbents who might have otherwise thought about moving away from him publicly before November once again find themselves worried about losing his favor.
In putting off any reckoning of how Trump’s policies have hurt their constituents, lawmakers are putting a larger target on their backs for further down the road.
The immediate upside for the GOP is, as the Times succinctly put it, “Republicans have roughly 10 more House seats that favor them than they did just 10 days ago.” But in putting off any reckoning of how Trump’s policies have hurt their constituents, lawmakers are putting a larger target on their backs for further down the road. If they manage to retain the House in the face of the growing backlash, then they likely won’t have enough new seats to move past the infighting and backbiting that’s currently denying them legislative momentum.
Meanwhile, the Democratic voters being deprived of districts don’t vanish into the ether. Some new districts Republicans are creating will inevitably be less red than they were. In what was already shaping up to be a wave election, those Democrats tucked into newly GOP-leaning districts may find themselves more inclined to turn out to vote and negate the GOP’s plans with massive turnout. Moreover, Democrats in blue states are already gearing up to join California and Virginia in their own midcycle redistricting efforts to better rebalance the odds for 2028.
In following Trump’s lead, the Republican Party has chosen short-term gratification over long-term growth and stability. By seeking to silence all but their most fervent supporters, they have essentially told the rest of their voters that their priorities don’t matter. It’s hard to see that message drawing huge turnout this fall or convincing voters to hold their nose and support their incumbent. The fault lines that gerrymandering have temporarily fused together are still there, and still vulnerable to cracking apart.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.