Democrats and Republicans are considering an aggressive strategy to gain an advantage in next year’s midterm elections that will decide the balance of power.
Trump said last week he is pushing Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional maps to create more seats in the House favorable to Republicans as the 2026 elections approach and will put every member of the lower chamber up for reelection.
Trump is hoping to avoid a wipeout of his narrow GOP majority in an election cycle that typically favors that party that is out of power. Democrats flipped the House after the first two years of his first term, derailing Trump’s hopes of implementing his agenda without pushback from the opposing party in Congress. The president has been in a sprint to push through legislative and executive changes at a rapid pace in his second term with the backing of GOP lawmakers despite some bumps along the road.in part to debate new congressional maps and attempt to further isolate Democrats’ chances of winning seats in the state. The president is counting on the state to provide a buffer to his party in the upcoming midterms with as many as five new GOP-leaning districts. When he was asked about the redistricting effort last week, Trump said “Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five.” Ohio is also going through the process of redistricting its map after a ballot measure to expand a mapmaking commission failed in the 2024 election that could provide Republicans with a few more safe seats due the state’s Republican lean. Lawmakers in Ohio are hoping to squeeze out a map favoring the GOP by as much as 13-2. Both states represent a chance for Republicans to bolster their chances to retain their very narrow majority in the House. “In the last three elections, the House of Representatives ‘margin has been five seats or less, so five seats there and maybe two more seats in Ohio could definitely potentially make the difference in control the House of Representatives if things are close,” said Shawn Donahue, a clinical assistant professor of political science at the University at Buffalo who studies redistricting. Congressional maps are redrawn every 10 years after the census to distribute shares of power in the House equally by population. Each party takes the opportunity in states where elected officials control the process as a way to rig the map to damage the opposing party’s chances of picking up seats. Trump’s push to redistrict in Texas is pushing Democrats to attempt to make the same move in heavily blue-leaning states like New York and California to counter.Some Democrats have accused Republicans of trying to “rig” the maps in their favor but are also planning their own efforts to make similar moves and challenge GOP-made districts in court. “Public servants should earn the votes of the people that they hope to represent. What Republicans are trying to do in Texas is to have politicians choose their voters,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters last week. Democrats are facing a bigger challenge nationally due to the prevalence of nonpartisan commissions designed to draw maps without partisan influence. States like Michigan, Washington and California have such commissions in place that will require lengthy and expensive legal battles that may ultimately prove unsuccessful and limit Democrats’ ability to fight back GOP attempts to swing maps with their own effort to do the same in blue states. Other Democratic-controlled states like New York and Illinois that can still draw its own lines have been mostly maxed out, again limiting opportunities for Democratic gains through new maps. “If you start getting into this tit-for-tat thing, are there other Republican states where the map might be very favorable to them, but they might try to see if they could squeeze seats out of other states?” Donahue said. Even if new maps are able to survive legal challenges, it still creates a delicate situation for both parties to navigate. Moving populations between districts may create new pick-up opportunities, but it can also backfire and put seats that were previously safe in play in future cycles. Fear of losing safe seats led most state legislatures to draw relatively cautious maps after the 2020 census that resulted in few changes to the balance of power in district makeups. Texas has already gone through the issue once in their last iteration of maps during the 2018 midterms when blowback against the first Trump administration cost the party two seats they had thought safe. Texas Democrats hope the GOP redistricting effort will create that exact scenario again in 2026 and put more seats in play. “This may end up biting Republicans in the ass. You have the possibility that they will disperse Republican voters to make up these 3 or 4 or 5 new congressional districts and put those districts in play,” Beto O’Rourke said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “So in Texas, we’ve got to get out there and register and meet the voters who are going to decide the outcomes in these next elections.”
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