In a series of mid-decade redistricting gambits, state legislatures are looking to rig next year’s congressional balloting in advance.
Voting rights protesters outside the Supreme Court in 2023 in advance of a gerrymandering ruling
.(Evelyn Hockstein / For The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Ohio’s Ninth and 13th Congressional Districts are two of the most evenly divided districts in the nation. In 2024, Democrats narrowly won both. Veteran Toledo lawmaker Representative Marcy Kaptur held the competitive Ninth, a slender, snaking district that runs along Ohio’s northwest coast, by less than 1 percentage point. In the 13th, which includes Akron, just over 8,500 votes provided the margin in a 51.1 to 48.9 percent victory for Representative Emilia Sykes.
It’s hard to imagine a path for Democrats to erase the GOP’s three-seat majority (which has ballooned to seven after four lawmakers sworn into the 119th Congress have died) and retake the House in 2026 without holding onto these seats, and scores of others like them throughout the country. Yet winning them next year is going to be more difficult—not because of shifting political winds but because Ohio Republicans will begin redrawing the state’s congressional map this fall ahead of the midterms—and plans are afoot in several other Republican-led states to create more safe GOP seats out of districts that now lean purple-to-blue.
The Ohio gerrymander will come on the heels of the bid in Texas’s Republican-controlled state legislature to redraw congressional maps there to the party’s advantage. In that still-pending GOP power play, the party stands to steal three to five congressional seats.
Republicans, fearful of losing the House next November, have embarked on an audacious and antidemocratic campaign to hold on to their narrow House majority by rigging the midterms in advance. Under this state-level initiative, the goal is for Republicans to recast already heavily gerrymandered congressional delegations so as to ensure even greater structural advantages that Democrats may not be able to counter. In a recursive set of rulings on voting rights and districting cases, John Roberts and the US Supreme Court have essentially given them free rein.
Texas is getting all the attention right now. But there is no indication that Republicans will stop there. Ohio will remap next. Florida, Indiana, Missouri, and North Carolina could follow. Kentucky and New Hampshire are also vulnerable to right-wing takeovers of their congressional delegations. Redistricting will give Republicans a massive, unearned boost heading into the midterms—especially since frustrated Democrats again find themselves with limited options to retaliate.
If Democrats thought the path to erasing the GOP’s narrow majority in 2026 is a simple question of capitalizing on an unpopular presidency and the historical midterm bounce for the party out of power—well, think again. These mid-decade gerrymanders could more than triple the number of wins needed to make Representative Hakeem Jeffries speaker. And there aren’t many ways to counter them.
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Let’s say Republicans have swung the minimal three-seat gain in Texas. That would just be the opening salvo in the redistricting wars. A new map is a sure thing in Ohio, where Republicans in 2021 and 2022 both strong-armed a bipartisan commission and defied repeated rulings by the state Supreme Court. Because the state’s commission didn’t agree on that 10–5 GOP map, it expired after four years instead of the usual 10. That’s turned into a perfect opening for the Republicans.
Ohio Democrats and voting rights groups have some options, including trying to force a statewide vote on the new map, but if Republicans battle back with similar determination, there’s little to be done. The Ohio GOP ignored multiple rulings from the state Supreme Court finding that their maps violated the state’s Constitution during the last go-round. Then, during the 2022 midterms, hard-line conservatives captured the court, winning the seat of a courageous GOP chief justice who ruled against the gerrymanders just before she retired. (Maureen O’Connor’s independence brought calls for her impeachment, and her portrait has been banished to the court’s basement.)
After Ohio, the GOP might then move one state west to Indiana, where the party already holds seven of nine seats. A mid-decade gerrymander could make that into an even more lopsided 8–1 advantage. In 2024, Democrats won the First district, in the state’s northwest corner, with 57 percent—but Republicans could carve up the blue stronghold in Gary into a series of narrow slices, scattered among the solidly red Second, Third, Fourth or Eighth districts.
Moving south, Trump aides have already reached out to Missouri lawmakers about turning a 6–2 GOP edge into a 7–1 map that disassembles the Democratic district in Kansas City currently held by Emanuel Cleaver. There’s also potential to expand the Republican’s gerrymandered 10–4 map in North Carolina, where the GOP-controlled state Supreme Court has already unraveled state constitutional protections against tilted, partisan maps. (The three additional seats won as a result provided the GOP with its House majority in the 2024 cycle.) If Republicans wanted to get extremely aggressive, they might also attempt to target the single Democratic seats in Kansas and Kentucky, or carve out a more favorable map in New Hampshire.
Democrats have threatened to meet these threatened gerrymanders with ones of their own, but in practical terms, they just have fewer options. After being caught flat-footed by the audacious GOP gerrymanders of the 2010s, which created red bastions in purple Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, Democrats pressed their advantages wherever they could after the 2021 Census. They drew an aggressive 14–3 map in Illinois. A map that could have created an 8–0 delegation in Maryland was blocked by the courts, leading to a 7–1 map instead. Democrats also drew advantageous lines in Oregon and New Mexico, and modified a commission map in New York.
That leaves fewer targets of opportunity for Democratic state legislatures—together with a body of laws standing in the way of grabbing more. The Illinois map appears maxed out. The courts would likely block another 8–0 map in Maryland. New York’s state Constitution appears to block any mid-decade redraw there; Democrats are trying to be creative, but even their likeliest play seems too late for 2026. New Jersey already has a 9–3 Democratic map, and tough talk from Governor Phil Murphy aside, there is reportedly little appetite in the legislature to unravel the state’s bipartisan commission in an election year.
This means the main Democratic battleground would likely be California. Governor Gavin Newsom, state legislators, and members of Congress have talked openly about putting a ballot initiative quickly before voters that would find a way around the state’s nonpartisan citizen commission, the national gold standard for fair redistricting. That’s a long road. Any other legislative power play would face an uphill legal path
The GOP’s gerrymanders will thus skew the midterm math against the sort of wave election Democrats had in 2018—and that’s before the US Supreme Court hears arguments in a case from Louisiana that could test the constitutionality of majority-minority districts, and put seats held by Black Democrats in Louisiana, Alabama, and elsewhere at risk.
The five seats all but certain to come from Texas and Ohio push the Democrats’s magic number to eight. Missouri would make it nine. North Carolina would edge it into double digits. And each gerrymander would further shrink the roster of potential Democratic pickups on a map where only 37 of 435 seats were within five points in 2024. The road is not impossible. There are winnable seats in Nebraska, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York.
But Democrats cannot count on history here. Yes, the party out of power in Washington traditionally earns a midterm bounce in the range of 20 seats. But many of those political science charts were built decades ago, in congressional battlegrounds governed by more competitive and less gerrymandered maps. It’s much more difficult to engineer a strong run of flipped House seats when so many of them have been taken off the table and rendered uncompetitive.
It’s true that Democrats recaptured the House by a robust margin of 41 seats in 2018—but they did this without overcoming the gerrymander. First, they won in courts, and established fairer maps in Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, and elsewhere. Then they won some three-quarters of the flipped seats that year in states where courts and commissions drew the lines. They did not beat gerrymanders in Ohio, Wisconsin, or North Carolina, but won in places like Utah and Oklahoma—and those seats have since been gerrymandered out of reach. That path no longer exists. Ahead of 2016, Florida’s state Supreme Court overturned several districts as unconstitutional and ordered a new map. This June, a court controlled by Ron DeSantis, Leonard Leo, and hard-right Federalist Society acolytes let a much more extreme GOP gerrymander stand.
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This isn’t a race to the bottom any longer; we are there. The national congressional map, already nearly maximally gerrymandered and uncompetitive, might soon have its last meaningful races drained away. The legislative body that’s supposed to be closest to the people is almost entirely insulated from the ballot box. The US Supreme Court has taken the federal courts out of play as a neutral arbiter. As a result, any state that fixes the antidemocratic adoption of gerrymanders on its own looks like a sucker embracing universal disarmament.
This is a problem in need of national solutions. They exist—chiefly in reforms such as ranked-choice voting, multimember districts, and proportional representation. But as the gerrymandering battles erupt once more into all-out partisan warfare, the important reforms to preserve the integrity of one person, one vote in our embattled democracy may well be on life support. If you hated the consequences of partisan gerrymandering before, just wait.
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