With midterm vote starting, here’s where things stand in national redistricting fight
-
Click here to listen to this article - Share via
- President Trump set off a partisan battle that spread to more than a dozen states, including California.
- Republican control of the House — and Trump’s largely unfettered power — is dangling by a thread.
Donald Trump has never been one to play by the rules.
Whether it’s stiffing contractors as a real estate developer, defying court orders he doesn’t like as president or leveraging the Oval Office to vastly inflate his family’s fortune, Trump’s guiding principle can be distilled to a simple, unswerving calculation: What’s in it for me?
Trump is no student of history. He’s famously allergic to books. But he knows enough to know that midterm elections like the one in November have, with few exceptions, been ugly for the party holding the presidency.
With control of the House — and Trump’s virtually unchecked authority — dangling by a gossamer thread, he reckoned correctly that Republicans were all but certain to lose power this fall unless something unusual happened.
So he effectively broke the rules.
Normally, the redrawing of the country’s congressional districts takes place once every 10 years, following the census and accounting for population changes over the previous decade. Instead, Trump prevailed upon the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, to throw out the state’s political map and refashion congressional lines to wipe out Democrats and boost GOP chances of winning as many as five additional House seats.
The intention was to create a bit of breathing room, as Democrats need a gain of just three seats to seize control of the House.
Voters in a prime congressional battleground are sharply divided over Trump. Beyond that, they can’t fathom how others can possibly believe what they believe or see the president the way they do.
In relatively short order, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, responded with his own partisan gerrymander. He rallied voters to pass a tit-for-tat ballot measure, Proposition 50, which revised the state’s political map to wipe out Republicans and boost Democratic prospects of winning as many as five additional seats.
Then came the deluge.
In more than a dozen states, lawmakers looked at ways to tinker with their congressional maps to lift their candidates, stick it to the other party and gain House seats in November.
Some of those efforts continue, including in Virginia where, as in California, voters are being asked to amend the state Constitution to let majority Democrats redraw political lines ahead of the midterm. A special election is set for April 21.
But as the first ballots of 2026 are cast on Tuesday — in Arkansas, North Carolina and Texas — the broad contours of the House map have become clearer, along with the result of all those partisan machinations. The likely upshot is a nationwide partisan shift of fewer than a handful of seats.
The independent, nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which has a sterling decades-long record of election forecasting, said the most probable outcome is a wash. “At the end of the day,” said Erin Covey, who analyzes House races for the Cook Report, “this doesn’t really benefit either party in a real way.”
Well.
That was a lot of wasted time and energy.
Let’s take a quick spin through the map and the math, knowing that, of course, there are no election guarantees.
In Texas, for instance, new House districts were drawn assuming Latinos would back Republican candidates by the same large percentage they supported Trump in 2024. But that’s become much less certain, given the backlash against his draconian immigration enforcement policies; numerous polls show a significant falloff in Latino support for the president, which could hurt GOP candidates up and down the ballot.
But suppose Texas Republicans gain five seats as hoped for and California Democrats pick up the five seats they’ve hand-crafted. The result would be no net change.
Elsewhere, under the best case for each party, a gain of four Democratic House seats in Virginia would be offset by a gain of four Republican House seats in Florida.
That leaves a smattering of partisan gains here and there. A combined pickup of four or so Republican seats in Ohio, North Carolina and Missouri could be mostly offset by Democratic gains of a seat apiece in New York, Maryland and Utah.
(The latter is not a result of legislative high jinks, but rather a judge throwing out the gerrymandered map passed by Utah Republicans, who ignored a voter-approved ballot measure intended to prevent such heavy-handed partisanship. A newly created district, contained entirely within Democratic-leaning Salt Lake County, seems certain to go Democrats’ way in November.)
In short, it’s easy to characterize the political exertions of Trump, Abbott, Newsom and others as so much sound and fury producing, at bottom, little to nothing.
But that’s not necessarily so.
Barabak: Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris have traveled parallel paths. Will they collide in 2028?
The Democrats rose together through San Francisco politics, sharing donors and, for a time, campaign strategists. A fight for their party’s nomination would bring their private jostling into the open.
The campaign surrounding Proposition 50 delivered a huge political boost to Newsom, shoring up his standing with Democrats, significantly raising his profile across the country and, not least for his 2028 presidential hopes, helping the governor build a significant nationwide fundraising base.
In crimson-colored Indiana, Republicans refused to buckle under tremendous pressure from Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other party leaders, rejecting an effort to redraw the state’s congressional map and give the GOP a hold on all nine House seats. That showed even Trump’s Svengali-like hold on his party has its limits.
But the biggest impact is also the most corrosive.
By redrawing political lines to predetermine the outcome of House races, politicians rendered many of their voters irrelevant and obsolete. Millions of Democrats in Texas, Republicans in California and partisans in other states have been effectively disenfranchised, their voices rendered mute. Their ballots spindled and nullified.
In short, the politicians — starting with Trump — extended a big middle finger to a large portion of the American electorate.
Is it any wonder, then, so many voters hold politicians and our political system in contempt?
Insights
L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.
Viewpoint
Perspectives
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
The 2026 midterm redistricting efforts initiated by Trump represent a departure from established norms, as congressional districts are typically redrawn only once per decade following the census, yet mid-cycle redistricting has now become a widespread practice across more than a dozen states.
Despite the extensive partisan maneuvering by multiple states to redraw maps, the cumulative effect has produced minimal net change in House seat allocation, with the Cook Political Report forecasting the outcome as essentially a wash that benefits neither party in a meaningful way.
The redistricting campaign had indirect political benefits beyond seat calculations, as the Proposition 50 effort in California provided California’s governor with substantial fundraising advantages and elevated national political standing.
The most significant consequence of mid-cycle redistricting is the systematic disenfranchisement of voters whose representation has been predetermined through partisan line-drawing, rendering millions of opposition-party voters effectively powerless and contributing to broader public contempt for the political system.
Some Republican officials resisted Trump’s pressure to pursue redistricting efforts, as demonstrated in Indiana where the legislature rejected redistricting legislation despite the president’s threats of primary challenges against opponents.
Different views on the topic
While mid-cycle redistricting represents a departure from historical practice, it remains legally permissible under current law, and courts have upheld several of the redrawn maps, including California’s revised districts and Texas’s plan, indicating that the actions comply with existing legal frameworks.[1][2]
The redistricting efforts, though appearing significant in scope, reflect legitimate partisan responses to shifting political terrain, where defensive countermeasures by one party are necessary to balance aggressive moves by the other party seeking electoral advantages.
From an election forecasting perspective, even modest changes in district composition carry consequential implications in closely divided chambers, and the narrow House majority means that redistricting outcomes, while currently appearing neutral on balance, could prove decisive in specific competitive races.[1][3]
Ongoing litigation and pending Supreme Court decisions may yet alter the redistricting landscape significantly before November, meaning the final impact of these efforts remains uncertain and could ultimately favor one party over the other depending on judicial rulings.[2]
More From the Los Angeles Times
Podcasts
Taped Jan 8, 2026, a year after the Eaton Fire, this episode features Ondi Timoner. After losing her home, she began documenting the displacement and financial struggles of her neighbors, joining My Tribe Rise to help Altadena rebuild and recover.
Attorney Frank Carson defended the accused for decades. Framed for murder and later acquitted, a star witness admitted he lied. Stanislaus County paid $22.5M to settle his estate’s lawsuit.
Hear from the winner of the 1968 Caltech vs MIT electric car race. But it’s not all fresh air: smog devastates communities of color, and the Trump administration may pull the plug on California’s ability to clear its own air.
