Trump began the frenzy this summer when he successfully persuaded the state of Texas to hold a special session to redraw its congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterms. While states are required to redraw their legislative maps after each census every 10 years, there is no legal barrier to redrawing them more frequently. Trump hopes to gain as many as five additional GOP-favored seats from the Lone Star State.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, whose state faces fewer impediments to gerrymandering than most others, hosted a group of Texas Democratic lawmakers last week in what some took as a signal that Illinois would retaliate if Republicans go forward with their plans. New York Governor Kathy Hochul also took her first steps toward support for retaliatory redistricting in public remarks last week.
Even some Republican-led states beyond Texas are now considering further steps. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said last week that his state’s legislature could take a second look at its congressional maps, claiming that Florida got a “raw deal” from the reapportionment of seats after the 2020 census. Missouri’s state lawmakers are also reportedly receiving direct pressure from Trump to eliminate the state’s fifth congressional district, a Democratic stronghold in the eastern half of Kansas City that last elected a Republican in 1946.
Legal conservatives have increasingly treated remedies to racial gerrymandering as indistinguishable from racial gerrymandering itself, so it is unsurprising that the department made this recommendation to Texas. The Supreme Court announced in June that it would rehear a racial gerrymandering case in the upcoming term that begins in October, likely for that same reason. Rehearing the case will give the justices an opportunity to squarely decide whether a key provision in the Voting Rights Act can be used by federal courts to remedy racial gerrymandering claims.
To blunt that effect, Trump reportedly pressured Texas’s congressional delegation and the state’s GOP leaders over the last few weeks to support a mid-decade redistricting push to reduce the number of Democratic seats in the state. The state’s voters sent 25 Republicans and 13 Democrats to Congress in its House delegation in 2024. Texas Governor Greg Abbott eventually agreed to call a special session to redraw the maps.
Because Republican-led states tend to be less populous, there are few options for gerrymandering-driven gains at this point. The GOP holds a majority of seats in 30 of the states’ House delegations. Twelve of those states, including four with a single congressional district, did not elect a single Democratic representative to the House last year. Only Texas and four other states—Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio—also have four or more Democratic seats in their House delegation.
Gerrymandering typically works by “packing” and “cracking” one party’s voters into different districts. Congressional districts are constitutionally required to be as equal in population as possible to one another. In a 10-district state where the electorate is 60 percent Republican and 40 percent Democratic, for example, lawmakers might try to pack as many of the Democrats into one or two districts as possible. Any Democrats that can’t fit in them would be distributed among the other districts so they can’t form a majority anywhere else. A 60–40 split in overall votes then becomes an 8–2 split in representation.
Democrats cannot simply hope that the Republicans will gerrymander themselves out of power, of course. As I’ve noted before, the GOP already effectively gerrymandered itself into power at the national level over the past decade, and Republican-led states now face far fewer legal constraints than Democratic-led ones when redrawing their legislative maps, thanks to blue-state reforms over the years. It is understandable that Democrats are reluctant to abandon their stated opposition to gerrymandering after decades of hoping to find a state-by-state solution to the problem. Trump’s ham-fisted efforts to eliminate any electoral opposition to himself next year should overcome whatever remaining hesitation they might have.
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