Republican redistricting efforts fail to deliver expected House seat gains

Texas and North Carolina show contrasting effects of the redrawn maps

Beginning last summer, Trump and Republican allies began reconfiguring congressional districts to give Republican candidates an advantage. Ahead of the midterm elections, the party redrew 15 seats to its advantage. After Tuesday’s election, Republicans appear poised to lose all but two of those districts, with defeats in Texas, Florida and North Carolina where they had hoped to pick up as many as 10 combined seats.

An unnamed House Republican told Fox News, “It was definitely the wrong move,” and added, “One of the truisms in politics is never to overreach. We did and that was part of the reason for the backlash.”

John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a Democratic redistricting group, said, “The maps themselves did fail, and failed quite epically.” Bisognano called the idea itself an even bigger failure: “Allowing an environment to be created around you in which everyone begins to realize how deeply corrupt this administration is and how fearful they are of the American people in elections, so much so that their main tactical path forward is going to be to redraw maps to steal as many voters as they can.”

The results did not mean the maps had little partisan effect, said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard professor who studies redistricting. Even though Republicans failed to pick up nearly all of the new seats they drew, it would be misleading to say gerrymandering did not work at all in this election: the party came up short because Democrats had the strongest midterm elections in half a century. “Compared to [GOP] dreams of winning like five more seats, all of these maps under-delivered,” Stephanopoulos said. “There’s no reason why the best-case scenario of the gerrymander is the right baseline.” Compared with a fair map that favored neither party, he added, “a lot of these maps performed very well for Republicans.”

Texas illustrates the difference between Republican seat share and statewide vote share. Republicans already held 25 of the state’s 38 congressional districts and redrew the map last year to try to gain as many as five new seats. They won just one of the districts they redrew and will hold 24 of 38, even though Democrats Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico received more than 50% of the statewide vote.

“Nobody should think gerrymandering failed when Republicans are winning 65% of the seats in Texas with 45% of the vote. That’s a massive victory for a gerrymander,” Stephanopoulos said.

Adam Kincaid, a Republican mapmaker who drew the Texas maps, said he always viewed the redrawn seats as competitive. “The pickup opportunities were not deep, deep red seats. And that was on purpose, because in a cycle like this, you didn’t want to put incumbents in jeopardy going into the fall that otherwise wouldn’t have been in jeopardy,” Kincaid said.

There may be no state that saw a bigger gerrymandering backfire for Republicans than North Carolina. Republicans already held 10 of the state’s 14 congressional seats and redrew them last year to add an additional Republican seat. The new map made it harder for Representative Don Davis, a Black Democrat in northeastern North Carolina, to win re-election. Davis won, and Democrats may flip as many as six seats, which would give them a 10-4 advantage in the delegation. Several Democrats won narrowly even though Roy Cooper, a Democrat running for US Senate, won his race by nearly 20 points.

Republican lawmakers built their North Carolina advantage by efficiently distributing Republican votes, giving each GOP district a solid firewall that was durable under usual election conditions. But when the generationally large Democratic wave hit the state, it completely overwhelmed the map. “The point is not to protect from the flood, it’s to protect from the wave,” Kincaid said.

“With any gerrymander, there’s literally some electoral tide that’s big enough to overwhelm the gerrymander. You almost never see that tide,” Stephanopoulos said. “North Carolina got the once-in-a-50-year wave that happened to wash out their gerrymander.”

Bisognano said the election results should not be interpreted as proof that the problem had been solved. “Democrats should not have needed to overperform by 10 to 15% in order to find the success that they found,” he said. “It’s a corrosive problem that still plagues this country regardless of these electoral outcomes, and they’re going to come back with more of it.”

Even though the unprecedented Democratic wave neutralized gerrymanders this election, the maps remain poised to give Republicans an advantage in future elections this decade should the electoral environment shift back in their favor. “In Florida and in Texas and in numerous other places, if we snap back to a more neutral electoral environment in 2028 or 2030, like a lot of these districts will just flip right back to Republicans,” Stephanopoulos said.

Together, the experts described an election in which unusually strong Democratic performance overwhelmed the expected Republican advantage in 2026 without erasing the advantages built into the maps. The maps’ longer-term value for Republicans remained contingent on whether electoral conditions shifted back in the party’s favor.