Will Gerrymandering End Democrats’ Hope of Taking Back the House in 2026?

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Texas Republicans are breaking tradition as they plan to redraw congressional maps ahead of next year’s midterms. It’s a move that many weren’t expecting until the end of the decade, but comes at the behest of President Trump who’s hoping to keep the narrow GOP House majority intact. Democrats are trying to push back with some calling this unusual redistricting drive completely unethical and deplorable. David Daley is a senior fellow at the organization FairVote and he joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the impact of this decision.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. David Daley, thanks so much for joining us. Last week in Texas, there was an extension of a legislative by session, and redistricting is back on that, and I think that probably caught a few people by surprise, because we’re kind of used to redistricting being once a 10 year event.

DAVID DALEY: That’s what redistricting is. In most states, that’s not the case in Texas. There are a handful of states where you can do a mid decade redistricting. Those usually tend to be doubly political, right? I mean, gerrymandering that takes place after the census in state legislatures oftentimes locks in political maps for a decade. But when you do this in the middle of a decade, you’ve got the benefit of the previous couple elections, you can tell which seats are competitive, and it gives you a real advantage if you jump back in and take another crack at those maps. That’s what’s happening in Texas right now. It could have real consequences for the midterm elections in 2026.

SREENIVASAN: So, just so I don’t lose my kind of overseas audience or people who aren’t that familiar with redistricting versus gerrymandering. I mean, first of all, what, what is the purpose of redrawing map lines per state and creating new House districts?

DALEY: It has a wonderful idea behind it. Every 10 years after the census, we want to redraw every congressional and state legislative district in the country in order to account for population changes and population shifts over the previous decade. So essentially it has fairness really at its core. 

The trouble is the politicians who draw these lines, especially these days with the kinds of technology and voter data and sophisticated mapping systems that they have, can use this process not to create an actual fair map or a competitive map, but to lock in a partisan advantage for their side. Those advantages have only become bigger and bigger as the technology has improved. And that’s gerrymandering, that is the use of redistricting in order to lock in political benefits.

SREENIVASAN: So when we look at the relationship between drawing a map in Texas and national politics, are you saying this is because, if I can make sure that I have a district that is more likely to go Republican or more likely to go Democrat, and I can essentially secure more seats in the US House – and right now we have a very small imbalance where the Republicans have an advantage by just a couple of votes. So if they were to, able to, what, create entirely new districts, they would just pad that lead.

DALEY: That’s right. Right now, Republicans have a three-seat advantage in the U.S. House. So Democrats only have to flip a handful of seats in the 2026 midterms in order to take back the chamber. Ordinarily the party that is out of the White House does pretty well during midterms. You know, if you look at the 2018 midterms, really good for Democrats, the 2010 midterms really good for Republicans. But if you can go into Texas and do a mid-decade redraw and take someplace between two and five Democratic seats off the board, suddenly then you’ve moved the Republican advantage from three seats to somewhere closer to six or seven. There is also likely to be a new map coming out of Ohio that could flip two close Democratic seats there.

And there is a really important Voting Rights Act redistricting case that the US Supreme Court will hear about majority-minority seats beginning in the fall. That could lead to the disappearance of majority-minority black democratic seats in Alabama, Louisiana, perhaps elsewhere across the south. So when we say right now that Democrats need to flip three seats, that’s on the current map, that could really change. Democrats could be looking at having to pick up somewhere closer to a dozen seats to win the House. And that gets much, much harder because there’s just not a lot of competitive seats out there due in part to all of the gerrymandering.

SREENIVASAN: You know the Department of Justice sent Governor Abbott a letter earlier this month, and they were expressing serious concerns regarding the legality of four of Texas’ congressional districts. They basically said that these are unconstitutional ger- racial gerrymanders. 

DALEY: I would say first that the DOJ letter is really designed to give Governor Abbott cover here. I’m not – I I would not call those districts racial gerrymanders. I would call those majority-minority seats that are drawn in order to keep Texas in line with the Voting Rights Act. 

SREENIVASAN: The – in a, in a statement, the Texas Republican Party said, this latest round of redistricting is “an essential step to preserving GOP control in Congress and advancing President Trump’s America first agenda.” I mean, in a way it’s a very honest declaration of their intentions, but it’s also, you know, very partisan. Is it legal?

DALEY: It’s very partisan and it’s very legal. First, it’s very legal because Texas allows this kind of mid-decade redistricting. But second, that entire statement is on the table right now because of John Roberts and the US Supreme Court. In a decision in 2019, in a case from North Carolina called Common Cause versus Rucho. The court said that partisan gerrymandering is a non-justiciable political issue. They closed the federal courts to these claims, and they did so at exactly the moment in which lower federal courts, judges appointed by presidents of both parties, made it very clear that they had all the tools they needed to determine when a partisan gerrymander had gone too far. They threw out Democratic gerrymanders in Maryland. They threw out Republican gerrymanders in Ohio and Michigan and North Carolina and Wisconsin, and they had a range of evidence. And they said, we know how to do this. 

And John Roberts and the court said, no. They said that all these standards, all these measures were sociological gobbledygook. They said it was going to look like the courts were being political. Instead, it was the US Supreme Court that was being political. They locked in these gains for Republicans. They incentivized both parties in 2021 to maximize their gerrymanders, knowing that nobody would stop them. And they encouraged statements like the one we see from the Texas GOP, because when politicians now say that we were doing an intentional partisan gerrymander, that is exactly in line with the decision that Roberts handed down. He made this possible. The court enabled this attack on democracy that both parties are engaged in right now.

SREENIVASAN: If the Democrats felt like that court case was a loss for them, I mean, they were controlling Congress from ‘21 to ‘23. Why didn’t they pass, you know, legislation against gerrymandering? I mean, you could conceivably see that that could be a bipartisan source of agreement because both teams realize that this is just, you know, kind of this, this technological warfare that keeps escalating.

DALEY: Yeah, I wish they had. Certainly what you saw at that point in time was a real public push on this. You had Michigan and Colorado and Utah and Missouri, Virginia – voters in all of those states voting to try to reign in the worst excesses of this system. And, you know red states, blue states, purple states – voters hate gerrymandering every place. And Democrats attempted to include this in some of the voting rights packages that they were advancing back in 2021. They did not make it through the, the Senate, I believe, largely because of the filibuster. You just didn’t have everybody on board for that kind of change. 

This is a national problem. It needs a national solution. It can’t be fixed piecemeal, state by state. And when the courts pulled themselves out of this, it really took away the last, best possibility of a neutral arbiter coming in and trying to enforce a standard.

It’s really difficult for politicians to end gerrymandering. They benefit from it. They like it. If we’re going to fix it, it needs a national problem and it needs to take on the real, you know, fundamental question here, which is that in a, a nation that has 435 single member districts, how you draw the lines in all of those districts determines winners and losers. There’s a bill that Congress is considering right now, the Fair Representation Act proposed by Don Beyer and Jamie Raskin that would move us towards a more proportional system that would make every district a swing district, it would put an end to gerrymandering. Oh, and by the way, it, it also calls for an end to mid-decade redistricting every place. I think that’s the kind of big picture thinking that this requires.

SREENIVASAN: So what would be the impact if, say Governor Newsom in California or Governor Murphy in New Jersey tried to counter whatever happens in Texas?

DALEY: It would be additionally bad for voters in, in all of those states. I think the road in California is very difficult. California has a non-partisan, independent commission draw its lines. If California wants to do something about this, they would either have to have a special election to change their, their constitutional system, or the legislature would have to find some kind of fig leaf to suggest that they could do a mid-decade redistricting on their own above and beyond the commission. That would certainly wind up in court, and I can’t imagine that the legislature would win. 

New Jersey could do the same thing. They have a commission, the state legislature could try to step in. But I think that Democrats have really maximized their gains on a lot of these maps. It’s currently a 9-3 Democratic delegation in New Jersey. It’s a 14-3 Democratic delegation in Illinois. It’s a 7-1 in Maryland. There’s not a lot of blue states where Democrats can do what Republicans are trying to do in Texas. So it’s going to be very difficult for them to find a way to match this.

SREENIVASAN: Okay. So there have, there have been some critics of what the Republicans are trying in Texas saying, look, there, this could backfire and, and create what’s – I think the, the phrase is a dummy mander. What does that mean?

DALEY: A dummy mander is a great term, right? A dummy mander means a map that is, that is drawn to benefit one side, but that the political situation changes and it ends up backfiring. You, you spread your voters too thin, you get too greedy trying for too many seats. I think this is unlikely to happen in Texas, and I think the fact that we’re talking about it in many ways is a sign that Democrats don’t have a lot of good options here other than to try to tell Republicans, well, be careful this might not work. It might backfire on you. 

Texas has a 25-13 Republican delegation. Only one of those 25 Republican seats is remotely competitive. That – one seat that was won at 57% of the vote in 2024. Of the other 24 seats, all of them were won with more than 60% of the vote. 13 of those seats were won with more than 65% of the vote, or were completely uncontested at all. If Republicans want to do this, the two south Texas districts, the 34th and 28th, which are currently democratic districts, very close, within 5%, you could wipe those away pretty quickly. And then if you wanted to go for a third, a fourth seat, what you would do is you’d go up towards like Dallas-Fort Worth. You would take a little piece of the city, and then you would attach it to a big swath of Central Eastern Texas. Those red districts right now that are almost entirely uncontested by Democrats, big Republican counties. 

So I think you could probably get to four seats without even putting a dummy mander on the table. Republicans have not drawn a dummy mander in the modern technological era. They are very, very good at this. The consultant that they brought on in 2021 to work on their maps, it’s the same consultant who drew the maps in Wisconsin, a map that has withstood democratic waves and, and never come close to backfiring. I think when we talk about a dummy mander we’re talking about something that might have been more apt to happen in the 1990s or the 2000s. Not really going to happen right now.

SREENIVASAN: You know, there are people who will say, listen, if the maps have been gerrymandered every 10 years. But in 2018, we had midterms where the Democrats kind of overcame some of those.

DALEY: Yeah. you’re right. Democrats took back the house in 2018. But I think what’s important to recognize about that is that Democrats were able to win that back, not because they defeated gerrymandering or because these maps backfired but it’s because Democrats and, and citizens defeated these maps in the courts ahead of time. So you had court cases that created fair maps and got rid of the gerrymandered maps in, in Pennsylvania, in parts of Florida, in Virginia, in North Carolina. So the map in 2018 looked very different from the map elsewhere. 

Democrats also won that year because they were able to win – about 75% of the seats that, that they flipped were, were drawn by courts or drawn by commissions. So they maximized their gains in the fair, competitive districts where it was still possible to do that. They did not really make any gains at all on gerrymandered maps. (They were able to win back two seats in Texas and two seats in Michigan that way, four of them. And that is all that these maps surrendered over a decade in all of these states. In, in all of these elections. 

Those districts don’t exist anymore. Republicans in 2021 went into Indiana, they went into Oklahoma, they went into Kansas, they went into Utah. These seats that went to Democrats in 2018 in that wave, they were redrawn. They’re not going to go back the other way. So there’s a really, really small pool of seats for Democrats to go after. You had 37 of 435 races in 2024 that were within 5%. Democrats already won 22 of those that year. It leaves you with 15 competitive districts. There were only three districts in which a Republican was elected, but Kamala Harris carried the district. That’s Don Bacon’s seat in Nebraska. Michael Lawler in New York, Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania. So you could, you could give it a shot. But the number of targets and how many voters you’d have to persuade in these districts, very, very difficult at this point.

SREENIVASAN: Senior fellow at FairVote, and author of “Anti-Democratic.” David Daley, thanks so much.

DALEY: A pleasure. Thank you.