It is certainly still too soon to say what the effects of a spasm of mid-decade gerrymandering will be on the results of the 2026 midterms, but one thing we can say for sure already: It won’t have been worth it.
After three furious months that began when Texas’s August gerrymander kicked off a national game of tit for tat, there are only 35 or 40 House seats that we can already expect to be at least somewhat competitive next year. About half of those are guaranteed battlegrounds — the perennial swing districts. But of the larger swing set, it’s Republicans who have slightly more exposure.
A light breeze would probably be enough to deliver the three red-to-blue flips necessary to see a fifth change in partisan control of the House this century. You’d have to go back to the 1870s and 1880s to find another equivalent period of partisan turmoil.
Another change in power would be no surprise for a House in which neither party has been able to find anything like a stable majority. But what we learned from the elections at the start of this month was that there are another 15 or more seats, all currently held by Republicans, that now have to be considered in play next November.
Certainly, the winds could still change direction. Given that less than 10 percent of House districts are competitive in a pure sense, a run of good news for the party in power could still limit Democrats to very modest gains. Maybe not fewer than three seats, but perhaps not enough to have anything other than a very weak majority.
That’s the scenario Republicans had in mind when they undertook their Texas maneuver. In 2022, the GOP learned the hard way that there are limits to the potency of the midterm curse that has afflicted the majority party in almost every midterm election for more than a century.
Four years ago at this time, the consensus view held that the deepening unpopularity of then-President Biden and the results of the off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia foreshadowed Democratic losses somewhere in the range of two dozen seats. With Republicans only needing to flip three seats, control of the House wasn’t ever really seriously in doubt. What the GOP was instead thinking about was how to get at the upper end of the range of possible flips and give future Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) a little cushion once the red team took control.
Instead, Republicans won only nine seats, which, as we know, gave the new leaders no room to maneuver. The future Speaker was a former Speaker in just nine months. The Republican underperformance of 2022 had created a narrow majority in which small factions, and even individual members, had veto power over the agenda.
Things got weirder still in 2024, when a Republican presidential candidate won the national popular vote for only the second time in 30 years, but House Republicans still managed a net loss of two seats. First, the midterm wave didn’t materialize, and then a decisive win for their party in a presidential contest produced no downballot benefits for them.
That’s all been very frustrating for House Republicans, many of whom still remember the golden days of the 2010s when the GOP controlled more than 240 seats. If you’ve served in a House majority where you could afford to lose nearly 30 members of your own party and still advance legislation, this has to be a real grind.
But there was an upside. As House Republicans came to terms with their even smaller majority after 2024, the silver lining seemed to be that perhaps the era of “wave” elections was over. Democrats lost a bunch of House seats when Biden won by more than 7 million votes in 2020, the Republicans had failed to capitalize in 2022, and Trump 2.0 had no coattails.
There’s a strong argument there for the idea that the boom-and-bust cycle that had delivered wild swings in both directions from 2006 to 2018 had come to a close. It could be explained by the ways in which technology has made gerrymandering more effective or by the self-gerrymandering of the electorate. American voters have become extraordinarily — dangerously, even — sorted into compact partisan clusters. This geographic siloing fits with the death of “all politics is local” in favor of a highly nationalized approach to elections. Plus, districts are huge now, with nearly 900,000 constituents for every House member.
Big districts with tight partisan clusters exploited by big data and a climate of zombie party loyalty could explain why in three consecutive elections we have had teeny-tiny majorities.
And if that is the way of the world, what Republicans did in Texas made sense. If the range of the cycle-to-cycle swing is less than 10 seats, five seats is a lot. It made even more sense if one accepted the conventional wisdom that Democrats didn’t have many options for retaliation. Democrats already mastered gerrymandering in the places like Illinois, where their state-level control was based on maximizing the clout of their voters in those big blue dots surrounded by red counties.
Plus, Democrats had been decrying gerrymandering for years. They put it at the center of their 2021 bill for a federal takeover of elections, and multiple blue states, including California, had passed measures requiring a nonpartisan drawing of lines.
Those assumptions turned out to be wrong. It’s still too soon to say, but right now, the best guess is that the coast-to-coast redistricting wars are probably worth just two or three seats for Republicans. If we assume the Republican premise that the potential swing before gerrymandering was just eight or nine seats, three seats isn’t nothing, but probably not worth the cost and the inevitable unintended consequences.
And if those unintended consequences include further motivating an already frothy Democratic base in a cycle that, for now anyway, looks like an old-fashioned wave, the Texas strategy will look like a debacle.
Stirewalt is the politics editor for The Hill, veteran campaign and elections journalist and best-selling author of books about American political history.
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