President Donald Trump has consistently pressured Republicans in Texas and elsewhere to redraw U.S. House of Representatives district boundaries in the middle of the decade as a means of giving the GOP an advantage in next year's midterm elections. But one prominent elections expert is predicting that strategy may ultimately backfire.
During a Tuesday appearance on liberal commentator Bill Press' podcast, Larry Sabato — who is the director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics — said that based on 2025's off-year elections in which Democrats enjoyed lopsided victories in multiple states, Republican gerrymandering efforts may not save the GOP's majority in the House of Representatives.
"It's not going to be as helpful as he thought it was going to be. They thought they had a surefire way to guarantee control of the House, even if the public didn't want Republicans to control the House. And for a while, I wondered if that was going to be true myself," Sabato said. "But I do think that it hasn't gone the way they planned."
In response to Texas redrawing its U.S. House districts to give Republicans an advantage in five districts previously held by Democrats, California's Democratic trifecta government redrew the Golden State's maps to give Democrats an edge in five Republican districts. But unlike Texas, California's maps were only set to go into effect if a majority of voters approved the Prop 50 ballot referendum. After Prop 50 passed overwhelmingly, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) specifically thanked Texas Republicans.
"Gavin Newsom does deserve a lot of credit for organizing that. In the beginning, if you looked at the polling that was available, the private polling at least, it didn't really suggest that Prop 50 would pass, much less pass with a massive landslide," Sabato said of California's redistricting ballot measure. "So that was impressive."
Sabato additionally observed that despite Texas Republicans' best efforts to make their new maps friendlier to Republicans, their new boundaries largely depend on Hispanic voters in the Lone Star State who voted for Trump in 2024 to remain in the Republican camp. However, a recent Pew survey of Hispanic voters shows that seven in 10 Latinos disapprove of the Trump administration less than a year into his second term.
"I think the Republicans made a fundamental error in Texas by assuming that Trump's gains with Hispanics in 2024 would just automatically carry forward to 2026. It's not working out that way," he said. "And then we had all the other states come into it, like my own here in Virginia, which it's tough to guarantee that a referendum will pass in any state, particularly a more competitive one than California. But, I think there's a reasonable shot that the Democrats will be able to get this passed here."