President Donald Trump’s push for mid-decade redistricting to prevent Republicans from losing control of the US House of Representatives appears to be on the verge of backfiring.
The latest blow to Trump’s nationwide redistricting efforts came in Utah, where District Court Judge Dianna Gibson shot down a proposed map drawn by Utah Republicans because it failed to abide by a 2018 ballot measure that restricted partisan gerrymandering in the state.
As reported by NBC News, Gibson instead approved a map that created “a solidly Democratic seat ahead of next year’s midterm elections,” thus giving Democrats a likely net gain of one seat in the US House.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin hailed Gibson’s ruling and vowed that Democrats weren’t finished fighting Trump’s efforts to rig next year’s elections in his favor.
“Utah Republicans gerrymandered the maps because they knew they were losing power in the state,” he said. “Republicans doubled down when they chose to submit another gerrymandered map, but today, they were once again thwarted by impartial Courts. Democrats will continue to fight for fair maps in Utah, regardless of what Donald Trump and Utah Republicans try next. Every seat counts, and Democrats everywhere are fired up and ready to take back the House in the midterms in 2026.”
Dave Wasserman, a senior elections analyst at Cook Political Report, wrote in a post on X that the Democrats’ Utah victory, along with California voters’ approval of newly gerrymandered maps and reported plans to redraw maps in Virginia, have “pushed the mid-decade redistricting war closer to a draw.”
In a lengthy analysis published in Bloomberg on Tuesday, columnist Mary Ellen Klas argued that Republicans should take a deep breath before going all-in on Trump’s unprecedented mid-decade redistricting crusade, which began in Texas and subsequently spread to Missouri and North Carolina.
The issue, Klas explained, is that Republicans in those states have carved out more GOP-friendly districts based on assumptions that Republican gains among Latino voters and young men would hold in 2026. As last week’s sweeping Democratic victories showed, however, the GOP now appears to be hemorrhaging support among these two demographics.
“In New Jersey, 68% of Latino voters broke for Democrat Mikie Sherrill,” wrote Klas. “So did 56% of men under the age of 30. In Virginia, 67% of Latino voters went for Democrat Abigail Spanberger. So did 57% of men under 30. Many of these voters had voted for Trump last year. The exit polls show that both Sherrill and Spanberger won 7% of Trump’s 2024 voters, with Sherrill getting a whopping 18% of Trump’s Hispanic support in the state.”
If those trends hold over the next year, it could wipe out advantages the GOP had hoped to gain with its Texas gerrymander, which assumed that Latino voters who swung to Trump in the state would remain loyal partisan soldiers.
“Republicans are hardly going to admit it, but they should evaluate whether Trump’s push to ignite a redistricting arms race may have made it easier for a blue wave to wipe out more Republicans than if they had left their maps alone,” argued Klass.
In fact, some Republican strategists are already fretting about Trump’s gerrymandering plan, as one anonymous GOP insider toldNBC News that if the endgame of the plan was “to net one seat across the country, then it will not have been worth it.”
A second anonymous GOP insider told NBC that there was “some concern” about whether Texas Republicans may have made themselves more vulnerable to a blue wave next year.
“In Texas, I do think there is some sense those seats will be ours, but nothing is guaranteed, so some concern there,” they said.
