It’s still early to forecast the 2026 midterms, but one thing is already obvious: Trump-ordered Republicans’ mid-decade gerrymander spree — kicked off by Texas’s August redistricting — is shaping up to be a flop. A loud, messy, completely avoidable flop.
After three months of map manipulation and retaliatory redraws across the country, we’re left with 35 to 40 competitive House seats — and Republicans are the ones dangling over the edge. Half of these are the usual battlegrounds. But once you pan out to the wider playing field, the GOP has slightly more to worry about. A gentle political breeze could deliver the three red-to-blue flips Democrats need to trigger yet another House power shift — the fifth this century. The only other stretch in history this volatile? The 1870s and 1880s.
And now there’s a bigger problem. The off-year elections earlier this month revealed about 15 more Republican-held seats that have slipped into the danger zone for 2026. Republicans wanted to draw themselves into safer territory. Instead, they drew themselves into a corner.
Sure, the winds could still shift. When fewer than 10 percent of districts are truly competitive, a few months of good news for the party in power can blunt a wave.
Maybe Democrats don’t pick up dozens of seats — maybe they barely scrape together the three they need. But that’s not the world Republicans had imagined when they launched the Texas map.
The Texas Plan Was Supposed to Guarantee the Majority — Not Complicate It
The GOP went into this cycle still stung from 2022, when they discovered the midterm curse wasn’t as reliable as it used to be. Back then, the consensus was that Biden’s sinking approval and warning signs from New Jersey and Virginia signaled big Democratic losses. With Republicans needing only three seats, the House flip was never in doubt. The question was how big the GOP’s margin would be — and whether Kevin McCarthy could bank some breathing room.
Instead, Republicans walked away with nine seats. And as we saw, that razor-thin majority let small factions and even lone lawmakers wield absurd power. “The future Speaker was a former Speaker in just nine months.” That line says it all.
Then came 2024, when a Republican presidential candidate finally won the national popular vote again — and House Republicans still somehow lost seats. No midterm punishment for Democrats in 2022. No coattails in 2024. Just frustration and head-scratching inside the GOP conference, especially among members who remember the days of 240-plus Republican seats and a majority big enough to survive almost 30 defections.
Republicans Thought the Wave Era Was Over
There was one silver lining for them: maybe elections had stabilized. Democrats lost seats in 2020 despite Biden’s big win. Republicans flopped again in 2022. Trump’s win in 2024 delivered nothing downballot. That quieted the idea that massive swings were still possible.
The logic was simple: “technology has made gerrymandering more effective,” and voters have “become extraordinarily — dangerously, even — sorted into compact partisan clusters.” Add in huge districts with nearly 900,000 constituents, and you get a House where small shifts settle into single-digit swings.
If the swing is only eight or nine seats, Republicans figured, adding five more safe seats in Texas was a smart investment — especially if Democrats were boxed in by independent redistricting commissions or had already maxed out their own gerrymanders.
And Democrats had spent years railing against partisan maps. Many blue states had made a point of going the “fair maps” route. Why would they suddenly dive into the knife fight?
Surprise: They Absolutely Dove In
Republican assumptions were wrong. Democrats retaliated — aggressively. And the net benefit of the nationwide redistricting war for the GOP? Maybe two or three seats. Not zero, but nowhere near enough to justify the political cost or the cascading backlash Republicans have triggered.
As the piece puts it, “three seats isn’t nothing, but probably not worth the cost and the inevitable unintended consequences.”
And those unintended consequences are already materializing. Republicans have managed to fire up Democratic voters in what increasingly looks like the early stages of a classic wave year. If that wave hits, the Texas map will go down not as a masterstroke but as a blunder — a spectacularly unnecessary one.
The GOP wanted to lock the House down. Instead, Trump’s gerrymander gamble is setting them up to lose it.
And this time, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.
