Trump-pushed gerrymanders backfire as Democrats win redrawn districts
Texas map built for five extra Republican seats returns four to Democrats, North Carolina lines drawn for 11 of 14 seats give Democrats nine
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A congressional redistricting map in Texas is set up for viewing at the Senate Special Committee on Congressional Redistricting meeting to hear testimony on Congressional plan C2308 at the Texas State Capitol on August 6, 2025 in Austin, Texas. The proposed Republican redistricting plan was engineered to secure five additional GOP seats in the U.S. House.
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theguardian.com
On Tuesday, Democrats won seats in at least twelve districts that Republicans had redrawn over the past eighteen months, according to Truthout's count — maps drawn at Donald Trump's urging, with his threat of a campaign against Indiana Republicans who balked, to prevent a loss of power in the midterm elections. By Thursday, with 29 House races still uncalled, the Guardian's tally put Democrats ahead 251 to 155.
In Texas, lines engineered to convert five Democratic-held districts and net five additional Republican seats produced Democratic wins in four of the five. Governor Greg Abbott had drawn them on racial grounds; a federal court panel temporarily blocked the map in November 2025, citing evidence of racial gerrymandering, and the Supreme Court reversed and let it stand for the election. North Carolina's Republican legislature drew its lines to secure 11 of the state's 14 districts; as of Thursday, Democrats had won nine. Florida's map, redrawn with outgoing governor Ron DeSantis to target four Democratic-held seats by eliminating districts around Democratic-leaning cities, kept all four in Democratic hands as Kathy Castor, Pia Dandiya, Darren Soto and Jared Moskowitz beat or stood poised to beat their Republican opponents. In Alabama, Shomari Figures won reelection anyway, telling supporters: "We put our hands to the plow and we did not look backwards."
Mid-decade redistricting is itself a departure — congressional maps are normally redrawn only once a decade, after the census — and Trump opened the push last summer by calling first on Texas Republicans. The pattern reached districts nobody had listed as competitive: in North Carolina's ninth, Democrat Richard Ojeda defeated two-term incumbent Richard Hudson in a seat that had been red for fourteen years; in Ohio's tenth, Kristina Knickerbocker unseated veteran Republican congressman Mike Turner; in Arizona's sixth, marine veteran JoAnna Mendoza beat two-term incumbent Juan Ciscomani; in Colorado's fifth, former Army captain Jessica Killin defeated first-term incumbent Jeff Crank.
Republicans found Tuesday's defeats worse than they had anticipated.