Democrats are staring down a gerrymandering Armageddon, and don’t have a lot of good answers. But if they think this current moment is frightening, just wait until the coming reapportionment apocalypse.
Their current gerrymandering problem threatens their hopes of taking back control of the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms. Reapportionment could be much worse than that, potentially an existential threat that pushes them into a minority for another decade.
How leading Democrats address these two significant challenges will determine whether they can pry back control of Congress, state legislatures and even the White House. But as Republican gerrymanders threaten to metastasize uncontrollably across the national map, Democrats don’t seem to fully understand the math or the depth of their difficulties.
Any day now, Texas will enact a new congressional map that nets as many as five additional GOP seats. This brazen mid-decade power grab will enhance the Republicans’ slender, three-seat majority in the U.S. House — and it won’t stop there. Ohio, Indiana, Missouri and Florida will go next, grabbing the GOP perhaps another six seats. Should Republicans decide to play serious hardball, they could remap North Carolina, Kentucky, Kansas and New Hampshire too.
Democrats have more limited options. In California, voters will be asked this fall to suspend the state’s independent redistricting commission and allow the legislature to enact a new map that adds five blue seats in retaliation for the Texas gerrymander. If voters approve — and that’s not guaranteed — the two maps would cancel each other out.
But what’s step two? The trouble for Democrats is they have nowhere else to target if Republicans keep on escalating. Blue-state governors are talking tough and insisting they are at war, but that rhetoric is no match for reality. Democrats simply control too few states, and they’ve pretty much maxed out the maps in the states where they hold trifecta power.
Blue-state governors are talking tough and insisting they are at war, but that rhetoric is no match for reality. Democrats control too few states, and they’ve maxed out the maps in the states where they hold trifecta power.
New York’s state constitution would prevent creating new congressional maps before the 2028 election. Illinois likely cannot carve out an additional Democratic seat in a map that already hands them 14 of 17 districts. State courts in Maryland have already blocked one Democratic map that would have eliminated the state’s lone red seat, creating an 8-0 wipeout. Oregon’s governor will not propose a new 6-0 map that would erase one GOP-friendly district.
So the arithmetic is stark, and it’s not on the Democrats’ side. That’s before the U.S. Supreme Court hears the Callais case in October and potentially overturns the last remnants of the Voting Rights Act, leading to the likely erasure of majority-minority seats currently held by Black Democrats in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.
So Democrats cannot realistically gerrymander their way out of their gerrymandering problem. If you’re wondering whether this blatant exercise of partisan political power is constitutional, the Supreme Court has already said yes, ruling that partisan gerrymandering is purely a political matter and not its problem. State courts, in many or most cases, are controlled by whichever party holds power.
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In other words, Democrats are going to have to win elections. To win a congressional majority next year, they might need to run the board in a diminishing number of genuine swing districts across the nation — perhaps 16 or so. Politics and persuasion — on a shrinking map, and in difficult electoral environments like Iowa and Arizona — is the only option. That’s a big problem, given that no prominent Democrats seem to be acknowledging that openly, or indeed saying anything other than they’re ready to “fight fire with fire.”
But bigger trouble for Democrats lies ahead: The map is about to shrink even further. This is another reason why gerrymandering blue states is such a short-term plan — someday soon, there will be fewer of them. When the next congressional reapportionment happens after the 2030 census, red states stand to make huge gains. Florida and Texas, according to early estimates, could add an additional four seats each, perhaps five in Texas. The Brennan Center suggests that Idaho, Utah, Arizona and North Carolina would each gain a seat.
More important still, those red-state gains have to come from somewhere, and that’s largely from current blue states. California could lose four seats and New York might lose two, while Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Oregon, Illinois and Wisconsin could each lose one.
Red states like Texas and Florida stand to make big gains after the next congressional reapportionment — and most of those new seats will be subtracted from blue states like California and New York.
That’s a significant swing, and most of those would effectively be blue seats heading south. Illinois has already packed Republican voterss into three overwhelming red seats. It’s hard to imagine they could draw a 14-2 map in 2031. The Oregon, Rhode Island and Minnesota seats might also come at Democrats’ expense. If New York and California successfully gerrymander Republicans into oblivion before all this happens, it will be far more difficult to erase any remaining red seats.
It’s certainly possible that GOP mapmakers in Texas and Florida can’t draw all eight or nine of those new districts as Republican seats. But they have proven highly adept at turning population gains — even those driven almost entirely by communities of color — to their advantage, consolidating most new seats for themselves while “packing and cracking” likely Democratic voters as much as possible. If the Supreme Court further eliminates the Voting Rights Act protections around racial gerrymanders, this task would become easier still.
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Democrats need a long-term plan to counter both the GOP gerrymanders happening right now and the coming, and potentially catastrophic, reapportionment. Short-term gerrymanders in blue states might put a Band-Aid on the immediate problem, but could come back to bite them once reapportionment arrives. The simple reality, as unsatisfying as this may be to nearly all factions of the party, is that they have to figure out how to win elections on maps designed by their opponents.
There’s literally no other choice. If a dozen blue state House seats migrate southward, so too will a dozen Electoral College votes, giving Texas, Florida and Idaho more clout in presidential elections and taking it away from New York, California, Oregon and Rhode Island. Democrats will need to find a new route to 270 electors by 2032, and that will necessitate flipping at least one state currently understood as red.
The U.S. Senate presents the same challenge. There are 25 states that voted for Donald Trump all three times: They have 50 Republican senators. If Democrats want to retake the chamber, they will need to win all the other Senate seats — which won’t be easy — plus win one back from the other side. That’s harder still.
Democrats are in a hole, and the retaliatory gerrymander of California only gets them a couple of rungs up the ladder. They need a plan that gets them all the way out. Instead of “fighting fire with fire,” and declaring wars that they can’t actually wage for another three years — in the 2028 presidential campaign, that is — they’d be wise to devise such a plan. It has to start with persuading voters in states where the Democratic brand has become toxic to consider them afresh. And it had better start now.
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