Off-year election losses spark Republican concerns about redistricting

President Donald Trump is confident that he drew the right battle lines when he launched a nationwide redistricting fight to try to preserve the Republican House majority, GOP strategists familiar with the White House’s thinking say — even after Tuesday’s election results gave Democrats openings to counterstrike in California and Virginia.

“The president understands intuitively, in a way that other Republicans don’t … that Democrats are always assaulting us, always, and mostly much of the Republican Party never fights back,” said one of the strategists familiar with the White House approach. “The redistricting fight is proof that they are not that way. So this is in his DNA in a way that is not in other Republicans’ DNA.”

The strategist, like others in this article, was granted anonymity to speak candidly about private conversations.

But two other Republicans close to the White House told NBC News that there are growing concerns in the party that the political war is not going as planned — that the juice may not have been worth the squeeze and could, in a nightmare scenario, result in a net gain for Democrats. And within broader GOP circles, misgivings about the strategy heightened last week after California voters overwhelmingly approved Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw the state’s congressional districts in a manner that Democrats hope will flip five House seats in their direction.

Still, White House officials say that the president remains in fight mode when it comes to redistricting.

In recent days, aides have presented Trump with three scenarios for the overall outcome of the redistricting fight, none of which include Republicans losing seats when all the maps are finalized, according to the GOP strategist familiar with the White House approach. The variables include how the Supreme Court rules on an upcoming case about the Voting Rights Act, which impedes states from diluting the voting power of minorities, and whether courts will block Democratic plans in California and Virginia.

The strategist said there was a “bad-luck Republicans, good-luck Democrats” scenario, which would result in “basically a wash of seats” but with some Republican-held seats in red states becoming more secure than they are now.

The two other scenarios, the person said, would result in Republicans picking up between five and nine seats, and a third, best-case scenario would see the GOP pick up seats “into double digits substantially.”

The range of scenarios depends not only on a surprise Democratic push to redraw Virginia, but also on outcomes in several red states. A compromise plan in Ohio and delays in Indiana and Kansas, where the White House hopes Republicans can squeeze more GOP seats out of new maps, coupled with California’s ballot initiative win, left Democrats with momentum last week — and Trump with some degree of heartburn, one of the sources said.

“For a few weeks now, he’s had the understanding that they were going to lose Prop 50,” a Republican operative close to the White House said, adding that Trump has been planning to sue California over the ballot measure while believing it was a bad idea to get involved in the fight.

The original impetus for Trump’s unprecedented campaign to draw new district lines in the middle of the decade was the fear that Republicans’ meager two-seat cushion in the House after the 2024 election might be too narrow to withstand the winds of a midterm election, which historically favors the out-of-power party. Republicans familiar with the origins of the strategy say that it stemmed from a view that past redistricting in Democratic-held states had put the GOP at an unfair disadvantage.

“It’s a fact that the Democrat Party has been redistricting maps in their favor for decades — just look at Illinois,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, pointing to a state where Democrats hold 14 of 17 House seats despite Trump having won 43% of the vote in the state in 2024. “President Trump wants Republicans to play tough and smart.” To counter that, Trump and his advisers pressed Republican-led states to redraw their lines — starting with Texas, where Trump’s ability to connect with Hispanic voters in 2024 opened up the possibility of adding as many as five seats to the Republican column.

The redistricting state of play

The stakes could hardly be higher.

Not only would Trump’s legislative agenda be imperiled by a Democratic takeover of the House, but also his administration would surely face myriad investigations and he could be impeached for a third time. Twice during his first term, the Democratic-run House voted to impeach him — and each time, Senate Republicans produced enough votes to prevent his conviction.

“With a narrow majority heading into a midterm, they need more seats for a buffer in order to hold the House. If they can ultimately net five or six seats, then it will be the story of the midterms of success for Republicans,” said one GOP strategist who is deeply involved in House races. “If the whole thing here was to net one seat across the country, then it will not have been worth it.”

Fresh off a sweep in Virginia’s off-year elections last week, including Abigail Spanberger’s 15-point win for the governor’s office, Democrats are threatening to redraw that state’s map to flip several more seats into their column. Their confidence in their ability to win newly drawn districts in California and other states — and to minimize GOP gains in Texas and elsewhere — was buoyed by the margins Spanberger and New Jersey Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill racked up Tuesday.

Erin Covey, a nonpartisan election analyst who is the House editor at The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, said that after the latest elections, there’s a risk for Republicans that their redistricting push may not net them as many seats as they hoped.

Pointing to strong Democratic showings in predominantly Hispanic areas of Virginia and New Jersey, Covey said there’s a clear “uncertainty” as to whether Hispanic voters will show up for the GOP next year like they did for Trump in 2024, particularly in states like Texas.

“That does not bode well for Republicans banking on Hispanic voters to help them keep their majority next year — but it doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll see Republican incumbents who would be in safe seats suddenly look vulnerable all of a sudden,” she said, adding she believes the results among Hispanic voters this November stem from a combination of them coming back around for Democrats as well as others just not turning out for Republicans.

The truth is that the net effect of all the gerrymandering won’t be fully known until elections are held in the new districts, some of which are drawn with such narrow advantage for either Republicans or Democrats that a slight shift in the national political environment — or the quality of candidates running in them — could be pivotal to the outcomes.

“I think ‘concern’ is a fair way to say it,” a second Republican who is close to the White House said of the president’s sentiments, adding: ”In Texas, I do think there is some sense those seats will be ours, but nothing is guaranteed, so some concern there.” Still, proponents of the White House’s tack say they see no reason to back off or point fingers.

“I remain pretty optimistic about everything,” said one person familiar with the White House goals in pressing for new maps. “In addition to inaccurate, it’s premature to say that it hasn’t been a success.”

With the tight margins in the House and the possibility of squeezing more seats out of redistricting, this person said, “How can you not try?” “At that point,” the person added, “it becomes malpractice.”

Bumps in the road

Trump is also finding that executing rewrites of congressional districts requires at least as much political muscle as it does cartographic skill.

While Democrats have faced obstacles to redrawing many blue states in the form of state constitutions, courts and some of their own legislators, some Republicans have not gone along with the White House’s plans. Over the summer, New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte threw cold water on the idea of redrawing the state’s two congressional districts to try to take one from Democrats.

In Ohio, Republican legislators have agreed to a new map that is more generous to Democrats than initially expected — the result of fears that an overly aggressive approach could have unintended consequences.

While the contours of that realignment were being debated, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries signaled interest in supporting a statewide redistricting referendum in 2026, which could have frozen the current map in place until voters had their say, all while flooding the state with Democratic money and organizers that could have helped lift the party’s midterm candidates for governor and Senate. That scenario was very much on White House officials’ minds as they sorted out redistricting options with Ohio Republicans, two people familiar with the discussions said.

“That was very directly communicated,” said one person who was involved in the talks and granted anonymity to share details from private conversations. “I was told specifically that they felt like if they weighed in and made this the ‘White House map’ or ‘Trump’s map,’ that the Democrats would balk and that the whole deal would blow up. So I do think that was part of the calculation.”

“The fact that you’ve seen, essentially, no comment, I think that sort of corroborates it,” this person added.

Some Republicans, including several Trump-aligned activists, have criticized the compromise map in Ohio because it makes a toss-up district represented by Democratic Rep. Emilia Sykes even more favorable to Democrats while presenting only one solid pickup opportunity. No one from the White House, including Trump and Vice President JD Vance, who represented the state in the Senate, has weighed in publicly on the map. But the person involved in the talks described Trump administration officials as fine with the deal.

“The White House just sort of took a position of, we’ll call it neutrality — where it was like, ‘We’re not going to go out and have a parade, but we’re comfortable with what’s been explained to us,” this person said.

The dynamics of a potential backfire are different in Texas, the first battlefront in Trump’s redistricting war.

Even as Trump pressured Texas legislators to redraw their maps, and gave short shrift to their concerns, some Republican members of Congress from the state expressed worry that shifting GOP voters into new districts could endanger some incumbents in the state. Aggressive redistricting plans tend to create friction between the party’s interest in winning a greater number of seats and the increased electoral risk for incumbents who have to give up loyal constituents in order to make new districts more competitive.

The Texas lines

Democrats, and some critics inside the Republican Party, say that the Texas methodology — which redrew the lines so that each GOP candidate would run in a district in which Trump won by at least 10 percentage points in 2024 — relies too heavily on the president’s most recent performance as a metric for House races in the 2026 midterms. If congressional candidates can’t replicate that, they could be in for competitive races.

For example, Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-Texas, now sits in a district that Trump won by almost 18 percentage points last year. But Trump won it by only 2 percentage points in 2020. In 2018, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott lost that turf by 11 percentage points. And Abbott won it by only 6 percentage points in 2022.

The trend line is clearly Republican red, but some in the GOP fear that Trump’s 2024 results with Latinos were a high-water mark, especially at a time when voters say they are worried about the state of the economy and Trump’s immigration policies have roiled Latino communities across the country.

Trump’s team is satisfied that Texas will go as planned.

“They are very, very cognizant of what the maps look like in Texas,” the person familiar with the White House approach said, pushing back on the wisdom of critics.

Still, the results of Tuesday’s elections — which showed GOP gains among Hispanic voters receding in New Jersey and Virginia — could be a red flag for the GOP in Texas.

In Texas, GOP consultant and data scientist John Eakin told NBC News that some Republicans in the state are regretting their aggressive new map already, worried that overconfidence in the 2024 results for Trump — which he describes as an exception, rather than a reliable baseline — could backfire.

“They should have never drawn maps based on the 2024 outcome. You can’t stress test that. You have to find the most vulnerable election and build the premise around that,” he said.

Eakin went on to point to eyepopping results in a Dallas-area special state Senate election, where the top Democrat there significantly overperformed, compared to the 2024 results, and advanced to the runoff as the race’s top vote-getter. It’s results like that, he says, that make him nervous about 2026.

“”Nobody wants to go against Trump in this district map because they fear him. They’ve pushed the envelope and it’s going to come back to bite them in the ass,” he said.

“They’re high as a f—ing kite off of 2024,” he added.