How will redistricting impact the midterm elections?

By Brian McNeill

Ahead of the 2026 midterm congressional elections, more than a dozen states have sought to redraw House districts in hopes of maximizing the number of safe seats for their party. As of Thursday, at least nine have successfully adopted new maps.

What impact will these redrawn maps have on the Nov. 3 elections? Alex Keena, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Political Science in the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of two books about gerrymandering, says redistricting will be a major factor, and it may also lead to some surprising outcomes.

Multiple states have redrawn congressional boundaries ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. What advantages or disadvantages do the current maps create for each party?

I would say that the Republicans have a modest advantage because of gerrymandering. They used to have a much bigger advantage during the last decade but then a series of court decisions created the incentives for Democrats to gerrymander some states. And so that somewhat leveled the playing field. But once President Trump weighed in last year and asked Republicans to gerrymander even more, that tilted the balance a little bit.

But the bigger issue isn’t necessarily that one party has a big advantage over the other. It’s the fact that we’re seeing so few races that are even competitive. Widespread gerrymandering means that only a handful of congressional districts are in play.

Some have speculated that the latest round of redistricting could backfire somewhat, because drawing maps that maximize seat share generally requires the creation of somewhat less-safe seats. What do you think?

The surprising aspect of this is that there is a trade-off between creating safe seats for your party and maximizing the number of seats you’re going to win. And obviously if you try to maximize the number of seats, then you undermine the margins that your incumbents are going to be able to win in those safe seats. In states like Texas and California, the parties have gerrymandered in order to maximize the number of seats for their party. But to do this, they have to reduce the size of their majorities on average so that you have more seats that are on the margin between being safe and being a district that might be up for grabs.

How big of a factor do you think redistricting will be on the outcome of the congressional elections?

I think it’ll be huge. If we were using the types of maps that were being drawn 20 years ago, the midterms elections would be a potentially landslide win for Democrats. It still looks like the Democrats will probably take power, but it’s not going to be by the massive numbers that we saw, for example, Republicans win in 2010. It’s going to be smaller gains because of gerrymandering.

Looking beyond the midterms, do you expect more states will continue to redraw districts? Is this going to continue?

I think so, yes. We saw in the last Supreme Court term only a few months ago the Court striking down a portion of the Voting Rights Act that will effectively allow states to get rid of their majority-minority districts. Some states have already started to do this in the aftermath of that decision. In Louisiana, state officials actually canceled election results for primary elections and implemented new maps and new primaries. But other states have been reluctant to do this given the short time frame. So I would expect a few states controlled by Republicans to redraw their maps to get rid of majority-minority districts to help their party win additional seats.

But the other side of this is that most of the states that could possibly gerrymander have already gerrymandered and have massive one-party advantages. So there’s not a lot of juice left that you can squeeze.

Looking specifically at Texas, which kicked off this round of mid-decade redistricting, how do you think things will play out in November?

There is a common misconception that drawing a gerrymander is a science rather than an art — that modern technology gives us greater certainty about the outcomes. You hear media reports about the map in Texas that gives Republicans five more seats, as though that is set in stone. There are messy factors like incumbency and national political mood that make it difficult to predict the outcomes of a gerrymander. Ultimately, a gerrymander is only as good as the data that you use to draw it.

In Texas, they used the presidential election data from 2024, in which, of course, Trump overperformed with Latino men, to draw their 2025 gerrymander. In doing so, they’re assuming the same level of turnout and support among those groups will occur in the future. But that’s probably not going to happen in 2026. We saw a special senate election in Texas earlier this year where there was a double-digit point swing against the Republicans.

If something similar happens statewide in November, districts that were intended to help Republicans could fall like dominoes.

Even if there is a smaller swing against Republicans, they’re not going to get the gains that they were expecting from this gerrymandering.

Right now there’s a Senate candidate, James Talarico, who is polling very closely to the Republican candidate. If he brings people out to the polls, I could see several of these districts that were supposed to go to Republicans actually going to Democrats. And actually the Republicans in Texas could be worse off than if they had never enacted the gerrymandering because of that delicate trade-off between maximizing seats and protecting incumbents.

In this context, the decision to gerrymander Texas was incredibly risky and dangerous to Republicans, especially in a midterm election where the president’s poll numbers are in the basement. This election could end up being a gigantic test case that forces political parties to rethink the whole strategy of trying to maximize seat share by gerrymandering.