Republicans hold one of the thinnest congressional margins in history.
Right now, in courtrooms and state capitals across the country, Republicans and Democrats are waging war with maps, lines, and voting demographics as their weapons of choice, all to determine who represents you in Congress. The outcome won’t just shape the 2026 midterms. It could lock in or flip control of the House of Representatives for the next decade.
In this video, we’ll take a look at how we got here, what’s actually happening, and what’s at stake for the future of Congress.
This is the redistricting war.
It’s appropriate in a year celebrating the 250th anniversary of America. Redistricting and gerrymandering date back to the nation’s founding. Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who would eventually become vice president, was governor of Massachusetts in 1812 when the state legislature adopted, and Gerry signed into law, new electoral district boundaries. A local political cartoon at the time compared one of the new districts to a salamander. Tag Jerry’s name to the beginning of the word, and now, two centuries later, the practice still carries his name.
Specifically, gerrymandering is the drawing of districts for political gain, which separates it from redistricting, which is the actual act of drawing those districts. As the nation grew and more states were added during the 19th century, so too were more representatives. That continued until the Reapportionment Act of 1929, which capped the permanent number of the U.S. House of Representatives at 435.
The total number of House members doesn’t grow anymore, but members are reallocated based on census numbers that determine which states have gained or lost population. The census occurs every decade, which is historically when states usually undertake their redistricting processes to draw new congressional districts.
Today, Republicans who currently control the House with a slim 217 to 212 margin over Democrats have moved to try and protect their majority by undertaking the extraordinary practice of redrawing the maps mid-decade. The effort, directed by President Trump, started last fall in Texas, a state that already added and gained two new seats overall after the 2020 census. The Lone Star State’s legislature created five new Republican-leaning seats out of its 38-member House delegation.
Democratic-led California then responded with a commission-drawn map approved by voters that answered Texas and created five new seats that lean in Democrats’ favor. From there, the dominoes started to tumble. Legislatures in Missouri and North Carolina extracted an additional GOP-leaning seat from their maps. A redistricting commission in Ohio added two more. Indiana made an attempt, but its legislature did not move forward, with some Republican lawmakers that opposed that effort losing their primary elections to Trump-backed candidates.
Individually, those might not seem significant, but collectively, squeezing the tilt of a congressional seat here and there can bolster what was only a three-seat majority for Republicans after the 2024 election.
Fast forward to this spring. A Democratic-led ballot referendum in Virginia passed last month and would have carved up the Old Dominion to add four Democratic-leaning districts. That map has since been overturned by Virginia’s Supreme Court. Florida jumped in the game, pushing forward a new map to add four GOP-friendly districts. It passed the state legislature and was signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, but faces court challenges of its own. Specifically, a constitutional amendment approved by Florida voters in 2010 that bans the drawing of maps that favor a political party or incumbent.
If you were hoping for the cascade to slow down, a recent Supreme Court ruling threw kerosene on the gerrymandering battles. A 6-3 decision by the Supreme Court weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which had required mapmakers to prove they weren’t discriminating against racial minorities when drawing districts. The justices said a map drawn in Louisiana to add an additional majority-minority district wasn’t justified and was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The result? Southern state Republicans immediately leapt at the chance to redraw their maps. Tennessee divided its lone Democratic-leaning district in majority Black Memphis into three Republican-leaning ones, including a serpent-shaped night district, which runs from Memphis along most of the southern border of the state and creeps all the way up into the Nashville suburbs. Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi may also move forward with new maps.
The biggest question is, what will all of this shuffling and geographic contortion amount to?
Recent House margins have been thin for the GOP. Republicans haven’t held more than 222 seats in the House since the 115th Congress, when they had 241 at the beginning of President Trump’s first term. The midterms, that go around in 2018, saw Democrats ride a blue wave to a House majority and knock the GOP down to only 199 members, only the second time this century they’ve had less than 200.
Overall, the gerrymanders are an indication of the atmosphere facing Republicans at the ballot box this fall. President Trump’s net approval rating is underwater to the tune of 20 points, and the president’s party has lost House seats in 20 of the last 23 midterm elections. Despite all the redraws and an overall House state of play that now leans in favor of Republicans, it’s still likely that repudiation at the ballot box could happen this year.
Why? Those who have the ultimate say, voters, haven’t spoken yet. And time is running out on the path to November.
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