Democrats claimed a win in Virginia earlier this month, when voters approved new maps that could create as many as five new solidly blue congressional districts going into the midterms. Republicans in Florida countered on Wednesday with a vote to create as many as four new red-leaning districts. The two votes cap off a year of back-and-forth gerrymandering that has reshaped dozens of congressional districts, without netting either party a runaway advantage in November.
The efforts kicked off last summer with the Texas Legislature’s move to create five more Republican-leaning districts at the behest of President Donald Trump, who said his strong showing in the state in the 2024 election “entitled” him to the additional seats. California responded immediately, drawing five more Democratic-leaning districts and putting the move to a statewide vote. It was followed by redistricting efforts in North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio and Utah, before Virginia put its plan to voters.
Voters in every district have free will and could elect anyone at any time. At the moment, though, the tally is looking a lot like a tie, with 10 more seats leaning toward Democrats and nine more seats leaning Republican prior to Florida’s vote. And everybody’s mad.
The Virginia vote, which could result in 10-1 Democratic control of the state’s congressional districts, was “one of the most corrupt, dishonest and well-funded campaigns in American history,” wrote Shane Harris, the Virginia Republican Party’s communications director, in an election postmortem. Jeff Ryer, the state GOP chairman, previously wrote that Democrats were “asking voters to effectively disenfranchise their fellow citizens by approving rigged maps that will give disproportionate power to just a few densely populated urban cores.” (The Virginia GOP declined an interview request, while top Republicans in the state legislature did not respond.) Republican legislative leaders have filed a court challenge to the redistricting plan.
Boohoo, says Kendall Scudder, chair of the Texas Democratic Party; Republicans started it.
“They’re a bunch of clowns, and you get to a point where you just don’t have any sympathy for what they’re trying to say,” Scudder says. “Do they think we weren’t around last year?”
Texas Democrats were still angry about the state’s 2021 redistricting when the Republican-led Legislature began working to change the maps again last year. Many Democrats in the Legislature decided to break quorum, even fleeing the state during a special session last summer in an effort to block the redistricting effort. Eventually they were escorted back by police, and some were even locked into the legislative chambers after refusing the police escort. Many Democrats in the state House are now facing more than $8,000 in fines related to the walkout, imposed by a Republican-controlled House committee. The $500-a-day fines add up to more than the $7,200 annual salary for elected representatives. Democrats knew they were outnumbered before they even staged the walkout.
“The debate was, is this worth it? Is doing this worth it for all the misery we’re going to suffer?” says state Rep. Gene Wu, the House minority leader. “Ultimately we didn’t have a better answer than, ‘We have to warn the rest of the country that this was happening.’”
The walkout sparked a backlash in California and around the country that has, so far at least, prevented Republicans from engineering an unfair advantage in the midterms. Democrats say the Virginia vote sent a message that partisan gerrymandering is a zero-sum game. But the collateral damage of the fight has been considerable. Voters in many states will end up with new representatives and less competitive districts. That means more races will ultimately be decided in primary elections, when voter turnout is lower.
“This wave of redistricting is really completely unprecedented. It’s a major step backward for voting rights,” says Samuel S. Wang, a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University and director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.
By Wang’s analysis, the 2025 Texas redistricting is “the worst gerrymander of the last 50 years,” followed closely by California’s response. The NAACP filed a lawsuit last year claiming that Texas’ new map “was enacted with a discriminatory purpose and results in even further discriminatory effect on Black and other voters of color in Texas.” Civil rights advocates fear a U.S. Supreme Court decision on Wednesday, eliminating a majority-Black district in Louisiana, will open the door to more efforts to weaken minority voters’ representation.
Meanwhile Texas’ redistricting made some of its previously existing districts more competitive. And it relies on an assumption that Hispanic voters who shifted toward Trump in 2024 will stick with Republicans in future elections, an assumption that many Republicans are now second-guessing.
“It looks like the net of all this is going to be reduced competition and a few seats gained for Democrats,” Wang says. “So I would say, we shouldn’t study war no more.”
