Voters have once again handed President Donald Trump a loss in one of the defining fights of his second administration: the national congressional redistricting race.
Tuesday night, Virginia approved a ballot measure to redraw the state’s 11 congressional districts to give Democrats a significant edge — salvaging Democratic hopes of flipping control of the House of Representatives in the fall.
In case you need a refresher, congressional redistricting — or the process by which states define the districts that House members represent — usually happens once per decade, after a new census.
That all changed over the summer when President Donald Trump urged Republicans in Texas to redraw their congressional maps early, to shore up the GOP’s tiny (currently one-seat) congressional majority and give the national party a boost during 2026 midterms. Texas Republicans created new maps in the summer, giving the GOP a new edge in five districts.
Democrats in some blue states also mobilized, kicking off a wave of mid-decade redistricting in both Democratic and Republican-controlled states that has undone some of the final remaining electoral norms of the Trump era. In November 2025, California voters approved a ballot measure that redrew maps to add up to five Democratic seats — neutralizing the Texas GOP gerrymander.
Virginia is not California, however. Though it has tended to vote for Democrats in presidential and gubernatorial elections since 2000, the state is swingy and had a Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, until January. That made the Virginia redistricting campaign — a vote on a constitutional amendment to bypass the state’s normal mapping process until the next census — even more complicated and unpredictable.
Voters complained about confusing messaging from both sides of the campaign, and many independent voters were uncomfortable with a partisan power grab. The “Yes” side relied heavily on direct appeals from former President Barack Obama, who reassured voters that the move was a justified response to Trump’s moves to tilt the House election. The “No” side ran ads that also featured earlier clips of Obama decrying gerrymandering in prior years, and ads and mailers aimed at Black voters that portrayed the referendum as a betrayal of civil rights activism to protect voting rights.
Republicans also appealed to regional concerns, warning rural residents that they would be put into awkward districts that lumped them with distant Northern Virginia suburbs.
That was reflected in the final results of the election — rural regions of the state turned out at a high rate. The electorate, overall, was more Republican than the electorate that swept in complete Democratic control of the state government during last year’s elections. Meanwhile, big urban centers, like Richmond, Virginia Beach, and the Washington, DC suburbs of northern Virginia, would turn out enough Democratic and independent votes to carry the measure statewide. In the end, the race was closer than expected, but the “Yes” side was comfortably on track for a majority win as of publication time.
While the “Yes” victory in Virginia is another major win for Democrats nationwide, the results of the 2026 redistricting wars have been more haphazard.
Across the country, political infighting, reluctant legislators, and timing constraints have headed off other redistricting efforts on both sides of the aisle. Now time is running out for any additional efforts: Primaries are already beginning across the country, and election preparation has to begin soon in those that haven’t started yet.
The state of the redistricting wars
Currently, Virginia’s congressional delegation is split 6-5 in Democrats’ favor; the referendum approved on Tuesday night asked voters to rejigger the map to favor Democrats in 10 districts, netting four seats.
Combined with redrawn maps in California, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, Ohio (mandated by the state constitution), and Utah (due to a court decision), the Virginia vote creates the possibility that Democrats enter the midterm elections with a one-seat edge based on past voting patterns.
At the moment, Democrats stand to gain one seat
Up until now, this electoral arms race had become a “close to a wash,” Barry C. Burden, an elections expert and political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me.
“Even though Republicans are doing it in more states than Democrats are, they’re not making big gains outside of Texas,” Burden said. “And there are so many other factors in play that I think make it difficult to know exactly how the maps will play out.”
Not every state has thrown itself into the mix. Despite intense pressure from national parties, Democrats have so far turned down opportunities to squeeze out seats in Illinois, Maryland, and New York, while Republicans stood down in Indiana, Kansas, and Nebraska.
That leaves one last big redistricting wild card: Florida.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has wanted to redraw his state’s maps since Trump made his appeals, yet the effort has been mired in GOP infighting, a lack of preparation, and faces a state constitution that bars partisan redistricting, although the courts approved Republican-friendly maps in its last redraw. The state legislature was supposed to meet for a special session this week to create anywhere from one to five seats, but that meeting was delayed until April 28.
“It’s a big state, so that would give Republicans a lot of opportunity,” Burden said. “But they already have a map that’s pretty favorable to Republicans, and there’s a little more concern that spreading Republican voters more thinly across more districts might really put them at risk.”
That’s related to one big electoral wild card: whether the rightward shift of Latino and Hispanic voters since 2020 holds firm in a midterm year. In redrawing at least two districts, Texas Republicans bet that this trend will hold firm. Yet polling of these voters nationally, and some off-year election results, suggests that Trump’s 2024 gains may have evaporated, or reversed, because of discontent over the economy, Trump’s mass deportation agenda, and a general sense of chaos and instability that many of these voters trusted Trump to steady. That opens the possibility for the Texas gerrymander to come up short — a scenario Florida Republicans might not want to risk.
“Texas acted earlier, so it was at a time when maybe Trump and Republicans didn’t look as vulnerable going into 2026,” Burden said. “But now that we’re just months away, it’s clear Republicans are going to have a difficult environment in November.”
None of this factors in the effects of a potential Voting Rights Act decision by the Supreme Court this year or future redistricting efforts ahead of 2028. The Court has so far declined to issue a ruling on provisions of the landmark 1965 law that prohibited states from breaking up communities of minority voters, which led to the rise of majority-minority districts to boost nonwhite representation. A handful of states could still redraw their districts were the Supreme Court to decide the case during this term.
With the latest vote, though, we may be nearing the end of the redistricting wars — for this cycle, at least.
