Comment: Red states may rue decision to gerrymander districts

By Mary Ellen Klas / Bloomberg Opinion

After widespread defeats in last week’s off-year elections, Republicans should realize they made a bad bet by following President Donald Trump’s lead on mid-decade redistricting.

Desperate not to lose the House in the midterms, the president sought to rig the game. He pressured legislatures in red states to create new Republican-leaning districts, and lawmakers duly redrew their maps. That weakened some safe red seats, but the GOP assumed that it would hurt Democrats more.

Last Tuesday’s results demonstrate the folly of Trump’s gamble.

Trump’s 2024 coalition is crumbling. To win in less-red Republican districts, the party will need all the voters Trump pulled together to achieve his 1.5 percentage point victory in 2024: young men, Latino voters and his MAGA base. But exit polls show that in the governors’ races in both Virginia and New Jersey, men and Latino voters abandoned the GOP in massive numbers, and in races across the country, many supported Democrats.

In New Jersey, 68 percent of Latino voters broke for Democrat Mikie Sherrill. So did 56 percent of men under the age of 30. In Virginia, 67 percent of Latino voters went for Democrat Abigail Spanberger. So did 57 percent of men under 30. Many of these voters had voted for Trump last year. The exit polls show that both Sherrill and Spanberger won 7 percent of Trump’s 2024 voters, with Sherrill getting a whopping 18 percent of Trump’s Hispanic support in the state.

“This is our wake-up call,” said U.S. Rep. Maria Salazar, a Miami Republican in a two-minute post-election rant on X. “If the GOP does not deliver, we will lose the Hispanic vote all over the country, and unfortunately, it happened last night in New Jersey and Virginia.”

For months, Republicans bragged that Trump had captured 48 percent of the Latino vote across the country in 2024. They assumed these voters would stay with them in 2026, and that became part of the GOP’s calculations in Texas to create five additional Republican congressional seats.

That gambit is a classic example of taking Latino votes for granted, Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant, told me in August.

“This is a pocketbook, economic, working-class voter,” he said. Assuming their support for Trump in 2024 was evidence of a permanent realignment was “believing their own press clippings here, which is dangerous,” he said at the time.

In a Substack post on Friday, Madrid could tell readers: “Told you so.” The Latino vote shift that helped build Democrats’ blue wave this month “isn’t a realignment. It’s a dealignment,” he said. Latino voters were punishing the party in power for their economic pain.

Trump’s disappearing coalition is only part of the president’s redistricting problem. The president’s performance is weighing GOP candidates down like an anchor even as Democrats are buoyed by a new wave of enthusiasm. The Republican gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia lost by double digits. In Georgia, Democrats flipped two statewide Georgia Public Service Commission races by 25-point margins. In Pennsylvania, they held onto three Supreme Court retention contests. In last week’s Miami mayoral race, Democrats turned out in numbers that were 14 points higher than the presidential election last year and opened the door for a Democrat to take control of the office for the first time in 28 years, said Matt Isbell, of MCI Maps, a Democratic data consultant.

Republicans are hardly going to admit it, but they should evaluate whether Trump’s push to ignite a redistricting arms race may have made it easier for a blue wave to wipe out more Republicans than if they had left their maps alone.

Ohio Republicans have already cut their losses. They approved a map drawn by the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission that makes relatively minor changes to the current plan and allows Democrats to keep their five seats in the 15-member delegation.

Kansas Republicans have also backed down. State House Speaker Dan Hawkins said on Tuesday that his chamber lacked enough support to call a special legislative session to redraw the House seat of U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, the only Democrat in the state’s four-person congressional delegation.

The next place to watch is Indiana, where Senate Republican leadership has publicly said they don’t have the votes to pass new maps, despite intense pressure from Gov. Mike Braun and the White House.

That leaves Florida, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is on a mission to get lawmakers to redistrict five of the eight districts Democrats hold in Congress, which would weaken neighboring GOP seats in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa and Orlando.

As with the Texas gerrymander, Florida Republicans risk weakening red districts that swung from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 and “could just swing back,’’ Isbell told me. “I don’t expect Florida to go Democratic in the general election, but there are a lot of congressional seats that are swingy, and if you start screwing around with them and Democrats really surge, it’s going to make a big difference.”

Meanwhile, Democrat-controlled states are lining up to try to cancel out Republican gains. After Gov. Gavin Newsom led California’s redistricting initiative to a 28-point victory last week, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore announced that he won’t “sit on our hands” and has formed a commission that could target the lone Republican seat in the eight-member congressional delegation.

Virginia Democrats, who swept Tuesday’s elections, also announced they would try to amend their state’s constitution to allow them to gain control over three of the districts held by Republicans. And New York and Colorado are also considering entering the redistricting war. If Democrats follow through, they could create up to 30 additional seats that favor Democrats; and essentially match the number of districts Republicans say they could gain if they succeed with gerrymandering efforts in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Indiana, Ohio and Florida.

The bottom line: There is no guarantee that the electorate that showed up in 2024 is going to be the one that goes to the polls in 2026. Instead of securing additional seats in Congress, Trump’s redistricting gamble looks like it might just boomerang back on him.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.