Trump’s gerrymandering push in Congress is getting complicated for the Republican Party

As President Donald Trump explained to reporters this summer, the plan was simple.

Republicans, the president said, were “entitled” to five more conservative-leaning seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in Texas and more in other red states. The president broke with more than a century of political tradition by ordering the Republican Party to redraw these maps in mid-decade to avoid losing control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.

Four months later, Trump’s bold question seems anything but simple. After a federal court panel slammed the Republicans’ new map in Texas on Tuesday, the entire exercise has the potential to give Democrats more winnable seats in the House of Representatives.

“Trump may have let the genie out of the bottle,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA, “but he may not get the wish he hoped for.”

Trump’s plan is to strengthen the narrow margin in the House of Representatives to protect Republicans from losing control of the chamber in next year’s elections. Normally, the president’s party loses seats during midterm elections. But his involvement in redistricting instead becomes an illustration of the limits of presidential power.

To maintain the Republicans’ grip on power in Washington, Trump relies on a complex political process.

Redrawing maps is a decentralized effort that involves navigating a maze of legal rules. It also poses a difficult political trade-off, because the lawmakers with the power to draw maps often want to protect themselves, business interests or local communities more than ruthlessly help their party.

And when a party takes aggressive action to draw lines to help itself win elections – also known as gerrymandering – it risks pushing its rival party to do the same.

That’s what Trump ultimately did, pushing California voters to replace their map drawn by a nonpartisan commission with one drawn by Democrats to gain five seats. If successful, the move would nullify the action taken by Texas Republicans. California voters approved that map earlier this month, and if a Republican lawsuit fails to block it, that map, which gives Democrats more winnable seats, will remain in effect even if Texas’ remains stuck.

“Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned – and democracy won,” California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, posted on X after the ruling in Texas, naming his Republican counterpart in Texas along with the president.

Rep. Kevin Kiley, a Republican whose Northern California district would be redrawn under the state’s new map, agreed.

“It could very well turn out to be a net loss for Republicans, honestly if you look at the map, or at the very least it could be a flop,” Kiley said. “But it’s something that should never have happened. It was poorly conceived from the start.”

There is no guarantee that Tuesday’s ruling on the Texas map will stand. Many lower courts have blocked Trump’s initiatives, only for the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court put those statements on hold. Texas Republicans also immediately appealed Tuesday’s decision to the Supreme Court.

Republicans hope the nation’s highest court will also weaken or eliminate the election the last major part of the Voting Rights Act next year, which could open the door for further redraws in their favor.

Even before Tuesday, Trump’s mid-decade push for redistricting was not going as cleanly as he had hoped, though he had scored some apparent victories. North Carolina Republicans may have created another conservative-leaning seat in that state, while Missouri Republicans redrew their congressional map at Trump’s insistence to eliminate one Democratic seat. The Missouri plan faces lawsuits and a possible referendum that would force a statewide vote on the issue.

Trump’s pressure has foundered elsewhere. Republicans in Kansas refused to try to eliminate the state’s only swing seat, which was held by a Democratic congressman. Indiana Republicans also refused to redraw their map to eliminate their two Democratic-leaning congressional seats.

After Trump attacked the key supporter in Indiana, Senator Greg Goode declared on social media, he was the victim of a swatting call This weekend that led to deputies coming to his home.

Most of the redistricting normally occurs once every ten years, following the release of new population estimates from the U.S. Census. That requires state lawmakers to adjust their legislative lines to ensure that each district has roughly the same population. It also opens the door to gerrymandering of maps to make it harder for the party without power to win seats in the legislature.

Inevitably, redistricting will lead to lawsuits, which can drag on for years and prompt court-ordered reviews by mid-decade.

Republicans could benefit from this after the last cycle in 2021, as they won 2022 Supreme Court elections in North Carolina and Ohio. But some lawsuits have not gone in the Republican Party’s favor. Earlier this month, a judge in Utah demanded that the state make a ruling one of four congressional seats that lean Democratic.

Trump broke with modern political practice by pushing for a massive mid-decade realignment in red states.

Democrats were in a bad position to respond to Trump’s gambit because more states they control have lines drawn by independent commissions rather than partisan lawmakers, which is the legacy of the administration’s reform efforts.

But now that Newsom has Democrats successfully drawing California’s borders, the party is trying to copy it elsewhere.

Next could be Virginiawhere Democrats this month retook the governor’s office and expanded their margins in the Legislature. A Democratic candidate for governor in Colorado has called for a similar measure there. Republicans currently hold nine of the nineteen seats in the House of Representatives in those two states.

Overall, Republicans have more to lose if redistricting at the national level becomes a purely partisan activity and voters in blue states abandon their nonpartisan committees to let their preferred party maximize its margins. In the last full redistricting cycle in 2021, the committees gained 95 seats in the House of Representatives that Democrats would otherwise have drawn, and only 13 that Republicans would have drawn.

On Tuesday, Republicans revalued Trump’s advocacy of hard redistribution.

“If you look at the basics of this, I don’t think there was a member of the delegation who was asked our opinion,” Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas told reporters.

Incumbents generally don’t like the idea of ​​radically redrawing districts. It could lead to what political experts call a “dummy mander”: spreading the opposing party’s voters so widely that they end up endangering your own incumbents in a year, like 2026, that is expected to be bad for the party in power.

Incumbents also don’t like losing voters who supported them or attracting entirely new communities to their districts, said Jonathan Cervas, who teaches redistricting at Carnegie Mellon University and has drawn new court maps. Democratic lawmakers in Illinois and Maryland have so far resisted mid-decade redistricting to strengthen their majorities in their states, joining their Republican counterparts in Indiana and Kansas.

Cervas said it was therefore striking to see Trump push Republicans to pass redistricting in the middle of the decade.

“The idea that they would get along is actually insane,” he said.

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Associated Press writers Joey Cappelletti and Kevin Freking in Washington contributed to this report.