Only the Supreme Court Can Save Trump’s Gerrymandering Drive
You’d need a 3-D bingo card to keep up with all the gerrymandering decisions that have been made around the country since Donald Trump began a drive this summer to rig midterm-election maps for 2026. But at the moment, it’s increasingly clear the big GOP advantage Trump envisioned when he pushed Texas into an abrupt gerrymander in July has faded and perhaps even disappeared. The New York Times’ Nate Cohn took stock of the situation:
This week, Republicans encountered yet another round of roadblocks in Texas and Indiana. The two states once seemed likely to help the Republicans flip as many as seven Democratic-held districts combined, but after a federal court ruled against the new Texas map and Indiana failed to redraw its map, it suddenly seems possible that Republicans might not gain even a single district in these states.
Without those seats, it’s now imaginable that the Democrats — not the Republicans — will narrowly win this year’s redistricting wars, and net the most seats heading into the 2026 midterm elections.
Cohn estimated that before all this activity, Republicans could lose the national House popular vote by 0.2 percent and still retain control of the House. With new maps in place in California, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Utah, that cushion increased to 0.9 percent — enough to really matter in a close national midterm election. If the adverse judicial decision earlier this week nukes the new Texas map, the GOP advantage would turn into a Democratic advantage of 0.6 percent. Add in the expected offsetting gerrymanders on tap in Republican-controlled Florida and Democratic-controlled Virginia, and you wind up with a Democratic advantage of 0.5 percent.
All this back-and-forth maneuvering more or less leaves in place a national landscape in which the historically indicated Democratic midterm wave, even if it’s just a ripple, will be enough to flip the House and destroy the GOP trifecta that has made it so easy for Trump to implement his radical 2025 agenda. But there are two potentially big shoes that could still drop in Washington from the Supreme Court.
First of all, Texas has appealed the federal-district-court decision dismissing the new gerrymandered House map adopted this summer to SCOTUS, which could set aside the lower-court order and let the good times roll for the Texas GOP. Cohn estimates that development would change the bottom line if everything else happens as expected from a 0.5 percent Democratic advantage to a one percent Republican advantage, a potentially significant shift.
But second of all, the really large intervention could come from the pending SCOTUS decision in Louisiana v. Callais. Many observers fear or hope the Court will all but kill the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in that decision, eliminating the powerful impetus many states (especially in the South) had to adopt maps that gave nonwhite voters a good shot at winning or influencing the outcome. That it turn could lead Republican-controlled state governments in the South to conduct last-minute gerrymanders to eliminate nearly all majority-Black or plurality-Black Democratic U.S. House districts before the midterms (19 of them, according to one estimate). It would be a real bloodbath. But even if they choose to move in that fateful direction, SCOTUS might not act in time to let the blood flow in 2026. And of all the arcane mysteries surrounding Supreme Court decisions, the timing is among the most mysterious.
Suffice it to say that the outcome of Trump’s bid to rig the midterm landscape is in the hands of exactly those black-robed lifetime appointees who may also determine the fate of Trump’s power grabs on tariffs, domestic deployment of military units, the rights of federal employees, control of federal agencies, election rules, and many other areas of political and civic life. If you’re involved in politics or political journalism, don’t plan any vacations for next June or July when SCOTUS traditionally drops its bigger decisions.