Republicans across the country rushed over the last 18 months to redraw their state’s congressional maps to make districts more favorable to their party at President Donald Trump’s urging. The party had hoped to net approximately 15 seats to hold on to its House majority.
But, as votes are tallied from Texas to Florida to Alabama, the redraws are on track to end in a wash.
In Alabama, Democrat Rep. Shomari Figures is projected to hold on to a seat that state Republicans tried to draw him out of after the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in April. In Florida, Democrats were projected to win three — and possibly one more — of the four districts that Republicans had carved up.
In North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District — which became the most expensive House race in U.S. history, according to AdImpact — Rep. Don Davis has a strong lead to hold on to his seat thanks in part to a blue wave that hit North Carolina particularly hard.
Trending
And in Texas, the state that set off the redistricting spree, GOP candidates likely lost four of the five seats their new map was aimed at flipping.
“Make no mistake about it: Republicans drew our congressional maps to steal five seats from the people of Texas,” Kendall Scudder, chair of the Texas Democratic Party, told The Washington Sun on Wednesday. “Instead of gaining five seats, they are now going to be losing seats in Texas.”
In Tennessee, which was redrawn to ultimately split Memphis into three congressional districts, Democratic nominee and state Rep. Justin Pearson did not concede until Wednesday afternoon in a race where he was trailing by just over 1 percentage point. But in Tennessee’s 4th District, a race that was rated “solid Republican” by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, now has a Democrat in the lead with 99% of the vote counted.
Another state where Republicans redrew the lines was Louisiana, which held the district at the center of the Louisiana v. Callais Supreme Court case. Those races were too close to call as of Wednesday afternoon, showing Democrats holding up even in districts that were favorable — sometimes by double digits — to their opponents using 2024 presidential margins. Those races are likely headed to a recount.
In California, where Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom led Proposition 50 in an effort to net his party up to five more congressional seats, Democrats are projected to pick up at least four of them — and are looking likely to pick up the last one, too.
Democrats have been pushing back on Republican redraw efforts in their own ways, including by redrawing in California, ballot propositions and legal mechanisms. But, John Bisognano, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said the overwhelming Democratic wins were “a complete rebuke” of Republican redistricting efforts.
“What this took to happen was Donald Trump standing in front of the American people and saying, ‘I acknowledge that I cannot win on fair lines. I acknowledge that my ideas are going to be so toxic that I need to cheat more than I already have in order to hold the House of Representatives,’ and that’s rare,” Bisognano said.
Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, said the redistricting that his party launched was a firewall against Republicans losing even more seats in states like Texas. But, he said, the night was still dire.
“I told a lot of people going into the night that it could be anything from bad to kind of OK to apocalyptic,” Kincaid said. “We got apocalyptic.”
In North Carolina, when the race at the top of the ticket — the Senate contest between Democrat Roy Cooper and Republican Michael Whatley — began turning toward Cooper, Kincaid said he began to get nervous about the outcome.
“When the North Carolina Senate race stopped being competitive, I just got really worried about all of those districts,” he continued. “I was hoping that wasn’t going to happen, but with the environment being as bad as it was, it washed all of them out.”
Bisognano said that, especially when considered in the context of not just the state’s 2025 redraw but also the change to the maps in 2022, the North Carolina outcome and races like Figures’ in Alabama showed that voters were tuned in and responded.
“North Carolina is a place that understands redistricting, having all of the egregious gerrymandering happen to it over the course of the past 10 years,” Bisognano said. The state, he said, “reached a boiling point where they were ready to come out and really vote at a rate that no one expected.”
Democrats also came out on top in a slew of ballot measures about redistricting.
In Missouri, voters rejected a proposition that would have put in place a Republican-friendly map for future elections. In Maryland, voters approved a ballot measure that would open the door for Democrats to more easily redraw their maps as early as next year. And in Colorado, a Republican-led measure aimed at making it harder for Democrats to redistrict seemed on track to fail as of Wednesday afternoon.
Both parties are already looking ahead to see what states will pick up the pen ahead of 2028. On Wednesday morning, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, announced that his state would not redraw after it elected a Democratic senator and governor, saying that “the voters of our state have spoken.”
“Gov. Kemp saying that he’s not going to redraw I think is quite a savvy move in that this is a completely toxic issue,” Bisognano said. “Donald Trump took it on head-on, believed at his core, seemingly, that no one cared, and was proven so deeply wrong.”
Author
