For those of you who’ve been worried about the fact that the Republicans will likely gerrymander more states, even after California and other blue states do their thing, G. Elliot Morris provides some analysis that shows all is not lost anyway:
I’ve assembled a crack team of redistricting expert friends to ask what they think is going to happen in each state that has already or is likely to redraw its congressional lines before November 2026. According to them, the best case for Democrats is something that looks like the following changes in seat control in each state:
- Republicans gain 3 seats in TX
- Democrats gain 5 seats in CA
- R+1 in IN
- R+1 in OH
- R+3 in FL
- R+1 in MO
- Total R+4
And the worst-case scenario for Democrats looks maybe like this:
- R+5 in TX
- D+3 in CA
- R+1 in IN
- R+2 in OH
- R+3 in FL
- R+1 in MO
- Total R+9
These are just guesses since we don’t know what the maps in all these states look like, but I trust the judgment of my experts and the general neighborhood of their estimates. In terms of caveats, note that we are not accounting for any changes in maps that may come if the Supreme Court strikes down the section of the Voting Rights Act that mandates majority-minority districts in some states. If that happens, we could see a deluge of Democratic seats due to map redrawing all over the South, including seats like MO-01 and TN-09. “All bets are off” if that happens, I’m told.
But if you take these changes in seat totals and then plug them into a computer program that projects the number of seats Democrats would win under each map, given different margins in the House popular vote, you get the following figure. This tells you, for each of our 3 scenarios (2024, best-case Dem, and worst-case Dem), the number of seats Democrats would win if they increased or decreased their vote margins uniformly across all seats.
For example, under the 2024 map, Democrats would likely have won control of the House even while losing the national popular vote by 1.5 percentage points. That’s because Republicans won 3 seats by less than 1.1 percentage points, and they’d flip to Democrats if you decrease the Republican popular vote margin from +2.6 to +1.5.
But now, if you take 4 or 9 seats away from the Democrats, they have to win the popular vote in order to win control of Congress. In the worst-case simulation where Democrats lose 9 seats due to partisan gerrymandering across the country, they would not recover their current number of seats (215) until they won the popular vote by 0.3 points — a 2.9-point shift from 2024. And they’d need to win the popular vote by 1.3 points to win the majority of seats in the House.
In all three scenarios, Democrats are pretty likely to win the majority if they win by their current 3.3-point margin in the generic ballot, according to our average:
[…]
The bottom line is that while Republican gerrymandering efforts could make Democrats’ path to retaking the House more difficult in 2026, they’re not insurmountable. Even in the worst-case scenario where Democrats lose 9 seats to partisan redistricting, they would still have a realistic chance of winning the majority if they can maintain their current polling advantage or capitalize on potential anti-Trump sentiment in the midterms.
Keep the pressure on, people. Don’t let up. They are trying to cheat — and they will likely contest any election they lose — but if our democracy can hang on for two more cycles we might just get through this.