Two weeks ago, after Virginia voters approved a new heavily Democratic congressional map, it was looking like President Donald Trump’s bare-knuckle gerrymandering push had fizzled – and might even backfire.
Two weeks, it turns out, is a long time in politics.
A pair of court rulings – one from the US Supreme Court and now one from the Virginia Supreme Court Friday – have sharply recast the 2026 redistricting battles in the GOP’s favor.
That doesn’t mean it’ll be enough to save the GOP’s House majority in 2026, and the impact this year could be more muted than a lot of people appreciate.
But the redistricting battle has now clearly benefitted Republicans. And it will probably help them even more in years to come.
A pair of GOP wins
The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a map passed after Democrats spent tens of millions of dollars to promote the referendum enacting it. The court ruled Democrats in the state legislature didn’t follow the correct procedure in setting up the constitutional amendment allowing the vote last fall.
That means Democrats won’t get a map that likely would have gained them four seats. They’ll instead have to try to flip seats on a map that currently features six Democrats and five Republicans.
That news comes after the US Supreme Court delivered an even more significant ruling last week – one with not just immediate partisan implications but also long-term implications, including for racial politics in America.
In Louisiana v. Callais, the court further gutted the Voting Rights Act and made it easier for Republicans to disassemble the majority-minority districts that are about all Democrats today have in the Deep South.
The GOP has quickly set about doing that. Tennessee has already carved up a majority-Black district based in Memphis to give Republicans a 9-0 map, and Louisiana is expected to soon eliminate one or both of its majority-Black districts. Alabama has petitioned to lift a court order that requires it to keep a second majority-minority district.
The GOP’s edge is not as big as people think
Applying these changes to the CNN redistricting tracker, it’s looking like Republicans will have drawn as many as 15, 16 or 17 new winnable districts for themselves for this year’s midterms, while Democrats will have drawn five – all of them in California. (Utah also added a Democratic-leaning district, but it was because of a court ruling.)
That’s certainly a much better scenario for Republicans than two weeks ago.
Rather than Democrats having to flip the three Republican seats they needed to break Speaker Mike Johnson’s razor-thin majority, they could now effectively have to flip more than 10.
But that might actually oversell the hurdle that’s been created for 2026. That’s because some of the districts drawn by Republicans are far from guaranteed to go their way, especially in a good year for Democrats.
Ohio’s new map, for instance, could gain Republicans two seats, but it could also gain them none. And while Republicans intend their Texas map to gain them five seats, and their Florida map four, some of these districts will be quite difficult to win in a good Democratic year, particularly with Trump’s sharp decline in approval with Latino voters.
Even in Virginia, Democrats could still flip one or more seats on the current map in 2026, meaning the ruling isn’t necessarily a loss of four seats.
“If the current map holds in Virginia, we will at minimum flip two seats,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CNN on Friday. “And we’re exploring other options given how unpopular the policies of the Republican party have been.”
Before the Virginia Supreme Court ruled Friday, the Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter estimated that actual net benefit for Republicans in 2026 was likely to be closer to four or five seats, even if the Virginia map was struck down.
The GOP might not be able to save its majority
Even if the GOP forces Democrats to flip double-digits worth of seats rather than three, that’s looking quite doable for the blue team.
That’s because Trump is a historically unpopular president. Presidents with low approval ratings don’t just lose 12 seats; they often lose a multiple of that.
Trump in 2018 lost more than 40 House seats. Barack Obama in 2010 lost more than 60. George W. Bush in 2006 lost about 30.
And Trump is worse off right now than all of those examples except Bush.
The universe of competitive seats is smaller these days, meaning a huge wave election would seem less likely than in these previous midterm elections. But it would still be surprising if the Democrats couldn’t win enough to flip the majority.
It will likely benefit Republicans for years to come
At the same time, it’s overly reductive to just look at how this will play out in 2026. That’s because all of this – and especially the US Supreme Court ruling – will reverberate for years to come.
And that’s where the GOP’s real likely gains could come in.
For one, even if these districts might not be red enough to go Republican in a good Democratic year in 2026, they’ll still favor Republicans in general. And they could well flip red in a better environment for Republicans – be that in 2028 or 2030.
For two, the GOP can continue to pull apart majority-minority districts in the South in the coming cycles, including in states like Georgia where the US Supreme Court’s ruling came too late for the 2026 election.
We still don’t know quite how far they can go in doing that; much depends on upcoming court cases interpreting the Supreme Court’s ruling, and Democrats will be able to fight back some. But one study before the case was decided suggested Republicans could gain well more than a dozen seats with a very favorable ruling.
And for three, there’s just the emerging reality of a constant redistricting war.
That reality: To the extent redistricting is now just a never-ending race to the bottom for partisan gain, where states draw new maps whenever it suits them, that likely benefits Republicans. They simply control more of the process.
Democrats could gain some power back by scrapping redistricting commissions in states they control and eliminating other state restrictions on partisan gerrymandering.
But Republicans are just in a better spot in state governments. The states where they hold the “trifecta” of both state legislative chambers and the governor’s mansion account for more seats.
And the US Supreme Court has now handed them a key weapon in a redistricting war that looks like it’s here to stay.
