Trump's congressional gerrymandering push is getting complicated for the GOP

Four months later, Trump's audacious ask looks anything but simple. After a federal court panel struck down Republicans' new map in Texas on Tuesday, the entire exercise holds the potential to net Democrats more winnable seats in the House instead.

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

Trump's plan is to bolster his party's narrow House margin to protect Republicans from losing control of the chamber in next year's elections. Normally, the president's party loses seats in the midterms. But his involvement in redistricting is instead becoming an illustration of the limits of presidential power.

Playing with fire

To hold Republicans' grip on power in Washington, Trump is relying on a complex political process.

Redrawing maps is a decentralized effort that involves navigating a tangle of legal rules. It also involves a tricky political calculus because the legislators who hold the power to draw maps often want to protect themselves, business interests or local communities more than ruthlessly help their party.

And when one party moves aggressively to draw lines to help itself win elections — also known as gerrymandering — it runs the risk of pushing its rival party to do the same.

That's what Trump ended up doing, spurring 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 cancel out 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 giving Democrats more winnable seats will remain in effect even if Texas' remains stalled.

“Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned -- and democracy won,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, posted on X after the Texas ruling, mentioning 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 come out as a net loss for Republicans, honestly when you look at the map, or at the very least, it could end up being a wash,” Kiley said. “But it’s something that never should have happened. It was ill-conceived from the start."

For Trump, a mix of wins and losses

There's 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 U.S. Supreme Court to put those rulings on hold. Texas Republicans immediately appealed Tuesday's decision to the high court, too.

Republicans hope the nation's highest court also weakens or eliminates the last major component of the Voting Rights Act next year, which could open the door to further redraws in their favor.

Even before Tuesday, Trump’s push for mid-decade redistricting was not playing out as neatly as he had hoped, though he had scored some apparent wins. North Carolina Republicans potentially created another conservative-leaning seat in that battleground state, while Missouri Republicans redrew their congressional map at Trump's urging to eliminate one Democratic seat. The Missouri plan faces lawsuits and a possible referendum that would force a statewide vote on the matter.

Trump's push has faltered elsewhere. Republicans in Kansas balked at trying to eliminate the state's lone swing seat, held by a Democratic congresswoman. Indiana Republicans also refused to redraw their map to eliminate their two Democratic-leaning congressional seats.

After Trump attacked the main Indiana holdout, state Sen. Greg Goode, on social media, he was the victim of a swatting call over the weekend that led to sheriff's deputies coming to his house.

Trump's push could have a boomerang effect on Republicans

The bulk of redistricting normally happens once every 10 years, following the release of new population estimates from the U.S. Census. That requires state lawmakers to adjust their legislative lines to make sure every district has roughly the same population. It also opens the door to gerrymandering maps to make it harder for the party out of power to win legislative seats.

Inevitably, redistricting leads to litigation, which can drag on for years and spur mid-decade, court-mandated revisions.

Republicans stood to benefit from these after the last cycle in 2021 because they won state supreme court elections in North Carolina and Ohio in 2022. But some litigation hasn't gone the GOP's way. A judge in Utah earlier this month required the state to make one of its four congressional seats Democratic-leaning.

Trump broke with modern political practice by urging a wholesale, mid-decade redraw 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 by partisan lawmakers, the legacy of government reform efforts.

But with Newsom's push to let Democrats draw California's lines successful, the party is looking to replicate it elsewhere.

Next up may be Virginia, where Democrats recaptured the governor's office this month and expanded their margins in the Legislature. A Democratic candidate for governor in Colorado has called for a similar measure there. Republicans currently hold 9 of the 19 House seats in those two states.

Overall, Republicans have more to lose if redistricting becomes a purely partisan activity nationally and voters in blue states ditch their nonpartisan commissions to let their preferred party maximize its margins. In the last complete redistricting cycle in 2021, commissions drew 95 House seats that Democrats would have otherwise drawn, and only 13 that Republicans would have drawn.

Gerrymandering's unintended consequences

On Tuesday, Republicans were reappraising Trump's championing of redistricting hardball.

“I think if you look at the basis of this, there was no member of the delegation that was asked our opinion,” Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas told reporters.

Incumbents usually don't like the idea of radically redrawing districts. It can lead to what political experts call a “dummymander” — spreading the opposing party's voters so broadly 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 have supported them or getting wholly new communities drawn into their districts, said Jonathan Cervas, who teaches redistricting at Carnegie Mellon University and has drawn new maps for courts. Democratic lawmakers in Illinois and Maryland have so far resisted mid-decade redraws to pad their majorities in their states, joining their GOP counterparts in Indiana and Kansas.

Cervas said that's why it was striking to watch Trump push Republicans to dive into mid-decade redistricting.

"The idea they'd go along to get along is basically crazy,” he said.

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