Why Trump’s plan to help the GOP control the House could backfire

As President Donald Trump explained to reporters this summer, the plan was simple.

The president said Republicans are “entitled” to five more conservative-leaning seats in the US House of Representatives in Texas and additional seats in other red states. The president has broken with more than a century of political tradition in directing the GOP to redraw those maps mid-decade to avoid losing control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.

Four months later, Trump’s bold question seems far from simple. After a federal court panel threw out Texas’ new Republican map on Tuesday, the whole exercise holds the potential to pick up more seats that Democrats could win in the House instead.

Read more: Federal judges are blocking a Texas congressional map that was drawn to help the GOP in the 2026 midterm elections

“Trump may have let the genie out of the bottle, but he may not get the wish he was hoping for,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, California.

Trump’s plan is to strengthen his party’s narrow margin in the House of Representatives to protect Republicans from losing control of the chamber in next year’s elections. Usually, the president’s party loses seats in the midterm elections. But his participation in redistricting instead became an example of the limits of presidential power.

Playing with fire

In order to tighten the Republicans’ grip on power in Washington, Trump relies on a complex political process.

Redrawing maps is a decentralized effort that involves navigating a tangle of legal rules. It also involves difficult political calculations, because legislators with map-drawing power often want to protect themselves, their business interests, or local communities more than to ruthlessly help their party.

When one party moves aggressively to draw lines to help itself win an election — also known as gerrymandering — it risks pushing its rival party to do the same.

This is what Trump ultimately did, as he motivated voters in California to replace their map drawn by a nonpartisan committee with a map drawn by Democrats for five seats. If successful, the move would undo the measure taken by Republicans in Texas. California voters approved that map earlier this month, and if the Republican lawsuit fails to block it, the map, which gives Democrats more winnable seats, will remain in effect even if Texas remains at a standstill.

Read more: What’s next in the national redistricting battle after California approved a new map for the U.S. House of Representatives

“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, tagging his Republican counterpart in Texas alongside the president.

Rep. Kevin Kelly, a Republican whose district in Northern California will be redrawn under the state’s new map, agreed.

“It could be a net loss for Republicans, frankly when you look at the map, or at the very least, it could end up being a wash,” Kelly said. “But this is something that should never have happened. It was ill-conceived from the beginning.”

For Trump, it’s a mix of victories and losses

There is no guarantee Tuesday’s ruling will stick on the Texas map. Several lower courts have blocked Trump’s initiatives, but the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court has suspended those rulings. Texas Republicans immediately appealed Tuesday’s decision to the Supreme Court as well.

Republicans are hoping the nation’s highest court will also weaken or strike down the final key component of the Voting Rights Act next year, which could open the door to more redrawings in their favor.

Even before Tuesday, Trump’s mid-decade redistricting push had not gone as well as he had hoped, though he had scored some clear victories. Republicans in North Carolina will likely create another conservative-leaning seat in that battleground state, while Republicans in Missouri redrew the congressional map at Trump’s urging to remove one Democratic seat. The Missouri plan faces lawsuits and a potential referendum that would force a statewide vote on the issue.

Trump’s efforts have faltered elsewhere. Kansas Republicans rejected an attempt to eliminate the state’s only swing seat, which is held by a Democratic congresswoman. Indiana Republicans also refused to redraw their map to remove their two Democratic-leaning congressional seats.

Read more: The battle to redraw the maps of the US House of Representatives is spreading. This is where things are in Missouri and other states

After Trump attacked Indiana’s key stronghold, state Sen. Greg Judd, on social media, he was the victim of a forceful call over the weekend that led to sheriff’s deputies coming to his home.

Trump’s pressure may have a boomerang effect on Republicans

The bulk of the redistricting process typically occurs once every 10 years, after new population estimates from the U.S. Census are released. This requires state lawmakers to adjust their legislative lines to ensure that each district has approximately the same population. It also opens the door to gerrymandering to make it difficult for the out-of-power party to win legislative seats.

Redistricting is bound to lead to lawsuits, which could last for years and spur court-ordered revisions mid-decade.

Republicans were expected to benefit from it after the last session in 2021 because they won state Supreme Court races in North Carolina and Ohio in 2022. But some of the lawsuits did not go the GOP’s way. A judge in Utah earlier this month asked the state to make one of its four congressional seats Democratic-leaning.

Trump broke with modern political practice by urging mid-decade redrawing of the sentence in red states.
Democrats were poorly positioned to respond to Trump’s gambit because more of the states they control have lines drawn by independent commissions rather than by party lawmakers, a legacy of government reform efforts.

But with Newsom’s push to let Democrats draw California’s lines succeed, the party is looking to replicate that elsewhere.

Virginia could be next, where Democrats regained the governor’s office this month and widened their margins in the Legislature. A Democratic candidate for governor of Colorado called for similar action there. Republicans currently hold 9 of the 19 House seats in these two states.

Overall, Republicans have much to lose if redistricting becomes a purely partisan activity at the national level, and voters in blue states abandon their nonpartisan committees to allow their preferred party to maximize its margins. In the last full redistricting cycle in 2021, committees drew 95 House seats that would have been drawn by Democrats, and only 13 that would have been drawn by Republicans.

Unintended consequences of cheating

On Tuesday, Republicans were reevaluating Trump’s support for redistricting.

“I think if you look at the basis of it, there was not a single member of the delegation who was asked our opinion,” Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas told reporters.

Incumbents typically don’t like the idea of ​​radically redrawing districts. This can lead to what political experts call “demagoguery” — spreading the opposing party’s voters so widely that they end up endangering 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 supported them or attracting entirely new communities to their districts, said Jonathan Serfas, who studies redistricting at Carnegie Mellon University and has drawn new court maps. Democratic lawmakers in Illinois and Maryland have so far resisted mid-decade redrawing to consolidate their majorities in their states, joining their GOP counterparts in Indiana and Kansas.

That’s why it was striking to see Trump push Republicans to dive into the redistricting process in the middle of the decade, Serfas said.

“The idea of ​​them continuing to coexist is basically crazy,” he said.

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