WASHINGTON (AP) — At the President’s Urgent Request Donald TrumpRepublicans in eight states redraw the borders dozens of congressional districts over the past year, while seeking an advantage that could help them maintain a slim House majority amid tough times. midterm election.
Ultimately it didn’t work.
Republicans lost most of the Democratic seats they had planned to flip, lost others they planned to hold, and won swept from power by a Democratic surge fueled by voter dissatisfaction with Trumpthe economy and the war with Iran.
The Republican redistricting plan failed in Alabama, Florida and Texas. It was scuttled by the courts of Missouri then soundly defeated by his voters on Tuesday. And this was offset in California, where reprisals Democratic redistricting flipped the five Republican-held seats he was targeting.
“This is a catastrophic rebuke of Donald Trump’s failed efforts to drag the country into oblivion to save the United States House of Representatives,” John Bisognano, chairman of the Democratic National Redistricting Committee, said Wednesday.
New presumed neighborhoods continued
growing support for Trump
Congressional districts are typically redrawn after a census at the beginning of each decade to account for demographic changes. But Trump sparked an unusual mid-decade redistricting battle last year when he urged Texas Republicans reshaping U.S. House of Representatives districts to give the GOP a chance to pick up five additional seats in the midterm elections.
A cascade of redistricting ensued, spurred in the South by a Supreme Court ruling that Federal voting rights law weakened protections for majority-black districts. Republicans hoped their redistricting could bring in as many people as possible. four additional seats in Floridatwo in Ohio and one each in Alabama, Louisiana and North Carolina and Tennessee.
In all but one of those redrawn districts, Trump would have received more than 54% of the vote had they been in place for the 2024 election, according to Associated Press estimates.
“Normally, this type of neighborhood is relatively safe,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and editor of the website “All About Redistricting.”
But presumptively Republican constituencies have been weakened by Trump’s evolving views. THE AP Voter Poll about 6 in 10 people disapprove of how Trump is handling the presidency. Views of Trump’s priorities were also mostly negative.
“If we look at the country as a whole, this whole mid-decade redistricting strategy was a total failure for Republicans,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.
Redistricting collapsed in the Rio Grande Valley
In Texas, Republicans reconfigured three heavily Latin American countries Rio Grande Valley districtswho had turned to Trump in 2024, to try to increase their chances of unseating Democratic Representatives Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez. But both were re-elected on Tuesday. And Democrats instead unseated Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz, whose district is sandwiched between theirs.
Although De La Cruz’s new district retained the same percentage of Trump-leaning voters as the 2024 version, about three in five voting-age residents were new, making it harder for her to compete with Democratic challenger Bobby Pulido, a celebrated Latin Grammy Award winner.
The AP Voter Poll indicates a substantial shift in Hispanics’ shift away from Republicans since Trump’s victory just two years ago. Nationally, about a third of Hispanics say they supported the Republican in their race for the U.S. House of Representatives, while about four in 10 voted for Trump two years ago.
The new Texas districts were drawn by Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust.
“Trying to win five seats in Texas, without seriously jeopardizing anything else, was a Herculean task,” Kincaid said Wednesday. He added: “The trends we’ve been seeing over the last few years needed to continue, and that hasn’t happened. »
If Republicans hadn’t redrawn Texas districts, they probably would have lost even more seats, Kincaid said.
Democrats retain seats in Florida and Alabama
Florida Republicans attempted to tip four additional House seats to the Republican Party in Trump’s adopted state. Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz was among their targets, but he still decided to run in one of the redrawn districts. He was re-elected on Tuesday.
“I worked across the aisle. I got results for my community and they spent $26 million trying to beat me,” Moskowitz said after his victory in Florida’s 25th congressional district. “They set that money on fire tonight.”
He said voters in his new district, like those across the country, were more concerned about the economy and their ability to afford a good quality of life. But he added that this redistricting also angered voters.
After redistricting, about two-thirds of voting-age residents were new to the district represented by Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor. But she was also re-elected. Democrat Pia Dandiya won another district — an open seat in South Florida — that Republicans had reshaped to gain an advantage.
In Alabama, a Supreme Court ruling allowed the Republican-led Legislature to return to what the GOP saw as a friendlier map. But Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures still won re-election, defying Republican plans.
North Carolina redistricting led to costly, close races
Republicans redrawn two congressional districts in eastern North Carolina in an effort to unseat Democratic Rep. Don Davis in the 1st Congressional District, which has sent a Black member to Congress for more than 30 years. They made Davis’ district a little more Republican by attracting thousands of voters from the 3rd Congressional District, held by Republican Greg Murphy. In exchange, they reassigned thousands of Democratic-leaning areas to Murphy’s district.
The ensuing ad battle for Davis’ seat cost well over $50 million, according to ad tracking firm AdImpact, ranking among the most expensive House races nationally.
Davis held a slight lead Wednesday and the race between Murphy and his Democratic challenger Raymond Smith was particularly close.
Further redistricting likely before 2028 elections
What started as a Republican redistricting effort could become a Democratic redistricting movement before the presidential election.
Maryland voters approved a constitutional amendment Tuesday that will make it easier for the Democratic-led General Assembly to redraw districts to the party’s advantage. Democratic supporters, backed by former President Barack Obama, touted it as a way to “stop Trump.”
Democrats who made gains in many state legislatures Tuesday could also use that power to redistrict, including in Wisconsin, where districts lean Republican. And democratic legislators in New York have already taken a first step toward congressional redistricting before the 2028 elections.
But recent midterm redistricting revealed that it can be difficult to anticipate how voters will behave as they try to cast ballots. gerrymander districts for partisan advantage. That could be especially the case for the upcoming presidential election, which would be the first in a dozen years without Trump’s name at the top of the ballots, making it unclear how his supporters will realign behind the new candidates.
The midterm elections “show that districts are not a foregone conclusion — that if voters actually show up, they can overcome district boundaries,” Levitt said.
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Associated Press writer Bill Barrow contributed to this report.
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