Following a series of Democratic electoral victories last November, and more recent Democratic gains in Texas, tensions over redistricting and the federal government’s role in elections have been magnified.
Democrat Taylor Rehmet’s victory in a special election for a Texas State Senate seat vacated by a Republican Incumbent was the larger surprise of the two. The district where Rehmet was elected had voted for Donald Trump by 17 points in the 2024 Presidential election, and Rehmet won over Trump’s endorsement for the opposing Republican candidate. Many Republicans reacted with dismay to this development. Texas’ Republican Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick, referred to Rehmet’s victory as a “wake-up call” and promised to “take this seat back” during the coming November midterms.
Meanwhile, a vacant seat in the US House of Representatives was filled by Democrat Christian Menefee. The seat was previously held by Democrat Sylvester Turner, but had been empty since Turner’s death in March of 2025. Menefee’s victory was not a surprise, but narrows the Republican Party’s majority in the House, further placing pressure on House Republicans to make the most of their majority before the midterms.
The midterms are not projected to go well for Republicans. Usually, the President’s political party loses legislative seats during the midterms after their election—the President’s party has only gained seats during midterms four times since 1900, with the last time being during George W. Bush’s administration. Currently, Republicans hold 218 House seats out of a possible 435, exactly the amount needed to constitute a majority. In the Senate, they have a slightly more favorable margin at 53 seats to Democrats’ 45 and Democrat-aligned Independents’ 2. It’s highly unlikely that Republicans will manage to maintain a majority in both houses, and losing both is a real possibility, although the Senate is more resistant to changes in composition than the house, giving Republicans a better shot at maintaining control over it.
Creating more uncertainty for Republicans is the record number of incumbents in Congress not seeking reelection. 63 members of the House and Senate have announced their intent not to run for their currently held seat in the midterms, and 32 are retiring from public office altogether, with 15 running for another Congressional seat (switching between House and Senate) and 16 running for state-level positions. A majority of those not seeking reelection are Republicans, giving them additional difficulty in keeping those seats without the advantages held by incumbent legislators.
The prospect of losing a majority in one or both chambers of Congress has alarmed Republican leaders and kickstarted a competition between parties to meddle with the midterms. It began last summer when, prompted by a call by Donald Trump to redistrict and a letter from the Department of Justice threatening legal action if four “coalition districts” lacking a single racial majority were not broken up, Texas Governor Greg Abbot resolved to redistrict his state’s House districts to favor Republicans. Over the summer, the Texas state legislature proceeded to redraw the state’s congressional map to flip a predicted 5 additional Democratically held seats to Republican representatives in the 2026 midterms. Political gerrymandering is not uncommon, but the Texas gerrymander was controversial both because of its prompting by federal requests and in that it occurred in the middle of a decade, not at the beginning, where censuses are conducted and districts are reapportioned based on changes in population. The Republican-favoring Texas map was briefly blocked from being used in the midterms by a district court, which asserted that the Department of Justice’s demands that Texas break up racial “coalition districts” signaled that the redistricting was racially motivated. However, in December, that decision was reversed by the Supreme Court, which wrote in an short, unattributed order that the district court’s decision “upsett[ed] the delicate federal-state balance in elections.”
Texas Republicans’ blatant gerrymandering have prompted a series of more blatant gerrymandering efforts as the parties in power in each state seek to politically optimize their districts in order to counter the advantages of gerrymanderers in the other states. Most notably, California has adopted Proposition 50, an explicitly retaliatory gerrymander which seeks to offset Republican gains in Texas with Democratic gains in California, targeting exactly five California seats held by Republicans to counter the predicted flipping of the five Democratically held Texas seats. A request by the California Republican Party and the Department of Justice to block the implementation of the Prop. 50 map was blocked by the Supreme Court. In doing so, Associate Justice Samuel Alito clarified the Court’s decision in the Texas case, claiming that both maps were “partisan advantage pure and simple” (The Supreme Court has consistently held that it cannot interfere with matters of partisan gerrymandering).
Gerrymandering efforts have also been pushed in Florida, where Republican governor Ron DeSantis has called for a special legislative session to redraw the state’s congressional districts. In Maryland, Democrats advanced a bill seeking to unseat the state’s only House Republican via gerrymandering, while, in Virginia, Democrats’ redistricting measures were blocked for not being introduced under the proper legislative procedure. The striking down of one Republican-held district’s boundaries in New York gives Democrats in the state legislature an opportunity to redraw the entire state’s districts and potentially gain several seats.
In Missouri, a petition to force a voter referendum on a Republican-favoring redistricting plan succeeded despite over 100,000 signatures being invalidated by Missouri’s Republican Secretary of State, Denny Hoskins, who contended that the signatures were submitted too early to legally count. Hoskins is currently being forced to revise “flawed” and “partisan” language on the new referendum encouraging voters to approve the Republican-favoring map.
Meanwhile, the majority-Republican North Carolina Court of Appeals issued an anonymous ruling swapping authority over the state’s Board of Elections from Democratic Governor Josh Stein to Republican State Auditor Dave Boliek. Boliek went on to create a new state office overseeing all county election boards in the state, and appointed the former Executive Director of the North Carolina Republican Party to that office. Afterwards, the North Carolina State Senate passed a new electoral map explicitly designed to give Republicans an extra Congressional seat, which Governor Stein was barred from vetoing. President Donald Trump praised the electoral map for offering “the opportunity to elect an additional MAGA Republican.”
“The motivation behind this redraw is simple and singular: drawing new map [sic] that will bring an additional Republican seat to the North Carolina congressional delegation.” – Republican NC State Senator Ralph Hise
Trump and his administration have been heavily involved in Republican efforts to change congressional districts and election laws. When a redistricting measure that would favor Republicans failed in Indiana, Trump pledged to support primary challenges to Republicans who voted against the redistricting. He later publicly endorsed opponents to several of those Republicans, calling them “America Last politican[s]” for voting against the plan. As noted earlier, the US Department of Justice has also intervened on his behalf, whether to force Republican state legislatures to redistrict or prevent Democratic legislatures from doing so (as with Texas and California respectively).
Additionally, the FBI recently conducted a raid on a Fulton County, Georgia election office, seizing around 700 boxes of ballots and other material concerning the 2020 presidential election. Director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who is reportedly conducting her own private investigation into the election, was present at the raid at President Trump’s recommendation and personally called Trump after the raid was conducted. Trump reportedly congratulated the FBI agents and asked them questions about the raid. Fulton County commission chair Robb Pitts claimed that he received a phone call threatening him and other Georgia officials with “imminent arrest” several days before the raid. Earlier at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump had promised that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did,” apparently referring to an alleged plot to make him lose the 2020 presidential election.
Trump has been open with his support of Republican interference in congressional elections, saying on a podcast that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting” and that Republicans should “take over the voting in at least 15 places.” In an interview with NBC Nightly News, he doubled down, suggesting a need to “put in federal controls” on midterm elections. Asked if he would accept the results of the midterms, he said, “I will if the elections are honest. I [am] the last one that wants to complain.”
America has a long and storied history of election meddling dating back to the early 19th century, when Elbridge Gerry approved a characteristically oddly-shaped district map in order to preserve a partisan electoral advantage. Unfortunately, with party leaders and the President openly endorsing underhanded tactics in the coming midterms, that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon.
