USA: 10 days that changed the House map — and the Democrats’ confidence

Just two weeks ago, Democrats were increasingly confident that they could regain control of the House in November, after apparently bringing the redistricting race to a draw.

But two court rulings — one from the U.S. Supreme Court and the other from Virginia’s highest court — coupled with an aggressive new push by Republican states to redraw electoral maps have given the Republican Party its biggest boost in many months.

Directly: the Republicans now have, in about 10 days, something like 10 more seats in the Chamber designed in a way that favors them, and the Democrats now face a much more difficult scenario.

“It’s clearly tighter than it was a week and a half ago,” Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pennsylvania, said of his party’s chances of winning back the House.

Democrats are still generally seen as favorites to win the House race this year. Republicans face an adverse political climate, with President Donald Trump’s low popularity, expensive gas and an unpopular war with Iran. In special elections and governor’s races last year, Democratic enthusiasm handily outpaced Republican mobilization.

“I was expecting a gain of 15 to 20 seats before this last week and a half,” Boyle said. “Now, I expect somewhere between 10 and 15 seats.”

That’s still more than enough to take away the majority of Republicans, who currently hold a narrow advantage of 217 to 212 seats. And history does not favor the party in power: the party in the White House almost always loses seats in midterm elections.

But after the latest map changes, winning a majority will require Democrats to flip seats in less favorable territories.

Republicans, in turn, became excited again.

“Lord, grant me humility,” James Blair, a Republican strategist coordinating Trump’s midterm election political operation, wrote on Network X on Friday, after Virginia’s highest court struck down a newly approved map that would have given four additional seats to Democrats.

One of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s top political advisers interrupted a meeting in Texas — where the Republican leader was holding a fundraising round — to break the news, according to two people familiar with the conversation. Johnson then celebrated on the phone with former Republican Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, who had spoken out against the Democratic plan to redraw the state’s districts.

The past 10 days have shown the power — and speed — with which courts can influence midterm elections, as well as the role of judges in the next phase of the redistricting war. Recent lawsuits still underway in Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, Louisiana and Alabama could reverse or block some of the potential Republican gains by November.

The outcome of this legislative and judicial dispute, which is unfolding largely outside the direct control of voters, could be highly relevant. No party has achieved a net gain of more than a dozen House seats in a national election since the 2018 “surge.”

Representative Yvette Clarke, Democrat of New York and chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said in an interview that the party is in “meetings upon meetings upon meetings” to try to react in Democratic-controlled states. But, according to her, the next steps are still uncertain, in part because the electoral calendar closes some windows.

“It’s not a good feeling,” he summed up.

Flood of good news for Republicans

The last few weeks have proven to be a period of enormous importance in the fight for control of Congress this year.

On April 21, voters in Virginia narrowly approved a referendum that validated a new district map drawn by Democrats and accused of gerrymandering. Shortly afterwards, the Democratic leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, of New York, held a press conference in which he recycled a slogan used the previous year by a Trump ally in a report on the New York Times: “Maximum war, everywhere, all the time.”

“Republicans started this gerrymandering war,” Jeffries said. “And we’ve made it clear, as Democrats, that we’re going to finish it.”

But the battle was just beginning.

Just over a week later, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling on the Voting Rights Act. Republicans acted quickly. In Tennessee, they redrawn the map to eliminate the only seat left for Democrats in the state. In Louisiana, the Republican governor took the unusual step of postponing the House primaries — even after the ballots had already been sent out — to get a new map approved. In Alabama, state officials asked the Supreme Court for permission to use a map that could flip yet another Democratic seat.

On the same day the Supreme Court issued its ruling, Florida lawmakers approved a new House map that creates up to four additional Republican-friendly districts. “Signed, sealed and delivered,” Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, wrote on social media the following Monday as he signed the bill into law.

With the aim of carrying out the redistricting offensive initiated by Trump, more states led by Republicans are studying similar measures. Party lawmakers were reminded of the price of defying the former president’s demands on Tuesday when a group of lawmakers in Indiana who resisted the Trump-backed redistricting plan lost the primary to candidates linked to the MAGA movement.

Then came Virginia, the biggest surprise of all.

Adding up the seats in which Democrats have lost or may lose ground — up to four in Virginia, up to four in Florida, one or two in Louisiana, one in Tennessee, one in Alabama — the total gives Republicans renewed optimism. Voters, of course, will have the final say, and Democrats still plan to try to flip two seats in Virginia and fight for some of the new districts in Florida.

Preparing the ground for November

The two parties are now preparing for a district-by-district fight this fall.

At the end of April, the Cook Political Report, which makes electoral projections, classified 217 House seats as “at least slightly favorable” to the Democrats — which meant that the party would need to win just one of the races considered “swings” (toss-ups) to win a majority. On Friday, Cook started to see only 208 seats as at least leaning towards Democrats — which forces the party to win 10 of the 18 races considered undecided.

The final maps are not yet finalized, less than six months before the election, with lawsuits associated with Democrats against new Republican maps in states such as Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee. And more states under Republican control, such as Kansas, Alabama and South Carolina, are openly considering pushing for further changes.

In some “blue” states, where more aggressive redistricting has been considered, Democrats are now looking for ways out.

“I’m worried about my party,” said state Sen. Arthur Ellis of Maryland, a Democrat who has been advocating for the state to redraw its map ahead of the midterm elections. He claims that defeats in the gerrymandering war are creating a “real challenge” for the attempt to regain the majority in the House.

Ellis said he plans to send a letter over the weekend to other Maryland lawmakers to demand approval of new district lines in response to the Virginia decision. “We need to have the courage to stand up and make our voices heard at this crucial and critical moment in the history of the United States of America,” he said.

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