What This Week’s Elections Mean for The Future of Elections
The New Yorker · Jon Allsop ·
Jon Allsop on the 2026 midterms and on Democratic versus Republican gains from redistricting efforts.
Republicans did win, on their own terms, by gerrymandering more seats than Democrats. What no one could have known at the time is that they were not fighting a war that would determine control of the House but, rather, a marginal skirmish of scant relevance to the over-all outcome. To turn to a different metaphor du jour, the G.O.P. put up sandbags to stop a rising tide but got hit with a tsunami. In Texas, several projected Republican gains depended, in part, on the Party’s retaining strong support among Latinos and, well, so much for that. Florida’s four-seat push looks to be a complete wash, and two endangered Black Democrats in the South held on comfortably (including Don Davis, in North Carolina, where the wave has reached so high that a potential eleven-three G.O.P. map looks set to morph into a ten-four map in favor of Democrats). As the Times noted, it’ll take time—and some very nerdy debate—to assess the granularities of what the gerrymandering wrought. (Already, the architect of the Texas redraw is telling anyone who will listen that Republicans would have been even worse off without the push.) For now, though, Democrats are the ones gloating. On Wednesday, Hakeem Jeffries, the presumptive next Speaker, posed triumphantly next to a poster board showing Blair’s X post.
There may be more gloating to come. The top-line results for Democrats—as many as fifty-six seats in the Senate; the largest proportion of the House popular vote since Watergate—have, naturally, commanded the lion’s share of attention this week, with the futility of G.O.P. gerrymandering generating a subsection thereof. But similarly favorable outcomes in gubernatorial and state-legislative races will determine where the redistricting war—or skirmish, or battle, or whatever you want to call it—goes from here, in ways that could have a more decisive influence over future elections than Donald Trump and his accomplices were able to exert on this one. Those future elections will be shaped, too, by a slew of ballot measures—concerning redistricting and much more besides—that have made few headlines. More than thirty election-related questions were popped this year—a record number, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. On the whole, the results paint a picture that is nuanced, but which should offer hope not only to big-“D” Democrats, but to small-“D” ones, as well.
At the state level—where congressional maps are ultimately drawn, and where Republicans have enjoyed a structural advantage over Democrats since the Tea Party wave of 2010—the blue tsunami has dramatically shifted the balance of power. Some red states that might have sought to redistrict (or redistrict again) ahead of 2028 will soon, at least partially, be in blue hands, including Texas and Georgia. (Texas could yet pursue a sneaky gerrymander in the lame-duck session before Democrats take over the governor’s mansion and the state House, but the outgoing Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, has already ruled out doing likewise in his state.) Meanwhile, Democrats won trifectas in Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It’s far too early to say what this means for the 2028 maps, and there are legal obstacles in the way in, for example, Michigan, where redistricting is handled by an independent commission. But some power brokers are already thinking about redraws. “We have gerrymandered maps, and they favor Republicans to a significant degree, and we know that other states will consider redistricting efforts in the months ahead that will further attempt to entrench Republican power,” Greta Neubauer, the Democratic leader in Wisconsin’s state Assembly, said. “And so we will be considering a congressional redistricting effort.”
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