Creating a bunch of razor’s-edge districts proved particularly unwise for a Republican Party that relies on the fits and fortunes of a single man.
Underplayed in the post-midterm coverage is the role of the White-House-driven campaign last year to redraw congressional maps in the middle of the decade. It was supposed to provide Republicans with insurance against midterm losses and blunt the structural advantage enjoyed by the opposition in year six (really year ten) of a presidency. Instead, it produced a remarkable assortment of failed gerrymanders, actual dummymanders, and near-catastrophes narrowly averted that netted out to more, not fewer GOP losses.
A dummymander is what happens when a party gets too clever with its gerrymandering, spreading voters too thinly across too many districts in an effort to squeeze out the most seats at the margins. Logically enough, when you go too far, you end up with more skin-of-the-teeth seats and fewer safe ones. That, uh, matters when you take a pasting like Tuesday’s.
Consider the overall results. Republicans redrew congressional districts across the country with the hopes of picking up 15 D seats. According to Decision Desk HQ, they appear to have won just two of those new districts. (By contrast California Democrats engineered a five-seat gerrymander of their own and appear to have captured all five.)
But it’s even worse than that. In some places, Republicans actually sacrificed seats they already controlled in pursuit of seats they hoped to gain. Elsewhere, they came astonishingly close to doing so. And in Indiana, a group of conservative Republican legislators who resisted Trump’s demands, and were subjected to months of abuse and political retaliation for their trouble, may have saved their party from an even more spectacular humiliation.
Take Tennessee. Republicans redrew the state hoping to eliminate its last Democratic seat and produce a 9–0 GOP delegation. Well, they succeeded in taking Democrat Steve Cohen’s old seat, by about a point. But they barely held on in a number of other red districts, and Representative Scott DesJarlais, who defeated Democrat Victoria Broderick by 43 points in 2024, appears to have lost to her by 280 votes in the rematch.
In North Carolina, Republicans already controlled ten of 14 House seats. They redrew their map to eliminate a blue NC-1 by carving away some territory from NC-3. But NC-1 stayed blue anyway, even though it had gone twelve points for Trump in 2024, and Representative Greg Murphy, the Republican in NC-3, is clinging to a lead of just 233 votes. Another Republican incumbent, Virginia Foxx, is trailing by 99 votes in a race that appears headed for a recount. Oh, and Republicans also lost five other seats in the state, including that of NRCC chairman Richard Hudson.
In Texas, the Alamo, as it were, of the redistricting war, Republicans hoped to net five new seats and got just one of them. They also lost two existing red seats, leaving them with a net loss statewide.
In Florida, Republicans hoped for four new seats and so far are 0–4. One Democrat, Darren Soto, is narrowly leading in a redrawn district Trump had carried by about 18.
In Ohio a kind of gerrymander-lite was supposed to imperil Democrats Marcy Kaptur and Greg Landsman. Both won comfortably. And Republicans lost the seventh, tenth, and 15th districts.
Then of course there is Indiana. Last year, 21 Republican state senators helped knock down a proposed 9–0 red map that positively julienned Indianapolis. Trump and his allies were furious and lashed out hard at the state party, threatening the whole lot with primaries. They spent more than $8 million targeting them and took some scalps. Other legislators faced harassment, intimidation, and threats.
Dems picked up a seat in Indiana. And a new Decision Desk HQ analysis concludes that had the dummymander passed, Democrats would have carried all nine districts.
According to the same DDHQ analysis, applying Tuesday’s vote to another rejected Republican map in South Carolina would have yielded three Democratic seats out of seven, up from the two they won with the existing boundaries.
Perhaps the lesson here is obvious — that dummymanders are dumb. But creating a bunch of razor’s-edge districts proved particularly unwise for a Republican Party that relies on a novel and polyglot voting coalition with few persistent shared interests, that is instead tethered to the fits and fortunes of a single man.