A GOP dummymander?

Why creating many new GOP congressional districts might not be the sure-fire strategy to hold the US House that Trump and the GOP think it is. A blue-wave election could wipe them out.

Photo by Silas Baisch on Unsplash

We don’t know how the US Supreme Court will rule in the Louisiana voting rights case, which could enable the Louisiana legislature and Gov. Jeff Landry to eliminate the state’s new, second minority congressional district created last year.

A decision in the case, which was heard on Wednesday before the court, may not come until next year, potentially too late to change Louisiana’s district lines for the 2026 elections.

But already, some in the national media are predicting disaster for the Democrats and their hopes of regaining the House in 2026 or beyond. With redistricting moves in Texas and possibly in North Carolina, the GOP stands to pick up a half dozen new seats by eliminating districts where Democrats are now the majority. Much of those gains may be offset if California aggressively redistricts its lines this year to eliminate some Republican seats.

But what if most Southern states get permission from the Supreme Court to nuke black majority districts? Well, that could be a game-changer.

Here’s how the New York Times described the potential situation:

Without Section 2 [of the 1965 Voting Rights Act], which has been interpreted to require the creation of majority-minority districts, Republicans could eliminate upward of a dozen Democratic-held districts across the South.

Republicans may not eliminate every Democratic-leaning district that they technically could . . . but the party’s aggressive mid-cycle redistricting suggests they would eliminate enough to obtain a significant structural advantage. It’s not clear whether this would occur by next year’s midterm elections, with a court ruling likely next summer, but the new seats would eventually be enough to make Republicans favored to win the House even if they lost the popular vote by a wide margin.

With those new seats added to the ones Republicans already seem poised to gain, the House would not be competitive in most election years. . . .

It’s hard to say exactly how many districts Republicans would eliminate if Section 2 falls. It’s also hard to say whether Republicans would be able to eliminate those districts before next year’s midterms; the Supreme Court’s decision is likely to come after many state primaries. The full fallout from the decision might not come until 2028 or even after the next census in 2030.

But even on the lower end of the estimate, Republicans will probably eliminate around a half-dozen districts: the majority Black districts in otherwise overwhelmingly Republican states and regions of the Deep South. In these reliably red states, Republicans could eliminate every Democratic-held majority-minority district while ensuring that the new districts remain relatively compact and overwhelmingly Republican.

But there’s another perspective on this potential disaster. And that’s what could happen in a blue-wave election that goes against Trump and his party in 2026.

Imagining such a blue wave isn’t difficult when we look back at the midterm election during Trump’s first term. Republicans lost 40 House seats and, with them, control of the institution.

But how might extreme gerrymandering to create more GOP districts hurt Republicans?

Conservative commentator Michael Barone put it this way in an August column in the New York Sun: “You can only jam so many opposition voters into a limited number of districts. And suppose you create too many 53 percent districts for your own side. In that case, you risk losing the whole bunch when opinion generally or within specific voting segments 5 percent the other way, which tends to happen at least once every 10-year interval between censuses.”

Boise State University political scientist Charlie Hunt and others who study gerrymandering suggest what’s happening now might be better called “dummymandering.” Here’s what Hunt means, as he explained in a column last August:

Parties that gerrymander their states’ districts are drawing lines to maximize their own advantage, either in state legislatures or, in this case, congressional delegations.

When parties gerrymander districts, they don’t usually try to make them all as lopsided as possible for their own side. Instead, they try to make as many districts as possible that they are likely to win. They do this by spreading groups of supportive voters across several districts so they can help the party win more of these districts.

But sometimes the effort backfires: In trying to maximize their seats, a party spreads its voters too thin and fails to make some districts safe enough. These vulnerable districts can then flip to the other party in future elections, and the opposing party ends up winning more seats than expected.

This phenomenon, commonly referred to as “dummymandering,” has happened before. It even happened in Texas, where Republicans lost a large handful of poorly drawn state legislative districts in the Dallas suburbs in 2018, a strong year for Democrats nationwide.

With Democrats poised for a strong 2026 midterm election against an unpopular president, this is a lesson Republicans might need to pay attention to.

After the 2010 census (and a Republican wave in 2010 state elections), the GOP controlled redistricting in many states and drew aggressive gerrymanders designed to maximize Republican seats. These maps, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University has observed, “mean[t] Democrats would need to win by a near eleven-point margin in 2018 to take back a majority in the U.S. House.”

In other words, Republicans had built a structural advantage—a firewall of districts tilted in their favor—so strong that even a sizable Democratic popular vote win might not flip enough seats.

Indeed, the Brennan Center warned in March 2018 that “even a strong blue wave would crash against a wall of gerrymandered maps,” estimating that Democrats would need an unprecedented +11% national House vote to secure a bare majority.

But Democrats won the 2018 House popular vote by about +8.6% and achieved a net gain of 40 seats to claim the House, a historic wave, although it was smaller than it might have been under nonpartisan maps.

Studies quantifying the effect of the gerrymanders backed this up. An Associated Press analysis found Republicans won roughly 16 more House seats in 2018 than expected from their vote share, thanks to partisan map-drawing.

In heavily gerrymandered states like North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas, the Democrats’ blue wave translated into surprisingly few seat gains. For example, North Carolina Democrats won 48% of the House vote in 2018 but only three of 13 seats (23%), as the GOP’s map packed most Democratic voters into just three districts.

In Ohio, Democrats won about 47% of the votes but only four of 16 seats.

And in Texas, Democrats got about 47% of the votes yet won just 13 of 36 seats (36%), four fewer than a proportional outcome.

These disparities show how the GOP’s map strategy blunted the wave in many states.

A Brennan Center post-election study noted that nearly three in four House seats that Democrats flipped in 2018 came from maps drawn by independent commissions or courts, not by GOP legislatures.

In contrast, of the handful of Democratic gains on Republican-drawn maps, none came from the most extremely gerrymandered states like North Carolina or Ohio (and only two from Michigan).

This suggests that the most extreme GOP gerrymanders largely held, limiting Democratic gains.

And it’s that history that motivates Trump and Republicans to aggressively gerrymander even more districts this year.

But ironically, the very tactics that have usually provided Republicans with a wide seat cushion in normal years now make many of those seats unusually vulnerable during a wave.

By “cracking” Democratic voters across many more GOP-leaning districts and avoiding “packing” too many Republicans into one district, the party may have created too many GOP districts with only modest 53-58% Republican majorities.

These districts are normally safe, but they are not immune to a big wave.

As one political analyst, Nathaniel Rakich, put it, “If Republicans lose the popular vote by too much, their firewall might break all at once, and Democratic gains could multiply.”

In other words, an aggressive gerrymander is a double-edged sword: It yields more seats in neutral times but can produce a sharper swing against the party in a large wave election.

That’s why what Trump and the GOP are doing this year could prove to be a “dummymander.”

The GOP’s post-2010 maps were built for maximizing seats, not for shoring up incumbents against a tsunami. Once a wave reaches a certain intensity, it can sweep away many GOP incumbents in districts drawn to be just slightly Republican.

As Rakich’s analysis showed, around an eight-point national environment for the Democrats (which is precisely what 2018 proved to be), Democratic seat gains suddenly accelerated: “It’s like a switch is thrown at D+8 … Republicans’ structural advantage begins to erode,” such that each additional point of Democratic vote translated to an outsized jump in seats flipped.

In short, the GOP’s gerrymanders this year may be a House-seat-maximizing dam that will hold back a normal tide but will collapse under a flood.

So, whatever you think the U.S. Supreme Court might do, there’s no reason to lose heart.

In fact, if the court strikes down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, leading to even more aggressive redistricting in Southern states, that should give those of us on the Democratic side even more motivation to work to ensure that next year’s midterms are the kind of massive blue wave that will not only sweep away the Republicans’ control of the House but, with it, the U.S. Senate.

Let’s keep working!