Could Trump’s 2024 Victory Counter A 2026 'Midterm Curse’?

Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics,

Donald Trump’s popular vote victory has eroded some of the demographic gains Democrats have been working on for years, giving Republicans hope they can break the historic trend of the president’s party losing seats in the first midterm election after winning the White House.

Two years from now some 14 Democratic House members will be defending districts Trump won, compared to just three Republicans in districts carried by Vice President Kamala Harris.

It’s a significantly better outlook than the GOP faced after Trump’s 2016 victory, which he eked out on the basis of an Electoral College win in the key swing states. That year, two dozen Republicans were elected in districts Hillary Clinton won, roughly the same number of Democrat-occupied seats that Trump carried. In 2018, Democrats gained seats in the Clinton districts and even carved into some of the districts that Trump won, wresting back control of the majority until 2022, when Republicans re-took control.

One reason House majorities have grown slimmer in recent years is the increasingly sophisticated redistricting fights waged by both parties. Over the last decade, Democrats and Republicans have engaged in a protracted battle over the redrawing of congressional districts involving millions of dollars in litigation, thousands of hours of closed-door negotiations, and multiple Supreme Court showdowns.

Partly because of their efforts, Democrats limited the House majority to five seats this year – 220 to Democrats’ 215. But because of Trump’s popular vote victory, winning back the majority in 2026 will require Democrats to carve a path through Trump territory.

“In places where the Democrats were really banking on this whole ‘demographics as destiny’ thing to carry them through the decade, President Trump just detonated that,” said Adam Kincaid, president and executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust.

Overall, Trump carried nearly the same number of congressional districts across the nation – 231 – that he did in 2016 before the most recent redrawing of the congressional maps took place. In 2016, Kincaid says Trump won many of those districts by a plurality because third-party candidate Evan McMullen, a former CIA officer who ran as an independent, siphoned off votes in nearly two dozen districts. Now, Trump’s two-party vote share is 50.8% – meaning he should have carried only 221 congressional districts if the results were directly proportional to the percentage of the vote he won.

Kincaid argues the surplus of 10 House districts is a sign of his group’s redistricting success.

Democrats counter that Republicans’ razor-thin majority demonstrates their own success in taking their fights for more advantageous maps to the courts, especially across the South, where Republicans control many state legislatures and have spent decades drawing the maps in their favor.

In 2016, voters favored House Republicans over Democrats by only a 1.1% advantage, 49.1% to 48%, but Republicans held a far larger House majority, 241 to 194. This year, House Republicans won 50.5% of the vote to Democrats’ 47.9% but will hold only a five-seat majority next year.

“The popular vote and seat-count margin in Congress this past election and in 2022 is evidence that the [Democratic] redistricting strategy is working,” Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, told RealClearPolitics. “What you’re seeing is a map that actually reflects where the voters are, and that’s a far cry from where we were a decade ago.”

Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the liberal-leaning Brennan Center has long argued that GOP-gerrymandered maps have for years given Republicans such an unfair edge that Democrats typically need to win the national aggregate popular vote in congressional races by 2-3% to control the House.

He and others often point to 2012, when House Democrats won 1.4 million more votes than Republicans, but the GOP held a 33-seat majority.

That gap has narrowed greatly in the ensuing years.

“There’s a lot of really good work that happened by candidates in competitive districts, and there are some places where those competitive districts went to Republicans, but that’s the whole point,” Jenkins said. “These districts are now fair and responsive. If it remains that way through the decade, that’s a good thing.”

With a more even playing field, the Democrats’ chances of taking advantage of the famed “midterm curse” in 2026 will depend in large part on whether Trump’s popularity recedes over the next two years, a variable impossible to predict. While the national politics play out, Democrats and Republicans will continue focusing on what they can control – continuing their redistricting court battles as far as they can take them.

This cycle, NDRC efforts are likely to result in Democrats gaining two seats in Alabama and Louisiana as a result of lawsuits forcing the state to abide by the Voting Rights Act, to draw maps reflecting the percentage of black voters. Federal judges ordered lawmakers in those states to give African Americans more opportunities to elect House candidates representing their views.

Meanwhile, the legal battle over the congressional map in Georgia didn’t change the partisan breakdown of the state’s House delegation. In North Carolina, the Republican-controlled state legislature crafted congressional district lines that gave their party a huge advantage, flipping three seats previously held by Democrats. In New York, the Democratic majority in the state legislature, ridiculed for the comically extreme gerrymandered original congressional map, adjusted to a more modest position.

Here are some of the most recent redistricting disputes, outcomes, and pending developments.

Louisiana

This year, the Supreme Court is expected to weigh in on the lower court ruling forcing the Republican-controlled state legislature to approve a second black-majority district.

After the November election, the state now has two black members of its six-member delegation – Rep. Cleo Fields representing the newly drawn 6th District, and Rep. Troy Carter, who easily won reelection with 60% of the vote.

New York

Even though the predicted Republican “red wave” never materialized in 2022, Republicans managed to flip four House seats in New York that year, which helped them secure the majority. But a ruling by the state’s highest court threatened to jeopardize those gains by making it easier for Democrats to net as many as six Republican-held seats.

Democratic state lawmakers, however, decided not to overreach and to make only modest adjustments to the district lines. The New York legislature’s final map made modest changes, reducing the number of Republicans in freshman GOP Rep. Brandon William’s district while solidifying Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi’s Long Island seat, which the party flipped in a February special election to succeed Rep. George Santos, who was expelled from the chamber.

Both parties have said they will operate with the new map, a decision that cements New York as a top battleground for House control for years to come.

North Carolina

Republicans hold a supermajority in North Carolina’s state legislature and used that power to redraw districts lines in their favor. The state’s congressional map was redrawn three times before the 2022 midterm elections, resulting in a 7-7 partisan split of the House delegation.

Republicans who had gained more sway over the redistricting process in the 2022 midterm elections, including flipping the state supreme court, weren’t satisfied and redrew the map once again before 2024.

In the end, Republicans flipped three House seats to Republicans after the Democratic incumbents decided against running for reelection in the GOP-skewed new districts.

Democratic Rep. Roy Cooper lacks veto power over redistricting legislation, so Democratic Party lawyers filed lawsuits on behalf of black and Hispanic voters alleging the new map “intentionally discriminates” against minority voters.

The cases are pending before a three-judge panel.

Alabama

The U.S. Supreme Court has already weighed in on the latest Alabama-approved map, which created a second congressional district with a substantial black population. Before the court action, the state, which is 27% African American, had only one black-majority district out of seven.

In the high court’s 5-4 decision upholding the map, conservative justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh agreed with three liberal justices to uphold the lower-court ruling enforcing a key provision of the Voting Rights Act – making it illegal to draw maps aimed at diluting the influence of black voters.

The ruling, which could impact the similar pending case in Louisiana, resulted in the election of two black House members from Alabama serving together for the first time in history. Shomari Figures will represent the newly drawn 2nd Congressional District, which includes Mobile County and much of the so-called rural “Black Belt” (named for its rich soil, not its people). Figures, a Mobile native who worked in the Biden administration, won by nine percentage points last month. He will join longtime incumbent Rep. Terri Sewell of the state’s sprawling 7th Congressional District centered in her hometown of Selma. She willingly ceded some of the Black Belt to help make the delegation more diverse – and more Democratic.

The Supreme Court’s ruling blocked the state from implementing its map but was not a final resolution of the case. State officials last fall said they would operate under the high court’s ruling but planned to continue litigating the case. The case is set to go to trial in February.

Georgia

Georgia Republicans fought Democratic efforts to add an additional House seat they would likely control. The GOP-drawn map complied with an order issued by U.S. District Judge Steve Jones to establish an additional black majority district.

The map accommodated that requirement but preserved the Republicans’ 9-5 advantage in the state’s House delegation by shifting the Atlanta-area district held by Rep. Lucy McBath, a black Democrat, farther into Republican territory.

Jones late in 2023 ruled that the newly drawn map, which preserved the GOP’s 9-5 advantage, “fully complied” with his ruling.

The judge was abiding by Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voters but doesn’t prevent Republicans from altering Democratic-held districts with white majorities or where no ethnic group is in the majority. Such was the case with McBath’s district, enabling the GOP-controlled legislature to dilute the district with more Republican voters. Despite the changes, McBath won the redrawn 6th District with 75% of the vote.

That’s not the end of the litigation. A separate federal case in Georgia argues the new map is unconstitutional. That case faces a stay pending an appeals court decision in the Voting Rights Act cases, which a three-judge panel is set to hear in late January.

Florida

In September 2023, a state judge ruled against a redrawn district in Northern Florida that Gov. Ron DeSantis had defended.

The case differs from Alabama’s Voting Rights Act lawsuit decided by the Supreme Court in that it is based on the Fair District provisions in the state constitution. The Republican-drawn map dismantled a seat held by Rep. Al Lawson, a black Democrat, that spanned several black communities across a northern swath of Florida.

Late last year, however, a state appeals court upheld the map DeSantis argued in favor of, determining that the plaintiffs “failed to present any evidence” that the prior version of the district contained a singular cohesive community that would have a right to protection under Florida law.

The state supreme court is expected to issue an opinion soon.

Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ national political correspondent.