Whether Democrats triumph in November or Republicans benefit from another improbable Trumpian comeback, the 2026 elections will be remembered for narrowing a critical aspect of American democracy.
President Donald Trump’s triggering of a mid-decade redistricting battle in an effort to stave off the presidential midterm election curse left Democrats with a choice: to cling to the purest political motives, or to fight back in kind.
Their decision to take the latter course has offered an early answer to a question that may eventually dominate the 2028 presidential campaign and the early days of any new Democratic presidency: To what extent should Democrats exploit new precedents, expanded interpretations of presidential power and the brass knuckle-methods pioneered by Trump in his turbulent second term?
Redistricting is being fueled by the urgency many Democrats feel in finally constraining an aggressive Republican president. It’s also being driven by leaders with potential national futures like California Gov. Gavin Newsom. So it’s not surprising state Democrats responded to Trump’s demands for new gerrymandering in Texas, Florida and elsewhere with congressional maps that favor them in strongholds like the Golden State and Virginia.
Top Democrats rationalized the move to adopt what former President Barack Obama called “temporary” steps to level the electoral playing field. Politically this is a no-brainer for a party whose impotence has frustrated its own most committed backers since Trump won back the White House. At this point, fighting is an imperative in itself.
But fighting with fire often creates a bigger blaze. And while some Democrats envision future independent commissions to fairly draw congressional districts, it’s hard to foresee a time when toxic political conditions will abate.
The showdown over redistricting deepened on several fronts Monday.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis joined the party after Republicans who control the state legislature took up his new map, which could give their party an edge in four seats currently held by Democrats.
Meanwhile, the Virginia Supreme Court on Monday heard a challenge to a new congressional redistricting plan approved by voters that Republicans want thrown out, claiming procedural rule breaches.
Skirmishes over electoral maps could be crucial for the 2026 and 2028 elections, especially if results are close and House and Senate majorities rest on a few seats. Trump’s actions highlight their importance for the fate of his second term as he stares at the possibility of two years of relentless congressional scrutiny.
But both sides are exacting a cost.
States that drew up new maps for partisan advantage intensified a damaging pattern that has long dogged US politics but has worsened after a pivotal 2019 Supreme Court decision: that of political leaders choosing their voters, rather than the reverse, in an upending of democratic principles.
Trump will one day leave office. But his methodology won’t be forgotten.
Any future Democratic president is likely to face pressure from the party’s progressive base to take aggressive steps to destroy Trump’s legacy and to implement its own agenda. This might parallel the current president’s race to transform the nation in the first 100 days of his second term with sweeping and sometimes questionable executive authority.
In some cases, courts only caught up and challenged or delayed Trump’s power plays when he’d take irreversible steps — for instance with his dismantling of the US Agency for International Development.
The toughening of the Democratic line is already starting.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is taking an aggressive approach heading into the midterms. On Monday, the New York Democrat refused to repudiate his depiction of “an era of maximum warfare” that referred specifically to Virginia voters last week approving the new map that could give the party a 10-1 edge in the state’s congressional delegation.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and several other Republicans had listed the comment among others by Democrats as having the potential to incite violence, two days after an alleged assassination attempt against Trump at a press gala. Jeffries argued the White House had done nothing to call out rhetoric from the right, adding, “Get lost. Clean up your own house before you have anything to say to us.”
The corrosive downside to redistricting
In the abstract, redrawing congressional maps for partisan ends can have a damaging impact on democracy. Elections that seem predetermined by parties contribute to voter cynicism and risk eroding the consent needed for a functioning political system of democratic self-government. Gerrymandered districts often heighten discrimination against voters of color. And cutting off legitimate routes for political change may increase the potential for anti-democratic activity and even political violence.
The creation of more safe partisan districts also means that party primaries end up posing the greatest threat to a sitting lawmaker. Candidates often find themselves pushed toward ideological extremes by activists. This makes compromise, the essential glue of the republican system, harder in Washington.
Still, attempts to tilt state congressional districts don’t always work. This year, Trump’s efforts that began in Texas could backfire because they encouraged a Democratic response. If his ebbing approval ratings augur a blue-wave election in November, changes to maps in Florida and Texas might paradoxically have made some solid GOP seats more vulnerable.
And not every Republican has been willing to play along with Trump’s demands for Washington which impinge on the constitutional role of states in running elections. In Indiana, for example, GOP state legislators withstood federal pressure to change the map. CNN’s Eric Bradner reported this week that Hoosier Trump voters might now defy the president’s effort to punish those lawmakers in state primaries.
Democrats argue that some of their efforts to fight back — for example in Virginia and California — were endorsed in ballot initiatives rather than simply decided by state legislatures that are themselves gerrymandered. Republicans counter that Democrats have long unfairly shaped districts in states like Maryland.
Big decisions for leaders eyeing bigger things
Trump’s redistricting blitz has thrust rising political personalities into the spotlight.
In Virginia, new Gov. Abigail Spanberger won in a landslide after campaigning as a moderate to defuse perceptions that national Democrats are too radical for the purplish state. But one of her first major actions was to back a statewide vote on redistricting at the behest of top party leaders that only passed by a narrow margin.
Spanberger has said the move was a temporary reaction to Trump and that the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission will return. But a Washington Post-Schar School poll this month showed her approval rating had slipped to 47% after just two months in office. Still, Virginia governors are barred from serving consecutive terms, and if Spanberger harbors higher ambitions in the future, her personal viability depended on lining up with the national party.
In California, Newsom built himself a powerful rallying call should his party win the House in November. He leaped into action to counter Trump’s Texas redistricting strategy, and voters last year approved new districts that could hand Democrats a handful of new seats. If November goes well for the national party, Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential primary candidate, could claim credit after showing the Trump-style toughness many Democrats want.
DeSantis has long been a gritty ideological fighter who pursued populist and conservative policies as part of his own personal political project. But if he hopes to repair his status as a possible MAGA heir — which was punctured by a disappointing 2024 GOP presidential primary campaign — he had no choice but to fall into line.
But his decision, like those of some Democratic counterparts, still threatens to fuel the public’s wider sense that the political system is broken. And it helps ensure that politics will be forever altered by Trump’s twin presidencies.
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