Republicans are ratcheting up their extraordinary efforts to tip the scales of the 2026 midterm elections by redistricting new GOP-leaning US House seats in the middle of the decade.
Such efforts have now proceeded apace in Missouri and North Carolina. Indiana and Kansas are weighing it, too, with pressure from the Trump White House. And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Tuesday that his state would join the fray if the Supreme Court opens the floodgates to more partisan gerrymandering.
All would join Texas, whose gambit to add five GOP seats set off this redistricting arms race and drew California Democrats to attempt to offset those gains.
It’s a striking power grab — one Democrats will try to match but can’t.
And it’s all the more remarkable given Americans don’t seem to like it, with polls showing they don’t think this is how the people’s business should be conducted.
The GOP seems to have reasoned that this bare-knuckle tactic will be worth it, because people just don’t care enough.
North Carolina state House Speaker Destin Hall, left, and Senate leader Phil Berger hold a news conference in Raleigh on September 11. – Gary D. Robertson/AP
As all this was happening this week, North Carolina state House Speaker Destin Hall on Monday offered a remarkable justification.
“@POTUS’s victory sent a clear message: the voters are with him,” Hall posted on X. “NC won’t allow radical Dems like @CAgovernor to redraw districts and undermine the will of the people.”
Hall made no mention of Texas getting the ball rolling by undermining “the will of the people.”
He also failed to mention that California Gov. Gavin Newsom will only succeed with “the will of the people” expressly on his side. That’s because California, unlike these red states, requires voters to pass a ballot measure before Democrats can redraw their districts. (Voters will make that choice this fall.)
That dynamic reinforces what a cynical power grab the GOP’s efforts are.
Pretty much every other state that’s doing this appears to be violating the will of the people based on national polling that shows Americans don’t like gerrymandering, especially mid-decade gerrymandering. (There’s limited state-level data on the issue that meets CNN standards.)
A CBS News-YouGov poll last month gave people a series of choices for how this mid-decade redistricting battle should play out.
Just one-quarter thought their preferred side should draw more favorable districts. Three-quarters wanted either more competitive districts (32%) or for everyone to wait to draw new districts after the next census, like normal (43%).
(Indeed, that’s what’s extraordinary here. Both sides gerrymander extensively after censuses are conducted, but it’s very rare to do so in the middle of the decade when courts haven’t ordered it. In the few cases that’s been done, it’s been Republicans leading the charge, as in Texas.)
A Yahoo News-YouGov poll around the same time showed Americans taking a dim view of the GOP’s gambit.
Americans as a whole disapproved of what Texas did by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, 49%-25%. They disapproved of President Donald Trump encouraging other GOP-controlled states to mimic Texas by a similar margin, 52%-25%.
In both cases, independents were 3-to-1 opposed.
And that’s where things get interesting. Given all of this, you might expect Americans to also take a dim view of what California Democrats are doing.
But they didn’t. The Yahoo News-YouGov survey noted that Newsom has pitched this as a “hardball” response to the GOP’s power grab — which it certainly is. And Americans were actually about evenly split on whether it was a legitimate response. While 39% approved, 37% disapproved.
That seems to echo polls in California, which suggest November’s ballot measure allowing the state to draw more Democratic districts is likely to pass.
In other words, Americans seem to see a difference between what the GOP is doing and what Democrats are doing.
And there is certainly a difference, both in who started it and the magnitude of their efforts.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks about the “Election Rigging Response Act” at a press conference in Los Angeles on August 14. – Mario Tama/Getty Images
The question from there is how much Americans care. Yes, they might regard gerrymandering as icky and mid-decade gerrymandering as even ickier, but that doesn’t mean it will swing many votes.
Indeed, a CNN poll last month showed just 25% American adults said the issue of “efforts to redraw the lines for congressional House districts” was “extremely important” to them. That was far less than many other issues like the economy (60%), health care (53%) and crime (42%). Though it did notably eclipse foreign policy (21%) and gender-identity and transgender issues (16%).
Republicans trying to maintain their narrow grip on the US House seem to have reasoned that however much Americans might view their gambit as a cynical ploy, it’ll be worth the handful of more favorable districts.
It might be a good bet, but that doesn’t mean they have “the will of the people” on their side.
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