With control of Congress on the line in 2026, both Republicans and Democrats are eyeing aggressive redistricting strategies to tilt the playing field in their favor — and President Donald Trump is leading the charge.
Trump has publicly urged Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional map in a way that carves out more GOP-friendly districts. The goal: shore up his party’s razor-thin majority in the House before all 435 seats go up for grabs next year. “Texas will be the biggest one,” Trump said last week, predicting as many as five new Republican-leaning seats.
The Republican-led Texas Legislature kicked off a special session this week to begin mapmaking discussions. Trump and GOP leaders see Texas as a potential firewall against Democratic gains, hoping to replicate the kind of redistricting-fueled advantage that could insulate them in what’s typically a turbulent midterm for the party in power.
But Democrats aren’t sitting still.
“We’re not going to let them play this game unchecked,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom warned on social media, signaling that Democrats may try to redraw maps in deep-blue states like California and New York to offset GOP advances.
The last time Trump held office, Democrats flipped the House after his first two years. Now, with a second-term agenda moving fast — albeit with some turbulence — he’s looking to avoid a similar scenario. “What Republicans are trying to do in Texas is to have politicians choose their voters,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said, while still acknowledging that Democrats are also exploring redistricting moves of their own.
Ohio is another redistricting battleground. After a 2024 ballot initiative to change how the state draws maps failed, Republican lawmakers there are working to lock in a congressional map that could favor them by a lopsided 13-2 margin.
“These states could be decisive,” said Shawn Donahue, a political science professor at the University at Buffalo who studies redistricting. “If Republicans can get five seats in Texas and two in Ohio, that could make or break House control.”
Redistricting happens every decade after the U.S. census, but mid-cycle map changes like these are legal in states where lawmakers have the authority to redraw lines at will. While Democrats hold power in several large states, many of them — like California and Michigan — use independent commissions to draw district boundaries, limiting partisan influence and reducing their ability to counter Republican-led efforts.
New York and Illinois remain two of the only blue states where Democrats still control redistricting, but those states are already maxed out in terms of favorable district lines, leaving little room to squeeze out more seats without legal or political blowback.
And there are risks on both sides. Redistricting too aggressively can backfire. After the first Trump administration, GOP-drawn maps in Texas that were meant to create safe seats actually resulted in Democratic pickups in the 2018 midterms. Some Democrats believe history could repeat itself in 2026.
“This may end up biting Republicans in the ass,” former Rep. Beto O’Rourke said during a CNN interview. “If they spread their voters too thin, they could lose what they think are safe districts. That’s why we’ve got to register voters and organize hard in Texas.”
Whether these map maneuvers hold up in court — or withstand political backlash — remains to be seen. But both parties appear ready to test the limits in a high-stakes game that could decide the balance of power in Washington for years to come.
