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The standard crack about gerrymandering is that it empowers politicians to pick their voters, rather than voters picking their representatives. But during wave elections, redistricting efforts can backfire if greedy politicians draw districts with too-narrow partisan margins.
Will the GOP’s unprecedented mid-decade US House district gerrymanders create a spate of these so-called “dummymander” losses? And if so, how many districts might flip, in which states, and what voting group will be most pivotal to turning Republican-designed districts into Democratic House seats?
Packing and cracking
The state party that controls the redistricting process — let’s call it the “advantaged party” — gerrymanders House district maps to create as many winnable seats as possible, given their state’s overall partisanship. To dilute the opposing party’s voting power, the advantaged party uses two strategies in tandem — “packing” and “cracking” — to maximize the number of seats it is favored to win.
Packing stuffs as many voters who identify or lean toward the disadvantaged party into one or a few districts with overwhelming and inefficient majorities of, say, 75 percent to 95 percent. Packing allows the advantaged party to then “crack” the disadvantaged party’s remaining voters across the state’s other districts, creating thin-yet-comfortable majorities for the advantaged party of, say, roughly 55 percent.
But those narrow-margin districts are potentially vulnerable to adverse, short-term effects. The advantaged party’s candidate in such a district may retire, resign, die, or suffer a debilitating scandal, turning a marginally safe district into a pickup opportunity for the opposing party. These cases are rare, but wave elections can threaten many more narrow-margin seats, creating the possibility for dummymanders.
Coined by political scientists Bernard Grofman and Thomas Brunell, “dummymandering” suggests that foolhardy mapmakers drew district lines without properly surmising the risks. But politicians and their consultants draw these high-risk districts precisely because they promise the higher reward of winning more seats in their House delegation. “Riskymander” might be a more apt label.
Sensing an opportunity to insulate the Republicans’ razor-thin US House majority, Donald Trump in 2025 started pressuring state Republicans to redraw their House maps mid-decade. With notable exceptions like the Tom DeLay-led redistricting of Texas following the 2004 election, mid-decade redistricting until last year was rare and usually triggered by court edicts. Per tradition, parties waited until after next census to redraw the maps.
But the party that blocked Barack Obama’s Supreme Court appointee Merrick Garland and repeatedly assaults ballot access long ago stopped caring about political traditions or norms. On cue, several GOP-controlled states in 2025 began redrawing their House maps.
Six states voluntarily redistricted mid-decade: California, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas. The Democrats’ new 52-seat map in California partially offset gains by Republicans, who redrew the 94 combined seats in the other five states. GOP efforts in two other states were thwarted: In Indiana by Republican state senators who rebuked Trump’s demand to redraw their state’s districts; and in Missouri, after the US Supreme Court rejected the Republicans’ proposed new map. (State laws or court rulings forced four other states to redraw or restore their House maps.)
In the immediate aftermath of these mid-decade gerrymanders, the conventional wisdom was that the GOP had successfully buffered itself against potential House losses this year. The Washington Post even went so far as to declare in July 2025 that the Texas redistricting alone could “help ensure a GOP House majority” in the 2026 midterms.
That conventional wisdom steadily eroded as Trump’s approval numbers collapsed over the past 15 months.
“Nationally, analysts are now pegging net GOP gains from redistricting anywhere from six seats to none,” The New Yorker’s Joe Allsop wrote in a new piece handicapping the GOP’s expected gains from its mid-decade redistricting efforts.
The total number of GOP seat gains are now projected by analysts like Sam Wang, Elliott Morris, and others to be half or fewer than the roughly dozen seats that Republicans originally hoped.
But the GOP’s declining midterm prospects do not imply a spate of dummymander pickups for the Democrats. Sabato’s Crystal Ball election expert Kyle Kondik cautions that any gains Democrats make must account for the fact the districts before the mid-decade redrawing would likely have elected more Democrats anyway.
“I don’t really see much potential for dummymanders based on the states that redrew for 2025-2026,” Kondik explained to me via email. “The reason for this is that if the Republicans lose seats in gerrymandered states, they probably would have lost them on the old map, too. A good example is [Republican] Maria Salazar in FL-27 — if she loses on this map, she would’ve lost on the old map in all likelihood, too.”
In other words, any Democratic dummymander wins this November should be regarded as gains relative to the GOP’s ambitions for its new maps, but not necessarily net gains relative to the expected 2026 partisan results had the mid-decade gerrymanders never occurred. Keep in mind, too, that narrow Democratic victories in competitive districts during favorable 2026 conditions immediately become flip-back targets for Republicans in 2028 or 2030, when the electoral environment may be less brutal for the GOP.
Simply put, the Republicans got away with it: If their mid-decade maps work, they make gains, but there’s little to no chance they will backfire in 2026 or the two remaining House cycles this decade.
“I actually have Republicans netting two to five seats from redistricting overall — a net change that takes into account all of the new maps, including California,” Kondik predicts. “It’s possible that the final number will fall outside that range if it’s a megawave, but it would be more about gerrymanders not working as opposed to ‘dummymanders’ backfiring.”
Latino voters are no dummies
Although Trump has seen his approval ratings plummet among groups including base constituencies like non-college whites and rural voters, no group has defected as much since 2024 as Latinos, who are expected to wield outsized power in the 2026 midterms.
I asked pollster Matt Barreto, co-founder of BSP Research and an expert on Latino opinion and voting behavior, where the Latino backlash against Trump’s second-term policies might hurt Republican House candidates the most. He cited three races each in Florida (CDs 9, 27 and “maybe” 13) and Texas (CDs 9, 15, and 35), all of which were drawn to be Latino-influenced districts the GOP expects to win.
The ethnicity and countries of origin for the Latino populations in these districts vary. Mexican Americans dominate the Rio Grand Valley-based TX-15; Puerto Rican voters can tilt the outcomes in Tampa-Orlando I-4 corridor districts FL-9 and FL-13; and, of course, Latinos with Cuban and South Americans backgrounds wield substantial electoral clout in South Florida’s FL-27. But Barreto says two forms of voter remorse transcend these disparate Latino communities: their fury with Trump’s ICE and immigration enforcement policies, and their discontent with enduring inflation and rising costs of living that Trump promised to rectify.
Trump’s 2024 Latino support was an “outlier,” says Barreto, because “Trump did not earn it, but it was instead a Latino vote of desperation with post-covid inflation.” Even Latinos who voted for Trump because of his promises to secure the border are horrified by the ICE roundups.
“Results from our recent seven-state battleground poll show that Latinos — including Latino Republicans — are very unhappy that ICE and immigration overreach has gone too far, especially attacks on non-criminals,” BSP finds.
Barreto forecasts at least a 12-point net national Latino shift back to the Democrats in 2026, erasing the GOP’s 2024 gains. A bigger shift of 15 to 18 points would return Democrats’ Latino support levels to the Barack Obama years and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. But Barreto said such a reversion requires a massive surge in Latino Democratic turnout coupled with a mix of lower turnout and some conversions among Latino Republicans.
The larger the pendulum swing, of course, the more Latino-influence House districts Democrats will flip in November. If Democrats claim any dummymander wins next month, expect Latino voters to propel these seat-flips in Florida and Texas.
Risk-free gerrymandering
Both parties’ exposure to dummymandering is far less today than three decades ago because the electorate is more predictable.
The dramatic red-blue partisan sorting that began during the late 1980s and early 1990s eliminated most of the liberal Republicans from the Northeast and Pacific Coast, and conservative Democrats from the Southeast and Plains states. Political firms today also possess more sophisticated redistricting software and massive voter databases full of predictive demographic and consumer information. Because voters are easier to identify and target, so too is pooling them into legislative districts with highly-predictable outcomes.
If mid-decade redistricting is the new political normal, the only way for Democrats to avoid or mitigate a similar nightmare in the coming decades is to gain control of as many state governments as possible — and hold those majorities all decade long. But every dummy knows that.
That’s it for today
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