Trump’s redistricting push could bring decades of Republican rule to the US House: Experts

WASHINGTON - US President Donald Trump’s push for Republican-led states to redraw their US House of Representatives districts to protect their majority in next year’s mid-term elections could set the stage for Republicans to dominate the chamber in decades to come, political analysts and experts said.

Republicans hold a 219-212 House majority, and Mr Trump is looking to break the streak of mid-term House losses for the sitting president’s party – as happened to him in 2018 and to then Democratic president Joe Biden in 2022 – by pushing states starting with Texas to aggressively redistrict.

Democratic states, led by California, have threatened to retaliate by redrawing their own districts for partisan gain, a longstanding feature of US politics known as gerrymandering that has grown far more potent thanks to modern data analysis tools.

But Republicans hold the advantage, with control of the state legislatures and governorships of 23 states, compared with 15 for Democrats. Further, independent analysts say, population shifts could create as many as 11 new congressional seats in Republican Southern and Western states after the 2030 US Census.

Democrats enjoyed 40 years of unbroken House control beginning in 1955 and ending in 1995 as conservative Southern Democrats defected to the Republican Party in earnest.

The current redistricting battle has raised concerns about a new era of gerrymandering, with Republicans and Democrats jockeying for advantage and further dividing an already polarised nation.

“I feel like it’s cheating,” said Mr Adam Kinzinger, a Trump critic and former Republican congressman who lost his Illinois seat to redistricting after the 2020 census. “Every time we break a norm in politics now, that norm never comes back. It’ll be an avalanche of constant redistricting. I worry about that.”

The Republican-controlled Texas state legislature last week passed a new map meant to provide five more Republican seats. The Democratic-led California legislature responded by proposing a map that would give Democrats five more seats, though the state’s voters will have to approve that move in a November special election.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll this month found that most Americans oppose partisan gerrymandering, to the degree that many worry about American democracy itself being in jeopardy.

Few competitive seats

Non-partisan election analysts currently rate just three dozen of the nation’s 435 House districts as competitive in the 2026 mid-term elections, pushing the real contests to party primaries that select more partisan lawmakers less interested in compromise.

“That would be another way of saying that the will of the voters is not being reflected in the outcome of the election,” said Mr Thomas Kahn, acting director of the Centre for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University.

“If Republicans build institutional advantages, whether through fund raising ... or through gerrymandering, then essentially they will be creating a lock on the House. And I don’t think that’s good for democracy,” he added.

Democratic strongholds including New York and California are already losing population to Florida, Texas, Idaho and other Republican-led states, a trend that many Republicans view as an endorsement of their party’s policies.

“A lot of the voters who are moving from California – the Bay Area – to Austin or Dallas or Boise, Idaho, are the more conservative-leaning folks who want to live in a red state for a variety of reasons: cost of living, laws and regulations, how the state’s run, business environment, stuff like that,” said Mr Will Kiley, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of the House Republicans.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 21 per cent of Republicans and 14 per cent of Democrats have considered moving to a different state where taxes are lower.

The US Census data that underlies redistricting expectations shows that nearly all of the population growth in states such as Texas and Florida since 2020 has occurred in minority communities.

In Texas, which is expected to pick up three to four House seats after 2030 according to party redistricting committees, nearly 97 per cent of newcomers are Hispanic, black or Asian. In Florida, which could add two to four seats, the same groups account for more than three-quarters of the growth, US Census data shows.

“What we know to be true is that growth is almost completely within communities of colour. And those are the very communities that these changes are attempting to curtail,” said Dr Kareem Crayton, vice-president at New York University’s non-partisan Brennan Centre for Justice.

Minority voters have shifted toward Republicans in recent elections. In the 2024 presidential election, Mr Trump saw a 14 percentage-point improvement among Hispanic voters from his 2020 performance, though he still lost the demographic group overall to his Democratic rival, Ms Kamala Harris, who was then the US vice-president.

The new congressional map unveiled by Texas Republicans at Mr Trump’s behest appears to cater to Hispanic voters. But Democrats say Republicans have eroded the group’s electoral power in some Hispanic-majority districts by minimising the number of voting-age Latinos and adding high-turnout white, conservative communities.

Partisan rancour in Congress has intensified since Mr Trump began his second term in January, driving out moderate Republicans including Representative Don Bacon, who drew Mr Trump’s ire after disagreeing with the administration over proposed funding cuts and security gaps at the Pentagon. Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher, once seen as a rising Republican star, left office in early 2024 after a firestorm of criticism for opposing the impeachment of former homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

“We have major issues to solve. We’re not solving them,” said former Representative John Duarte, who was rated the least conservative House Republican by Heritage Action for America before losing his California seat to Democrat Adam Gray in 2024. “We can do a lot. But right now, everyone’s running away from the ball.” REUTERS