A new report from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics confirms what voters already feel: the 2026 battlefield was not won at the ballot box. It was drafted in statehouses under presidential pressure, ratified by a Supreme Court that hollowed out the Voting Rights Act, and engineered to insulate a failing administration from democratic accountability.
The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, through its long-respected Sabato’s Crystal Ball newsletter, has now published the most comprehensive accounting yet of the mid-decade redistricting wars — and the picture it paints is grim. Managing editor Kyle Kondik and his colleagues have calculated 2024 presidential margins inside every newly redrawn congressional district in the country, and the resulting maps cover an extraordinary share of American political life. Roughly forty percent of all U.S. House seats now sit in states that have torn up their lines mid-decade. That figure alone tells the story. Redistricting on this scale has no peacetime precedent in modern American history.
What ordinarily happens once a decade — congressional maps redrawn after the census, contested, finalized, and then left alone until the next count — has become a rolling, presidentially directed arms race. The trigger was not population shift. It was a phone call. In the summer of 2025, with his approval cratering and the House majority sitting on a four-seat knife edge, President Donald Trump ordered Texas Governor Greg Abbott to redraw his state’s congressional map and conjure five additional Republican seats out of nothing. The Department of Justice supplied the legal pretext, with Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon writing to Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton that four of the state’s existing districts were “unconstitutional coalition districts” that had to be dismantled. The order, the letter, and the new map followed in rapid succession. So did the cascade.
1. The Engineering of a Stolen Map
The Center for Politics report frames Texas as the ignition point of what has since become a national redistricting war. After Trump’s demand, Texas Republicans rammed through new lines on a party-line vote, with House Democrats fleeing the state in August 2025 in a desperate two-week walkout to deny the legislature a quorum. The maps passed anyway. The Texas House approved them 88 to 52, with Democratic leader Gene Wu calling the effort a racially discriminatory attempt to stack the deck for the midterms.
From there, Trump pressured one Republican legislature after another. Missouri redrew its lines to target a Democratic-held seat. North Carolina did the same. Indiana, after Trump and Governor Mike Braun threatened primary challenges against holdouts — and after several state legislators received anonymous threats against their families — passed a new map through its House targeting both of the state’s Democratic seats. Florida adopted a Republican gerrymander designed to pick up four additional seats. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, formalizing nine ratings changes in Florida alone, described the cumulative effect as a redistricting frenzy “triggered by Trump” — language that came from CNN’s reporting on Kondik’s research, not from partisan rhetoric.
Additional Republican seats Trump personally demanded from the Texas legislature in mid-2025, kicking off the national redistricting war.
Share of all 435 House seats now sitting in states that have redrawn maps mid-decade, per Sabato’s Crystal Ball.
Additional Republican-leaning seats the Crystal Ball now estimates Republicans can extract through redistricting alone.
Silver Bulletin polling average as of May 22, the lowest of Trump’s second term — the political context that made the rigging necessary.
2. Callais and the Court That Cleared the Path
None of this would have been possible without the Supreme Court. On April 29, 2026, in a 6–3 ruling along ideological lines, the Court issued its decision in Louisiana v. Callais — the most consequential voting rights ruling in over a decade. The majority struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, which had been drawn under court order to create a second majority-Black district, and ruled that the state had engaged in unconstitutional racial gerrymandering by complying with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The League of Women Voters, in a withering statement, described the ruling as weakening the Act to the point of inoperability. Justice Elena Kagan, in dissent, wrote that the decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.
The practical effect was immediate. As the Congressional Research Service has documented, Callais narrowed the circumstances under which racial vote-dilution challenges can succeed, raising the bar to demonstrating that a state intentionally drew districts to deny minority voters opportunity because of their race. State legislatures took the cue. Within weeks, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee began modifying or scrapping the majority-minority districts that had stood for years under Section 2 protection. Tennessee Republicans carved up the state’s only Black-majority congressional district. The Supreme Court then expedited finalization of the Callais opinion so Louisiana could redraw in time for November — a procedural choice that drew sharp dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the lone holdout on the expedition.
“The Supreme Court has been chipping away at our elections for years. It is clearly carrying out Donald Trump’s will with this decision.”
— Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.), responding to Callais
What Callais did, in plain terms, was supply a legal blessing for the partisan project Trump had already set in motion. As University of Virginia political scientist Alan Abramowitz explains in his recent Crystal Ball forecasting model, the pre-Callais redistricting wars were heading toward a rough draw. After the ruling — and after the Virginia Supreme Court separately threw out a Democratic counter-gerrymander in that state on procedural grounds — the redistricting balance tilted sharply Republican. Kondik’s best current estimate is a Republican gain in the high single digits from redistricting alone, with the potential to grow as states like Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina finalize their post-Callais redraws.
3. The Counter-Map: California, Virginia, and a Defense Built on Sand
Democrats did not sit still. California Governor Gavin Newsom, in what he framed as “fighting fire with fire,” pushed Proposition 50 — the Election Rigging Response Act — onto the November 2025 ballot. It passed with nearly 64 percent of the vote, suspending California’s independent redistricting commission for three election cycles and authorizing legislators to redraw the map to net Democrats up to five additional seats. Newsom later revealed on the Axios Show that he had called former President Barack Obama before launching the campaign, expecting a warning to play it safe — and instead received Obama’s full encouragement to proceed. Trump’s Justice Department promptly sued the state.
Virginia was where the counter-strategy collapsed. A 4–3 ruling from the Virginia Supreme Court, issued earlier this month, threw out a Democratic-led ballot measure that would have allowed the state to redraw its lines and net the party as many as four additional House seats. The Crystal Ball, in its post-ruling rating changes, called the decision a bombshell that handed Republicans an edge that may yet expand. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had previously declared that the law was on the Democrats’ side in Virginia. The state’s highest court disagreed. Jeffries, in his subsequent letter to Democratic members, conceded the setback but insisted the gerrymander would not save the GOP, telling colleagues that the failed Republican majority cannot gerrymander itself back into power.
He may yet be proved right. Both the Crystal Ball’s Kondik and Abramowitz are clear: Republicans entered this cycle structurally disadvantaged by an unpopular president, an inflationary economy, and the historical pattern of midterm losses. Abramowitz’s adjusted model still projects a Democratic House takeover even with the GOP’s redistricting gains baked in, so long as Democrats hold their generic-ballot lead. But that is the wrong frame entirely. The question is not whether the rigging succeeded. The question is what it means that the rigging was attempted at all.
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4. A Chronology of the Steal
5. What a Rigged Map Says About a Failing President
It is worth asking why this was necessary. Presidents who govern well do not need to redraw the country to keep their majorities. They run on their record. Trump is not running on his record because his record will not bear weight. His approval on the economy, as Newsweek reported earlier this month, has collapsed to a net rating of negative forty in CNN’s tracking — the lowest of his political career. The American Research Group’s late-May survey places his overall approval at thirty-one percent, with sixty-four percent disapproving. Independent voters, the swing constituency of American politics, sit at thirty-four percent approval — well below the level that preceded the 2018 Democratic wave.
This is the political context in which an American president decided to redraw the country. He did not order Texas to gerrymander because his policies were popular. He ordered it because they were not. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries put the matter with unusual moral clarity in August of last year, telling reporters that Republicans launched the redistricting war precisely because they had failed to govern in a manner that improves the lives of the American people. Utility costs are up. Fuel prices are up. The cost of clothing is up. And rather than address any of it, the President of the United States chose to rewrite the rules of the next election.
“GOP extremists have concluded the only way to win in November is to rig the national congressional map, beginning with Texas. Democrats fought back.”
— House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.)
That is the moral architecture of the Trump redistricting project. It is the response of a man who cannot win on what he has done, and who therefore intends to choose his voters before they have the chance to choose against him. The Crystal Ball’s data does not say this in so many words — it is a forecasting newsletter, not an editorial — but the data permits no other reading. A president who must redistrict forty percent of the country to defend a four-seat majority is a president who has lost the consent of the governed and is hunting for a way to govern without it.
When a President Governs Against the People, the Constitution Has an Answer
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, establishes the constitutional mechanism for replacing a president who is unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office. Section 4 — the relevant provision here — empowers the Vice President, together with a majority of the Cabinet, to declare in writing to Congress that the President is unable to serve, at which point the Vice President immediately assumes the powers of the office as Acting President. The amendment was designed precisely for moments in which a president becomes incapable, by reason of judgment or capacity, of fulfilling the constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
A growing roster of lawmakers has openly called for its invocation in 2026. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.), Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.), Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), and Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois have all publicly invoked the amendment by name in response to Trump’s escalating threats and conduct in office. Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut wrote on his Substack that he was not joking when he urged the Cabinet to begin researching the procedure.
The constitutional argument is straightforward. A president who orders state legislatures to redraw their maps in violation of the spirit of the Voting Rights Act, who threatens primary challenges against lawmakers who refuse to participate, who weaponizes the Department of Justice to manufacture a legal pretext, and whose Truth Social posts threaten to wipe out entire civilizations — as Trump did during the Iran crisis in April — is a president whose judgment and fitness for office have become an open constitutional question. The redistricting campaign is not, in isolation, an Article II crisis. But it is evidence of a pattern: a presidency that no longer recognizes the people as the source of its authority, and that treats elections themselves as obstacles to be engineered around.
The honest assessment is that Section 4 will not be invoked. Vice President JD Vance will not sign the declaration. Trump’s Cabinet, populated by loyalists chosen for their willingness to defer to him, will not vote to remove him. The PBS NewsHour noted in its April analysis that the procedure is highly unlikely to occur in this presidency for exactly this reason. But the practical barriers do not negate the constitutional case. The Framers of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment understood that the mechanism would only ever be used in extremis. They wrote it to exist as a standing constitutional answer to a president who has lost the capacity to govern within the system’s limits. That a Cabinet stocked with loyalists refuses to act does not mean the conditions for action are absent. It means the institution designed to check the President has been captured by him — which is itself the gravamen of the constitutional crisis.
6. The Senate, the House, and the Stakes of November
What does all of this mean for actual control of Congress? The honest answer, drawn from the Crystal Ball’s own data, is that the House remains winnable for Democrats — but only barely, and only because Trump is so historically unpopular that the political environment may overwhelm even an aggressively gerrymandered map. The Crystal Ball’s current topline shows 210 seats rated Safe, Likely, or Leans Democratic against 208 for Republicans, with seventeen seats classified as Toss-ups. Democrats need a net gain of three. Abramowitz’s model, with redistricting effects accounted for, projects that they will get more than that — but the margin is thin, and the maps have made what should be a comfortable wave into a coin-flip race.
The Senate is a different story entirely. There, redistricting is irrelevant — senators are elected statewide — and Democrats face a structurally hostile 2026 map regardless. The redistricting wars do not save the Senate, and the Senate’s makeup will determine whether a Democratic House is paired with a body capable of conducting oversight or one that continues to rubber-stamp the President’s project. The downstream consequence is that even a successful Democratic House recapture leaves Trump with a Senate willing to confirm his judges, ratify his appointments, and refuse to convict on any impeachment that might arise from the conduct documented above.
And that downstream consequence is the point. The redistricting project was never solely about 2026. It was about entrenching minority rule for the remainder of the decade and beyond. The Crystal Ball notes that the post-Callais redistricting battles will continue into the 2027 and 2028 cycles. Jeffries himself has acknowledged, in remarks at a Center for American Progress conference, that at least seven blue states — Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington, Oregon, and Maryland — may engage in retaliatory redistricting by 2028. American congressional maps are now in a state of permanent revision, redrawn election to election to suit whichever party holds power at the moment. That is not democracy. That is a system in which politicians choose their voters rather than voters choosing their politicians — a phrase that has become a cliché precisely because it is the simplest accurate description of what is happening.
Editorial Conclusion
The Sabato’s Crystal Ball report does not editorialize. It does not need to. The numbers it presents — forty percent of House seats redrawn mid-decade, a projected Republican gain in the high single digits from gerrymandering alone, a Supreme Court ruling that has made racial vote dilution all but legally invisible — describe a country whose elections are being engineered in real time by an administration that cannot win them honestly.
This is the central fact of the 2026 midterms, and it should be the central fact of how voters understand them. A president with a thirty-one percent approval rating did not redraw the country because he had a popular mandate. He did it because he did not. The Republican Party, faced with the choice between governing well and rewriting the rules, chose the rules. The Supreme Court, faced with the choice between defending the Voting Rights Act and clearing the path, chose the path. The Cabinet, faced with the choice between the Twenty-Fifth Amendment and continued service to a president who threatens to wipe out civilizations on social media, chose to serve.
What is required is not subtle. It is the largest turnout in American midterm history, in defiance of the gerrymander. It is the election of senators who will conduct oversight. It is the restoration of the Voting Rights Act through federal legislation the moment a Congress capable of passing it is seated. And it is the long, generational work of remembering that democracy is not a structure that survives on its own. It survives only as long as the people insist on it — and, when the maps are drawn against them, on showing up in numbers the maps cannot contain.
Sources & References
- Sabato’s Crystal Ball — A Redistricting Check-In at the Dawn of the Callais Era
- Sabato’s Crystal Ball — A Simple Model for Forecasting Mid-Cycle Redistricting (Abramowitz)
- Sabato’s Crystal Ball — Estimating the GOP Edge from Redistricting: A State-by-State Accounting
- Sabato’s Crystal Ball — Redistricting Makes the House Map a Bit Redder
- Sabato’s Crystal Ball — House Rating Changes: Six Moves Toward Democrats
- CNN — These Are the Districts That Will Decide House Control
- Texas Tribune — Texas House Approves GOP Congressional Map
- Texas Tribune — How Two Texas Legal Battles Led to the 2025 Redraw
- Texas Tribune — Newsom Thanks Texas After Redistricting Win
- Center for American Progress — Trump Ordered Texas to Gerrymander 5 New Districts
- NPR — The Framers Wanted the House Closest to the People
- NPR — After Texas Ruling, Trump and Republicans Head to 2026 With Edge
- Votebeat — How Trump’s Redistricting War Is Affecting Texas, Indiana, and North Carolina
- Brookings — Texas Redistricting Plan Unlikely to Add 5 New Republican Seats
- CBS News — Texas Pushes Redistricting Plan to Add 5 GOP Seats
- Congress.gov / CRS — High Court Narrows Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais
- SCOTUSblog — Court Agrees to Immediately Finalize Voting Rights Decision
- League of Women Voters — SCOTUS’s Final Blow Dismantling the Voting Rights Act
- Axios — Obama Urged Newsom on California’s Prop 50 Push
- Democracy Docket — Jeffries: Gerrymandering Won’t Save House Republicans
- Democracy Docket — Jeffries: At Least 7 Blue States Could Redistrict by 2028
- Newsweek — Lawmakers Demand 25th Amendment Be Invoked Against Trump
- Newsweek — Trump Approval Rating on Economy Sinks Across Three New Polls
- Newsweek — Trump Approval Rating Sinks to Lowest Ever Recorded
- PBS NewsHour — Could the 25th Amendment Be Invoked Against Trump?
- Silver Bulletin (Nate Silver) — Trump Approval Rating: Latest Polls
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