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Photo: Alex Brandon/AP Photo

Of Donald Trump’s many second-term power grabs, perhaps the most momentous has been his effort to improve the low odds of his party maintaining trifecta control of Washington in the 2026 midterm elections by literally redrawing congressional maps wherever Republicans have the power to do so. This began with his successful demand that Texas Republicans hijack a special summer legislative session that was supposed to be about disaster recovery to conduct a rare mid-decade congressional gerrymander giving the GOP as many as five new U.S. House seats in 2026. That’s a done deal despite ongoing litigation. Under the White House lash, several other red states began reluctantly moving in the same direction. But Trump’s momentum seems to have slowed.

The thing about this sort of maneuver is that it works best if it’s fast and relatively quiet. Redistricting is an arcane process that normally doesn’t get regular people very excited. But if it takes a while, the audacity of what Trump is trying to accomplish will sink in and even the GOP state legislators being ordered to steal a House seat or three will begin to have misgivings.

This dynamic is most evident in Indiana, where legislative foot-dragging has been evident over White House orders to extinguish one or both of the state’s two Democratic U.S. House districts, as Politico reports:

President Donald Trump’s mid-cycle redistricting push is on the verge of stalling in Indiana, top state Republican officials have warned the White House, and Vice President JD Vance is on his way to the Hoosier state to turn things around.

The cautionary note, shared by three Republicans close to the deliberations, prompted Vance’s second trip in three months to the state to mount a “hard push,” one of the people said.

The intensity of this effort is reflected in the over-the-top rhetoric of Trump’s Hoosier allies. “They killed Charlie Kirk — the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine to zero map,” Republican senator Jim Banks of Indiana told Politico.

Missouri Republicans have been more instantly obedient to Trump’s orders, enacting a new congressional map that zapped the House district of veteran Kansas City Democrat Emanuel Cleaver. But quick action by opponents of the Show Me State power grab could yet reverse it, as Punchbowl News reports:

If Democrats can get roughly 110,000 valid signatures by mid-December, they can trigger a referendum on the new map next year. That likely would save Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) for at least two more years and longer if voters reject the proposal. The new GOP-drawn map turns Cleaver’s Kansas City–based seat deep red …

Republicans in Washington and Missouri say the Democratic signature-gathering effort is well-funded and organized. And some fear it might just work. Democrats report that they’re hitting their daily quotas.

And there’s a third, more momentous setback for Trump on the way in California. When he first announced it, Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposal to suspend a nonpartisan redistricting process and impose a Democratic-leaning House map by ballot initiative to counter what Texas did looked like a bit of a long shot. It was both procedurally and politically complicated and very late in the day for a November 2025 ballot measure. But Newsom’s Prop 50 campaign has skillfully sold the initiative as a temporary curb on Trump’s power, outspending the opposition handily and leading in every available poll. It’s becoming a referendum on the 47th president, who is very unpopular in the Golden State.

On top of these problems, Republicans suddenly have to worry about their four House seats in deep-red Utah, where a lawsuit has led to a situation wherein a federal judge could impose a new congressional map for 2026 that gives Democrats a shot at picking up a seat there. This was probably not on the national GOP’s bingo card.

While the Trump steamroller has slowed down, there remain a number of states — more of them red than blue — with partisan trifectas in place that could conduct redistricting in time for the midterms. GOP-controlled Ohio definitely will and could flip two Democratic-held House districts. The Legal Defense Fund lists Republican-controlled Florida, Kansas, Louisiana (where a Supreme Court decision on its map is pending), Nebraska, New Hampshire, and South Carolina as possible gerrymandering sites, along with Democratic-controlled Illinois, Maine, Maryland, and New York (where the changes wouldn’t take place until 2028). Two GOP states show the political complexity of the issue. In New Hampshire, Republican governor Kelly Ayotte’s opposition to re-redistricting has led to White House threats of a primary challenge (possibly undertaken by Granite State native and Trump associate Corey Lewandowski, who has been pretty busy co-directing the Department of Homeland Security with its secretary, Kristi Noem).

But Florida could be the big prize. The situation there is very much up in the air, as Reuters reports:

Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has expressed support for a new map, which analysts believe could take aim at two or three Democratic incumbents. Republicans control 20 of the state’s 28 seats, after DeSantis and the Republican-controlled legislature passed a map in 2021 that flipped four Democratic seats in 2022.

One possible legal hurdle is a constitutional amendment, approved by voters in 2010, that bars the legislature from drawing districts purely for partisan gain. A majority of justices on the Florida Supreme Court, which upheld the 2021 map, were nominated by DeSantis.

So DeSantis may need a court decision to gut the anti-gerrymandering constitutional provision before going to town on the map. It’s quite the national chess game, but the longer this goes on, the more likely it is that the small but abiding anti-Trump majority of the American people (plus some Republicans who worry about his excesses) will take notice and react.

Trump’s Redistricting Power Grab Is Losing Momentum

Trump’s Redistricting Power Grab Is Losing Momentum