Chris Stirewalt tells the Hill that the GOP’s “spasm of mid-decade gerrymandering” does not appear to “have been worth it.”
“After three furious months that began when Texas’s August gerrymander kicked off a national game of tit for tat, there are only 35 or 40 House seats that we can already expect to be at least somewhat competitive next year. About half of those are guaranteed battlegrounds — the perennial swing districts. But of the larger swing set, it’s Republicans who have slightly more exposure.”
“A light breeze would probably be enough to deliver the three red-to-blue flips necessary to see a fifth change in partisan control of the House this century,” said Stirewalt, pointing out that “less than 10 percent of House districts are competitive.”
After predicting a bigger recovery in the 2022 midterms, Republicans only won nine seats, which gave smaller warring factions in the GOP more power than usual, resulting in the removal of a House speaker within just nine months.
“Things got weirder still in 2024, when a Republican presidential candidate won the national popular vote for only the second time in 30 years, but House Republicans still managed a net loss of two seats,” said Stirewalt.
With big sweep elections appearing to be a thing of the past, Stirewalt said five new mid-decade gerrymandered seats could make a big difference. Plus, Republicans were confident Democrats had gerrymandered all the seats they could, and had even worked to make gerrymandering impossible in some blue states.
“Those assumptions turned out to be wrong,” Stirewalt said. “It’s still too soon to say, but right now, the best guess is that the coast-to-coast redistricting wars are probably worth just two or three seats for Republicans. If we assume the Republican premise that the potential swing before gerrymandering was just eight or nine seats, three seats isn’t nothing, but probably not worth the cost and the inevitable unintended consequences.”
“And if those unintended consequences include further motivating an already frothy Democratic base in a cycle that, for now anyway, looks like an old-fashioned wave, the Texas strategy will look like a debacle,” Stirewalt said.
Read the Hill report at this link.