U.S. President Donald Trump places a hand over his heart during a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., November 11, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Columnist Mary Ellen Klas tells the Kansas City Star that the GOP got a loud wake-up call on their gerrymandered midterm maps following last week's nationwide victories by Democrats.
“After widespread defeats in last week's off-year elections, Republicans should realize they made a bad bet by following President Donald Trump's lead on mid-decade redistricting,” said Klas. “Desperate not to lose the House in the midterms, the president sought to rig the game. He pressured legislatures in red states to create new Republican-leaning districts, and lawmakers duly redrew their maps. That weakened some safe red seats, but the GOP assumed that it would hurt Democrats more.”
“Last Tuesday's results demonstrate the folly of Trump's gamble,” Klas added. “Trump's 2024 coalition is crumbling. To win in less-red Republican districts, the party will need all the voters Trump pulled together to achieve his 1.5 percentage point victory in 2024—young men, Latino voters and his MAGA base. But exit polls show that in the governors' races in both Virginia and New Jersey, men and Latino voters abandoned the GOP in massive numbers, and in races across the country, many supported Democrats.”
In New Jersey, 68 percent of Latino voters broke for Democrat Mikie Sherrill, said Klas, as did 56 percent of men under the age of 30. And In Virginia, 67 percent of Latino voters went for Democrat Abigail Spanberger, joining 57 percent of men under 30.
Many of these voters had voted for Trump last year Klas pointed out, with exit polls showing both Sherrill and Spanberger won 7 percent of Trump's 2024 voters. Those same numbers revealed Sherrill to have claimed “a whopping 18 percent of Trump's Hispanic support in the state.”
“For months, Republicans bragged that Trump had captured 48 percent of the Latino vote across the country in 2024. They assumed these voters would stay with them in 2026, and that became part of the GOP's calculations in Texas to create five additional Republican congressional seats,” said Klas, citing Republican political consultant Mike Madrid claiming the gambit was “a classic example of taking Latino votes for granted.”
Madrid went on to describe Trump’s Latino vote shift last week not as a “realignment,” but a “dealignment,” with Latino voters deliberately punishing the party in power for the economic pain they’ve caused them.
But “Trump's disappearing coalition is only part of the president's redistricting problem,” said Klas. “The president's performance is weighing GOP candidates down like an anchor even as Democrats are buoyed by a new wave of enthusiasm.”
Klas went on to point out that Trump’s Republican allies lost by double digits. Even a purple state like Georgia took out Republican incumbents by 25-point margins last week.
Some Republicans are already catching on to the problem as they quickly evaluate whether Trump's redistricting arms race is a liability.
“Ohio Republicans have already cut their losses. They approved a map drawn by the state's bipartisan redistricting commission that makes relatively minor changes to the current plan and allows Democrats to keep their five seats in the 15-member delegation. Kansas Republicans have also backed down,” said Klas.
And while Democrats are working to neutralize Republican gerrymanders with their own in blue states, Florida Republicans are risking weakening red districts that swung from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 by entertaining their own mid-decade redistricting plan.
“There is no guarantee that the electorate that showed up in 2024 is going to be the one that goes to the polls in 2026. Instead of securing additional seats in Congress, Trump's redistricting gamble looks like it might just boomerang back on him,” said Klas.
Read the Kansas City Star report at this link.