Voters wait in line to cast their votes during early voting in the U.S. presidential election at a polling station in Detroit, Michigan, U.S. November 3, 2024. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook
Both times he was inaugurated — January 20, 2017 and January 20, 2025 — President Donald Trump entered the White House with Republican majorities in the U.S. Senate as well as the U.S. House of Representatives. But Democratic strategists are hoping that the 2026 midterms will play out like the 2018 midterms, which found Democrats flipping the House with a net gain of 40 seats. And some Democrats argued that the 2018 blue wave in Congress' lower chamber would have been even larger if House districts hadn't been so badly gerrymandered.
It remains to be seen, however, what will happen in 2026, and Trump is hoping that next year's midterms won't be a replay of 2018.
In an op-ed published by MSNBC on October 23, Symone D. Sanders Townsend — who co-hosts MSNBC's "The Weeknight" with Alicia Menendez and former Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Michael Steele — argues that although Trump is going into the 2026 midterms with some major disadvantages, he has a comprehensive game plan for stealing the election.
"As part of a broad, multi-state effort by allies of President Donald Trump," Townsend warns, "(North Carolina's) Republicans have taken the dramatic step to try to redraw their already gerrymandered congressional districts five years before the normal end-of-decade cycle. The goal is to secure one more Republican U.S. House seat in a desperate attempt to hang onto the House majority and protect Trump from political consequences. Keep in mind, this map was already unfairly drawn up."
The MSNBC host continues, "The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gave it an 'F,' with only one competitive district, ten safe Republican seats and three safe Democratic seats. The new map would be even worse. This is happening all over the country. From Texas, where lawmakers passed a new map at Trump's behest, to Missouri, where organizers are trying to put an initiative on the ballot to overturn a recent gerrymander, to Indiana, where party leaders admitted this week they may not have the votes."
Republicans, Townsend emphasizes, "wouldn't be trying this if they were confident they could win in 2026."
"But rather than trying to persuade the American people that they have better ideas," Townsend laments, "they are trying to rig it so that they can win anyway…. The representative ideal is under siege, but not defeated. The people still hold the power. They always have. And the fight now is to make sure they can still exercise it freely."
Townsend adds, "As Republicans attempt to redraw the lines of power, we should listen for the echoes of our ancestors. Times have changed, but the struggle has not."
Symone D. Sanders Townsend's full op-ed for MSNBC is available at this link.