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Democrats have no shortage of ideas for how to chart their path back from the political wilderness over the next few years. But a series of events — some only possible, others inevitable — could create a shortage of opportunities for them to do so.
Before Democrats get to the question of whether populism, centrism, progressivism, or some other -ism yet to be mined from their overpriced consultants can save them, the party must confront structural threats to its hold on power. Those could, within the next five years, tilt the political landscape significantly toward Republicans.
Although mid-decade redistricting has, so far, proven a wash for the parties, it could start an arms race that Democrats are unlikely to win. The Supreme Court appears ready to undo a section of the Voting Rights Act that has, for decades, forced states to draw congressional maps that, in practice, skew toward Democrats. And the 2030 census will reflect the mass exodus of Americans from blue states since the pandemic era, which will hand the red states where they settled more congressional seats and Electoral College votes. If the census includes a citizenship question, the losses for Democrats could be even more profound.
“All of it taken together is a perfect storm for the Democrats,” Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner.
Given the razor-thin majority the Republicans have, as well as the number of true swing seats at any given time, a shift in the makeup of just one congressional district could have a significant impact.
Shifting the makeup of dozens of districts, however, could be seismic. And because it would not take more than a light breeze to knock all those procedural dominoes down in Republicans’ favor, Democrats may be living through their last few years of playing with an advantage.
Democrats’ redistricting lemon
When Texas Republicans announced plans this year to redraw the state’s congressional maps to give the GOP as many as five more House seats, California Democrats responded by drawing themselves an additional five seats as well.
The episode sparked fears — or excitement, at least at the White House — about a redistricting war between red and blue states at halftime between censuses.
Vice President JD Vance said in August that Democrats, having spent years gerrymandering their way to lopsided delegations, have already squeezed most of the extra seats out of their states.
“There’s just not a whole lot of juice left out of that lemon,” Vance said. “The Democrats have already gone as far as they possibly can.”
Some blue states are juicier than others. In Connecticut, for example, more than 40% of voters chose Trump over 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who won 56% of the state. But all five of Connecticut’s congressional districts favor Democrats. In Illinois, nearly 44% of voters chose Trump over Harris last year. But just three of the state’s 17 congressional districts favor Republicans.
And while other blue states have more evenly divided maps, and therefore more Republican seats to erase, Democrats face obstacles to redistricting that Republicans in less-gerrymandered red states simply do not.
“The Republicans control more state legislatures, and so if this gets to the point where it’s an all-out, knock-down, drag-out battle to squeeze as many seats as you can out of this, it’s going to work against the Democrats,” Grant Reeher, political science professor at Syracuse University, told the Washington Examiner. “If everybody holsters up on this, [Republicans] are going to have more bullets to shoot. They’re going to have more chances to do this.”
A handful of GOP-controlled states have bipartisan delegations that Republican state lawmakers could make less so by redrawing their maps, including Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina.
“This is a group of states where there may be more meat on the bone for Republican line-drawers,” Kyle Kondik of the Center for Politics wrote earlier this year. A Trump-driven attempt to push through a more GOP-friendly map in Indiana, however, failed last week, suggesting Republicans may not have an easy path to redistricting even in states they control.
Ohio, a populous state with 15 congressional seats, recently adopted a new map for use in 2026 that will likely give Republicans two more seats. That map was the result of a compromise with Democrats, however, and GOP lawmakers could go even further if a redistricting war breaks out.
In several states that Democrats have eyed as possible targets for their own redistricting effort, the options are more limited. Minnesota, for example, presently has four Republican and four Democratic seats. But control of its state legislature is divided, and even if Democrats had a governing trifecta, its state constitution limits when lawmakers can draw new maps.
Awaiting a Supreme Court surprise
By June 2026, the Supreme Court will decide whether to change decades-old rules about racial considerations in redistricting. And after the justices heard oral arguments for the second time in Louisiana v. Calais in October, Democrats may be sweating the outcome.
The case centers on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which was passed in 1965 and amended in 1982 to allow lawsuits over redistricting decisions that had the effect of splitting up black voters into multiple districts, regardless of whether racial discrimination was the intent.
“The amendments opened the door for voters to challenge electoral maps and at-large election systems that, whether by design or not, diluted the votes of communities of color by locking them out of any reasonable chance of winning power,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
In practice, that meant states had to consider race prominently when drawing their congressional maps. States had to ensure no map watered down the black vote by either “packing” too many black voters into a smaller number of districts or “cracking” up black communities by spreading their voters into multiple districts where the majority of voters were otherwise white.
Although it is perfectly legal for state lawmakers to draw maps that maximize their political party’s advantage, those partisan goals have to take a backseat to the racial requirements of the Voting Rights Act. In the South, that has long preserved districts for Democrats in states that, over the decades, became deeply Republican.
Congress wrote the legislation during the civil rights era because states at the time were imposing poll taxes, literacy tests, and other policies aimed specifically at preventing black people from voting. However, von Spakovsky said the conditions that led to the passage of the law no longer exist.
“Racial discrimination in the voting context has basically disappeared across the United States,” he said. “The type of barriers that kept black Americans from voting, from being able to register to vote in 1965, they’re gone. What’s unfortunately been happening here for really the past two decades is that the NAACP, the Democratic Party, and their allies have been misusing the Voting Rights Act to achieve political objectives, not to stop racial discrimination that’s going on.”
Conservative justices appeared skeptical during oral arguments in October of the rationale for continued reliance on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to draw congressional maps.
“Should the Court adopt the color-blind approach and find racially motivated redistricting unconstitutional, it is not likely to end African-American membership in Congress, but it may end some majority-minority districts in future redistricting within the states. This could benefit the Republican Party, since majority-minority districts tend to favor Democrats,” Stephen Presser, legal history professor emeritus at Northwestern University, wrote recently in Chronicles magazine. “Indeed, in his questioning, it appeared that Justice [Samuel] Alito understood that what might really be at stake in these racial gerrymandering controversies was not constitutional violations but rather simple partisan political differences between Democrats and Republicans.”
The Supreme Court could leave the Voting Rights Act untouched. But if it does not, Democrats could be positioned for substantial losses.
An analysis by Black Voters Matter found that Republicans could gain as many as 19 seats if they no longer had to arrange their districts around minority communities.
That includes two Democratic districts in Georgia that could be redrawn into favorable GOP districts, two in Alabama, and one each in Missouri, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee, based solely on the end of racial requirements. Texas could hand Republicans another five congressional seats, on top of the five it already redrew on a partisan basis, without the VRA rules, according to the Black Voters Matter analysis.
Other estimates place the number of seats that would tilt toward the GOP lower. David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report and Nate Cohn of the New York Times both estimated that the upper end of Republican gains would be around 12 seats, should the Supreme Court toss out the VRA requirements.
Still, that is roughly twice the size of the GOP’s House majority.
The census earthquake ahead
Five years contain several lifetimes in Washington. But once those lifetimes have passed, Democrats are staring down the near certainty that the 2030 census will shift even more congressional seats out of their reach.
The nationwide headcount, conducted once a decade, is enormously important because the results determine how many Electoral College votes each state can cast in presidential elections and how many representatives each state gets to send to the House.
While state lawmakers can reshuffle pieces on their board by drawing new maps as often as their state laws allow, they have to play with the same number of pieces for the decade in between each census. And there are two dynamics working against Democrats heading into 2030.
One is that millions of people have left blue states since 2020, and most of them have settled in red states. Between 2023 and 2024, for example, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina experienced the biggest population increases from internal migration, while California, Florida, and Illinois experienced the biggest population losses, according to the Census Bureau.
The other is that mathematical mistakes made during the 2020 census ended up benefiting Democrats, and once those mistakes are corrected in the next census, Democrats stand to lose seats.
Just how much those errors skewed the apportionment process is unclear. Some estimates say Democrats unfairly gained six seats that would have otherwise gone to red states. That is because Census Bureau officials undercounted the populations of Florida and Texas, costing them a combined three seats that they should have had this decade, and overcounted the populations of Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Colorado, meaning each blue state got an extra congressional district to which it was not entitled.
The correction of those errors alone would benefit Republicans in both congressional and presidential elections because the population totals also determine how many Electoral College votes each state gets to cast.
However, the losses for Democrats from internal migration are likely to be even steeper if trends hold for the remaining four years before the count begins. California stands to lose as many as five congressional seats in the next round of apportionment due to population loss, according to the Census Project. New York could lose two seats. So could Illinois.
At the same time, Texas is likely to gain at least three seats, Florida is likely to gain two, and Georgia is likely to gain at least one, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee estimated in July.
For Democrats, there are few bright spots in the outlook for 2030 apportionment.
“The one [thing] that points in the blue direction is: Who’s moving there? In other words, what are the net changes of the composition of those states?” said Reeher of Syracuse University. “They’re becoming more heavily minority than they were before.”
Reeher noted that while red states are likely to pick up extra congressional seats, the population growth that will enable them to do so could make those states less reliably Republican because of how many minorities are internally migrating.
Illegal immigration will also help blunt the impact of the 2030 census changes for Democrats. Although illegal immigrants cannot vote in elections, they are still included in the population totals tallied by the Census Bureau, and those totals determine how congressional seats are distributed. An analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies estimated that counting both legal and illegal immigrants in the 2020 census handed Democratic-leaning states an additional 14 seats that they would not otherwise have had, cost Republican-leaning states 10 seats, and cost battleground states four seats.
Republicans have introduced legislation to exclude illegal immigrants from counting toward apportionment, and the White House has backed the effort.
“We’re literally losing representatives for American citizens in order to give congressional representation to illegal aliens,” Vance said in August.
Adding a citizenship question, however, could prove to be a lighter lift, and it could still help Republicans draw maps to their advantage in red states, even if the results of the question do not affect apportionment.
“If they get a citizenship question put on the U.S. Census then that will give state legislatures, who are doing redistricting after the 2030 census, it will give them citizen population data, and if those legislatures in places like Texas, Florida, Georgia switch to using citizen populations for redistricting instead of total population, that will also shift seats from Democrats to Republicans,” von Spakovsky said. “The reason being that the higher the percentage of citizens in a district, the higher the likelihood it will vote for a Republican, so by using citizen populations and not including aliens, Republicans will give themselves an even bigger advantage.”
Democrats contend Republicans are preparing to game the system by redistricting mid-decade, eyeing even further gains in light of a possible Supreme Court win on the Voting Rights Act, and considering ways to exclude illegal immigrants from the apportionment process. Success in all three areas, in addition to near-certain changes after the 2030 census, would give the GOP dozens of safe seats.
CENSUS WARS: BATTLE OVER 2030 CENSUS COULD UPEND POLITICAL POWER IN WASHINGTON
But Republicans argue the deck has been unfairly stacked in favor of Democrats for years.
“Really, what we’re living with is the consequence of 40 years of institutional control of the Democratic Party,” Vance said earlier this year. “These guys have fought very dirty for a very long time. They have tried to rig the game for Democrats and against Republicans.”
