President Donald Trump’s mid-decade redistricting war is shaping up to be a strategic blunder. At the president’s urging, Republicans gerrymandered new maps based on Trump’s 2024 performance, wrongly assuming the midterm electorate would match his presidential coalition. Now, once-durable Republican strongholds that were redrawn for partisan gain have become fragile, forcing Republicans to direct resources to districts they thought would be solidly red.

Six of the GOP’s gerrymandered districts — Texas 9th and 32nd, Florida’s 9th, Tennessee’s 9th, Louisiana’s 6th, and Alabama’s 2nd — are likely to become Republican thanks to their new lines, according to the elections forecasters at Cook Political Report. The nine other GOP-redrawn districts are considered either toss-ups or will likely swing towards Democrats — not exactly the argument Republicans made when they reopened the redistricting battle last year.

What’s more, these fights have required enormous amounts of spending to defend, helping to make the midterm elections the most expensive ever, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. All of this was predictable — and avoidable.

At Trump’s urging, Texas launched the redistricting wars in the summer of 2025. Then, after the US Supreme Court ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act, Republicans in Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama revised their maps to split apart majority-Black districts and help elect White Republicans.

Together, they created 15 new Republican districts that Trump would have won handily in 2024. To do it, they shifted GOP voters from safely red districts into neighboring blue ones. The reshuffling left most of the redrawn districts more competitive, especially in the event of a wave election.

But the GOP failed to calculate a few things — like the impact of Trump’s tariffs, or his war with Iran or the negative pull of the administration’s aggressive ICE raids and immigration crackdowns on Latino families. They also didn’t consider the backlash from Black voters angry about erasing the congressional districts that had given voice to their communities for decades.

Although Democrats entered the redistricting arms race, too, outside of California they were largely unsuccessful. Unfortunately, the gamesmanship is likely to be repeated by both parties before 2028.

But while Republicans won the redistricting battle on paper, it may turn out to be a massive miscalculation. The party had baked into its districts assumptions about the electorate based on 2024, not 2026. Republicans in Texas and Florida had drawn districts that assumed Latino voters who voted for Trump in record numbers in 2024 would support Republican congressional candidates in the midterms. But when the president’s job approval tanked, his coalition splintered and the redistricting assumptions crashed.

Republicans also face long-term challenges in some of these areas. Over the last decade, 85% of the population growth in the South has been attributable to people of color, while the non-Hispanic White share of the electorate has been in decline, according to Michael McDonald, a political scientist who runs the University of Florida’s Election Lab. Both demographics have tended to vote more for Democrats, even though Trump made inroads in 2024.

“2024 was the high-water mark for Republicans,” McDonald told me. “They drank the echo chamber Kool-Aid and thought it was a permanent shift, not temporary.”No place is this more evident than in Texas, where Republicans were confident that they had room to manipulate the map because Trump had won there with a 14-point margin of victory. They gerrymandered five Texas seats by adding more Republicans to districts held by Democratic incumbents.

Polls now show that Latino voters have swung so hard toward Democrats that Democrats are leading in three of the five new Texas districts, and at least one Republican incumbent, whose district was significantly altered, could lose her seat.

In Florida, where Republicans sliced up three Black and Hispanic districts to create four new GOP seats, Democrats are in toss-up contests in two of those seats and leading in another. Meanwhile, according to McDonald’s analysis, the midterms electorate is more diverse than ever, as voters of color are turning out in higher rates than in past midterm elections in the states he’s studied so far: Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.

But the strongest signal that the redistricting gambit is backfiring on the GOP is the rush of party money into the redrawn districts.

In Texas’ 35th, for example, Republicans drew the district to favor Trump by 10 percentage points in an open seat, but the Trump-affiliated political committee No Going Back PAC has now poured $5.8 million into defeating the Democrat. The race is a toss-up.

No Going Back PAC is also pumping $25 million into the three redrawn districts in Florida. Other GOP-aligned groups are spending more than $50 million to defend the Florida Republicans in those districts — which Trump would have won by double digits. In North Carolina, in what may go down in history as the most expensive US House general election ever, the GOP is spending $23 million to defend another gerrymandered district. That race is also a toss-up.

It’s possible that many of these shifts flatten out by Election Day or, as McDonald predicts, communities of color will have been underestimated and the blue wave will be larger than forecasted. Either way, Republicans will have fumbled. Imagine what the landscape would have looked like if Trump put his political capital into a more popular agenda instead of new maps.