In May, James Blair, a Trump strategist and a driving force behind the President’s push to have red states gerrymander their U.S. House maps to favor Republicans ahead of the midterms, took to social media to gloat. “Two weeks ago people were dooming and asking wAs rEdIsTrIcTiNg wOrTh iT?” he wrote, on X. Now, he predicted, there would be a “16 net seat swing to GOP.”Blair was posting at the end of a whiplash few weeks in what had become a national redistricting war.

Less than a month earlier, Democrats appeared to have neutered (or even overtaken) G.O.P. gains in states including Texas and North Carolina by responding in California and Virginia. But Virginia’s top court soon restored the status quo there, Florida Republicans created four good pickup opportunities in the Sunshine State, and the Supreme Court opened the door to further shenanigans in the South, by weakening protections against racial gerrymandering that had previously shielded numerous blue seats. The war looked won.

Republicans win, on their own terms, by gerrymandering more seats than Democrats. What no one could have known at the time is that they were not fighting a war that would determine control of the House but, rather, a marginal skirmish of scant relevance to the over-all outcome. To turn to a different metaphor du jour, the G.O.P. put up sandbags to stop a rising tide but got hit with a tsunami.

In Texas, several projected Republican gains depended, in part, on the Party’s retaining strong support among Latinos and, well, so much for that. Florida’s four-seat push looks to be a complete wash, and two endangered Black Democrats in the South held on comfortably (including Don Davis, in North Carolina, where the wave has reached so high that a potential eleven-three G.O.P. map looks set to morph into a ten-four map in favor of Democrats).

As the noted, it’ll take time—and some very nerdy debate—to assess the granularities of what the gerrymandering wrought. (Already, the architect of the Texas redraw is telling anyone who will listen that Republicans would have been even worse off without the push.) For now, though, Democrats are the ones gloating. On Wednesday, Hakeem Jeffries, the presumptive next Speaker, posed triumphantly next to a poster board showing Blair’s X post.

There may be more gloating to come. The top-line results for Democrats—as many as fifty-six seats in the Senate; the largest proportion of the House popular vote since Watergate—have, naturally, commanded the lion’s share of attention this week, with the futility of G.O.P. gerrymandering generating a subsection thereof. But similarly favorable outcomes in gubernatorial and state-legislative races will determine where the redistricting war—or skirmish, or battle, or whatever you want to call it—goes from here, in ways that could have a more decisive influence over future elections than Donald Trump and his accomplices were able to exert on this one.

Those future elections will be shaped, too, by a slew of ballot measures—concerning redistricting and much more besides—that have made few headlines. More than thirty election-related questions were popped this year—a record number, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. On the whole, the results paint a picture that is nuanced, but which should offer hope not only to big-“D” Democrats, but to small-“D” ones, as well.

At the state level—where congressional maps are ultimately drawn, and where Republicans have enjoyed a structural advantage over Democrats since the Tea Party wave of 2010—the blue tsunami has dramatically shifted the balance of power. Some red states that might have sought to redistrict (or redistrict ) ahead of 2028 will soon, at least partially, be in blue hands, including Texas and Georgia. (Texas could yet pursue a sneaky gerrymander in the lame-duck session before Democrats take over the governor’s mansion and the state House, but the outgoing Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, has already ruled out doing likewise in his state.)

Meanwhile, Democrats won trifectas in Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It’s far too early to say what this means for the 2028 maps, and there are legal obstacles in the way in, for example, Michigan, where redistricting is handled by an independent commission. But some power brokers are already thinking about redraws. “We have gerrymandered maps, and they favor Republicans to a significant degree, and we know that other states will consider redistricting efforts in the months ahead that will further attempt to entrench Republican power,” Greta Neubauer, the Democratic leader in Wisconsin’s state Assembly, said.

“And so we will be considering a congressional redistricting effort.”Voters in three other states sent even clearer signals about redistricting on Tuesday night—and each of the results seemed, on the surface, to favor Democrats. Colorado is on course to reject a conservative-backed amendment to the state constitution that would have made it harder for Democrats to redo districts mid-decade. In Maryland, a successful amendment supported by Governor Wes Moore seems to have cleared a previously thorny legal path for Democrats to try and eke out an extra seat—a significant victory, especially in light of the amendment’s confusing wording. (“I have a freaking Ph.D. in political science and American politics,” an academic told the news site , “and if I didn’t know what that amendment was about, I would have no idea what that amendment was about.”)

In Missouri, voters rejected a redrawn map that local Republicans were so eager to implement that they used it for the primaries before it was even legal.

Beyond redistricting, voters in Missouri approved an amendment that should impede politicians from overturning citizen-initiated ballot measures. (Not that this is entirely unrelated to redistricting: Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told me that he expects the amendment to make it harder for the Missouri G.O.P. to try again to pass its new map, or a similar one, in the medium term—though this question is murky and likely to be litigated.)

In the same vein, voters in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Utah rejected measures that would have watered down their direct-democracy rights. Massachusetts voted decisively to permit same-day election registration, over G.O.P. objections, and Virginians opted to guarantee the restoration of voting rights to people convicted of felonies at the end of their sentences, removing that determination from the discretion of the governor. Some Trumpier-sounding election-administration measures did win out. North Carolina and Ohio voted to extend or entrench existing voter-I.D. requirements, and Nevada opted to create new ones.

But three other states—Arizona, Colorado, and California—appear to have rejected comparable proposals, a notable batting average given that, according to , the vast majority of I.D.-related ballot measures that have been introduced nationally in the past two decades have been approved. Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia approved measures banning non-citizens from voting, though in each state this was banned already.

Some election-related ballot measures this year were harder to parse. Massachusetts asked voters whether they wanted to replace their partisan primaries with a free-for-all, with the top two vote-getters advancing regardless of party. (This already happens in California and Washington State—and, locally, in Boston—with some small differences.) The change was pushed by Danielle Allen, a scholar of democracy renovation at Harvard, who argued that it would make elections more competitive in the state.

It was also backed by prominent donors from the private-equity business, making many liberals squeamish; this also seemed to reinforce critics’ fears of a jungle-type primary favoring candidates with more money, or even allowing a pair of Republicans to lock out Democrats in a blue state, should a large number of the latter split the vote, as nearly(-ish) happened in California this year. (Allen attributed the donors’ interest to civic-mindedness, and pointed to a write-in option on the ballot that could be used in cases where the majority party gets locked out of a runoff.)

The state Democratic and Republican apparatuses opposed the reform, even as prominent pols of both parties supported it; the regional N.A.A.C.P. was in favor, too, though the chair of the “No” campaign said that he feared an all-party primary could dilute Black voting power in a manner “not dissimilar” to that of G.O.P. gerrymandering in the South. After listening to all the arguments, I still have no idea how I’d have voted if I were a Masshole. In the end, voters said no.

Alaska already has an all-party primary, though, in that state, four candidates advance to the general election, at which point voters rank them in order of preference. Proponents of ranked-choice voting argue that it leads to less wastage of votes and favors candidates able to generate cross-partisan consensus. This year, Dan Sullivan advanced from the primary, as did Dan Sullivan—one being the incumbent Republican Senator, the other a retired teacher and political neophyte whom Senator Sullivan accused the Democrats of planting, to split the vote (correctly, it would seem, per a recent bombshell in the , though Democrats have denied it).

While the Sullivan saga hogged national headlines, Alaska’s unusual electoral system itself was also on the ballot, after critics mounted a campaign to kill it. Among other quibbles, they argue that it’s confusing, and that it robs partisans of the chance to punish heretics. (Paging Lisa Murkowski.) Currently, the repeal effort (which would also lead to the elimination of certain campaign-finance disclosure rules) looks set for defeat, though more than a quarter of votes are yet to be counted.

Either way, the stakes of the fight are bigger than Alaska. Elon Musk donated to the repeal campaign (because of course he did); Michael Bloomberg gave money to defeat it. One proponent of Alaska’s current system told MS NOW that it could inspire other states to implement reforms that increase both competition, electorally, and consensus-building, legislatively, but likened that prospect to a baby turtle heading to sea. “If it gets to the ocean, it can live there for 100 years,” he said.

“But it’s a very dangerous walk across the beach.”Reasonable people can, of course, disagree as to whether a partisan or free-for-all primary—producing two victors or four—is more democratic. It’s much harder to make such a case for partisan redistricting.

It may have been democratically satisfying to see Republicans’ blatant cheating fall flat this week, though small- and big-“D” interests might diverge from here if the Democrats opt to escalate the race to the bottom that Trump started. Their new trifectas do not make this a foregone conclusion. There’s the question of political capital, for starters: partisan redistricting is not popular, and Trump’s embrace of it only thickened the miasma of corruption misting around Republicans. In the South, meanwhile, the Supreme Court decision and subsequent gerrymanders appear to have rocket-boosted turnout among the constituents they were supposed to disempower.

Mapmakers on both sides might also find it tough to know to draw new lines, given the uncertainty as to whether this week’s realignment was a pure repudiation of Trump or a scrambling of typical assumptions about the electorate.

Democrats could equally choose to listen to their better angels and prove that their response to Trump’s redraws was what they said it was at the time: a refusal to disarm unilaterally, not a prelude to going on the offensive. One operative told the Washington this week, “If they stop, we stop!,” though Jeffries, in his victory lap, made less reassuring noises. Putting a durable end to the redistricting war would likely require congressional guardrails, such as banning the practice between censuses, or mandating that it be handled by independent commissions.

Before these midterms, reform looked unlikely, despite the introduction of some bipartisan bills in this direction. It now looks, if not likely, then likelier. As Richard L. Hasen, an election-law expert at U.C.L.A., put it to me in an e-mail on Wednesday, “With Republicans facing the prospect now of further mid-decade redistricting—from Democrats—perhaps there is the smallest opening for some congressional legislation.”Would Trump even sign such a thing?

Who knows? At minimum, an awful lot is up in the air right now, and with that comes new possibility. If this week’s results ultimately help to rein in an odious practice, then Trump’s redistricting push may just have been “wOrTh iT” after all.