NYT:

When President Trump set out to force a gerrymander in Texas that would help Republicans keep control of the closely divided House, he argued it was a simple matter of fairness.

“We are entitled to five more seats,” the president said this month.

He got what he wanted from Texas, where the governor on Friday signed a redistricting plan. But the consequences may not be so simple.

With California Democrats immediately retaliating with their own re-engineering that could potentially swing up to five seats in the opposite direction, a redistricting arms race is quickly spreading across the country. That has become a major headache for incumbent members of Congress in both parties, who are concerned about changes to districts they have spent years — some of them decades — figuring out how to win.

On paper, the changes that have been approved or are under discussion could potentially give Republicans a leg up of six to seven seats in what is expected to be an uphill fight to keep control of the House. But redistricting can deliver unpredictable results, and it is uncertain whether this one will ultimately pan out the way either party hopes.

What is clear is that it has created confusion in the already volatile battle for congressional power, with no clear outcome guaranteed for Republicans or Democrats.

“They’re clearly counting on Democrats not forcefully responding,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said in an interview. “We are going to unleash righteous hellfire on them until the cheating scheme ends.”

Some Republicans believe it never should have started.

“The simplest solution here is just to say, ‘Enough is enough, and let’s not do that in any state,’” said Representative Kevin Kiley of California, who is one of five Republican members of Congress in the state at risk of losing their seats if voters approve Democrats’ redistricting plan this fall.

“It’s a pretty tortured logic to say we ought to do something worse because they’re doing something bad,” Mr. Kiley said of California Democrats’ plan, which aims to counter Texas Republicans’ partisan redistricting effort. “That being said, I don’t like what’s going on in Texas. I don’t think that should be happening anywhere.”…

Nate Cohn for the NYT:

The next phase of the redistricting war is starting to come into focus.

Indiana, Missouri, Ohio and perhaps Florida — all Republican-controlled states — seem likely to join Texas and California in attempting to redraw their congressional maps, according to my New York Times colleagues. By their tally, Republicans could carve out up to seven more House seats where they would be favored to win.

It’s too soon to be sure if these states will follow through, let alone whether it would mark the end of this cycle’s redistricting battles. Other states could join; a legal challenge to Utah’s map and a challenge to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act also loom. But suppose that this is where the redistricting war goes next, and where it ends. If so, how much would the new maps tilt the playing field toward Republicans?

Ultimately, the most important question is whether redistricting prevents the party that wins the national popular vote from winning control of the House. If the popular vote winner is still likely to prevail, then gerrymandering, however odious, hasn’t necessarily left one party at an undemocratic disadvantage overall.

By this measure, the House map was fundamentally fair in 2024: Despite plenty of gerrymandering, the winner of the popular vote was reasonably likely to win the most seats. But if the new maps are enacted in all of these states, Democrats will need to win the national popular vote by two or three percentage points to be favored to retake the House, according to projections based on recent congressional and presidential election results.

A two-to-three-point structural advantage for the G.O.P. is meaningful, but pretty modest. With Democrats leading by four points in the national generic ballot polls today, the party would still be favored to win next year’s midterm election. The Republicans wouldn’t stand much of any chance at all of surviving a so-called “wave” election, like in 2018, when Democrats won the House popular vote by seven points.

But while Democrats would be favored if the election were held tomorrow, the race for the House would be significantly more competitive on the new maps. Even if the Democrats won, the likeliest outcome would be a piecemeal seat-by-seat battle in which control of the chamber would come down to a fairly small number of seats. The race might not be called for days. Democrats wouldn’t have much margin for error: A few mediocre Democratic recruits, some ill-timed retirements, an unexpected demographic shift or even plain bad luck in contests with razor-thin margins could be enough to give Republicans control even if the G.O.P. loses the popular vote by a modest margin….

NYT:

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed into law on Friday a newly gerrymandered map for Texas’ U.S. House districts, openly declaring that the state’s congressional delegation would soon be more Republican.

The redistricting push has triggered a scramble in other states, controlled by Democrats and Republicans, to redraw their U.S. House maps ahead of the 2026 midterms, as President Trump pushes to maintain control of Congress with methods far outside the political norm. Democrats such as Gov. Gavin Newsom of California have tried to counter in a fight that appears to be accelerating.

Mr. Abbott’s signing, announced in a video posted to social media, came nearly a week after the legislation passed the Texas Legislature. And it punctuated a special legislative session in which Republican lawmakers battled with Democrats over redistricting and, once the map was passed, quickly pushed through a raft of other hard-right bills.

Mr. Abbott said that the map, which redraws congressional districts to flip five seats currently held by Democrats, would ensure “fairer representation in the United States Congress.” In signing the legislation, he referred to it by the name favored by President Trump — “the One Big Beautiful Map” — who had been pushing for Texas to conduct the rare mid-decade redistricting since the spring…

WaPo:

Republican leaders of the Utah Legislature said Thursday they would follow a court order to redraw the state’s congressional map — which could help Democrats — even as President Donald Trump pressures them to shut the opposition party out.

The legislators are caught between Trump, who is waging a national fight to bolster the Republican Party in the midterm elections, and a court ruling that is demanding they redraw their maps on a short timeline.

The lawmakers said they disagree with the ruling but will not defy it.

“While we will continue to pursue every legal option available — including requesting a stay from the Utah Supreme Court if necessary — we will attempt to redistrict under these unprecedented constraints, consistent with our oath to represent the best interests of Utah,” Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams and state House Speaker Mike Schultz said in a statement Thursday.

All four of Utah’s House seats are held by Republicans. A redrawing could allow a Democrat to pick up a seat at a time when both parties nationwide are in an unusual mid-decade redistricting battle sparked by Trump and his drive to preserve his party’s narrow House majority….

Details via At the Lectern.

Texas Tribune:

Hours after the Texas Senate approved a new congressional map early Saturday morning that more heavily favors Republicans — legislation Gov. Greg Abbott plans to “swiftly” sign into law — a lawsuit against the governor was filed, alleging that the redrawn districts are racially discriminatory.

The 67-page complaint against Abbott and Secretary of State Jane Nelson supplements legal action filed by LULAC in 2021 challenging the state’s original maps and argues that redrawing districts mid-decade is unconstitutional…

Lawyers’ Committee:

 Today, the Texas NAACP, represented by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in their ongoing lawsuit against the state of Texas, challenging its recently passed congressional maps for illegal, racial gerrymandering. The maps bulldoze important majority-minority districts and dilute the ability for Black and Brown communities to pick their political representation fairly. 

The Texas NAACP and Lawyers’ Committee originally filed the case in 2021 regarding Texas’ redistricting plan for Congress, as well as the state Senate and House, arguing that multiple districts at all levels—principally in the Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston areas—intentionally discriminate against people of color. 

In July of this year, the Department of Justice sent Texas Governor Greg Abbott a letter arguing that four Democratic districts—three of them coalition, or synonymously, majority-minority districts—were racially gerrymandered and that the Fifth Circuit had declared coalition districts unconstitutional. While this was a misstatement and blatant misinterpretation of the law, it still instructed Texas to redraw its maps, and Governor Abbott obliged by adding redistricting to the legislative agenda, claiming the state no longer needed coalition districts. 

Now, with the passage of the new maps, the Texas Legislature doubles down on its original gerrymander, seeking to dismantle majority Black and Brown communities and weaken their political power for the years to come, and critically, ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. 

WaPo:

President Donald Trump privately pushed Indiana’s top GOPlawmakers to redraw their state’s congressional maps this week, while outside allies lodged a pressure campaign, part of an increasingly urgent effort to help Republicans preserve their narrow majority in next year’s U.S. House elections.

Indiana’s Republican lawmakers remain divided. But Trump’s direct input appears to be making a difference, with at least one critic who attended meetings at the White House on Tuesday, which also included Vice President JD Vance, softening his position.

State Rep. Jim Lucas (R) told the Indianapolis Star that he was more open to redistricting after hearing from Vance, a sharp turn in rhetoric from just weeks ago, when he questioned on X whether it was worth “putting many good state elected officials at risk because of a political redistricting stunt!”

The Indiana debate shows how closely every seat is being fought. Republicans already hold seven of nine U.S. House seats and it’s possible new maps would yield them only a single new favorable district. But that couldmake a difference in a Congress where Republicans now hold a narrow advantage, 219-212, with four vacancies. A loss of GOP control would let Democrats thwart some of Trump’s agenda and investigate his administration…

AP:

The Utah Legislature will need to rapidly redraw the state’s congressional boundaries after a judge ruled Monday that the Republican-controlled body circumvented safeguards put in place by voters to ensure districts aren’t drawn to favor any party.

The current map, adopted in 2021, divides Salt Lake County — Utah’s population center and a Democratic stronghold — among the state’s four congressional districts, all of which have since elected Republicans by wide margins.

District Court Judge Dianna Gibson made few judgments on the content of the map but declared it unlawful because lawmakers had weakened and ignored an independent commission established by voters to prevent partisan gerrymandering.

“The nature of the violation lies in the Legislature’s refusal to respect the people’s exercise of their constitutional lawmaking power and to honor the people’s right to reform their government,” Gibson said in the ruling.

New maps will need to be drawn quickly, before candidates start filing in early January for the 2026 midterm elections. The ruling gives lawmakers a deadline of Sept. 24 and allows voting rights groups involved in the legal challenge to submit alternate proposals to the court.

But appeals expected from Republican officials could help them run out the clock to possibly delay adopting new maps until 2028.

Barry Burden and Veronica Judson have written this article for Legislative Studies Quarterly. Here is the abstract:

We investigate whether the differing population sizes of legislative districts affect the ability to engage in partisan gerrymandering. We conjecture that larger populations facilitate partisan gerrymandering by providing mapmakers with more “raw material” to manipulate, and this might make such districts less compact. Evidence based on measures of partisan bias, district population, and compactness suggests that more populous districts encourage partisan distortion and do so partly through violations of compactness. Regression analysis of lower and upper chamber state legislative maps shows that more populous districts lead to more partisan bias in maps even after accounting for other aspects of districts and Voting Rights Act requirements that affect how states draw district lines.

Politico:

When word got out that Texas might undertake an extraordinary mid-decade redistricting at Donald Trump’s behest, a handful of top California Democratic operatives floated an idea to Rep. Zoe Lofgren: Could California respond in kind?

Lofgren, the chair of California’s 43-member Democratic delegation, consulted in June with a trusted data expert who dismissed it as absurd — a foolhardy end-run around the state’s popular redistricting panel with no guarantee of yielding enough blue seats to fully offset Texas. Deterred by those misgivings, California Democrats instead spent weeks putting up a front, dangling the threat of a countermove without making any real plans to do so.

“It seemed to me worth a bluff,” Lofgren said. “If the Texans and Trump thought they’d go through all of this and they’d end up not gaining anything, maybe they would stop.”

“But they didn’t stop,” she added. “They just doubled down.”

So did California Democrats, especially Gov. Gavin Newsom. In a matter of weeks, they bluffed themselves into the marquee political contest of Trump’s second term, a high-voltage fight to shape the outcome of the 2026 midterms and the remaining years of his presidency.

“It got very real, very fast,” recounted Newsom, whose provocative podcast appearances and social media posturing lit the fuse for this slapdash effort — and positioned him as a de facto leader of the opposition party in advance of his likely 2028 White House run.

Texas Republicans approved a gerrymandered map early Saturday morning.

POLITICO spoke with nearly 50 people involved with the California effort, including lawmakers, political operatives, staffers and redistricting wonks. Many were granted anonymity to share details of private deliberations of the tightly-guarded process, which spanned multiple states and levels of government. Together, they paint a picture of a showdown propelled not by painstaking deliberations but by its own self-generating momentum and the opportunity for a rudderless Democratic party to remake itself as a political street brawler….