President Donald Trump thought he had a brilliant plan to save his House Republican majority from his own growing unpopularity. His push for mid-decade redistricting to eliminate Democratic seats would give Republicans enough padding to sustain losses elsewhere and keep Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in power.

But this scheme collapsed Tuesday as a “blue tsunami” washed over these districts and destroyed Trump’s too-clever-by-half plans.

In short: “The Republican plan to gerrymander their way into holding onto power was a complete and utter disaster,” said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.

Between August 2025 and June 2026, Republicans redrew 15 House districts in their favor. Or so they thought. They made five seats in Texas lean more to Republicans, four in Florida, two in Ohio and one in North Carolina. Then, after the Supreme Court ripped the Voting Rights Act apart in the Louisiana v. Callais decision, Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee each changed seats drawn to elect Black lawmakers into ones that favored white Republicans.

But for all these efforts, after the tsunami tide retreated, Republicans were left with just three wins in these 15 seats – one each in Louisiana, Tennessee and Texas. Overall, Republicans lost seats in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. Combined with the five Democratic wins in seats that California redistricted in response to the new Texas map, Republicans lost the redistricting war by two seats.

People react as voting results come in during an election night watch party Tuesday at Axelrad Beer Garden in Houston.

Sharon Steinmann/Austin American-Statesman/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images

Some of these wins were shocking to Republicans. In Alabama, the district represented by Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures was redrawn into a seat that Trump won in 2024 by 14 points, but on Tuesday, Figures won by 8. The district represented by former Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) was turned from a safe Democratic district into one that voted for Trump by nearly 20 points. Democrat Leticia Gutierrez won it by 16 points. In Florida, Democrats Pia Dandiya, Jared Moskowitz and Darren Soto all won districts Trump won by more than 10. So did Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur in Ohio and Rep. Don Davis in North Carolina.

And more, Democrats won romping victories at the state level, flipping at least five governor races, creating at least six new trifectas, winning control of five more state legislative chambers and breaking GOP legislative supermajorities in 10 states.

The failures across these states show the two big flaws in Trump’s redistricting plans.

One was that Republicans relied only on Trump’s 2024 win totals when they drew new maps in 2025. Particularly in Texas, they assumed Latino voters, who swung hard to Republicans in 2024, would stay in their column. But Trump’s victory with Latino voters that year was ultimately an aberration. It was a fatal error, especially after Trump and Republicans across the country engaged in a violent and racist mass deportation campaign targeting Latino communities.

“The way the maps were drawn was quite risky, because they were drawn around an assumption that the levels of support that Republicans got from Latino voters in 2024 would hold, and that there were a bunch of reasons to believe that that would not actually be the case,” said Katherine Fischer, the executive director of Texas Majority PAC. “And that’s exactly what happened (Tuesday) night.”

Texas Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez and candidates Johnny Garcia and Gutierrez all romped to wins in districts where Republicans relied on this assumption about Latino voters. Meanwhile, Democrats beat GOP incumbents in two more races in Texas to end the night up by one House seat in the state.

“We picked up congressional seats despite the fact that these districts were drawn for us to lose five seats,” said Kendall Scudder, Texas Democratic Party chairman.

Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) speaks during the "Stop the Trump Takeover" demonstration outside of the State Capitol on Aug. 16, 2025, in Austin, Texas.

Brandon Bell via Getty Images

The other problem for Republicans was that the size of their loss was so big, no gerrymander could overcome it. In fact, things could have been much worse had more GOP states followed Trump’s orders and drawn new maps. That would have been the case in Indiana and South Carolina, where maps rejected by just enough Republican state lawmakers could have flipped nearly their whole congressional delegations to Democrats.

The GOP wipeout now has significant consequences for redistricting going forward.

One is that with Democrats holding state leadership, even trifectas, in many areas, the present danger of GOP-led mid-decade redistricting has been beaten back in a lot of states. Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp announced on Wednesday that he will not call a special session of the legislature during the lame-duck period to redraw districts before Democrats take the reins, as he had suggested he would earlier in the year.

“Dead on arrival is any Republican attempt to further gerrymander our maps or take away the power of Black voters in this state, which they tried to do,” said Charlie Bailey, chairman of the Democratic Party of Georgia.

Democrats are also now in a position to roll back the two-decade-long gerrymandering wave that Republicans launched under Project REDMAP in 2010.

“It’s taken 16 years, but it feels like last night’s results have really eliminated the impact of that big right-wing swing,” said Mandara Meyers, executive director of The States Project, a Democratic group that spent $100 million to flip state legislatures in 2026.

In Wisconsin, Democrats broke through two decades of Republican gerrymandering to win full control of state government. They are now considering reversing the Republican maps that had locked them out of power for the past 20 years.

“We are going to consider congressional redistricting,” said Wisconsin state Rep. Greta Neubauer, the Democratic leader in the State Assembly. “We have gerrymandered maps in Wisconsin. They favor Republicans to a significant degree.”

In states like Georgia and Texas, where Democrats won both the governors’ races and one legislative chamber, Democrats hope they can get buy-in from enough Republicans to break existing gerrymanders and draw fair maps. That could happen with Republicans likely holding extremely slim majorities in the state Senate in both states.

“We flipped the state House, we will not have flipped the state Senate, and the congressional maps are still crazy, even though we’ve picked up one,” Fischer said about Texas. “But this is a blue state now, and we should not have such an imbalance of representation in any of these states’ chambers, given how the people are voting, so I expect Democrats will address that sometime, either within the next four years or in the next redistricting period.”

Democratic state representatives link arms in protest on the floor following the approval of a new congressional map during a special legislative session at the Tennessee State Capitol.

Madison Thorn/Bloomberg via Getty Images

To win the state House, Georgia Democrats had to overcome “a bad gerrymander,” Bailey said. That could be addressed by Democratic Gov.-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms if enough Republicans in the state Senate decide to lay down their arms in the redistricting war.

“We can have fair maps,” Bailey said. “Gov. Keisha Lance Bottoms can sign those. I’m not talking about gerrymandering in our favor. I’m just talking about a straight-up map.”

Ultimately, the only way to truly end the redistricting wars is for Congress to pass legislation banning partisan gerrymandering for good. Democrats passed legislation to do this in the House in 2021 with all Republicans opposed. The legislation failed in the Senate due to a Republican filibuster. But the complete flop of Trump’s plan on Tuesday could make a detente more appealing for Republicans, particularly as states like Georgia, North Carolina and Texas trend away from them.

Bisognano expects Democrats to introduce new legislation to ban partisan gerrymandering early next year.

“My hope is that after this catastrophe on the Republican side, maybe we’ll have more support from some of their members that maybe would look back and say, ‘I’m not sure that the best path for us was to publicly state that our only plan was to cheat these maps as much as we could,’” Bisognano said. “Sometimes it does take seismic change for people to come to their senses.”