House

With few options left in redistricting, Democrats ramp up affordability message

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by Mike Lillis - 05/12/26 6:00 AM ET

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by Mike Lillis - 05/12/26 6:00 AM ET

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Where do House Democrats go next?

That’s the big question facing party leaders in the wake of last week’s ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court that killed a new House map designed to give Democrats a big boost in November’s midterms.

Behind House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Democratic leaders are vowing a full-court press featuring new redistricting efforts in blue states, new lawsuits against gerrymandered maps in red states, and a renewed promise to fight for judicial, electoral and campaign finance reforms if they seize power in the next Congress.

The House Democratic Caucus will huddle as a group Thursday in the Capitol to chart its next steps on each front. And party leaders insist the Virginia ruling, while a setback, is no permanent barrier to achieving their goals.

“We remain undeterred,” Jeffries wrote Monday in a letter to fellow Democrats. “Our effort to forcefully push back against the Republican redistricting scheme will not slow down. We are just getting started.”

Their options, however, are scarce, given the short window remaining before November.

On the redistricting front, the shrinking timeline means the opportunity for additional blue states to redraw their lines this year has been essentially exhausted, even as a small handful of GOP-led states are expected to alter their maps in the coming weeks with eyes on eliminating Democratic seats.

On the litigation side, the conservative lean of the U.S. Supreme Court — where the various state lawsuits might eventually land — predicts that Republicans ultimately will win the redistricting arms race, which was instigated by President Trump to protect the GOP’s House majority in the next Congress.

Meanwhile, the Democrats’ promise to overhaul the judicial and electoral systems can’t be realized until they have power — next year, at the earliest.

The accumulation of imposing factors, to be sure, has not eliminated the Democrats’ chances of flipping control of the lower chamber in November. In fact, they appear to have the edge given the historic unpopularity of Trump, the economic anxieties of voters, the sheer number of vulnerable Republicans facing tough reelection contests and the history of a midterm cycle that predicts heavy losses for the party of the president.

“[We] do still think the Democrats are favored overall in the House, particularly if the environment does not improve for Republicans,” Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, an independent election handicapper based at the University of Virginia, wrote Monday.

Still, the Virginia court ruling immediately nullified four new Democratic-leaning districts in the Old Dominion, where the party was hoping to gain a 10-1 advantage. Combined with an earlier decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to void key parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) — a ruling that could wipe out several other Democratic seats across the South — the verdict has created higher hurdles for Democrats as they race to provide a check on Trump in the final two years of his White House tenure.

A number of Democratic-controlled states are eying new maps in response to those rulings, including New York, Colorado, Washington and Illinois. But each of those states has already had its midterm primary, meaning those changes could be in place to help Democrats in the 2028 presidential cycle, but not in time for this year’s elections.

Of the blue states considering redistricting, only Maryland has not had its primary. But an earlier push to redraw the map to eliminate the sole Republican seat — a strategy championed by Jeffries and Gov. Wes Moore (D) — hit a wall in the state Senate, where the leading Democrat opposed that plan.

In the court battle, Democrats are also pressing their case with no lack of urgency, launching lawsuits challenging new Republican maps in Texas, Missouri, Florida, Wisconsin and Virginia. But most of those states have rules empowering state legislators to adopt redistricting plans unilaterally, without taking the issue to voters. And outside observers expect the U.S. Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, to uphold those changes if the challenges get that far.

The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election handicapper, predicts that the combination of the Virginia and VRA rulings will give Republicans six or seven more seats than they otherwise would have had — a dynamic that has buoyed Republican leaders as they scramble to keep their paper-thin majority in the next Congress.

“We have a battlefield, a map, that favors Republicans,” Rep. Richard Hudson (N.C.), t