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Democrats are staring down a gerrymandering Armageddon, and don’t have a lot of good answers. But if they think this current moment is frightening, just wait until the coming reapportionment apocalypse.

Their current gerrymandering problem threatens their hopes of taking back control of the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms. Reapportionment could be much worse than that, potentially an existential threat that pushes them into a minority for another decade.

How leading Democrats address these two significant challenges will determine whether they can pry back control of Congress, state legislatures and even the White House. But as Republican gerrymanders threaten to metastasize uncontrollably across the national map, Democrats don’t seem to fully understand the math or the depth of their difficulties.

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Any day now, Texas will enact a new congressional map that nets as many as five additional GOP seats. This brazen mid-decade power grab will enhance the Republicans’ slender, three-seat majority in the U.S. House — and it won’t stop there. Ohio, Indiana, Missouri and Florida will go next, grabbing the GOP perhaps another six seats. Should Republicans decide to play serious hardball, they could remap North Carolina, Kentucky, Kansas and New Hampshire too.

Democrats have more limited options. In California, voters will be asked this fall to suspend the state’s independent redistricting commission and allow the legislature to enact a new map that adds five blue seats in retaliation for the Texas gerrymander. If voters approve — and that’s not guaranteed — the two maps would cancel each other out.

But what’s step two? The trouble for Democrats is they have nowhere else to target if Republicans keep on escalating. Blue-state governors are talking tough and insisting they are at war, but that rhetoric is no match for reality. Democrats simply control too few states, and they’ve pretty much maxed out the maps in the states where they hold trifecta power.

Blue-state governors are talking tough and insisting they are at war, but that rhetoric is no match for reality. Democrats control too few states, and they’ve maxed out the maps in the states where they hold trifecta power.

New York’s state constitution would prevent creating new congressional maps before the 2028 election. Illinois likely cannot carve out an additional Democratic seat in a map that already hands them 14 of 17 districts. State courts in Maryland have already blocked one Democratic map that would have eliminated the state’s lone red seat, creating an 8-0 wipeout. Oregon’s governor will not propose a new 6-0 map that would erase one GOP-friendly district.

So the arithmetic is stark, and it’s not on the Democrats’ side. That’s before the U.S. Supreme Court hears the Callais case in October and potentially overturns the last remnants of the Voting Rights Act, leading to the likely erasure of majority-minority seats currently held by Black Democrats in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

So Democrats cannot realistically gerrymander their way out of their gerrymandering problem. If you’re wondering whether this blatant exercise of partisan political power is constitutional, the Supreme Court has already said yes, ruling that partisan gerrymandering is purely a political matter and not its problem. State courts, in many or most cases, are controlled by whichever party holds power.

In other words, Democrats are going to have to win elections. To win a congressional majority next year, they might need to run the board in a diminishing number of genuine swing districts across the nation — perhaps 16 or so. Politics and persuasion — on a shrinking map, and in difficult electoral environments like Iowa and Arizona — is the only option. That’s a big problem, given that no prominent Democrats seem to be acknowledging that openly, or indeed saying anything other than they’re ready to “fight fire with fire.”

But bigger trouble for Democrats lies ahead: The map is about to shrink even further. This is another reason why gerrymandering blue states is such a short-term plan — someday soon, there will be fewer of them. When the next congressional reapportionment happens after the 2030 census, red states stand to make huge gains. Florida and Texas, according to early estimates, could add an additional four seats each, perhaps five in Texas. The Brennan Center suggests that Idaho, Utah, Arizona and North Carolina would each gain a seat.

More important still, those red-state gains have to come from somewhere, and that’s largely from current blue states. California could lose four seats and New York might lose two, while Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Oregon, Illinois and Wisconsin could each lose one.

Red states like Texas and Florida stand to make big gains after the next congressional reapportionment — and most of those new seats will be subtracted from blue states like California and New York.

That’s a significant swing, and most of those would effectively be blue seats heading south. Illinois has already packed Republican voterss into three overwhelming red seats. It’s hard to imagine they could draw a 14-2 map in 2031. The Oregon, Rhode Island and Minnesota seats might also come at Democrats’ expense. If New York and California successfully gerrymander Republicans into oblivion before all this happens, it will be far more difficult to erase any remaining red seats.

It’s certainly possible that GOP mapmakers in Texas and Florida can’t draw all eight or nine of those new districts as Republican seats. But they have proven highly adept at turning population gains — even those driven almost entirely by communities of color — to their advantage, consolidating most new seats for themselves while “packing and cracking” likely Democratic voters as much as possible. If the Supreme Court further eliminates the Voting Rights Act protections around racial gerrymanders, this task would become easier still.

Democrats need a long-term plan to counter both the GOP gerrymanders happening right now and the coming, and potentially catastrophic, reapportionment. Short-term gerrymanders in blue states might put a Band-Aid on the immediate problem, but could come back to bite them once reapportionment arrives. The simple reality, as unsatisfying as this may be to nearly all factions of the party, is that they have to figure out how to win elections on maps designed by their opponents.

There’s literally no other choice. If a dozen blue state House seats migrate southward, so too will a dozen Electoral College votes, giving Texas, Florida and Idaho more clout in presidential elections and taking it away from New York, California, Oregon and Rhode Island. Democrats will need to find a new route to 270 electors by 2032, and that will necessitate flipping at least one state currently understood as red.

The U.S. Senate presents the same challenge. There are 25 states that voted for Donald Trump all three times: They have 50 Republican senators. If Democrats want to retake the chamber, they will need to win all the other Senate seats — which won’t be easy — plus win one back from the other side. That’s harder still.

Democrats are in a hole, and the retaliatory gerrymander of California only gets them a couple of rungs up the ladder. They need a plan that gets them all the way out. Instead of “fighting fire with fire,” and declaring wars that they can’t actually wage for another three years — in the 2028 presidential campaign, that is — they’d be wise to devise such a plan. It has to start with persuading voters in states where the Democratic brand has become toxic to consider them afresh. And it had better start now.

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How will the Electoral College look in 2032?
A buzzy study predicts a rightward shift. What do you think?
Halina Bennet
Aug 26, 2025

My timeline is full of takes on the New York Times article “How the Electoral College Could Tilt Further From Democrats,” published on Sunday. People are discussing everything from the study’s methodology to reasons for the tilt to corrective strategies for Democrats.

The main conversation I’m seeing (definitely because of my algorithm) is about the failure of blue states to build dense, affordable housing, causing them to lose votes.

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The year is 2032. Studying the Electoral College map, a Democratic presidential candidate can no longer plan to sweep New Hampshire, Minnesota and the “blue wall” battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and win the White House. A victory in the swing state of Nevada would not help, either.

That is the nightmare scenario many Democratic Party insiders see playing out if current U.S. population projections hold. After every decennial census, like the one coming up in 2030, congressional seats are reallocated among the states based on population shifts. Those seats in turn affect how big a prize each state is within the Electoral College — or how a candidate actually wins the presidency.

In the next decade, the Electoral College will tilt significantly away from Democrats.

Deeply conservative Texas and Florida could gain a total of five congressional seats, and the red states of Utah and Idaho are each expected to add a seat.

Those gains will come at the expense of major Democratic states like New York and California, according to a New York Times analysis of population projections by Esri, a nonpartisan company whose mapping software and demographic data are widely used by businesses and governments across the world.

Across all of the possible scenarios in the nine states that would be considered battlegrounds in the 2032 election, Democrats would see about a third of their current winning Electoral College combinations disappear if population projections hold. However, when looking only at the most feasible winning combinations based on voting behaviors in the 2024 election, the outlook is far worse. Of Democrats’ 25 most plausible paths to victory in 2024, only five would remain.

Some groups have arrived at an even more challenging outlook for Democrats in 2032. For example, the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan organization, projected Republicans to have three more safe seats from Texas and Florida, and New York to lose one more seat than The Times’s projection.

The Democratic Party already faces acute challenges after its disastrous losses in 2024, including fundraising woes, an electorate that slid decidedly to the right, a vacuum of leadership and a sharp decline in voter registrations.

The party is also battling President Trump’s push for red states to redraw their congressional maps in the middle of the decade in order to secure Republicans an advantage in next year’s midterm elections. While this does not directly affect a future Electoral College, it adds urgency for Democrats to expand into new areas.

The dire post-census projections put the party in a bind between two necessary tasks: investing to win in the short term, including in the midterms, and building a future in states that have not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in decades.

Still, the looming Electoral College shift presents such an existential threat to the party that many Democrats, including the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, are adamant that planning for the next decade must begin now.

“There’s no doubt about it, and it’s a lot of what I talked about when I ran for chair,” Ken Martin, the D.N.C. leader, said in an interview. He added, “We have to acknowledge that there's some of these states that are red that are going to need more resources to essentially help us win down the road.”
Red states are growing fast, and blue states aren’t keeping up

Rapid growth in Southern and Western red states is driving the changes to the political map, according to The Times’s analysis. Texas and Florida are each expected to gain millions of residents in the coming years, expanding each state’s population by nearly 13 percent, according to Esri.

The fastest growing Democratic state, Colorado, will expand its population by less than 10 percent. New York and Illinois are both expected to shrink by 2030, and California’s population will essentially stay the same.

These projections are not a guarantee of things to come, and could still change significantly. Natural disasters, economic upheaval and other factors could alter the country’s population patterns. Political realignment among demographic groups, such as Republicans’ gaining with Latino voters, could further scramble the landscape.

But some of the population shifts that will influence the reallocation of congressional seats have already taken place. State populations have changed enough since 2020 that if the redistribution of congressional seats occurred this year, red states would gain five seats. Blue states would lose five.

Should the projections hold, one hope for Democrats is to do what seems, at least after the 2024 election, impossible: pivot to the South. That would mean turning states like Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana — all places Mr. Trump won by more than 20 percentage points — into competitive battlegrounds, and quickly.

Democrats point to underlying trends as signs of hope in some of those states, or at least as a foundation to build upon. Mississippi, they note, has the highest percentage of Black voting-age adults in the country. Alabama and Louisiana both just added a second majority Black congressional district, though the Louisiana district is currently being challenged before the Supreme Court. And Arkansas was the only red state to add Democrats to its Legislature during the last election.

Additionally, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a group founded by the former Democratic attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr., noted in a memo last month that the population growth in the two largest counties in Texas, Harris and Dallas, was driven completely by communities of color. Those counties and their suburbs are expected to see the fastest growth by 2030.

In Georgia, a newer battleground state that swung back toward Republicans and Mr. Trump in 2024, communities of color are the only ones that have grown since 2020, adding about 487,000 people to the state’s population. At the same time, the state’s non-Hispanic white population has dropped by about 20,000.

But 2024 showed Democrats that demographics no longer spell the party’s destiny, as Latino voters drifted significantly toward Republicans and Black male voters moved slightly rightward.
Hedging for the future

To blunt its concerns about an increasingly tough Electoral College map, and potentially turn Southern states competitive, the Democratic Party needs money.

Yet months into Mr. Martin’s tenure as chair, cash remains scarce after spending billions on the 2024 defeat, a record sum roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of a small country. Top officials have discussed whether they might need to borrow money this year to keep paying the bills. The same donors who readily contributed to the 2024 effort are reluctant to sign more checks, especially as Democrats flail politically in response to the aggressive first months of the Trump administration.

The Democratic state parties in the South, meanwhile, have seen little to no investment for decades, leaving no local donor base to draw from. Most do not have more than a single office with a skeletal staff. The Alabama Democratic Party, for example, has just five people on its payroll, according to its most recent campaign finance disclosure.

A recent governor’s race in Mississippi offers a particularly striking example. In 2023, Democrats had their first real opportunity in 20 years to win a statewide race in Mississippi, when Brandon Presley, a popular local mayor and a cousin of Elvis Presley, challenged an unpopular incumbent, Gov. Tate Reeves.

Mr. Presley’s viability excited Democrats across the country, even as his stance against abortion kept most major national Democratic donors from significantly contributing. Bennie Thompson, the lone Democratic representative from Mississippi who has held elected office in the state for half a century, said he had expected a flood of questions from national Democrats eager for a major upset.

“I was never asked, not one call,” Mr. Thompson said. He criticized the D.N.C. for “parachuting” in operatives and not hiring local experts to help build a coalition for Mr. Presley. He added that money was wasted on expensive television ads that came with fees lining the pockets of national consultants.

With a month and a half left in the race, Mr. Martin, then the vice-chair of the D.N.C., attended a private event with Mr. Presley at a casino in Biloxi, Miss. The two spoke about the looming final sprint and how the D.N.C. could help.

In Mr. Martin’s recollection, Mr. Presley had been blunt. “I’m on the cusp of being one of the first Democrats elected governor in the Deep South in a generation, yet there’s no infrastructure on the ground to help me,” Mr. Presley had said, according to Mr. Martin. “I have to build it all myself.”

Six weeks later, Mr. Presley lost by three percentage points.

As party chair, Mr. Martin has initiated a program to cut checks to state parties, prioritizing conservative states over safer Democratic territory. Each state party in a blue state gets $17,500 monthly, and those in red states get $22,500.

From Mr. Martin’s perch, investing in the future is not a matter of resources but a shift in behavior. Democrats raised nearly $3 billion in the last presidential cycle, with much of that money coming in the final stretch. Mr. Martin pointed to those totals as evidence that money was available to Democrats, both now and in the future.

“I’m not going to take a scarcity mind-set to this,” Mr. Martin said in an interview. “We can do both, right? We just have to. You have to be diligent about it, you have to be disciplined, and you have to make the case that it’s not an either/or proposition.’”

There is debate, however, about whether spending money in some of these deep red states is the best way to counter the looming Electoral College threat.

And even money cannot speed up time. Georgia took a decade of work before becoming competitive.

“In an ideal world, what it would look like is eight- to nine-figure investment over the course of a decade,” said Charles V. Taylor Jr., the executive director of the Mississippi conference of the N.A.A.C.P., about what it would take to make Mississippi competitive. “And it also is spent on the ground.”

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