The following is a guest post from Bruce Cain and Ben Schneer:
In our August post on the Election Law Blog, we described the mid-decade congressional redistricting efforts as making conditional bets on the size of the November 2026 electoral swing. We argued that the Trump-instigated Republican partisan plans would likely pay off if the 2026 election resembled the one in 2024 or at least was only mildly adverse for Republicans, but the expected gains would shrink as the swing toward Democrats grew. We pointed out a well-known line-drawing principle that spreading partisan strength more efficiently necessarily entailed more exposure to wave elections or other unforeseen circumstances.
As it turned out, the election more resembled what happened in 2006 than the 2024 outcome: a big swing against the Republicans that flipped both houses of Congress. The misconception was that Trump would be roughly as popular as he was when he was elected in 2024 and that the newly won-over groups like Latino voters and young men would remain in the Republican coalition. Those assumptions were wrong, and consequently, the redistricting plans yielded just a fraction of what Republicans had hoped for.
Redistricting scholars had long observed that partisan plans often did not achieve all that the line-drawers intended, and sometimes even backfired, resulting in even greater losses from the pre-redistricting seat share. Bernie Grofman and Thomas Brunell called such plans “dummymanders,” reflecting Grofman’s penchant for wry wit. But the term was never precise about how much loss made you a dummy, and more importantly, how much blame should be attributed to the plan as opposed to a coinciding swing…..
To sum up, in August we called these redraws conditional bets on the size of the electoral swing. Judged against expectations, the Republican maps fell far short of their expectations. Yet compared with keeping the old maps, they still came out a few seats ahead at our best estimates, even net of California’s counter-gerrymander, and by the current count either none or one state backfired, depending on whether the Democratic candidate wins NC-3. All that said, a few more points of swing would have turned some of those maps, Texas above all and also Florida, into dummymanders that would have added to the generational Republican wipeout in 2026. For mapmakers weighing a gerrymander in the future, Indiana’s proposed map, and to some extent Texas and North Carolina, illustrate how quickly an aggressive map can turn into losses when the vote moves against the gerrymandering party.
