Trump's Republicans had a plan to lock in Texas for a generation. Why is it failing?

The United States midterm elections are less than three weeks away, with the Nov. 3 election date looking to become a reckoning for President Donald Trump.

In 2024, Trump won his presidential re-election contest, with his Republican Party securing majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, known as a trifecta.

The party’s control of several state legislatures and judicial support for their efforts to redraw electoral districts looked like it would cement the Republican majority in the House, a process known as "gerrymandering."

But by October 2026, a scant two years later, outlets like Politico report that Republican leaders have all but ceded the House to the opposition Democrats and are turning their efforts to defending the Senate and holding on to what seats they can in the House.

Did Republican efforts to gerrymander themselves a majority fail, and if so, why?

RE: Districting

The U.S. House of Representatives consists of 435 seats, apportioned to its 50 states by population (with each state receiving one seat no matter how small its population is), with its members re-elected every two years.

Each state then draws its own electoral boundaries as it sees fit, usually controlled by its local state legislature.

At a local level, it is one of the most significant contributions of state legislatures to national elections, as redistricting efforts can, in theory, produce significantly different results depending on how they were drawn.

Majority parties often attempt to split their opponent’s voters into as many seats as possible, diluting their vote, or concentrating them into a few seats, thereby ensuring that both parties have unassailable seats, but the opposition has fewer.

These redistricting efforts are usually held after nationally mandated censuses, usually held at the beginning of each decade, and in the past both parties have attempted to gerrymander their states and win the state before going to the ballot.

What is unique about 2026 is that at least nine states, most of them Republican, will see new electoral districts enacted off-cycle, while several other states, such as Missouri, saw their attempts rejected judicially, at least for the moment.

States such as Texas redrew their maps extensively, and in Texas’s case, with the explicit encouragement of Trump.

But due to factors arguably within the control of Republican leaders, many of these attempts appear to have failed or backfired.

Deep in the heart of Texas

Texas last had a majority of Democratic Congressmen over two decades ago, in 2002.

But according to the Pew Research Center, ever since a 2004 redistricting, Texas Congressional Republicans have held the state.

After Trump’s 2024 victory, he encouraged Texas Republicans, as well as those of other states, to carry out a mid-cycle revamp, and the resultant map looked to give them 30 out of 38 seats, up from 25, according to the Texas Tribune.

For context, Republicans now hold 218 seats in the House of Representatives, with Democrats holding 214 seats, which is a razor-thin majority.

Five seats in Texas alone would double their majority; this is before considering other affected states.

Democratic states were so concerned about this that one, California, threatened to enact its own partisan mid-cycle redistricting effort to effectively cancel out the gains made in Texas, and then did it when Texas passed its new maps.

Coalition politics

But the districts were drawn up based on the results of the 2024 general election, which saw Trump assemble a new electoral coalition made up of voters not traditionally Republican, such as young men and Latinos, adding to groups like white working-class men.

Republicans assumed that the coalition was essentially set in stone, or at least would last them for some time, as Reuters reports.

But events since Trump has taken back the White House have changed the complexion of 2026’s election.

As a previous article explained, between Trump’s trade tariffs and his war of choice in Iran that has spiked energy prices, he not only broke his promise to ease the cost of living; he’s all but blown those promises up.

ICE

Worse yet is the Justice Department’s actions against illegal immigration.

Latino voters are not, as a rule, naturally against immigration enforcement, largely because they are not a homogeneous group.

So their stance on immigration varies, as is explained in a commentary by the Los Angeles Times, and many not only support ICE, but are members of it.

Trump’s return to power has seen a notable enforcement of immigration policy and deportations.

However, many Latinos have come to criticise those efforts as overzealous, and feel that they have become the unwarranted target of those efforts due to their race.

They have been subject to arrests, and even deportation, often without due process, and to vulnerable individuals including babies.

This has fractured support for Trump and his Republican Party, especially in border states such as Texas.

Dummymandering

The seats that were specifically drawn up to rely on their support now face a situation where not only is their vote share decreased, but in some cases it makes them especially vulnerable to electoral collapse, as is described by polling analyst Nate Silver in the Silver Bulletin.

This is a process that is known as “Dummymandering”, and Silver points out that efforts to redistrict are designed for ordinary, competitive elections.

But Trump and the Republicans are facing a unique set of circumstances: Trump’s approval ratings are especially low, and the economy is performing especially poorly, at least for most run-of-the-mill individuals, for reasons that can be directly attributed to Trump's policies.

Furthermore, Trump isn’t personally involved in a election this November, so even his personal charisma and popularity amongst never-say-die supporters are of limited value, as it does not always transfer to other Republican candidates.

Silver points out that Democrats are doing especially well not just in Texas, but in other traditionally Republican states such as Kansas and Alaska, signifying that the Republicans are not just facing a loss, but an electoral wave.

These effects are pronounced in Texas, but are affecting races all across the country, and Republican efforts to secure their majority look to have crippled their ability to hold it.