The GOP's Desperate Struggle to Keep Control of the House

Trying to maximize partisan advantage through creative legislative district line-drawing has a long history in American politics. Gerrymandering, as it is commonly called, got its name from a Massachusetts governor named Elbridge Gerry. His efforts to create a salamander-shaped district to help his party actually took place over two centuries ago. What is new this year about such machinations is their timing. The gerrymandering process typically takes place in the immediate aftermath of the once-a-decade census. When the new population numbers become available at the start of a new decade, redistricting takes place to try to maintain equal-population districts for the House of Representatives and state legislative seats (in keeping with a requirement imposed by the U.S. Supreme Court in a series of rulings during the 1960s). Redrawing during the middle of a decade has been, until now, highly unusual. Only if courts found fault with the maps drawn during the usual time early in the decade would legislatures find themselves obliged to make a mid-decade effort to correct them. Efforts by Republicans in such states as Texas and Florida to redraw their legally acceptable maps for congressional districts now is part of a larger, seemingly desperate effort by GOP leaders to retain control of the U.S. House as the 2026 off-year elections loom. That strategy has provoked Democrats in states such as California, Illinois, and New York to threaten to do the same thing.

The single most important catalyst in bringing about this odd state of affairs is the closeness of the margin between the two parties in the U.S. House of Representatives — the narrowest in over 90 years. At present, there are 220 Republicans there, 212 Democrats and three vacancies (all in districts the Democrats usually win). If the Democrats fill the three vacancies with members of their party, it would only take a net swing of three seats from the Republicans to the Democrats in the 2026 election cycle to give the Democrats control of the House. Given that the party in control of the White House almost always loses seats in the off-year election cycle, the anxiety among Republicans about keeping control of the House becomes easy to understand.

The most heavily publicized part of the GOP’s efforts to keep control of the House is mid-decade redistricting, but that’s not the only strategy the Republicans are pursuing. President Trump has ordered the U.S. Census Bureau to conduct a mid-decade census that counts U.S. citizens only for the purpose of congressional representation rather than the customary practice of counting everyone in the country for that purpose regardless of their citizenship status. (Native Americans still living on tribal lands were a special exception to that rule until they became U.S. citizens by act of Congress in the 1920s.) Doing so would likely hurt the Democrats’ representation in the U.S. House, because states with high numbers of non-citizens (many but not all of which tend to be strongly Democratic) would likely lose seats. That’s because U.S. House seats are awarded to states in proportion to their population as determined by the Census Bureau. If non-citizens are not counted for the purpose of congressional representation, the “red” states would likely gain seats overall at the expense of the “blue” ones.

The idea of counting citizens only for the purpose of congressional representation has been circulating in the nativist-populist wing of the Republican party for decades. The origins of that idea are much older, however, and date back at least to the early 1920s. Once the number of congressional representatives reached 435 after the 1910 census (as a result of population growth), a sense grew in Congress that a numerical limit was needed lest the House become so big in terms of members as to be unable to function efficiently. That led to the passage of a federal law in 1911 that capped the overall size of the House at 435. Thus, after the 1920 census was completed and the results were released, gains in populations leading to more House seats for some states would henceforth mean fewer seats in others.

That new, zero-sum situation prompted House leaders in both parties to come up with some outside-the-box ideas about reapportionment. Some Republicans in the House, which the GOP controlled throughout the 1920s, sought to protect their majority by shrinking the number of seats held by the Southern states, which were overwhelmingly Democratic because white Southerners who dominated the political system there viewed the Republicans as “the party of Lincoln.” The 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, contained a clause in Section 2 authorizing Congress to reduce states’ House delegations in proportion to the number of eligible voters denied the right to do so. (The clause had been intended to put pressure on the Southern states after the Civil War to allow black men to vote.) By the 1920s, almost all African Americans had been excluded from the Southern electorate by such means as literacy and “understanding” tests, as well as poll taxes that required would-be voters to pay in order to cast a ballot. Those requirements were administered in a blatantly discriminatory fashion, thus screening out all but a tiny handful of black voters.

When the Republicans running the House in the 1920s suggested invoking the relevant clause of the 14th Amendment, some Southern Democrats serving there countered by suggesting that if the GOP made that move, they would push for excluding non-citizens from the census for the purposes of congressional representation. At the time, the total number of resident aliens was high due to decades of heavy immigration and they mostly lived in the North. Thus, excluding non-citizens from the census count would have greatly disadvantaged the Northern states at a time when the GOP was an almost entirely Northern-based political party. The resulting impasse between the Republicans and Democrats over reapportionment of the House was so great that both sides eventually backed down, dropping both the 14th Amendment clause proposal and the citizens-only census one. But the idea of excluding non-citizens never entirely went away, and now it has resurfaced again.

What is troubling to thoughtful people about the current redistricting furor is the Republican pattern of trying to change the rules if the GOP cannot be certain of winning control of the House in 2026. And the Democrats who advocate, in essence, fighting fire with fire are troubling, too, because what they are proposing is even more extremely partisan redistricting in the states that they control, in response to what partisan Republicans have started to do in Texas. The net result would be likely be a set of maps (in states where one party is dominant) that are even less reflective of the electorate’s preferences than the maps that already exist. And even if Donald Trump’s order to the Census Bureau doesn’t translate into a mid-decade census excluding non-citizens, simply suggesting such a thing seems likely to fuel even more social and political polarization. Whether cooler heads will eventually prevail is unclear, but at the moment the odds of that happening seem low.