Cook Political Predicts GOP Took 12 House Seats From Dems With Trump’s Gerrymander Push

(AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

Dave Wasserman, the senior editor and elections analyst for The Cook Political Report, released a deep-dive assessment on Wednesday on the state of play for the House following the unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering by several states ahead of the midterms.

President Donald Trump kicked off a mad dash of political gerrymandering by pressuring Texas to redraw its map in an effort to remove some five Democratic Party-held seats in the state. California followed suit and gerrymandered its map in retaliation, eliminating some five GOP-held seats in the state.

Wasserman crunched the data and came up with the definitive number for how the gerrymandering wars, which spread to ten states in total from Florida to Utah to Ohio, impacted the House map overall and shifted the advantage for Democrats going into November.

Wasserman’s numbers are based on Cook’s PVI (partisan voter index), which labels each district’s partisan tilt based on past presidential performance.

“If no boundaries had changed since 2024 and Democrats hypothetically won every seat more Democratic than a PVI score of R+3 — and nothing else — they would have ended up with 235 districts this fall – a 20-seat gain and the exact same number of seats they held after the 2018 ‘blue wave’ during Trump’s first term,” read the top line bullet points Cook sent out from Wasserman’s analysis. Adding:

But under the new lines, if Democrats were to win every seat more Democratic than a PVI score of R+3 — and nothing else — they would end up with just 223 seats — enough for a majority, but a full dozen seats fewer and just five seats over the magic number of 218.

So, all in all, Wasserman and Cook’s PVI ratings concluded that the GOP-led gerrymandering efforts may cost Democrats 12 House seats in an environment that favors them by around 3-points.

“In late spring of 2025, it would have been hard to believe that ten states would have new congressional maps in place for the 2026 midterms. But the Trump White House’s brazen strategy of pressuring GOP-controlled states to eliminate as many Democratic seats as possible to save the party’s deeply endangered majority set off a chain reaction that has fundamentally altered the fight for the House in 2026 and beyond,” wrote Wasserman of the stunning situation ahead of the midterms.

Wasserman also noted that the map is “less elastic than before” – meaning less competitive Republicans in blue states and less competitive Democrats in red states.

“It’s glaringly obvious that the gerrymandering wars have devastated red-state Democrats and blue-state Republicans alike, homogenizing more and more delegations,” added the analysis, “Under the new 2026 lines, the number of seats in the ‘competitive zone’ of D+5 to R+5 has fallen from 87 to 77.”

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