Resistance: Gerrymanders, Midterms, and the Blue Tsunami

The Blue Tsunami of Election Day 2025 was a resounding rejection of the Republicans’ performative cruelty, incompetence, and destructive designs at all levels of government. The midterms – if they happen - are a year away. A lot is going to happen between now and then. I want to focus for the moment on one particular thing that everyone seems to think will advantage the Republicans – gerrymanders.

Trump has ordered Republican governors and legislators to redistrict their states to create more ironclad Republican Congressional districts and increase the number of House seats held by Republicans. States with Democratic governors and legislators, led by California, are responding by doing their own redistricting.

People generally believe this will result in more Republican seats. I’m not going to do the arithmetic. I want to consider the dynamics. Considering how completely Democrats – progressive ones at that! – won last night, I don’t believe the typical gerrymandering benefit will materialize for the Republicans next year. In fact, I think it will be just the opposite. Here's how I think it will go down.

In a state with fairly drawn districts, some are blue, some are red, and some are purple just by dint of geography and demographics. Districts are required to be ‘compact,’ a decidedly vague term that has been much ignored. But that means that in a fair redistricting, some districts are plopped down in the middle of blue cities, some are overlaid on red rural areas, and some spread over purple suburbs, exurbs, and other types of settlement. So sometimes you will just have a permanently blue or red district. And that’s okay. That’s fair.

A gerrymander, however, doesn’t leave this permanency to chance.

A successful gerrymander concentrates the opposing party’s voters into a single district so that that party’s candidate wins that district by an overwhelming amount, say with 60-65% of the vote.

All the other districts are drawn so that the party doing the gerrymander has a roughly 2% advantage. A 2% advantage is considered enough to make it a “safe” district, i.e. any minimally competent candidate from the advantaged party should be able to win. This makes it possible to regularly win in multiple districts outside the one where they concentrated the opposition.

But gerrymanders do not stand up well against tsunamis.

In an election where the voters from the disadvantaged party are very motivated and turn out in large numbers, that 2% margin is often not enough. The party that did the gerrymander essentially spread its strength around so it could just beat the opposition in multiple districts in every election. But in a tsunami election, that strength is needed just to retain the most secure districts. Spreading it around results in the “advantaged” party putting itself at a disadvantage. Its permanent 2% margin is swamped by the anger and motivation of the other party in any gerrymandered district.

This means that with enough anger, enough disgust, and enough determination to change things, the Democrats may see an historical gain in House seats in 2026. And that will be, not despite, but because of, Republican gerrymanders.