Beginning last year, President Trump and his political team pressed Republican-led states to redraw congressional district lines in the party's favor. The idea was to create a buffer against the historical tendency of a president's party to suffer heavy midterm losses. With the election approaching, that plan is not working out as hoped. "It just has not turned out that way," said Nathan Gonzales, editor of Inside Elections.
Republicans are now spending millions of dollars to defend House seats that were supposed to be easy wins, and they could still lose some of them. One example is North Carolina's 1st Congressional District, which the state legislature aggressively redrew late last year to make it reliably Republican. Under the new lines, Trump would have carried the district by more than 11 percentage points in 2024. It is now widely viewed as a toss-up.
Trump recently headlined a rally in eastern North Carolina, where Michael Whatley, a former Republican Party chairman now running for U.S. Senate, drew most of the attention. Late in the cold evening, Trump called up two congressional candidates from the VIP section: Laurie Buckhout, the Republican nominee in the 1st District, and Jennifer Balkcom, who is running in the 11th District on the other side of the state.
Buckhout, a retired Army colonel who ran and lost in the district two years ago, pointed to her party's built-in edge, calling it "simple math." She told the crowd, "There are more of us. All you've got to do is get out the vote." Trump said House Speaker Mike Johnson had asked him to give the two candidates an extra boost because they face close races. Buckhout's team did not respond to requests to take part in NPR's story.
The race has become one of the costliest House contests in the country. An NPR analysis of AdImpact data found more than $42 million in advertising spending between Sept. 1 and Election Day.
The Democratic incumbent, Rep. Don Davis, was recently greeting voters at an early voting site in Swansboro, in a part of the district he has not represented before. A voter told him he was outside his district, and Davis laughed, noting it happens often. "This is my third run on a third new map," he said. His home county was drawn out of the district, and he gained all or part of six new counties. Davis said voters are focused on costs, especially farmers, truckers and fishermen hit by high fuel prices. "You hear so much about affordability, inflation and costs but I believe this is becoming for many about survivability," he said.
Members of both parties acknowledge that Davis is a formidable campaigner. Morgan Jackson, a North Carolina political consultant who runs Democrat Roy Cooper's U.S. Senate campaign, said Republicans believed they had beaten Davis "with the redistricting pen," but that "Don Davis has always been a tough out."
Gonzales said incumbent Democrats in several redrawn districts chose to stay and fight, and many now look well positioned to win. Republicans gained an advantage in 15 districts nationwide, he said, but some expected easy victories are not materializing, forcing the party to spend heavily.
A Republican strategist involved in midterm races, who was not authorized to speak publicly, rejected the idea that redistricting has been a bust. "Redistricting creates new battlefields, it doesn't create outcomes," the strategist said. That is a more muted tone than Republicans struck about these districts a few months ago.
Elsewhere, two Florida districts redrawn to push out Democratic incumbents are nearing a combined $90 million in ad spending. In Texas, districts drawn to carry a 10-point Trump advantage have shifted toward Democrats, and a previously safe Republican district that gained some Democratic voters now appears to be at risk. Jackson predicted the effort will be remembered "as a dummymander rather than a gerrymander."
