Redistricting Backfires: GOP's Safe Seats Turn Into Costly Toss-Ups

What happened

Starting last year, President Donald Trump and his political team pressed Republican-led states to redraw congressional district lines to favor Republicans. The plan was meant to build a firewall against the heavy midterm losses that usually hit the president's party. Days before the Nov. 3 vote, that firewall is leaking.

North Carolina's 1st District is the clearest example. The state legislature redrew it late last year so aggressively that Trump would have won it by more than 11 percentage points in 2024 under the new lines. It is now widely considered a toss-up.

Trump headlined a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on Oct. 20, where he called up two congressional candidates sitting in the VIP section: Laurie Buckhout, the Republican nominee in the 1st District, and Jennifer Balkcom, running in the 11th District on the other side of the state. Trump told the crowd that House Speaker Mike Johnson had asked him to give them an extra boost because they face close races. Buckhout, a retired Army colonel who lost in the district two years ago, told supporters the math was simple: there are more Republicans, they just need to turn out.

That turnout push has not come cheap. More than $42 million has been spent on advertising in the 1st District race between Sept. 1 and Election Day, according to an NPR analysis of AdImpact data, making it one of the most expensive House races in the country.

Why it matters

The North Carolina race is not an outlier. Inside Elections editor Nathan Gonzales told NPR that Republicans gained an advantage in 15 congressional districts nationwide through redistricting, but some of the seats that were supposed to be easy wins are not turning out that way. The party is now pouring millions of dollars into districts that were drawn to be safe.

Two Florida congressional districts redrawn to remove 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 in the redraw now appears to be at risk as well.

The stakes go beyond one party's map. The [Nov. 3 midterms](/article/us-midterm-elections-2026-explained) will decide control of the House, and the redrawn seats were supposed to settle that question early. Instead, several of them will be fought to the finish, and [results in some races may not be known on election night](/article/why-some-2026-midterm-races-wont-be-called-on-election-night).

Democratic Rep. Don Davis, the incumbent in North Carolina's 1st District, has become the symbol of the backlash. This is his third run on a third new map. His home county was drawn out of the district and he picked up all or part of six new counties. At an early voting site in Swansboro, voters kept telling him he was not their representative anymore. Davis told NPR the issues in eastern North Carolina are universal: affordability, inflation and costs, with farmers, truckers and fishermen hit by high fuel prices. That squeeze on household budgets is also shaping [how US workers feel heading into the vote](/article/cost-of-living-strain-us-workers-midterm-elections).

Republicans and Democrats alike call Davis a formidable campaigner. Morgan Jackson, a prominent North Carolina political consultant, said the mapmakers believed they had beaten Davis with the redistricting pen. "As it turns out, Don Davis has always been a tough out," Jackson said. He offered a blunt verdict on the whole exercise: "I think at the end of the day, this will go down as a dummymander rather than a gerrymander."

What it means for the US

If seats drawn to be safe stay competitive, the firewall strategy fails on its own terms. House control could hinge on districts that were never supposed to be in play, which means more national money, more advertising and more attention flooding into local races in the final days.

For voters, the churn has a practical cost too. Redrawn lines mean new representatives, new campaign offices and, as Davis keeps hearing at polling places, confusion about who actually represents a neighborhood. When maps change this fast, voters have to re-learn their own district before they can vote in it.

And the issues deciding these races are national ones. Davis frames the contest around survivability: whether working people can make it through high prices and high fuel costs. That is the same affordability fight driving races far beyond North Carolina.

What happens next

Voters settle the question on Nov. 3. Watch North Carolina's 1st District first, then the two big-spending Florida races and the shifting Texas seats. If the redrawn districts break for Democrats, the redistricting push will be remembered as a costly miscalculation. If Republicans hold them, the money spent will look like the price of survival.

Not everyone in the party concedes the strategy failed. A Republican strategist involved in midterm races, who was not authorized to speak publicly, pushed back on the idea that the push was a bust, telling NPR that "redistricting creates new battlefields, it doesn't create outcomes." The ballots will show which description fits.