Matt Shinners
In November 2024, Don Davis did something vanishingly rare in modern American politics: he won a congressional district that voted against his party at the top of the ticket. NC-1 was one of only 13 congressional districts in the country that voted for Donald Trump in 2024 while simultaneously electing a Democrat to the House.
To Republicans, it was not supposed to go that way.
Davis, a moderate Democratic congressman representing the state's 1st District, had been the explicit target of a Republican supermajority’s gerrymandering attempt in the state legislature. The goal was to take what had been a safe Democratic seat since 1883 and make it a certified toss-up that any Republican should have been able to win in an election that saw President Trump get re-elected.
Davis won anyway, by about one and a half points, in a district that simultaneously voted for Donald Trump by three points. It was a ticket-splitting electorate that refused to behave the way the mapmakers had modeled.
The Republican response was immediate and instructive: they redrew the map again. In October 2025, the legislature passed new lines designed to push the 1st District in an even more Republican-friendly direction—a reaction to the ticket-splitting voters that had broken their model.
This is the central tension in American redistricting right now. The maps are becoming more precise, more surgical, and more nakedly partisan. And yet, the more precisely a map is drawn to guarantee outcomes, the thinner the margins it must manufacture elsewhere, and the more exposure it creates to the one variable that no mapmaker can reliably model: the independent voter who simply refuses to be sorted and refuses to vote along party lines.
The Legal Landscape: Map Maker, Map Maker, Make Me A Map
The turbo-charged redistricting battles we’re seeing aren’t happening now solely because of political factors. The Supreme Court has, in two critical decisions, handed state legislatures something close to unlimited license to draw maps for partisan advantage.
The first decision was Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019. Writing for a 5-4 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts held that federal courts have no role in policing partisan gerrymandering. The practice, Roberts acknowledged, is "unjust" and "incompatible with democratic principles." But without a manageable judicial standard to apply, he concluded, it is a political question beyond the reach of Article III courts.
The practical effect was a green light: state legislatures could draw maps as aggressively as they chose as long as it was for partisan reasons. It would be “distasteful,” but legal.
Another consideration–racial discrimination—became the topic of the second major case, Callais v. Landry, a challenge to the application of the Voting Rights Act in drawing congressional districts. The implications of this ruling are currently playing out across the country, particularly in the South.
Louisiana, ordered by courts to create a second majority-Black congressional district after Allen v. Milligan, drew a seat so aggressively shaped that it prompted a new round of litigation over whether the remedy itself was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court's ruling in Callais found that the district crossed the line, and that absent clear evidence that redistricting was being driven by an intentional attempt to undermine the power of minority voters, the new lines would be allowed under Rucho’s decision allowing partisan gerrymanders..
Together, Rucho and Callais put us in a new world: there’s nothing the courts can do about partisan gerrymandering—and almost any gerrymander could be framed as driven by partisan aims.
The result? Any check on gerrymandering won’t be judicial.
Episode III: The Redistricting Wars Strike... Back?
Running concurrently with the judicial decisions has been a political race between the Republican and Democratic parties to engage in unusual mid-decade redistricting. Generally, such changes to the electoral map happen after the census, but President Trump triggered a round of mid-decade redistricting in 2025 when he urged Texas Republicans to redraw House districts to give the GOP an edge in the midterm elections.
California Democrats reciprocated, and redistricting efforts cascaded across states.
Cara Brown McCormick
Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida all passed new maps, resulting in up to 12 more potential GOP seats in Congress. Ohio conducted its own legally required redraw, adding a few more potential GOP seats.
On the Democratic side, California's Proposition 50 established new maps for 2026, and a court-ordered remap in Utah added a Democratic-leaning seat.
Virginia attempted to go further, passing a ballot initiative to shift four Republican-held seats toward Democrats. Voters approved it 52% to 48% in April 2026, but the Virginia Supreme Court struck it down, finding that the legislature had made procedural errors in how it placed the question on the ballot.
As of May 2026, Republicans will have drawn as many as 15 to 17 new winnable districts for themselves, while Democrats will have drawn five in California plus the court-ordered seat in Utah.
Cook Political Report's Amy Walter estimates the actual net benefit to Republicans is much lower, especially with a political environment favoring Democrats. But that calculation could shift further, as state legislatures, prompted by the Callais ruling, are already considering or have enacted modifications to their maps that eliminate majority-minority districts.
The Numbers: Independent Voters, Compressed Margins, and The Ticket-Splitting Problem
The first thing to understand about the redistricting wars is what they produce mathematically. When a party draws maps to maximize its seat count, it does so by spreading its voters across more districts, creating more majorities that they believe provide enough “padding” to ensure victory.
But they only have so many voters to go around, and so bumping up their margins in one district lowers them in others. Safe seats that once generated 20- or 30-point victories get carved into two or three new districts, each engineered to win by 8 or 10. The map produces more wins, but thinner ones.
In North Carolina, the effect is visible across the delegation. Drawn by the Republicans in the state, the 14 Republican-leaning districts hold PVIs ranging from R+1 to R+10, while the three Democrat-leaning districts are at +17, +23, and +24.
Districts from D+3 to R+3 are generally competitive and the ones most likely to flip. The Republican seats mostly sit in the R+7 to R+10 range, but small swings in the electorate, especially in a so-called “wave” year, can put seats in that range into play.
This is where the independent voter can create problems for partisan mapmakers. First, political independents constitute the largest political bloc in the United States. In 2023, 43% of American voters claimed that label, and in June 2024, 51% of U.S. adults said they were independents, more than the two major parties combined.
Despite independents historically showing up to the polls at lower rates than partisans, 2024 saw a shift in this metric, with 34% of all ballots cast being cast by independents (higher than Democrats at 31%; just lower than Republicans at 35%). In 2020, independents cast just 26% of the ballots nationwide. The surge of 11 million more independent voters to the polls in 2024 compared to 2020 marked a structural shift in who is actually deciding elections.
In the four states at the center of the redistricting wars, independent voter shares are substantial and growing. As of September 2024, 38% of North Carolina's 7.6 million registered voters were registered unaffiliated. By early 2026, that figure had climbed further to 39.64%.
Ohio’s number is in the same range, with 37.7% of voters identifying as independent. Georgia sits slightly lower at 30.08%, and Texas is at about half that rate at 15.81%.
The second problem is that independents don't behave in a predictably partisan manner. Unlike most traditional views that these voters lean one way or are secretly partisan, the 2024 cycle produced particularly sharp evidence of that isn’t the case, according to Edison Research exit polling from a national survey of 22,900 respondents.
The results? Those independent voters do not sort neatly.
Self-identified independent voters were nearly twice as likely to split their ticket as partisans, with 9.7% doing so nationwide. The same voters who handed Trump a popular vote victory in 2024 simultaneously kept Democrats alive in Senate races across swing states.
Independents favored Barack Obama in 2008 by 8 percentage points, Trump in 2016 by 4 points, Biden in 2020 by 13 points, and Harris in 2024 by just 3 points—a 10-point swing toward Republicans in a single cycle. From D+8 to R+4 to D+13 to D+3 (with swing-state independents in 2024 breaking for President Trump, bucking the overall trend)—that’s the type of behavior that software cannot model.
Party registration data and past vote history capture partisans. They do not capture the independent voter.
The Check That Wasn't in The Constitution
When the 2026 results come in, the coverage will focus on the obvious question: which party controls the House, and by how much? Republicans enter the cycle attempting to defend a narrow majority through an aggressive national redistricting push. Democrats enter it with a historical tailwind (the tendency of the president's party to lose House seats in midterms) and the need to pick up only a handful of seats to regain control of the House.
But the more revealing number to watch may not be the topline. It is the margin in individual districts. And, specifically, the degree to which independent voters in redrawn seats deviate from the partisan outcome their new lines were designed to produce.
As partisans get spread more evenly between seats to politically gerrymander more wins, and the vote share of independents increases, these new maps may increase the volatility of the outcomes. Independents don’t behave like partisans, and they’re more likely to split their vote between parties or switch from supporting one to the other between elections.
In most districts, the independent vote share exceeds the PVI created by the gerrymander, creating a situation where swings in the independent electorate could create major swings in the makeup of the House. This group elected Trump in ‘24 by breaking for him in the key states of AZ, PA, NC, and GA, two of which are on the list of states engaged in the most aggressive gerrymanders.
According to a recent Ipsos poll covered at IVN, 30% of independents say that they plan to sit out the 2026 election. As Democrats and Republicans vie for control of the House (and it’s increasingly looking like the Senate could be in play, as well), and as state legislatures redraw their maps, minimizing the independent vote share is a key way they can increase the predictability of outcomes that they desire.
But Independents showing up in record numbers—as they did in the 2024 presidential election—would allow the bloc to potentially shift a number of seats against the gerrymander. And a party looking to either safeguard their districts or put some additional ones into play might find that appealing to independents is a good way to make that happen.
The mapmakers driving on gerrymandered districts are hoping that the electorate is predictably partisan. Independent voters are not. It might be that the best protection against gerrymandering sits not in the courtroom or in the halls of Congress, but with an electorate that isn’t beholden to the parties.
