The 2026 Election and Gerrymandering.

For those who haven’t kept up, gerrymandering is when you make funny-looking districts to carve out a selection of voters that you want to pick, because you think that set will vote the way you want. It’s like if you ran a casino and had a special list to only let the bad gamblers in.

For those who haven’t kept up, at least for now gerrymandering is illegal when done to deprive a racial group that votes alike the ability to elect the candidate of their choice.

For those who haven’t kept up, under Donald John Trump an irregular mid-decade redistricting war has taken place. Members of both parties have hyped it up or denounced it, sometimes the same members. It is creating a mess and it is recidive. Several states have enacted non-partisan commissions, including at least a couple that have or may bypass them to gerrymander anew.

The slight hope is that all this mucking about will result in enough of a consensus that it wasn’t a good idea to muck about, so that we see real and lasting, strong and helpful reforms to redistricting. That we can pass the card with the word gerrymander into the pile labeled archaic.

For that to happen, it will probably require a few things. One will be that the Republicans get burned badly enough in 2026 that they recognize the clarion call of Donald John Trump—Gerrymander!—turned out to be a siren’s song that led their party smack into the rocks. For another, the Democrats would have to generally agree that while they might have prevailed, the terms of elections should be fair and level. And finally, the Supreme Court would have to let whatever legislative solution arises to be effective, both in not overruling it and in allowing the courts to police its terms.

But regardless of the long-term prospects, the 2026 House elections and the 120th Congress will be the most consequential actions that Donald John Trump caused. This was already set to be a wave election for Democrats in the House, going from a narrow minority to a reasonable majority, but with the redistricting and gerrymandering, it may run into the foothills of landslide territory.

And that’s before you talk about the other races on various ballots. There are 36 gubernatorial elections to be had, and most of those states will also be electing various statewide officers besides. There are 33 Class-2 senatorial elections. While these other races will influence and be influenced by the changes to districts, it’s hard to know what exact outcomes might arise.

More significant will be the careers of those new Democratic House members elected in 2026. The 2010s saw a lot of new blood in Republican politics because of the Tea Party wave. Only a few of them now remain, but their impact helped bring the era of Donald John Trump. With his redistricting push, he pulled the pin and released the handle on the grenade that will wipe his era off the map. We can only hope better things grow in its place.