Could Trump's 2024 Victory Counter A 2026 'Midterm Curse'?

Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPoliticsDonald Trump’s popular vote victory has eroded some of the demographic gains Democrats have been working on for years giving Republicans hope they can break the historic trend of the president’s party losing seats in the first midterm election after winning the White House.Two years from now some 14 Democratic House members will be defending districts Trump won compared to just three Republicans in districts carried by Vice President Kamala Harris.It’s a significantly better outlook than the GOP faced after Trump’s 2016 victory which he eked out on the basis of an Electoral College win in the key swing states. That year two dozen Republicans were elected in districts Hillary Clinton won roughly the same number of Democrat-occupied seats that Trump carried. In 2018 Democrats gained seats in the Clinton districts and even carved into some of the districts that Trump won wresting back control of the majority until 2022 when Republicans re-took control.One reason House majorities have grown slimmer in recent years is the increasingly sophisticated redistricting fights waged by both parties. Over the last decade Democrats and Republicans have engaged in a protracted battle over the redrawing of congressional districts involving millions of dollars in litigation thousands of hours of closed-door negotiations and multiple Supreme Court showdowns.Partly because of their efforts Democrats limited the House majority to five seats this year – 220 to Democrats’ 215. But because of Trump’s popular vote victory winning back the majority in 2026 will require

Democrats to carve a path through Trump territory.“In places where the Democrats were really banking on this whole ‘demographics as destiny’ thing to carry them through the decade President Trump just detonated that” said Adam Kincaid president and executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust.Overall Trump carried nearly the same number of congressional districts across the nation – 231 – that he did in 2016 before the most recent redrawing of the congressional maps took place. In 2016 Kincaid says Trump won many of those districts by a plurality because third-party candidate Evan McMullen a former CIA officer who ran as an independent siphoned off votes in nearly two dozen districts. Now Trump’s two-party vote share is 50.8% – meaning he should have carried only 221 congressional districts if the results were directly proportional to the percentage of the vote he won.Kincaid argues the surplus of 10 House districts is a sign of his group’s redistricting success.Democrats counter that Republicans’ razor-thin majority demonstrates their own success in taking their fights for more advantageous maps to the courts especially across the South where Republicans control many state legislatures and have spent decades drawing the maps in their favor.In 2016 voters favored House Republicans over Democrats by only a 1.1% advantage 49.1% to 48% but Republicans held a far larger House majority 241 to 194. This year House Republicans won 50.5% of the vote to Democrats’ 47.9% but will hold only a five-seat majority next year.“The popular vote and seat-count margin in Congress this

past election and in 2022 is evidence that the [Democratic] redistricting strategy is working” Marina Jenkins executive director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee told RealClearPolitics. “What you’re seeing is a map that actually reflects where the voters are and that’s a far cry from where we were a decade ago.”Michael Li a redistricting expert at the liberal-leaning Brennan Center has long argued that GOP-gerrymandered maps have for years given Republicans such an unfair edge that Democrats typically need to win the national aggregate popular vote in congressional races by 2-3% to control the House.He and others often point to 2012 when House Democrats won 1.4 million more votes than Republicans but the GOP held a 33-seat majority.That gap has narrowed greatly in the ensuing years.“There’s a lot of really good work that happened by candidates in competitive districts and there are some places where those competitive districts went to Republicans but that’s the whole point” Jenkins said. “These districts are now fair and responsive. If it remains that way through the decade that’s a good thing.”With a more even playing field the Democrats’ chances of taking advantage of the famed “midterm curse” in 2026 will depend in large part on whether Trump’s popularity recedes over the next two years a variable impossible to predict. While the national politics play out Democrats and Republicans will continue focusing on what they can control – continuing their redistricting court battles as far as they can take them.This cycle NDRC efforts are likely to result in Democrats gaining t