Republicans redrew 15 House seats ahead of this election to make them friendlier to the party, ABC News reported. ABC projects they will lose more than two-thirds of them. Its summary: "Dems were able to keep seats that Republicans redrew to make them GOP-friendly."
Across the whole map, CBS News counted 44 districts shifting to Democrats and two shifting to Republicans as of Nov. 6.
Now narrow it to one district in North Carolina.
The chairman's seat
Richard Hudson chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP's campaign arm. His job was to protect Republican seats across the country. He won his own district by nearly 20 points in 2024, WFAE reported.
On Nov. 3, Democrat Richard Ojeda beat him, 138,707 votes to 132,692, in unofficial returns reported by WFAE. That is about 51% to 49%, in a seat Trump carried by 15 points, according to WRAL. County boards canvass Nov. 13 and the state canvass follows Nov. 24, WECT reported.
Ojeda's campaign manager, Amy Dorra, said it in one line: "Nobody in Washington thought this seat was in play."
The man whose job was to read the map lost on his own square of it.
The board nobody drew
| Winner | District | Trump 2024 margin | Result (unofficial) | Defeated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Leticia Gutierrez (D) | TX-9, Houston | About 20 points | Won; Mealer conceded | Alex Mealer (R) |
| Bobby Pulido (D) | TX-15 | 18 points | 61.6% to 38.4%, about 89% counted | Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R) |
| Cyril Jefferson (D) | NC-6 | 17 points | Won; final margin after canvass | Rep. Addison McDowell (R) |
| Paul Barringer (D) | NC-13 | 16 points | Won; final margin after canvass | Rep. Brad Knott (R) |
| Richard Ojeda (D) | NC-9 | 15 points | 138,707 to 132,692 | Rep. Richard Hudson (R) |
| Katy Padilla Stout (D) | TX-23 | 15 points | 55.2% to 42.5%; called by the New York Times, per TPR | Brandon Herrera (R) |
| Lakesha Womack (D) | NC-14 | 15 points | Won; final margin after canvass | Rep. Tim Moore (R) |
| Shomari Figures (D) | AL-2 | About 7 points more Republican than the nation (Cook) | Won by more than 7 points | Rhett Marques (R) |
| Marcy Kaptur (D) | OH-9 | 10.6 points | Won | Derek Merrin (R) |
| Johnny Garcia (D) | TX-35 | 10 points | 57.2% to 42.8% | Carlos De La Cruz (R) |
Trump margins come from the Texas Tribune, Texas Public Radio, WRAL, the Alabama Political Reporter and Ballotpedia News, which cites The Downballot. Results come from those outlets plus Fox 26 Houston, News 4 San Antonio and News 5 Cleveland, citing AP. North Carolina's 1st District, where Rep. Don Davis held on 148,327 to 141,951 in WLOS's count, is left off only because we could not find its Trump margin under the new lines.
Three stories behind the numbers
TX-15. Pulido, a Grammy-winning Tejano singer, unseated an incumbent by about 23 points in a seat Trump won by 18, Texas Public Radio reported. The race was seen as a test of Republican gains with Latino voters. His line on election night: "history is made in places nobody thought to look."
TX-23. This one was partly about the candidates. Herrera outraised Padilla Stout four to one, and her campaign highlighted his derogatory posts about women and his Holocaust jokes, the Texas Tribune reported. The Republican who held the seat, Tony Gonzales, had resigned in March amid an affair scandal. No public poll showed her leading. She told TPR, "Sometimes the narrative can be really loud, but there's not a lot of substance behind that."
AL-2. Alabama went back to a 2023 map after the Supreme Court's ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. A court had found that map intentionally diluted Black voting power, the Alabama Political Reporter noted. Figures won anyway, by more than 7 points. DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene: "Alabama voters have sent a powerful message: their voices won't be silenced."
The cushion
A party that draws a map has a fixed number of its own voters to spread around. Pack them tight and you win fewer seats by huge margins. Spread them thin and you win more seats, each with a smaller cushion. The thinner the cushion, the smaller the wave it takes to tear it.
Political scientists have a name for a map that tears: a dummymander. UT Dallas professor Thomas Brunell, credited with coining the term, warned in May: "If they get too greedy, it could backfire on them," Spectrum News reported. Princeton's Sam Wang said Florida's map leaned on Hispanic voters staying Republican: "And that is by no means a done deal."
The Texas map made the same bet. It "banked on the GOP holding most of Trump's 2024 gains with Latino Texans," the Texas Tribune reported. That bet lost. In exit polls cited by Newsweek, the Latino House vote moved from D+9 in 2024 to D+30 in 2026. Latino men moved from R+8 to D+19.
Political scientist Frances Lee put it this way in a Good Authority interview: "some of these gerrymanders turned out to be 'dummymanders.'" Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr was blunter: "The narrow GOP margins didn't hold. The result? An absolute trouncing."
The best argument against this story
Sean Trende, a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says the dummymander story is mostly wrong. His case is owed full strength.
His claim: "Republicans are no worse off than they would have been under the old maps (as of this writing)." His reason: "The old maps would have performed under wave conditions as well, and it's not clear they would have held up any worse." By his math, North Carolina's old and new maps both project to 10 Democrats and 4 Republicans under this year's swing.
In other words, the wave did this, not the redraw. A map is a levee, and Trende's point is that this flood would have topped the old levee too.
Two races support him. In TX-32, Republican Jace Yarbrough won 51.5% to 48.5% in a seat Democrats had targeted, Al Jazeera reported. SMU's Matthew Wilson credited the lines: "It was just the fact that his district was drawn to be so heavily Republican." In TN-9, Republicans split the Memphis seat, and Brent Taylor won it over Justin Pearson, who conceded, according to ABC News.
So the honest answer has two halves. Some maps worked. Many failed. And the failure was mostly the size of the wave, which no mapmaker controls.
Was this ticket-splitting?
Mostly not. Only 7% of Trump's 2024 voters backed Democratic House candidates, according to exit polls cited by Newsweek. House voters who said they had voted for Harris outnumbered self-reported Trump voters 49 to 44. That is a turnout and composition wave: who showed up, and how independents and Latino voters broke.
There are exceptions. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez held Washington's 3rd District, a Trump-won seat, with about 54% of the early count, OPB reported. In Newsweek, Republican strategist Mike Madrid called the night "a massive rebuke of Donald Trump." Democratic strategist Doug Gordon added the warning label: "voters dislike President Trump but still do not trust Democrats."
We could not find a published national count of Trump-won seats now held by Democrats. The table above is a floor, not a census.
The wave below the Capitol
The same thin cushions broke in statehouses. Democrats flipped the Texas House, the Georgia House, both Wisconsin chambers and the Pennsylvania Senate, ABC News reported. Texas state Sen. Taylor Rehmet held a Fort Worth seat Trump carried by 17 points, according to the Texas Tribune. In Wisconsin, Democrats flipped three Trump-won Assembly seats, WPR reported. Republicans won one back in Pennsylvania, where Tom Jones beat Sen. James Malone, according to WHYY.
What we owe each other
Go back to the voter the lines were drawn around.
In Alabama's 2nd District, a court found that the map now in use diluted Black voting power on purpose. In Texas, mapmakers assumed Latino voters would keep voting the way they did in 2024. In both places, someone decided how much a vote should count before it was cast.
Scanlon's question fits here. Could a mapmaker justify the lines to the voter they were drawn to outnumber, on grounds that voter could not reasonably reject? "We needed the seat" is not one of those grounds.
This year, those voters answered the mapmakers themselves. That should not comfort anyone. A fair map should not need a wave to work.
Watch three things: North Carolina's state canvass on Nov. 24, the final margins in NC-6, NC-13 and NC-14, and the next round of redistricting fights, where both parties will decide whether the lesson was "draw fair" or "draw thicker."
Denzel D. Burnside III is the founder and editor of The State, a 50-state statehouse desk based in Raleigh. A former organizer and campaign manager from Miami-Dade, he also leads the North Carolina Housing Table as executive director.