Alabama Republicans had hoped Rep. Shomari Figures would deliver a concession speech on Tuesday night after the state legislature redrew his district to be more GOP-friendly. 

Instead, the Democrat declared victory — winning nearly 54% of the vote.

“We know what happened with this district,” Figures told supporters as he invoked the Republican gerrymander. “But we had a job to do. And so we put our hands to the plow and we did not look backwards.”

The Republican project to gerrymander congressional districts across the country, initiated by President Donald Trump more than a year ago, failed to deliver significant wins for the party — and, in North Carolina at least, even worked against it. Amid a nationwide blue tsunami and voter backlash in Southern states that split apart districts where a majority of residents are Black, Democrats won seats that Republicans redrew to give themselves an advantage.

States typically draw new maps every 10 years after the census. But Trump’s redistricting push, which kicked off in Texas in the summer of 2025, triggered a nationwide rush as Republican and Democratic states battled to set the electoral landscape ahead of this week’s midterms.

A late April decision from the U.S. Supreme Court set off another round of gerrymanders. The court sharply curtailed federal protections against racial gerrymandering, clearing the way for Southern states to break apart majority-Black districts that often elect Democrats.

Republicans had once hoped mid-decade redistricting would create a buffer against the losses the president’s party traditionally suffers in midterm elections. Perhaps, the thinking among Republicans went in 2025, the party could even maintain a narrow majority with the help of the gerrymandered districts.

It didn’t turn out that way, as the GOP’s effort proved woefully insufficient against the strength of the Democratic vote. 

As of Thursday afternoon, Democrats had won 247 House seats, far above the 218 needed for a majority, while Republicans had won 153, according to The Associated Press. Thirty-five races had yet to be called.

“Let this be a lesson: never capitulate, never acquiesce to those who would use power for improper purposes,” Eric Holder, a former U.S. attorney general under President Barack Obama and the chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a statement.

Gains were expected

New Republican maps could have netted the party as many as 15 seats, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. GOP-controlled state legislatures advanced news maps in Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina and Tennessee, in addition to Alabama and Texas.

In response, Democrats successfully gerrymandered a single state, California, where the party picked up five seats it had targeted. Voters approved a Democratic gerrymander in Virginia, but the state Supreme Court struck down the measure. A state court also imposed a Democratic-leaning district in Utah.

In states where Republicans targeted Democratic seats for gerrymandering, the party made no net gains, according to a Wednesday memo from the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. 

“This is close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said at a news conference Wednesday as he broadly described his party’s losses.

GOP efforts fail

DeSantis signed a new Florida map aimed at securing four new GOP seats into law in May. Democrats now appear likely to retain all four.

The redistricting failure was starkest in North Carolina, where Republicans are on track to lose six seats. 

In the state’s 1st Congressional District, Democratic Rep. Don Davis won reelection Tuesday with just over 50% of the vote, overcoming a GOP gerrymander in what was the most expensive U.S. House race in history.

In Rocky Mount, a city of about 55,000 in North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, Letrice Felton voted for the first time on Tuesday. The 50-year-old said she cast a ballot because of rising costs and poverty within the city. More than 60% of the city’s residents are Black and roughly 1 in 5 residents live in poverty, nearly double the national rate.

“To see people out in Rocky Mount, walking with beds of carts, with clothes and stuff,” Felton said. “It’s very sad. And they need help, and it’s like, there’s no resources here for it.”

Jislem Rodriguez, 18, voted for the first time Tuesday at Edgecombe Community College in Rocky Mount. Rodriguez said she is concerned about the economy.

“Money isn’t really lasting like it used to,” she said. 

In Texas, state lawmakers sought to secure five additional seats for Republicans. The party instead flipped only a single newly gerrymandered district and suffered a net loss of one seat.

When Republicans redrew most of the targeted districts, they assumed Latino voters would continue backing GOP candidates, Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston, said in an interview.

A significant share of Latino voters instead cast ballots for Democrats. Nineteen percent of Latino voters in Texas who said they voted for Trump in 2024 voted for Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for governor, in 2026, according to CNN voter polls (poll results weren’t available for specific House races).

“On paper, these districts are still Republican but the trend has been in general toward the Republicans and the Latino vote — which these are premised on — has shifted back to the Democrats,” Rottinghaus said.

Black voter backlash

The NAACP reported strong turnout among Black voters on Tuesday. Eighty-one percent of Black voters supported Democrats in the election, up from 70% in 2024 and 73% in 2022, according to exit poll data analyzed by NPR.

Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, a legal advocacy group focused on racial justice, said in a statement that Black turnout was especially pronounced in states that redrew maps following the Supreme Court’s decision on racial gerrymandering — Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee.

In the case, Louisiana v. Callais, the court’s conservative majority significantly limited the consideration of race when drawing legislative maps. Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act had previously limited states from using maps that diluted the voting power of minority citizens.

“Black and brown voters made a statement last night,” Nelson said. “Despite relentless attempts to silence their voices and stifle their power, voters of color turned out in extraordinary numbers.”

For example, Alabama voter turnout was nearly 44%, up from nearly 39% in 2022. In Montgomery County, part of Figures’ gerrymandered district, turnout among Democratic voters rose 39% over 2022.

“I’m at a loss for words, because we had the deck stacked against us,” Figures said during his victory speech.

Future maps?

The prospects of additional gerrymanders before the 2028 election are mixed.

Maryland voters approved a measure that would ease the way for the blue state to pass a Democratic gerrymander. Democratic Gov. Wes Moore said Wednesday that he wants new maps after the redistricting measure, called Question 3, passed with 60% of the vote.

“Donald Trump is not done. He has already been very clear about his intention to go after additional states,” Moore told reporters Wednesday.

The White House didn’t respond to questions about Trump’s support for future GOP redistricting efforts.

At least some Republicans have expressed reservations about pursuing new maps after such a sharp rebuke by voters. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, announced Wednesday that he wouldn’t call the state legislature into special session to pass new maps before the Democratic governor-elect, Keisha Lance Bottoms, takes office in January.

Kemp had previously called a special session earlier this year, but lawmakers opted not to advance redistricting legislation.

“The voters of our state have spoken,” Kemp said in a statement.

Gerrymandering critics have called for a national ban on the practice — or at the very least, a ban on the mid-decade redraws.

Common Cause, a nonpartisan watchdog that opposes gerrymandering, said the failure of Trump’s redistricting push sets the stage for federal reform.

“At the end of the day, the American people this time around, they rejected the attempts to rig the midterms through gerrymandering,” Common Cause president and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón told reporters on Wednesday.

In Missouri, voters rejected a gerrymander passed by the GOP-controlled state legislature — called the Missouri First map — that targeted a seat in Kansas City held by longtime Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. 

The measure failed resoundingly, 62% to 38%. The map wasn’t in effect for the 2026 election because of a state Supreme Court decision, but voter approval would have implemented it for the 2028 election.

“In the future, I hope that the people of Missouri will be served by a Congressional map like the Missouri First map that better represents our state,” Rick Brattin, Cleaver’s Republican opponent, said in a statement that attacked the Missouri Supreme Court for issuing a decision “to benefit Democrats” by blocking the map.

Cleaver, who won reelection with 69% of the vote, said in his own statement that his campaign overcame major hurdles, including the gerrymandered map, which was in place for the primary election and part of the general election.

“As I’ve always said from the beginning,” Cleaver said, “the will of the people always prevails in the end.”

Stateline’s Elisha Brown contributed reporting.

WASHINGTON — When the polls close Tuesday night, the 2026 U.S. election will go down as one of history’s most expensive and extraordinarily ugly midterms — galvanizing record-breaking early voter turnout among a deeply divided electorate.

Voters on Saturday crossed the high-water mark of 52.7 million early votes cast, surpassing the midterm record set in 2022, though analysts were reluctant to translate it into a Democratic wave on the way.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice continued to run into a firewall of federal judges, losing its previous cases to take over mail-in balloting and obtain state voter rolls in advance of the midterms. The Trump DOJ actions nonetheless rattled state officials who hold the constitutional responsibility to conduct their elections.

“My hope is that this trend will continue and that our worst-case scenarios don’t come to fruition,” former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson told States Newsroom.

A federal appeals court on Friday denied Trump’s efforts to force state officials to quarantine up to 20,000 voter ballots. The department continues to pursue its preemptive lawsuit against Alaska’s U.S. Senate race results, depending on who wins. 

When asked by reporters Tuesday if he’ll accept a Democratic victory, Trump said, “I will, if they’re honest elections,” refusing to rule out federal interference feared by Democratic critics.

Trump insisted in September that his supporters “pretend” he is on the ballot, as his base has turned out in higher numbers during presidential elections to vote for him. “When I’m on the ballot, we kill everybody,” he said at his midterm convention in Texas. 

He also promised a $5,000 “Trump dividend” to voters if Republicans retained congressional majorities.

With GOP control of the House and Senate during the last two years of the Trump presidency in play, campaigns are on track to shell out $11.6 billion on ads, according to the firm AdImpact. The hard-fought Ohio and Texas Senate races led the way in spending. 

Democrats need to net four seats to control the Senate, while Republicans hold a narrow majority in the House.

Campaign advertising hit a low point when Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy aired a $4 million ad in which the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, called Acton “a liar.” 

The woman, Donna Arthur, has not been in communication with her daughter since the late 1970s, when court records show she lost custody and fled the state with her husband, Acton’s stepfather, after he was indicted for raping Acton.

Ramaswamy’s campaign pulled the ad Friday, roughly 10 days after it began to circulate. The ad drew outcry including from outgoing Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, though both Trump and Vice President JD Vance defended it.

Voters feel punished by cost of living

While ugliness punctuated the campaign season, poll after poll revealed the cost of living remains the top motivator for voters — including fuel prices and the cost of food and everyday goods that have been driven up by Trump’s war with Iran and an erratic tariff policy. 

“It ranks as one of the most important issues for over 80% of voters, and the majority of the electorate disapproves of Trump’s handling, not just of the economy in general, but of cost of living,” economist and former Biden White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein said Tuesday, during a virtual press briefing organized by the Democrat-aligned advocacy group Defend America Action.

The GOP also risks losing Latino support on account of the administration’s dragnet immigration enforcement tactics that have targeted legal immigrants, as well as U.S. citizens, and have ended in injury or even death on multiple occasions.

María Isabel Di Franco Quiñonez of Equis, a Latino-focused research firm, surveyed 900 Latino voters across seven battleground states and found sinking support for and trust in Republicans.

“The clearest finding was that voters want both responsible enforcement and generosity towards immigrants,” she said. “They want a controlled border, enforcement focused on criminals and a pathway to legalization.”

Trump ratings

Trump’s sagging approval ratings have dogged Republican midterm candidates, giving a major boost to Democrats’ chances of flipping the House — a tried and true pattern for midterm elections — and increasing the competitiveness of several U.S. Senate races.

“Given that the president’s not on the ballot, (voters) have no other place to take out their frustration or disappointment or anger, aside from candidates of the president’s party,” said David Dulio, a distinguished professor of political science at Oakland University in Michigan. The state is the site of one of the nation’s most vitriolic U.S. Senate races, between Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed and former Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers.

Democrats are reaching for command of the upper chamber, and if the final prognosticators and polls are correct, they could stand a chance in Republican strongholds. 

Major forecasts and pollsters more strongly favor Democrats to take the House, though some experts observe that years of gerrymandering, including Republicans’ mid-decade redistricting, combined with entrenched polarization could stunt the crest of a so-called blue wave. 

Several Republican-led state legislatures, including those in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, split majority Black voter districts after a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year struck down protections that were enshrined in the Voting Rights Act.

“I hesitate to say that Republicans are going to lose control of both houses, or Trump is going to be totally hamstrung by this blue wave. The polling has been so shaky in prior election cycles,” said Rob Glover, associate professor of political science at the University of Maine, where longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins is fighting to keep her seat against Democratic challenger Troy Jackson.  

“But if I was a Republican operative or strategist, I would be concerned,” he said. 

Senate races

As of Friday, The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, a nonpartisan forecaster, rated Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Texas as toss-up U.S. Senate races. The University of Virginia’s Sabato’s Crystal Ball categorized Alaska as a possible flip.

Inside Elections, another nonpartisan forecaster, projected Thursday that Democrats would gain enough seats to reach at least a 50-50 split Senate, ranking Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas as tilting blue. 

Pollsters have also found Democratic rumblings in time-tested Republican bastions. 

Wednesday’s New York Times/Siena poll found South Carolina voters, surveyed between Oct. 19 and Oct. 26, evenly split between Republican nominee Darline Graham, who is running to fill the seat of her late brother Sen. Lindsey Graham, and her Democratic challenger Annie Andrews, a pediatrician. 

A survey of Kansas voters between Oct. 26 and Oct. 28 by Emerson College Polling found Democratic candidate and pastor Adam Hamilton at 49% over Republican incumbent Sen. Roger Marshall, who polled at 45%. The survey, which asked voters who they would vote for if the election were held today, carried a 3.5 percentage point margin of error.

Trump on Thursday canceled his weekend trip to a rally in Kansas because Marshall is “doing very well,” but reversed his plans by Friday morning and announced he’ll appear in person, as scheduled. 

He similarly flipped on canceling his trip to Iowa to support Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is running against Democrat Josh Turek for U.S. Senate.

While the U.S. House appears to be tipping toward the Democrats, only a small fraction of the races across the U.S. are competitive. The districts include California’s 22nd; Florida’s 14th and 22nd; Iowa’s 2nd; Kentucky’s 6th; Michigan’s 4th, 7th and 10th; Montana’s 1st; New York’s 17th; North Carolina’s 1st; Ohio’s 7th and 9th; Texas’ 15th and 35th; and Virginia’s 1st, according to widely cited prognosticators.

Surge in early voting

Tens of millions of Americans have already marched — some literally —  to the polls, or submitted their mail-in ballots, in the final stretch leading up to Election Day.

Carrie LeVan, a political scientist at Colby College in Maine, said she’s not sure whether the enthusiasm driving early voters will translate into a “wave” election for Democrats, like the 2010 midterm “Tea Party” wave when Republicans regained House control by flipping more than 60 seats.

“There’s a lot of hype and expectation that Democrats are going to perform and have this huge wave this election cycle, and I don’t know — if I’m gonna make a prediction, I don’t think it’s gonna be that big,” she said.

LeVan highlighted this cycle’s rare mid-decade redistricting by Republicans, and then by Democrats, combined with “affective” polarization as obstacles to the size of shifts. The academic term affective polarization, she explained, is not just clinging to your side and your beliefs but rather “how much do I hate the opposition party?” 

“There’s all these things that have changed since the 2010 election, so can we ever have a wave that was as big, even if we’re so dissatisfied with the state of things right now?” she said.

An NRP/PBS News/Marist poll published Tuesday found other possible warning signs for Democrats hoping for a big surge.

The survey found several “key pillar groups” among Democratic voters, including voters under age 45 and voters of color, lagged in enthusiasm to vote in the midterms, while some Republican voter segments gained ground on who is “very closely” monitoring the races.

The poll also found some swing voters turned off by the Democrats’ primary victories for some far-left candidates, including those belonging to the Democratic Socialists of America. 

Democrats are grappling with how to navigate the intraparty divisions, particularly if they gain control of the House.

In the courts

Ahead of Election Day, an array of legal challenges are playing out in federal courts across the country.

The Justice Department wants to require California election officials to set aside the ballots of 20,000 voters it says are suspected noncitizens. The Trump administration doesn’t want those ballots to count unless voters can prove their citizenship. A similar request was also made to officials in Washington state.

Multiple federal judges have already ruled against the DOJ’s California request and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday dealt the Trump administration its third and fourth courtroom losses in less than a week. It’s possible the Trump administration will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. 

The Justice Department has also issued subpoenas to election officials in California, prompting a new lawsuit that seeks to stop the department from threatening state and local officials with prosecution. In recent days, DOJ lawyers have suggested election officials face “criminal liability” if they count the ballots of noncitizen voters.

In Washington, D.C., a federal judge is weighing whether to issue an order prohibiting the Trump administration from demanding that states set aside the ballots of voters. The judge has promised a decision by Monday.

And in Alaska, the Justice Department is continuing to pursue a preemptive lawsuit that would block the state from certifying the results of its U.S. Senate election if the Republican incumbent loses by less than the votes received by a nonpartisan challenger of the same name that Trump has said is on the ballot to confuse voters. 

The New York Times has reported Democrats helped recruit the spoiler candidate.

Ariana Figueroa, Shauneen Miranda and Jennifer Shutt contributed to this report.