Feb. 6, 2025
Because the party out of power almost always does well in midterm elections, Democrats should be cruising toward a comfortable performance in the fall. And public sentiment has steadily drifted away from President Trump — and, by proxy, Republicans — amid an unpopular war with Iran, high gas prices and discontent with the president’s handling of the economy.
But public sentiment matters only so much in elections. The way congressional maps are drawn can have an enormous impact on which party is favored to win. Over the last year, Republicans have created a structural advantage by redrawing maps to carve out more safe red territory.
The data from the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan group that analyzes elections, lays bare this tug-of-war for House control.
House race ratings from the Cook Political Report
Of the 88 revisions the Cook Political Report has made to race ratings since February 2025, two-thirds of them shifted toward Democrats. Yet most of the races in which Republicans gained ground were not because they won over voters, but because they redrew district lines. Four out of every five shifts in Republicans’ favor were the result of partisan redistricting.
Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of the shifts.
When the Cook Political Report published its first set of ratings for this midterm cycle in February 2025, it gave Republicans a nominal advantage.
Congressional maps are usually drawn only once a decade to reflect population shifts after the census. But this year Republicans started a rare round of middecade redistricting at the urging of President Trump, prompting battles with Democrats nationwide.
In the first round, Texas redrew its map to add more Republican-favored seats. Shortly after, Republican-led governments in Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio followed suit.
In response, leaders in California drew new maps to add safer Democratic seats, which voters approved in November. The same month, Utah went through court-ordered redistricting, restoring the state’s one Democratic-leaning district.
For the next several months, Democrats overperformed in special elections and continued to lead in general congressional polling. As the political environment shifted during this period, the Cook Political Report revised dozens of race ratings — unrelated to redistricting efforts — and nearly all of them shifted toward Democrats.
In April, voters in Virginia approved a new map that added more Democratic-leaning seats. It seemed for a while that the redistricting battle would shake out to be a stalemate between the parties.
Then the tides of redistricting turned back in Republicans’ favor. Florida lawmakers swiftly approved a new map to add more Republican-leaning districts. The Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, prompting several Southern states like Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee to redraw their maps in ways that helped Republicans.
And in another blow to Democrats, Virginia’s new map was struck down in court, wiping out the potential Democratic gains there.
The Cook Political Report typically revises its race ratings for a wide variety of reasons. Polling numbers change. Strong challengers emerge. Incumbents decide to retire. The results of primary and special elections change the political landscape. Revisions from these factors often inch a race modestly along the rating spectrum, shifting it to be slightly more competitive or slightly less so.
Redistricting, which has affected nearly half of all revisions so far this cycle, has rewritten these rules. In many cases, seats have shifted suddenly from safely Democratic seats to safely Republican, vaulting them from one end of the rating spectrum to the other and bypassing the competitive middle entirely.
Midterm elections in the last two decades have been largely seen as a referendum on the party that controls the White House. It remains to be seen if the gains the G.O.P. has built into the electoral map will be enough to overcome the Democrats’ environmental advantage.
“We still view Democrats as favorites — strong favorites — to retake control of the House of Representatives in November,” said Matthew Klein, an analyst at the Cook Political Report who focuses on the House and governors’ races. “But certainly Republicans have built a bit more of a firewall than they had at this time last year.”
