The GOP’s 2025 playbook to steal House seats
Instead of changing its message, the Republican Party decided to change the maps.
By Jeff Nesbit
On Nov. 4, voters in Virginia and New Jersey sent a five-alarm fire to the national Republican Party.
In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger wasn’t just elected the state’s first female governor; she led a Democratic sweep that secured a full state trifecta. In New Jersey, Rep. Mikie Sherrill won the governorship by a comfortable margin.
It was, by any measure, a “blue wave,” a clear and present suburban revolt against the GOP brand. And yet, barely 24 hours later, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) remained supremely confident that the GOP will hold its majority in the House (or even grow it) in the mid-term elections.
In July, the speaker was “absolutely convinced” the GOP would not only keep its House majority in 2026 but grow it.
What does Johnson know that Virginia’s and New Jersey’s voters don’t?
We don’t have to guess where Johnson’s confidence comes from. He knows the Republican Party has a plan to make those voters irrelevant.
The 2025 off-year elections were not a fluke. They were a referendum. From the suburbs of Richmond to the bellwether counties of New Jersey, voters rejected the GOP’s platform.
This is the same anti-Trump sentiment that has shown up time and again since 2018. The Republican party, under the leadership of President Donald Trump, has seen this writing on the wall. And instead of changing its message, it has decided to change the maps.
This is the GOP’s two-pronged insurance policy against democracy itself.
The first prong is a brutalist campaign of “mid-decade redistricting.” This isn’t the normal, once-a-decade process dictated by the Census. This is a rare and aggressive partisan power grab.
This summer, Trump explicitly urged Texas lawmakers to redraw their congressional maps to gain an immediate partisan advantage for 2026.
They quickly complied. Spurred on by this, Republican-controlled legislatures in North Carolina and Missouri followed, cracking and packing Democratic voters to engineer GOP victories.
The situation has devolved into a full-blown “gerrymandering war,” with California passing Proposition 50 to claw back seats in response to this GOP-initiated aggression.
This is the ground war, the first layer of Johnson’s insurance: drawing lines to ensure that, for example, even if Democrats win 55% of the statewide vote, they get only 40% of the seats.
But this raw partisan gerrymandering has one major obstacle: The Voting Rights Act. Specifically, Section 2, which for decades has forbidden “racially discriminatory voting maps” that dilute minority voting power.
For the GOP’s plan to work, Section 2 must die.
This brings us to the second prong of the plan: the air war at the Supreme Court. On Oct. 15, the justices heard oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais. The case is the dagger aimed at the heart of the VRA.
Louisiana, a state where nearly one-third of the population is Black, is making the perverse argument that complying with the VRA by drawing a second majority-Black congressional district is itself an unconstitutional “racial gerrymander.”
Let’s be clear: This is a “colorblind” legal argument designed to achieve a purely discriminatory result. It is an attempt to use the 14th Amendment to destroy its primary purpose: protecting the political power of Black Americans.
As UCLA law professor Rick Hasen warned, a ruling for the state would be an “earthquake in the American political system.” During arguments, Janai Nelson, representing Black Louisiana voters, put the stakes more plainly: “pretty catastrophic.”
Why catastrophic? Because this is where the 19 seats (or more) the GOP plans to steal come from.
If the court’s conservative majority sides with opponents of Section 2, it will unleash a firestorm of redistricting across the South. GOP legislatures will be given a legal green light to dismantle protected, majority-minority districts.
The math is chilling. Reports show this ruling would allow GOP legislatures to eliminate at least 19 congressional districts currently held by Democrats. This move alone could wipe out up to 30% of the Congressional Black Caucus.
This is the source of Johnson’s confidence. This is the GOP’s 19-seat heist, planned in plain sight.
Prong 1 (partisan gerrymandering) builds the cage. Prong 2 (gutting the VRA) locks the door, ensuring no court can pick the lock.
The Republican “majority” for 2026 is being engineered right now—not in polling booths but in statehouse backrooms and at the Supreme Court.
Johnson isn’t predicting an election result; he’s previewing the result of a meticulously planned rigging. He’s not counting votes. He’s counting maps and justices.
Jeff Nesbit was the public affairs chief for five Cabinet departments or agencies under four presidents.
Cheating is the only way fascists ever win majorities in countrywide elections. It started in 2000 with Al Gore vs. W, continued on with the McConnell/Roberts inferior court, and it will continue in that vein, until there are no more pesky Democratic voters
Very important points! This article and partisan gerrymandering and the SCOTUS majority's deceitful efforts to convince us that it is constitutional accentuate how SCOTUS justices lied to us in Trump v. Anderson (regarding the power of states to control state elections).
Trump v. Anderson was founded on at least two lies. One was the obvious fairytale-type falsehood that all "federal officers" '‘owe their existence and functions to the united voice of the whole, not of a portion, of the people.' ” That's obviously false in multiple respects. In no election do "the whole people" speak with a "united voice."
No president since George Washington can even potentially plausibly claim to have been elected by "the united voice of the whole" of "the people." As every election for national office highlights, the multitude of voters clearly do not speak with one voice. Many people do not speak (vote) at all. Moreover, we clearly have no national election.
Every election in which voters vote and that culminates in or contributes to a federal employee being elected is a state election. As states like Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Utah have highlighted recently, state legislatures make state laws, e.g., governing who can vote and where they can vote (including redistricting/gerrymandering) to determine how the president is chosen. The president clearly is not chosen by "the united voice of the whole" of "the people."
As Article II established clearly, the president must be chosen by the votes of state electors. State electors must be chosen according to state law and their votes are expected (or required) to reflect (according to state law) the votes of state voters who often have been corralled into districts by state legislators.
Article II of our Constitution proves the truth of Madison's statement in The Federalist No. 45 that "Without the intervention of the State legislatures, the President of the United States cannot be elected at all. [State legislatures] must in all cases have a great share in [the president's] appointment, and will, perhaps, in most cases, of themselves determine it."
Another obvious falsehood by SCOTUS justices in Trump v. Anderson was that "powers over [the] election" of the president "must be specifically 'delegated to, rather than reserved by, the States.' ” That contention was clearly contrary to the plain text of our Constitution. Our original Constitution was amended very promptly to identify and distinguish "delegated" powers from "reserved" powers in the Tenth Amendment. It's not even plausible that any SCOTUS justice, much less all SCOTUS justices, failed to grasp the significance of the plain text of the single sentence of the Tenth Amendment.
The Tenth Amendment summarized our Constitution in a single sentence: "by the Constitution" We the People "delegated to the United States" limited "powers;" We "prohibited by it [our Constitution] to the States" certain powers; We "reserved to the States" certain specific powers and general powers; and We "reserved" to "the people" the remaining powers.
Stated another way, the Tenth Amendment emphasized that all powers relevant here were "reserved to the States" except to the extent that our Constitution "delegated" limited powers "to the United States" government or "prohibited" certain powers "to the States."
State legislators are actively working to use partisan gerrymandering to rig not only the upcoming congressional elections, but also the next presidential election.