One of the Republican Party’s most celebrated political strategists is sounding the alarm about the aggressive redistricting push backed by President Trump.
Karl Rove, the former political architect for George W. Bush and a Fox News contributor, even warned that the playbook could cost the GOP its House majority rather than secure it.
Speaking to Trey Gowdy on the network on Sunday, he laid out the math in stark terms. Asked by Gowdy whether the new maps risked winning the battle but losing the war, Rove said: “Oh, sure. You could, in essence, take, you know, like here in Texas, take big cities, which are typically Democrat, and split them up among several sort of suburban and rural Republicans and thereby reduce their margin and make them more vulnerable in an election year.
“Same thing could happen in the South, where you take these large, Blacks-dominated cities like New Orleans, or rural areas like in South Carolina that are dominated by Blacks, and who are traditionally Democrat voters, and split them up into several different Republican districts and make things more problematic in a swing year. You know, nothing ever plays out exactly in politics as we think it does.”
Rove’s warning posits that by cracking Democratic-heavy areas—particularly Black-majority cities—across multiple Republican-leaning districts, the GOP can win more seats on paper. But those newly drawn districts are thinner, more exposed, and potentially flippable in a rough election cycle.
Democrats, he said, expect to pick up between four and five seats in California and one in Utah—a net gain of five to six from redistricting alone. Republicans, meanwhile, are projecting gains of three to five seats in Texas, one in Missouri, one or two in Ohio, one in Louisiana, possibly one in Alabama, one in Tennessee, and perhaps one in South Carolina—a total of eight to twelve seats.
The math, however, does not flatter the GOP. “Even if the Republicans pull it off, that means between eight-to-twelve offset by five-to-six,” Rove said. “So the Republicans may pick up a net of three, or maybe of six. Now, maybe that’s enough to control the House, but maybe not, because that’d be a very small number of seats that would be lost otherwise.”
The bigger problem, Rove suggested, is the political environment itself. “With the president’s approval rating where it is, and with the normal malaise that we have, it’s hard to believe that the Republican losses are only going to be five or six seats,” he said.
By saying this, he suggested that Trump’s standing with voters could overwhelm whatever gains the map-drawers manage to engineer.
Rove also took a swipe at both parties for abandoning “the business of the people” in favor of district carving, calling it “not a new phenomenon” but also “not a particularly helpful phenomenon.”
The critique lands at a moment when Republicans in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and other states have moved aggressively to redraw maps at Trump’s urging, prompting Democratic-led states including California and Virginia to respond in kind.
The midterms are six months away and the maps are still being drawn.
