The 2026 midterm elections results show there wasn’t just a blue wave — it was a tsunami.
Democrats won the Senate and the House of Representatives, where they will enter 2027 with a bigger majority than either party has had since at least 2009.
And the nationwide redistricting fight from 2025 didn’t turn out the way Republicans hoped. With overwhelming Democratic turnout, Republicans failed to pick up most of the congressional seats they targeted.
Across Texas, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Tennessee, Republican redistricting efforts targeted 12 seats held by Democrats, and only flipped two of them.
But in California, Proposition 50 was a clean sweep.
California Democrats flipped all five congressional seats that were targeted by Prop 50, including the 48th District in San Diego County. Marni von Wilpert won that redrawn district by a wide margin over Republican candidate Jim Desmond.
Lauren Prather, a professor of Political Science at the University of California San Diego, said California might not have even needed a gerrymandered map to flip those seats.
“It's possible in an election with such a huge Democratic wave, you know, some calling it a tsunami, that the old districts would have also resulted in Democratic wins,” Prather said.
She also noted that the back-and-forth gerrymandering contributed to a decline in trust in our elections. But Prather also said people were more receptive to an aggressive action like Prop 50 because of the national redistricting battle.
“That could actually be viewed as more confidence building in the sense that overall nationally, while voters don't like it, they may hold their noses when they think it actually can level the playing field if other actors are using other means or similar means in other places to tilt the playing field,” Prather said.
At the same time, she said, the efforts to redistrict in Republican-held states, and a Supreme Court case that weakened the Voting Rights Act, motivated people to vote.
“So I think in those places also, you saw that as a galvanizing factor, like, we're not going to let this beat us,” Prather said. “We're going to turn out to vote and vote so overwhelmingly that the gerrymandering is not going to make a difference.”
Prather said this also shows the limitations of gerrymandering when faced with a wave election year like 2026.
“If you gerrymander just enough so that now you can win seven seats, but you're winning those seven seats just by a 5 or 10 point margin in a, you know, plus-14 wave, you could end up losing all of those,” Prather said.
California’s redistricting process is set to return to the Citizens Redistricting Commission. Before Prop 50, California had an independent, bipartisan body of commissioners work to draw fair congressional districts every ten years following the census; the normal time to redistrict.
Following the 2030 census, California’s Citizens Redistricting Commission will redraw the congressional map.
