Top Democrats spent the last 10 months tearing up their midterm playbook and duking it out with the GOP over redrawing US House districts — forcing Republicans to a draw.
Then, in just 13 days, Hakeem Jeffries and his party found themselves in a worst-case scenario.
A pair of court rulings — one from the US Supreme Court, one from Virginia — set the party’s redistricting ambitions back by as many 10 seats and left Democrats increasingly desperate to find ways to respond in the coast-to-coast redistricting war that President Donald Trump started last summer.
Jeffries and his allies have designed plans for the next two years to push Democratic-held states to set aside nonpartisan redistricting rules or gerrymander even more aggressively, with an eye toward producing a dozen or more new Democratic-held seats by November 2028, people familiar with the matter said. They’re eying seats from Oregon to New York in an effort that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars more in the next two years.
And they’re willing to put an uncomfortable spotlight on members of their own party to do it.
