House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) is bullish on Democrats’ prospects to retake control of the House despite the GOP’s redistricting advantage following the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act.Jeffries, who would become the nation’s first African American House Speaker if Democrats win control, compared the 2026 midterms to 2018, when Democrats gained 40 seats during President Donald Trump’s first term.“Keep in mind when we won the House back in 2018, and we’re in a 2018 type of environment right now, as poll after poll, private and public, continue to show, if not better, we needed to flip 24 seats,” Jeffries said on Tuesday while speaking at the Center for American Progress’s Ideas Conference. “With the help of many of the people in this room and people all across the country, we flipped 40.”
Democrats suffered two recent defeats on the redistricting front. The Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which protected majority-minority congressional districts. Virginia’s Supreme Court also struck down a 10-1 congressional map that would have likely given the GOP only one district after commonwealth voters approved the mid-decade redrawing in a special election.
