Wile E. Coyote politics?

The GOP gerrymandering schemes pioneered in North Carolina might backfire this year.

Yesterday, Virginia Democrats released a new Congressional map that gives the party a 10-1 advantage. Republicans on Twitter are in an uproar; they’ve never seen such an egregious gerrymander! As a North Carolina Democrat, I can’t stop laughing.

Donald Trump’s plan to rig the 2026 election with a national mid-decade gerrymander is blowing up in his face. After he ordered his minions in Texas to redraw their Congressional districts to squeeze out a few more seats, California responded to even the score. Now, it looks like Democrats are actually going to pick up seats in the gerrymandering wars.

North Carolina, of course, is Ground Zero for the modern gerrymandering battles. For more than three decades, the state drew and redrew districts due to lawsuits filed by one side or the other. After a redistricting in 2015, then-Representative David Lewis famously defended partisan gerrymandering by saying, “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” Well, Virginia Democrats figured out how to draw one that gives Democrats a 10-1 advantage.

In Texas, the Republicans who drew the new districts are now in a panic. In a special election for a state Senate seat last week, a Democrat defeated the Republican by 14 points in a district that Trump won by 17. The GOP map-makers based their new districts on the premise that Hispanic voters had shifted to the GOP after they voted that way in 2024. The special election results indicate those voters have shifted back toward Democrats. If they stay with Democrats, Texas Republicans may lose more seats than they gain.

Here in North Carolina, Republicans bent the knee to Trump. They redrew two districts in eastern North Carolina in an attempt to unseat Democrat Don Davis in the First Congressional District. In doing so, they shifted Republicans out of GOP Representative Greg Murphy’s Third Congressional District into Davis’s district. If 2026 becomes a big Democratic wave year, both NC-01 and NC-03 could be Democratic after the votes are counted.

Republicans, though, aren’t finished. They’re trying to nationalize voting by requiring proof of citizenship to vote through the SAVE Act. The bill restricts the type of identification voters can use and excludes standard driver’s licenses. It’s another attempt by Republicans to limit access to the ballot box for voters who don’t fit the GOP profile.

Republicans know that 2026 is going to be a tough year for them. They’re falling back on the strategies and tactics they learned in North Carolina—rigging elections through gerrymandering and voter suppression. Neither tactic can stop a large wave. The attempt at gerrymandering, though, may turn out to be a Wile E. Coyote move.