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.
Jeffries believes that despite the setback, Democrats can still win the House as Trump’s poll numbers have slumped due to the unpopularity of the Iran war, high gas prices, and historical precedent.
In 2018, 31 of the seats Democrats won were in districts that Donald Trump had also won, Jeffries said.
“And so we only need to flip a fraction of those, even given all of the gerrymandering that they’ve done, aided and abetted by these two Supreme Court decisions, we only need to flip a fraction of those in order to take back control of the House,” the House minority leader said. “And I can tell you right now, as a guarantee, we are taking back control of the United States House of Representatives.”
He also warned that in response to southern states creating new GOP-favorable maps, Democrats will also create friendlier maps after 2026 due to state laws.
“In states like New York and New Jersey and Washington and Colorado, and we’ll add on top of that Oregon, Illinois, and Maryland, we’ll have at least seven states that we believe we need to respond in advance of 2028 to what they are doing in the Deep South,” he said, “to wipe out any structural advantage that they’re trying to get themselves in advance of 2028.”
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) also predicted that despite the setback in her state, Democrats will likely flip a handful of states this year.
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“Notably, we have 11 congressional districts,” Spanberger said at the conference. “We have six that are currently held by Democrats, five that are currently held by Republicans. Of those remaining five that are held by Republicans, I won two of them on the ballot in November when I ran for governor.”
“Two of those races are imminently winnable,” she continued. “And then, arguably, when I won my first congressional race, my predecessor had won in 2016 by 15 points. I won in 2018 by two points. That’s a 17-point swing. By those numbers, and with a president who is even more unpopular than he was the last time we faced a midterm for him, we can win three to four seats in Virginia.”