In 2024, Kamala Harris won Texas’s 35th congressional district — which then stretched from central San Antonio up to the Austin suburbs — by more than 33 points. The next year, Texas Republicans redrew the district to exclude Austin and much of San Antonio and incorporate more rural counties. Under the new lines, Trump would have won it by 10 points.

Now, days before the midterms, the south-central Texas seat is a toss-up. So far, Republicans have spent $13.9 million on ads trying to elect Air Force veteran Carlos De La Cruz, compared to the $12.3 million Democrats have spent to try to elect Johnny Garcia, a deputy sheriff in nearby Bexar County. (The seat is open, with the incumbent, Democratic Rep. Greg Casar, running in the redrawn 37th district, surrounding Austin.)

The race captures an irony playing out in House contests across the country: Trump demanded Republican-led states redraw their congressional maps in an effort to win more House seats for the GOP. Now, the party is at risk of losing several of the very districts it drew — and is spending millions to try to win them.

Of the 18 House races the Cook Political Report rated as toss-ups as of Friday, nearly a third are recent Republican gerrymanders. Trump carried two of those five in 2024, and the other three were redrawn in ways to give the president a 10-point lead over Harris. Those districts were supposed to be friendly territory for the GOP. Instead, the party is fighting for them. Republicans have outspent Democrats on ads across those five seats by $12.3 million, according to an MS NOW review of data available through the ad-tracking firm AdImpact through Saturday.

It’s not hard to see why Republicans are struggling, even in the districts they drew to win. Trump’s approval rating is at a historic low, inflation persists, and the war in Iran grinds on.

Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said the GOP’s redistricting push reflected “a basic misunderstanding — especially in South Texas and Florida — of what was moving these voters in 2024.”

The GOP “believed that it was aspirational and supportive of them. It was not,” Madrid told MS NOW on Friday. “It was a rebuke of the Biden-Harris administration, the same way this is going to be a rebuke of Donald Trump.”

In the Texas race, De La Cruz seems aware that being seen as too closely tied to the president could be a liability. This summer, he altered his website to remove a description of himself as a “Trump conservative.” He has called the president’s tariffs “way too broad” — though he also told the Texas Tribune that any suggestion he was distancing himself from Trump was “hogwash,” and he appeared with the president and Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton at a San Antonio rally last month.

Garcia, meanwhile, has campaigned against the president’s tariffs and promised to reverse Medicaid cuts backed by congressional Republicans. He has also branded De La Cruz the president’s “wingman” who would be “another rubber stamp” for his agenda.

Democrats in other GOP-redrawn toss-ups are running similar campaigns, casting their races as referendums on Republican control of Washington. In Florida’s 22nd district, another open gerrymandered seat rated as a toss-up, Democrat Pia Dandiya has pledged to fight Trump’s tariffs and has called out her GOP opponent Casey Askar for scrubbing references to the president from his website. (Askar has since added some back.) And in North Carolina’s 1st District, a seat Trump carried in 2024, Democratic Rep. Don Davis has campaigned on ending the war in Iran and criticized the president’s tariffs, which his Republican opponent, Laurie Buckhout, has defended.

“The tectonics of foreign policy and the economy present bad news for this president … and that’s before you even get to the quality of the candidates,” said Kareem Crayton, vice president of the Washington office of the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan think tank based at the New York University School of Law.

Some strategists argue that the GOP’s maps themselves made Republicans’ already tough midterm odds worse. To create the new seats, mapmakers had to spread the party’s voters more thinly across more districts, leaving less room for error. And they did so in red states like Texas and Florida, whose populations are changing rapidly because of immigration. A map built on past census results can quickly fall out of step with the electorate.

In Florida, the warning signs were clear. An April memo distributed by the nonpartisan Civic Data and Research Institute found that drawing new GOP seats would require “diluting existing Republican vote margins across a larger geographic footprint.”

Now, Republicans could come up short in both of the state’s two toss-up races. One is the open 22nd District. The other is the 14th District, where former Republican state legislator Mike Beltran is trying to unseat Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor. Republicans have spent $14.7 million more than Democrats in advertising across those two races as of Saturday.

Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida, believes Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and GOP officials who backed the new map “didn’t take seriously enough” several things: Trump’s unpopularity, the economic woes on his watch and the fact that he “seems a lot more interested in ballrooms and getting his name on the Kennedy Center and building arches rather than focusing on bringing prices down.”

National Democrats have seized on Republicans’ struggles to keep the seats they redrew. In a statement to MS NOW, Viet Shelton, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said Republicans “underestimated how much the public hates the idea of politicians picking their voters” and that redistricting “has backfired spectacularly and has had the net effect of forcing Republicans to defend in more places.”

“Instead of creating safe red seats,” Shelton said, “they created new opportunities for Democrats to compete in.”

Mike Marinella, spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, countered that redistricting “created offense for Republicans and forced Democrats to spend precious resources in districts they never expected to defend.”

A national GOP operative, granted anonymity in order to speak freely, told MS NOW party officials see Democrats as “renting” some of the redrawn districts. They believe those seats will be easier for Republicans to win in a different political environment — like the 2028 presidential election.

Strategists also caution Democrats against overconfidence, noting that winning GOP-drawn seats this cycle doesn’t mean Republicans won’t benefit from those maps down the road.

“This has everything to do with Republicans and nothing to do with Democrats,” Madrid said. “The Democrats’ problems start Wednesday morning.”

Hunter Woodall contributed reporting.

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