House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) predicted Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Republicans can not gerrymander enough House seats to stop Democrats from winning the majority in the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections.
Jeffries said, “As Democrats, we’re going to focus as well on fixing our broken health care system and cleaning up corruption. So we have an affirmative agenda that is compelling that we will continue to present to the American people. The Republicans have failed. That is why they are running scared.”
Host Dana Bash said, “I want to move on to other issues, but first, I do just have to ask you to talk a lot about Texas, as do other Democrats. You supported a move in your state of New York where Democrats you wanted to throw out congressional maps that were drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission. You praised New York’s state legislature for redrawing new ones. Is criticizing Texas hypocritical, given what you push for in your own state?”
Jeffries said, “What’s important is that in New York, the redrawn map that was actually adopted by the legislature was adopted on a bipartisan basis. Democrats and Republicans in the assembly voted for the map because the redraw was fair. That’s not what’s happening in Texas. In Texas, this is a racial partisan gerrymander ordered by Donald Trump as part of an effort to rig the midterm elections. We’re not going to let it happen. And at the end of the day, we were 24 seats down during Donald Trump’s first midterm election in 2018. We won 40 seats in 2018. There’s no way that Republicans can mathematically gerrymander their way to an artificial victory next year.”
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