KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE
— Prior to the election, we identified some key House districts that would tell the tale of both the race for the presidency and the race for the House.
— A tour of these districts shows the broad gains Donald Trump made in 2024, both in places that moved toward him, and away from him, in 2020.
— Trump gains among Latino voters jump off the screen when looking at some key congressional district results.
— The battle for the 2026 House majority will likely be determined by how both sides perform in districts narrowly won by Trump.
— Redistricting changes in advance of 2024 very well could have been a partisan wash, although what happened in New York will merit more detailed study.
Surveying the results in key congressional districts
After President-elect Trump’s victory and the Republican capture of the Senate last week, the House of Representatives majority remains uncalled by most news organizations, although the writing is on the wall.
Our own best guess is that the House GOP majority will be something like 220-222 seats at full strength—although the House will not be at full strength for long, for reasons we’ll get into throughout this piece.
On the Sunday before the election, I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times exploring some key House districts that I thought would tell us something about both the race for the House and the race for the presidency. I’m going to use those same districts (and some others) to identify notable highlights from the results.
As a note, all of the election data from 2024 presented here is unofficial and is subject to change. Also, keep in mind that Joe Biden won the national popular vote by about 4.5 points in 2020, and Donald Trump appears to be in line for a popular vote margin of about 1.5 points when all the votes are counted, according to analysts Nate Silver and John Couvillon. That means a “uniform swing” across states and districts from 2020 to 2024 would be about 6 points toward the Republicans in terms of margin. So a swing greater than 6 points is better than average for Trump, while a swing below that is weaker than average.
Virginia (VA-2, VA-7, VA-10)
An early signal on Election Night about the trajectory of the House might have come from two competitive districts in the Old Dominion, the open VA-7 in Northern Virginia and Rep. Jen Kiggans’s (R, VA-2) district in Hampton Roads. Had one side swept these seats, that party would have had momentum toward winning the House. As it was, the districts split, as Kiggans held VA-2 51%-47% while Eugene Vindman (D) held VA-7 51%-49%.
According to informal calculations from my colleague J. Miles Coleman, VA-7 likely voted for Kamala Harris by about 2 points, down about half a dozen points from 2020 (roughly the size of the average swing noted above). So Harris’s and Vindman’s margins were likely about the same in VA-7. VA-2 voted for Trump by about a point after voting for Biden by 2, meaning that Kiggans ran a few points ahead of Trump (and the swing in this district was smaller than the national swing). This split ultimately suggested the murky House result we ultimately got, in which Republicans apparently won another small majority.
But the bigger overall signal of the political environment from Virginia was in a race that did not seem like it would be as competitive: VA-10, which Suhas Subramanyam (D) won by only 4.5 points. The heart of VA-10 is affluent, highly-educated Loudoun County, and its result on Election Night was one of the first major signs of the very broad national shift toward Trump in 2024. Loudoun, whose Democratic margin ballooned to 25 points in the 2020 presidential race, contracted to just 16 points. Loudoun’s vote count was almost entirely reported early in the night, and it was a horrible sign for Harris, given that it was precisely the kind of previously Democratic-trending place where she would have wanted to hold or even expand her support compared to Joe Biden’s 2020 showing rather than see it contract.
Loudoun’s 16-point margin for Harris was about the same as its margin for Hillary Clinton, just like how the state’s current 5.5-point margin for Harris was down from a 10-point margin for Biden but very similar to Clinton’s 2016 showing.
VA-10, despite becoming more Democratic in recent years, can be described as “ancestrally Republican” because the area it covers used to be more Republican than it is now, even taking 2024 into account. As such, it still likely contains a handful of non-Republican presidential voters who may be a little more open to Republicans down-ballot. For instance, Harris won Loudoun 56.1%-39.7%, but Subramanyam beat Mike Clancy (R) there by a smaller 55.2%-42.7% spread.
NC-1
Another key House test in a state with an early poll close was the marginal, Biden +2 NC-1, defended by Rep. Don Davis (D). This district, which has a substantial but not majority Black population, was a must-hold for House Democrats given challenges elsewhere on the map.
Again according to calculations from my colleague Miles Coleman, Trump carried NC-1 by roughly 2.5 points. This was indeed suggestive of Trump winning North Carolina overall, which he did by a little over 3 points.
Davis, however, won 49.5%-47.9%, holding a district that North Carolina Republicans made more competitive as part of a new gerrymander they put in place for 2024 that allowed them to net 3 additional seats elsewhere in the state.
One place we highlighted before the election was Wilson County, a Biden +3 county in Davis’s district where Democratic performance has been flagging in recent years. Harris did actually carry it, although only by a few tenths of a percentage point. Meanwhile, Davis carried it by about 5.5 points, the kind of overperformance Davis ultimately needed, and got, while Harris was losing the district.
Davis will be one of several Trump-district Democrats in the next Congress. These numbers will take a while to finalize but there certainly will be many more Trump-district Democrats than Harris-district Republicans. As of now, we think there are at least 10 (and likely more) House Democrats in Trump-won seats, and definitively only a single Republican, Rep. Don Bacon (NE-2 – more on him below) in a Harris-won district, although that should also grow, but perhaps only modestly.
This is somewhat reminiscent of 2004, the last time a Republican won the popular vote for president. Back then, there were 58 “crossover” districts—that is way more than there will be this time, even as we’re still figuring out the precise number—but just 18 of them were districts that voted for John Kerry while electing a House Republican, while there were 40 Democrats in George W. Bush-won districts. This came as Republicans won the House with 232 seats, a majority significantly larger than whatever the Republicans will get this time. But in both 2004 and 2024, the House minority party will nonetheless have won more “crossover” districts than the House majority.
Looking ahead, the House playing field in the 2026 midterm will be littered with narrow Trump-won districts, both in terms of Democratic and Republican defense.
One other aside: Among Black Democrats defending substantially Black seats outside big urban areas in the South, Davis was really the only vulnerable Democrat. But other Democrats in less competitive districts held up fine, such as Rep. Sanford Bishop (D, GA-2) in southwest Georgia as well as victorious Democrats in AL-2 and LA-6, new 2024 districts effectively allowed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Allen v. Milligan decision in 2023, which upheld Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. These 2 new districts won by Democrats helped make up for the 3 districts that they lost in the North Carolina remap. The Louisiana remap is going back to the Supreme Court—the way it is drawn may very well be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander—so we could see additional changes there and maybe elsewhere. This is something to watch on the redistricting front for 2026.
New York (NY-3, NY-4, NY-19, NY-22)
Despite Harris losing a ton of ground in New York—her current 11.5-point statewide margin is half that of Biden’s 23-point edge—Democrats did well in the state’s key House races, defeating Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (R, NY-4) on Long Island and Reps. Marc Molinaro (R, NY-19) and Brandon Williams (R, NY-22) upstate. The margins in NY-4 and NY-19 were close (about 2 and 1.5 points, respectively), while Williams lost by a much clearer 8-point margin.
This was another state that had a new map in place for 2024, after Democrats (lightly) gerrymandered a court-drawn map. What’s interesting about the new map, though, is that Democrats likely would have flipped these same districts on both the old and the new map—but Democrats’ decision to shore up another seat may have prevented an upset loss for them.
First of all, NY-4 did not change in redistricting, so there is no redistricting effect there. The makeup of NY-19 did change but the presidential topline remained basically the same (it was roughly Biden +4.5 on both maps). Perhaps a more detailed analysis with certified results will come up with a different conclusion, but it stands to reason Molinaro could have lost on the old map just like he did on the new one. Williams, meanwhile, saw his district go from roughly Biden +7.5 to Biden +11.5. But he lost by 8 points, so the actual margin was considerably larger than the Democratic shift in redistricting.
However, one under-the-radar change on the new map was that Rep. Tom Suozzi (D, NY-3), who recaptured his district impressively in an early 2024 special election after it had flipped to Republicans as an open seat in 2022, saw his district go from Biden +8.2 to Biden +11.3 under the new lines. Suozzi was only reelected by about 3 points as the district flipped to Trump—so the additional padding may have made a difference.
Again, this all merits a further look down the road. But the redistricting may have been most impactful in allowing Democrats to defend NY-3 rather than allowing them to flip any of their offensive targets.
If the redistricting did make the difference in NY-3, it suggests that the 2024 redistricting was a wash: Republicans gained 3 seats in North Carolina, but Democrats made up for it by flipping the aforementioned Alabama and Louisiana districts because of redistricting and perhaps by protecting Suozzi in NY-3.
Before leaving New York, we would be remiss not to note a pending House vacancy: Trump is set to nominate Rep. Elise Stefanik (R, NY-21) as ambassador to the United Nations. This will set up a 2025 special election in a heavily Republican district covering New York’s North Country—we don’t have district-level results for it, but Trump probably carried it by something higher than his 2016 margin there of 18.5 points (it was about 16 points in 2020). Early in the first Trump administration, Democrats were competitive in (but did not win) some other similarly red districts left behind by House members who joined the administration. Another House Republican, Rep. Michael Waltz (R, FL-6), is set to join the incoming administration as National Security Adviser—his district, Trump +24 in 2020 and definitely redder in 2024, is more Republican than Stefanik’s. But still, the already-small GOP House majority in 2025 will be reduced by at least two members, assuming Stefanik and Waltz move to these new positions, until they are replaced in special elections (U.S. House vacancies are always filled by special elections, no matter the state).
The Latino vote
We focused on the Central Valley-based race between Rep. John Duarte (R, CA-13) and his 2022 opponent, Adam Gray (D), in our election preview as both a key race and a place to watch for Latino voter trends. But that race remains uncalled with votes left to count, so let’s set it aside for now.
It is blindingly obvious that Trump made major gains among Latino voters, building on his improvements from 2020. A few examples show the big swing.
Rep.-elect Nellie Pou (D) held the open NJ-9 for Democrats by a fairly narrow margin following the death of long-serving Rep. Bill Pascrell (D) earlier this year. Pou’s margin stands at only 4.5 points in a district that Biden carried by 19 points in 2020 but Trump may have carried, according to a crowdsourced collection of district-level results curated by analyst Drew Savicki. The district, which runs northwest from a sliver of the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, is plurality Latino. This shift toward Trump did not come completely out of the blue, either—the district swung toward Trump from 2016 to 2020 as well, and Gov. Phil Murphy’s (D-NJ) margin there fell from 27 points to 8 from 2017 to 2021. The city of Passaic, which is located in the district and is three-quarters Latino, has shifted strongly toward the Republicans recently: Elections Daily analyst Kraz Greinetz noted that Hillary Clinton won the city 75%-23%, but by 2024, Trump had actually flipped it, 51%-46%.
In South Texas, which already experienced a huge swing toward Trump in 2020, there was another turn of the realigning wheel. In Rep. Vicente Gonzalez’s (D, TX-34) roughly 90% Latino border district, Democratic margins went from Clinton by 36, to Biden by 15.5, to Trump by 4.5, again according to Savicki’s district-level results list. Gonzalez held his seat by about 2.5 points in a 2022 rematch with former Rep. Mayra Flores (R), but the trendlines for Democrats in the area are awful. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D, TX-28), meanwhile, beat an unheralded opponent by 5 points; we don’t have presidential figures for this district yet but it stands to reason that Trump carried it, too. Cuellar faces serious federal corruption charges and is set to stand trial next year; this district would be difficult for Democrats to hold in a special election if Cuellar eventually is compelled to resign.
Finally, Republicans scored two victories in competitive eastern Pennsylvania districts, defeating Rep. Matt Cartwright (D, PA-8) in a district covering Scranton/Wilkes-Barre that had already voted for Trump in 2020 and Rep. Susan Wild (D, PA-7) in a Lehigh Valley-based district. In the leadup to the election, Puerto Rican voters were being closely watched, both because of the overall possibility of a Latino shift to Trump but also a possible backlash to comments made at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally late in the campaign. Allentown, a majority Latino city in Wild’s district with a substantial Puerto Rican population, swung right, per NBC’s Steve Kornacki, going from Biden by 35 to Harris by 23. Map 1, again from my colleague Miles Coleman, shows the change in PA-7, comparing 2016 and 2024. Trump won the district by similar margins in the 2-party vote in 2016 and 2024 (Biden won it by less than a point in 2020), but notice how the Trump vote pattern changes from 2016 to 2024: Allentown (which is marked on the map) and some other cities got markedly less blue while the changes in some suburban and outlying areas were both more mixed and less drastic. The net result was that Trump did slightly better in the district in 2024 than he did in 2016, and 2024 overall was his best showing in Pennsylvania of his 3 elections (he won the state by about 2 points).
Map 1: 2016 and 2024 PA-7 results, 2-party vote
Long story short: Pre-election polling consistently suggested Trump was poised to make significant gains with Latino voters, and he very clearly did, even as it will take time to figure out the precise size of the shift and how it varied across the country.
ME-2 and NE-2
Finally, a pair of survivors in unfavorable districts that again awarded an electoral vote to the other party’s presidential candidate apparently won again.
We say “apparently” because Rep. Jared Golden (D, ME-2), leading Austin Theriault (R) by just 0.2 points, is going to a ranked-choice voting allocation that began on Tuesday, but Golden is so close to 50% (49.94%, according to the Associated Press’s count, compared to 49.75% for Theriault), that he should be able to get over the threshold, although there also may be a recount (see here for more details). Meanwhile, the aforementioned Bacon in Nebraska surprisingly held on despite being behind in polls throughout the last months of the campaign: He’s leading Tony Vargas (D) by a little over 2 points, and news outlets have called the race for him.
This pair of districts seemed like they would illustrate the diverging electoral patterns between suburban areas with high levels of four-year college attainment (Omaha, the heart of NE-2) and white, small-town/rural working-class areas (ME-2). Instead, they both moved right: Trump’s margin expanded from roughly 6 points to 8 points in ME-2, and his deficit contracted from a little over 6 points to a little over 4 points in NE-2. The disappointing Democratic showing in NE-2, particularly as polls suggested Harris would outrun Biden in the district instead, mirrored the disappointing Democratic results in other highly-educated suburban places across the northern battlegrounds: Harris did worse than Biden in Oakland (Detroit suburbs) and Kent (Grand Rapids) counties in Michigan and all of the Philadelphia collar counties, for instance (and we already mentioned Loudoun, in a different region, above).
Harris needed to counterbalance her likely losses compared to Biden in working-class areas with improvements in suburban places that had been swinging toward the Democrats, like NE-2. But by and large she failed to do so, which helps explain why Trump did better in 2024 than he did in his previous presidential bids.