Republicans may not gain as many House seats as they anticipated on Tuesday from redistricting in Texas and Florida compared to Democrats in California, whose newly drawn maps are more likely to create safe blue seats, but have shifted fights about Israel into Democratic primaries, experts told JNS.
In November 2025, California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50, which authorized the state legislature to draw a new congressional map through 2030, when the state’s independent redistricting commission would draw another.
The California secretary of state said at the time that the proposition was “in response to Texas’s partisan redistricting.” The Texas state legislature redrew the state’s districts last year at U.S. President Donald Trump’s direction. The president said at the time that he hoped the GOP could gain five new seats in the state.
In May, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a redistricting measure into law that aimed to flip four congressional seats to the GOP.
Redistricting in California, Texas and Florida “will not help Republicans as much as they had thought,” Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and host of the podcast “Beyond the Polls,” told JNS.
“California will send five new Democrats, while Florida will be fortunate to send three new Republicans,” he said. “Texas might be plus-three GOP, but might also be even, as Democrats are very competitive in three GOP-held or GOP-leaning new seats.”
Olsen doesn’t think that Israel will be an issue in those districts, but “any new Democrat is subject to internal party pressures that Republicans are not.”
The key race to watch when it comes to issues related to the Jewish state, according to Olsen, is California’s 7th Congressional District, where Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Calif.) is squaring off against Mai Vang, a member of the Sacramento City Council.
Vang calls for an end to the “genocide in Palestine” and states that “in 2024, while Doris was cashing checks from AIPAC, I was in City Hall passing Sacramento’s ceasefire resolution.”
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee endorsed Matsui in 2024, but she does not appear on AIPAC’s list of 2026 endorsements.
“If Vang wins, it will be another victory for the anti-Bibi, Israel-suspicious far left,” Olsen told JNS.
Jared Sclar, a Democratic consultant in San Diego, told JNS that “the thing most people get backwards about Prop 50 is that it reduced competition in California rather than increasing it.”
“The map worked by taking five Republican seats and making them safely Democratic, and a safe seat is not a competitive general election,” he said. “We went into this cycle with a handful of real battlegrounds, and we are down to two.”
Sclar thinks that the two main battleground districts in the state are the 22nd and 48th Congressional Districts. In the former, Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) is facing Randy Villegas, a political science professor who has said that U.S. tax dollars shouldn’t fund Israeli “genocide” in Gaza.
In the 48th District, Jim Desmond, a member of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors who is running as a Republican, is running against Marni von Wilpert, a member of the San Diego City Council who is running as a Democrat.
Democratic Majority for Israel’s political action committee has backed von Wilpert. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), of the 48th District, is retiring at the end of his term.
Sclar believes that the 22nd District is the “harder one to call” of the two.
“The new lines help Democrats on paper, but the district has been trending the other way, from Biden plus-17 in 2020 to Trump plus-two in 2024, and Valadao has survived worse,” Sclar told JNS. “I would not put money on either side there.”
Because Prop 50 made some California congressional seats safe for Democrats, “the fight over Israel moved out of general elections and into Democratic primaries and Democrat-versus-Democrat contests,” according to Sclar.
“That is where the money is going now,” he told JNS. “AIPAC-aligned groups put roughly $6 million into a low-turnout August special in the East Bay and lost to Aisha Wahab, who faces Melissa Hernandez again in a rematch on Tuesday.”
Rep. Aisha Wahab (D-Calif.) defeated Hernandez, former mayor of Dublin, Calif., in the August special election to replace former congressman Eric Swalwell, a Democrat.
Wahab, who had been a Democratic state senator, has accused Israel of “genocide.” Hernandez said that “Israel had the right to defend itself” after Oct. 7 but that “the destruction in Gaza has gone too far.” (Sclar consulted on Hernandez’s 2020 campaign for Alameda County Board of Supervisors.)
The Democratic consultant also cited the Vang-Matsui race and California’s 11th Congressional District, where Scott Wiener, a Jewish Democratic state senator, and Connie Chan, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, have accused Israel of “genocide.”
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who is retiring, has long held the seat.
“The California delegation will get bluer, and the Israel question will increasingly be settled inside the Democratic Party rather than between the parties,” Sclar told JNS.
“I would stop short of calling Tuesday a referendum on any of it,” he said. “Even in the race where pro-Israel money spent the most, the attack ads were mostly about crime, not Israel.”
“Voters in these districts are deciding on cost-of-living and health care,” he told JNS. “The Israel fight is happening above their heads, among donors and interest groups, and the results will get read as a verdict on something the voters were not really asked about.”
‘Environment is bad’ in Texas
Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist in Texas, told JNS that when the state legislature voted to redraw congressional maps, he was concerned that “we might be a little too aggressive in thinking that Hispanic voters’ support for President Trump would necessarily translate into support for Republicans up-and-down the ballot in 2026.”
“I think some of that’s playing out,” he said.
“I think that Republicans are not likely to gain the number of seats that they hoped for in Texas after redistricting,” he told JNS. “We’re seeing Hispanic voters have moved away from the president. They moved away from the Republican Party. Most of them are now supporting the Democrats.”
The races that are on the “bubble” are in South Texas, where Hispanic voters will decide the elections, according to Steinhauser.
Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-Texas), in the 15th Congressional District, where she is facing Bobby Pulido, a Tejano music star, is an example, Steinhauser said.
There is also the state’s 35th Congressional District, where De La Cruz’s brother, Carlos De La Cruz, a Republican business owner and U.S. Air Force veteran, is facing Johnny Garcia, a Democrat and former deputy in the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office.
“Those South Texas races that are plurality Hispanic or majority Hispanic are the ones that everybody’s watching in terms of what we’re seeing with Hispanic voters moving away from the GOP,” Steinhauser told JNS.
He thinks Republicans will likely gain either one additional seat in Texas or none at all.
“The environment is bad,” he said. “Originally, many Republicans thought we’d pick up three, four or five seats, and I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Steinhauser thinks that Democrats have a 65% to 70% chance of winning the House, and if Republicans lose a seat, then “that’s not good for the pro-Israel caucus.”
The Republicans “support Israel more than Democrats do,” he told JNS. “They support the policies of the current Israeli administration and government more than Democrats do. They support the Iran war, and they support allying with Israel more than the Democrats do.”
‘Republicans are growing in Florida’
Brian Ruddle, vice president of political affairs at Harris Media, a conservative political marketing agency based in Miami, told JNS that the newly drawn congressional lines in Florida “help Republicans” and that “the math will probably be more Republican at the end of the day.”
“I do expect Republicans to increase their total number,” Ruddle said. “These district lines are helping Republicans, because Republicans are growing in the state of Florida.”
He thinks the redistricted lines will have a “long-term benefit” for Republicans beyond the current election cycle and that the new map has “forced some of the Republicans to introduce themselves to a whole new group of voters that they haven’t really had to interact with before.”
Ruddle acknowledged that there “could be some short-term pains.”
“There are a couple races that we thought, hey, this is going to be a Republican district, to where maybe it looks a little bit more swingy, or leaning maybe out of the Republican camp right now,” Ruddle told JNS.
Since Florida’s primary election was in August, candidates have only had two months to introduce themselves to general election voters, he said.
Ruddle also said Democratic voters are going to vote for their party’s candidate no matter what, while “more independent Republican voters” are being more “candidate specific,” making it more of an “uphill” battle for Republicans.
“On the Republican side, I think you saw a lot of folks jump into just a few open seats as well, so they spent a lot of time focused on the primary electorate, and it made it a little bit harder to transition to the general,” Ruddle said.
Ruddle worked on the congressional campaign for Dan Franzese, a businessman, in the Republican primary for the 25th Congressional District. Franzese lost to Scott Singer, mayor of Boca Raton, Fla., who is now facing Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) in the general election.
There have been “some pretty significant shifts” in the district under the new map, he said.
He thinks South Florida will be where the key competitive races are because of “some interesting voting patterns” in the Miami-Dade area. There are “many areas” of the state where if the election were held today, the Democrats would “probably do very, very well,” he said.
“But the election isn’t held today. It’s held next week, and there are a lot of Republicans still to vote,” he told JNS. “If the Republicans turn out, they’re going to be just fine.”
Ruddle thinks it’s “more likely than not” that Democrats win the House due to redistricting in California and Illinois, the latter of which he said is a “case study” of a “truly carved-up state with the goal of stopping Republicans.”
“Historically, the party in power is going to lose seats, and right now we have a very thin margin in the House,” he said.
JNS asked Ruddle how that would affect support for Israel in Congress.
“Republicans are still in defense of really the only true democracy in the Middle East,” he said. Many Democrats are promulgating “anti-Jewish messaging,” he said.
Ruddle hopes that the Senate can “temper that” and has a “good feeling” that the Republicans will maintain control of the Senate.
“If the Senate stays in Republican hands, then the House, their impact on things like Israel becomes a little bit less,” he told JNS. “It’s going to be hearings. It’s going to be a lot of talk, but I don’t think any substantive major changes.”
“They’re not going to be able to force anything that can’t get through the Senate or pass muster with the president,” he added.
