The fight to flip the House just got harder for Dems. And they have New York to blame.

Republicans eked out a narrow win in the 2024 redistricting wars, gaining a single seat before the general election.

While there’s an outside chance of another last-minute redistricting before November, after two significant court rulings this week the House landscape is largely locked in place — and the GOP is breathing a sigh of relief that this mid-decade round of redistricting went its way.

“It is a marginally more favorable map in ‘24 than we even had in ‘22,” said Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the top group that coordinates the party’s redistricting efforts. “It turned out pretty well.”

The battle to control the House is expected to be extremely competitive. And with Republicans currently holding only a two-seat majority, every single district will count.

The GOP came out ahead thanks to the redistricting aggression of North Carolina Republicans — and the timidity of New York Democrats.

In North Carolina, the Republican-majority state Supreme Court said it would not police partisan gerrymandering, even though the same court, when Democrats were in the majority, had overturned a GOP-drawn map the year before. That gave a green light to Republicans in the state legislature to craft a particularly efficient gerrymander that wiped out three battleground Democrats by turning their seats into safe red districts. It also made Democratic Rep. Don Davis’ already competitive district slightly redder, giving Republicans a higher chance of flipping that one, too.

But on a purely partisan measure, those guaranteed pickups were nearly wiped out by Democrats’ gains elsewhere in the South. Voting-rights groups — sometimes with the backing of Democratic Party-aligned organizations — won legal challenges to racial gerrymandering in Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia that each created a new seat where Black voters will be able to elect a representative of their choosing.

“When you balance it out, you end up with the same rough partisan perspective, while you're getting a significantly better, more representative Congress,” said John Bisognano, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.

The streak of courtroom wins was no guarantee. The Alabama suit reached all the way up to the Supreme Court, which in the Roberts era has been generally hostile to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But in a surprise ruling, a majority of the court — including the chief justice — affirmed a lower court ruling that the state’s maps likely violated the landmark law by diluting the power of Black voters.

Alabama Republicans effectively ignored those findings, daring the courts to force them to comply. An angry panel of federal judges did just that.

It was also a boon for similar challenges across the South. Soon after, courts in Georgia and Louisiana also found that new maps were needed to better represent Black voters.

The new lines in Alabama and Louisiana will almost assuredly result in Democratic pickups.

The court-drawn map in Alabama carved up a GOP-held district to create a new near-majority-Black district that sweeps across the state. Republican incumbents Barry Moore and Jerry Carl were forced into a member-on-member primary that Moore won; the Democratic nominee will be picked in a runoff next month.

And in Louisiana, Republican legislators sacrificed GOP Rep. Garret Graves — ignoring pleas from the highest-ranking Louisianan in government, House Speaker Mike Johnson — to create a new majority-Black district that will also likely be represented by a Democrat come 2025.

Georgia’s new map won’t change the partisan balance, though. There, Republicans increased the number of majority-Black districts in the state — but did so by cannibalizing Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath’s “coalition district,” where no single group makes up a majority but cumulatively form a majority-minority district.

Democrats argued that that was contrary to what the judge ordered and a violation of the Voting Rights Act. The judge said Georgia Republicans — unlike their Alabama counterparts — weren’t ignoring the courts, and if Democrats wanted to defend coalition districts it would have to be done in a separate lawsuit, effectively locking this map in place for at least 2024.

McBath is running for the new majority-Black district, even though it’s clear on the other side of Atlanta from her current seat.

But the most consequential post-midterm redistricting took place in New York — where lines drawn by the Democratic legislature only made fairly small tweaks to the state’s map.

It was a shocking turn of events after years of legal wrangling. The state has an independent redistricting commission split evenly between the two parties — but ultimately, the Democratic-dominated state legislature gets the final say.

And in 2022, when Democrats in Albany passed a gerrymander so aggressive that Republicans called it the “Hochulmander” — a portmanteau with Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul’s name — the GOP sued.

The bombshell legal victory Republicans won before the midterms resulted in a hypercompetitive, court-drawn map being used in 2022. The GOP nearly swept all of the contested seats, key to Republicans’ narrow House majority.

But Democrats wanted another shot. After the midterms, they ultimately won a procedural court ruling allowing them to start the whole process over — the commission with the first crack, and final approval to the Democratic legislature. Pursuing another chance at a redraw led to rampant speculation that Democrats wanted another shot at a gerrymander — though perhaps not quite as ruthless as last time.

But it was not to be. The state’s independent commission came to a bipartisan agreement on a map that only made modest changes. The Democratic-dominated state legislature signaled it was unhappy with that map and would make changes of its own — but then only made minor tweaks on lines that ultimately got bipartisan approval.

“Everyone was talking about bringing back a new ‘Hochulmander,’” Kincaid said. But, he added, Republicans’ earlier court wins — and the threat of more lawsuits, not on procedural grounds but on the legality of the political lines — may have kept the legislature from going wild. “New York was a pleasant surprise, that we didn't have to continue pursuing it in court,” Kincaid said.

At the end of the day — and after expensive litigation — the map ended up just modestly more favorable for Democrats, and served more to protect incumbents and keep existing battlegrounds largely in play.

(The notable exception was first-term GOP Rep. Brandon Williams, who's already Biden-friendly, Syracuse-based district got a couple points bluer in both the commission and lawmakers’ maps.)

“I recognize some people maybe had different expectations than were ever reasonable in New York, but from where I stand, there's a partisan gerrymandering prohibition in the Constitution in New York,” Bisognano noted. “That's an important reality that needs to be accepted and appreciated.”

One state could still, theoretically, see changes as well — although it has seen long delays in court.

Utah’s state Supreme Court heard a partisan gerrymandering challenge in July, after Republicans diced up Salt Lake City to turn all four House seats red, and the court has not given an indication on when it will weigh in.

A pair of rulings this week also removed two question marks off the board, likely locking two states in place. A federal court in Florida ruled this week that the state’s congressional map did not discriminate against Black voters in North Florida, where a district that had previously elected a Black Democrat was erased in redistricting before the 2022 elections.

And the Supreme Court has yet to issue an opinion in a case challenging a GOP-held district in South Carolina, where challengers alleged that voters’ partisanship was illegally used as a proxy to discriminate on account of race. The Supreme Court, however, seemed extremely unlikely to buy that argument — and this week a lower court that initially ruled the maps were unconstitutional said they could be used for the 2024 elections, given the delay at the Supreme Court.

States accounting for 67 congressional districts — more than 15 percent of the entire House — have already redrawn their maps for 2024, the most for any mid-decade cycle this century. And even if the other three states where litigation remains active see their maps stand, more changes are possible for 2026.

The slow pace of litigation continues across the country, including challenges to the new maps in all of the states that saw post-midterm redraws besides New York. (Louisiana has an oddity: A case filed by a group of self-identified “non-African American” voters alleging racial gerrymandering.) Texas has a long-running racial gerrymandering challenge as well.

And Democrats in Wisconsin will likely push for new maps there after winning a liberal majority on that state Supreme Court, even though justices there turned away a last-minute challenge this year.

“There will be maps that change between now and 2030, no doubt about it,” said Kincaid.