Politicians are moving quickly on partisan redistricting efforts in several states to shape the 2026 midterm elections. But a large majority of Americans — including those living in the critical states of Texas and California — oppose political parties controlling the drawing of congressional maps.
The findings in the latest NBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey were gathered amid Texas Republicans’ successful effort to redraw their 2026 congressional map to boost GOP chances of keeping the U.S. House majority next year. That move, at President Donald Trump’s urging, set off an arms race of off-cycle redistricting that now includes efforts by California Democrats and Republicans in other states. Political districts are usually redrawn at the beginning of each decade, after the census.
Nationwide, over 8 in 10 Americans (82%) prefer that congressional districts be drawn by nonpartisan commissions rather than the party in power in each state. While a handful of states have independent commissions handling their congressional line-drawing, state legislatures have that power in more than half of states.
The finding is a striking instance of political maneuvering falling out of sync with the opinions of Americans, as the White House continues to urge GOP-led states to redraw maps. Following Texas, Republicans began a mid-decade redistricting process in Missouri this month, while Democrats have countered in California, with Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom pushing a redistricting ballot measure there this fall.
Support for nonpartisan commissions is strong among both Democrats and Republicans, the poll shows, though nationally, Republicans have a greater preference for partisan control of the process compared to Democrats.
Americans’ support for nonpartisan redistricting is high even when their party would be in control of the process.
In states where Republicans or Democrats would benefit from partisan gerrymandering, members of both parties still overwhelmingly prefer the idea of district boundaries being drawn by a nonpartisan commission.
Republicans are more likely than Democrats to support gerrymandering by political parties, including in Democratic-controlled states. But even in Republican-controlled states, 71% of Republicans prefer a nonpartisan commission. Meanwhile, 88% of Democrats living in Democratic-controlled states prefer that districts be drawn by nonpartisan commissions.
The pattern extends to Texas and California, even as those states rush in the other direction.
Texas Republicans were slightly more likely than the average national Republican to support district-drawing by their political party instead of a nonpartisan commission, after weeks of news about the GOP's successful redistricting effort there. But 66% still prefer a nonpartisan commission.
In California, where voters created an independent redistricting commission to draw legislative and congressional lines in 2008 and 2010, there is overwhelming and bipartisan support for nonpartisan commissions. Nearly 8 in 10 Democrats in the Democratic-dominated state would prefer that districts are drawn by nonpartisan commissions.
Despite these results, there is little evidence at this point to support any prediction that Texas Republicans will pay an electoral cost for their partisan redistricting efforts — or that the November ballot measure vote in California, where Newsom is arguing to temporarily reintroduce partisan redistricting as pushback against Trump and Texas, will go down in defeat.
The line between political beliefs and political action is always difficult to predict — especially in a hyperpolarized political environment.
What the findings in both Texas and California do show, however, is that Americans do not think about the issue of redistricting in a zero-sum, partisan way, at least when asked about it in the abstract. And they may provide an example of why so many Americans have a negative view of our politics.
The NBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey surveyed 30,196 adults online from Aug. 13 to Sept. 1 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.9 percentage points. The sample included 2,062 adults in Texas and 3,068 adults in California. Results for Texas and California were weighted separately to state-level targets.
