Democrats gained a new House seat in Utah after a state judge shot down Republicans’ attempt to gerrymander their way to an all-red congressional map for the Beehive State.
Judge Dianna Gibson ruled that state Republicans’ new congressional map violates the state’s anti-gerrymandering rules, saying lawmakers crossed the line when they drew it.
In its stead, she ruled in favor of a new map that makes the blue-leaning Salt Lake City its own district, giving Democrats a new congressional seat ahead of the 2026 midterms.
“[The map] fails in many ways to comply with Proposition 4,” wrote Gibson, referring to an anti-gerrymandering measure passed in 2018 that prevents congressional maps being drawn with partisan data.
“First, [the map] was drawn with partisan political data on display. [the map] does not abide by Proposition 4’s traditional redistricting criteria ‘to the greatest extent practicable.’ And, based on the evidence presented, the Court finds that [the map] was drawn with the purpose to favor Republicans.”
The map chopped the solidly blue Salt Lake City area into surrounding red districts, all but assuring Utah would send four Republican congresspeople to the House of Representatives in November 2026.
The League of Women Voters of Utah and Mormon Women for Ethical Government challenged the map in court. Gibson ruled in favor of a map drawn by the plaintiffs in the case that makes the Salt Lake City area a proverbial Democrat “donut hole”—a blue district surrounded by three large red districts.
The ruling is the latest step in a redistricting battle that has been raging since Proposition 4 narrowly passed in 2018. In 2020, the state’s GOP legislature passed Senate Bill 200, which overrode the congressional map drawn by the sponsors of Prop. 4, gave Utah four red seats, and effectively made the measure useless.
When the bill was challenged by the League of Women Voters in 2024, the state’s Supreme Court ruled the bill unconstitutional. In August of 2025, a lower court ordered new maps be drawn ahead of the 2026 midterms, and two months later, the state’s legislature passed the extremely red-leaning Map C.
Jowei Chen, a redistricting expert from the University of Michigan who testified for the plaintiffs in court, ran thousands of simulations of Utahn voting patterns, and found that the map showed extreme Republican bias.
The map “creates more Republican districts than 99.94% of the computer-simulated plans, which were drawn according to Proposition 4’s priority-ordered neutral criteria,” he said.
Gibson’s ruling is the second major redistricting victory for Democrats ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. At the direction of President Trump, GOP state legislatures began scrambling their maps to try and solidify the GOP’s majority in the House. So far, Texas has added five red seats, Ohio has added two, and Missouri and North Carolina have added one.
This prompted California Governor Gavin Newsom to pursue Prop. 50, which gave the state five more blue seats ahead of 2026. Prop. 50 passed overwhelmingly in the Nov. 4 elections.
