A Detailed Analysis of Utah’s New Congressional Map
November 11, 2025 · 11:59 AM EST
Six states have now adopted new congressional lines for the 2026 midterms — a modern record for a cycle that doesn’t immediately follow a Census. On Monday night, Utah became the most recent member of that club after a judge approved a new map that will shake up the state’s congressional delegation. Democrats are now favored to flip a GOP-held House seat that was previously solidly Republican, and the new map could pit two of the state’s Republican representatives against each other in a primary.
How We Got Here
Unlike most states that have passed new maps this cycle, Utah’s wasn’t prompted by President Donald Trump pressuring legislators to draw more red seats to help Republicans win the House in 2026. (The Beehive State already has four Republicans and zero Democrats in its House delegation.) Instead, in a throwback to the normal way mid-decade redistricting is triggered, the state’s old congressional map was thrown out in court earlier this year.
Back in August, Utah Third District Court Judge Dianna Gibson nixed the map because the Utah Legislature had ignored voter-approved fair-redistricting standards when passing it in 2021. Utah voters had passed a ballot measure in 2018 creating an independent redistricting commission for the state and requiring its congressional map to adhere to certain criteria, including not considering partisanship. The legislature was allowed to reject the commission’s map and implement its own, but its map still had to adhere to the same criteria.
However, in 2020, the legislature repealed that ballot measure and replaced it with a new redistricting process that didn’t require the legislature to stick to the commission’s criteria. A year later, it adopted a very Republican-friendly congressional map. The plan divided Salt Lake County, the state’s largest concentration of Democratic votes, among all four of the state’s congressional districts. As a result, urban Democrats were outnumbered in all four districts by Republicans in other parts of the state.
Voting-rights groups sued over the map, arguing it was a partisan gerrymander and that lawmakers had illegally ignored the will of the voters when they repealed the 2018 ballot measure. In a 2022 ruling, Gibson rejected these arguments, but plaintiffs successfully appealed to the Utah Supreme Court, which ruled last year that the legislature can’t repeal voter-approved initiatives. The court asked Gibson to reconsider the map’s legality in light of its decision, and after more than a year of deliberation, Gibson finally ruled that the map had been illegally enacted.
Gibson’s decision directed the Utah Legislature to draw a new map for 2026 using the voter-approved nonpartisan criteria. But as Republicans across the country were acceding to Trump’s demands to draw more GOP-leaning seats, Utah Republicans were loath to give up any of theirs. As a result, the legislature passed a map that divided Salt Lake County only two ways, creating two seats that were more evenly divided but in which Republicans still would have been favored.
Democrats argued that that map was still a gerrymander, and a few minutes before midnight on Monday night — the date election officials had said they needed to know the new lines by — Gibson agreed. She ruled that the map drawn by the legislature had violated the voter-approved criteria by considering partisanship, and she imposed a plan drawn by plaintiffs as the state’s new congressional map.
Overview of the New Map
According to a couple of commonly used ways to evaluate how gerrymandered a map is, Utah’s new map is the first one to pass so far this year that is fairer than the one it replaced. For instance, according to Inside Elections’ Baseline (our measure of the baseline partisanship of states and congressional districts), all four districts under the old map were redder than R+10; none were Democratic-leaning or even competitive. But the new map turns one of those Republican-leaning seats into a Democratic-leaning one, such that, now, three districts are redder than R+10 and one district is bluer than D+10.
Another stat that illustrates this point is the map’s efficiency gap, a metric that compares how many of one party’s votes are “wasted” versus the other’s. (For these purposes, any vote cast for the losing party is considered “wasted,” as is any vote cast for the winning party beyond those necessary to reach a majority in a district.) Going by the results of the 2024 presidential election, Utah’s old map had an efficiency gap of R+28, meaning 28 percent fewer Republican votes were wasted than Democratic votes. That made Utah’s map one of the most biased congressional maps passed in 2021-22, at least according to this one metric.
By contrast, the new map has an efficiency gap of just R+6 — pretty close to the ideal number of 0. That is, by far, the lowest efficiency gap of any of the new congressional maps that have been passed this year.
District by District
Under the new map, Utah’s 1st District is now a Democratic-leaning seat that covers most of Salt Lake County. Former Vice President Kamala Harris would have carried it by 24 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election. However, its Baseline is only D+14, reflecting the fact that downballot Republicans perform better than Trump in Utah given his uniquely bad fit for the state’s GOP electorate.
Some of those local Republicans have been able to keep the new 1st District tight in recent elections; for instance, Gov. Spencer Cox would have lost it by only 9 points in 2020. However, the only Republican to actually carry the district in the last decade would have been Sen. Mike Lee in 2016. The district looks like a very uphill climb for Republicans in 2026, especially given that the political winds will likely be at Democrats’ backs. Therefore, we are switching our rating for the 1st District to Solid Democratic.
Former Rep. Ben McAdams, the most recent Democrat to represent Utah, is poised to make a comeback attempt in this seat after losing re-election in 2020, but the former Salt Lake County mayor probably won’t have the primary field to himself now that the seat is a sure thing for Democrats. State Sen. Kathleen Riebe ran in a special election for the 2nd District in 2023 and has expressed interest in running as well.
However, the 1st District’s new configuration isn’t necessarily a career-ender for its current Republican congressman, Rep. Blake Moore, either. Because of how radically the map was redrawn, the successor district to the old 1st — which had been based in northern Utah with most of its population in Weber and Davis counties — is the new 2nd District, which is still Solid Republican with an R+38 Baseline. Ninety-five percent of the 2024 voters in the new 2nd District hail from the old 1st District, and Moore’s birthplace of Ogden is in the new 2nd too, so it should be an easy decision for him to run for re-election here.
The 3rd District also remains Solid Republican with an R+47 Baseline. However, it now includes southwestern Utah in addition to eastern Utah — meaning it is now home to both current 3rd District Rep. Mike Kennedy (who lives in Alpine, in Utah County) and 2nd District Rep. Celeste Maloy (who lives in Cedar City, in Iron County). Neither Kennedy nor Maloy has yet announced their plans, but it’s possible that the 3rd District will host an incumbent-versus-incumbent primary next year. Kennedy would probably start out with an edge in that contest, as 76 percent of the new district’s 2024 voters also live in his old district, compared to just 21 percent who live in Maloy’s. Maloy also barely won her primary in 2024 against a more conservative opponent.
Maloy could choose instead to run for re-election in the new 4th District, which includes many rural communities that are in her current district; 53 percent of the new district’s 2024 voters currently live in the 2nd. However, the new 4th also includes many voters (44 percent of its electorate) from the current 4th District, in southern Salt Lake and northern Utah counties and currently represented by Rep. Burgess Owens. Owens is likely to seek re-election here as a result, so Maloy will probably have to go through an incumbent regardless. In the general election, the 4th District also remains Solid Republican, with an R+42 Baseline.