The redistricting wars are close to ending, and some veteran lawmakers aren’t sure what has been accomplished.

After Virginians narrowly approved new maps on Tuesday in favor of Democrats for its congressional delegation, neither party is coming out on top.

The Cook Political Report has maintained a redistricting tracker for the past several months, and the best-case scenario for Republicans after all the reconfiguring is finished is a net gain of only four seats. And the best-case scenario for Democrats? A net gain of … only four seats.

House Republicans’ political campaign chief acknowledged that the hype of last summer’s Texas redistricting had been largely countered by Democratic-led states and provided no real edge ahead of November’s elections.

“I think we’ll retain the majority either way. I mean, if you look at the landscape of the seats that are up for grabs, the redistricting may have changed a few seats here or there,” Rep. Richard Hudson, chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told NOTUS on Tuesday, before Virginia’s results came in later that night.

Democrats took a we-told-you-so approach to the near deadlock after so many states drew up new congressional maps.

“We told the Republicans, when they started this in Texas, that we weren’t going to let them further jerry-rig the maps, that we had to have a level playing field. So they went ahead,” said House Minority Whip Katherine Clark, also suggesting a very minimal shift had occurred with the redistricting.

“Whether we come out ahead or behind, we had to match what they were trying to do,” Clark said.

The Florida Legislature may try to draw up new maps netting a couple extra Republican seats in a special session, and legal observers are awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of districts drawn to produce minority districts to overcome decades of racial injustice in some southern states.

The historically narrow majorities of this era egged party leaders into this political arms race. The 119th Congress is the third straight to start with a single-digit edge for the majority party, the first time that has happened since the 1790s, when the number of House seats was a fraction of the current 435.

With the belief that every additional seat could be a majority maker, Republicans started this latest round of mid-decade redistricting hoping to build a buffer against President Donald Trump’s low approval ratings.

Yet the one clear impact has been to force a bunch of veteran lawmakers into the awkward decision of whether to run in a new district, sometimes far afield from their current constituents, run against another incumbent of their own party in a primary or to retire altogether.

Take Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican first elected in 2000 who retired in 2018 only to win a different Southern California seat in 2020.

California Democrats won the referendum last fall by a wide margin in an effort to gain up to five seats, saying they were only responding to the GOP-dominated Texas Legislature’s new House maps.

Issa, 72, considered moving to Texas and running in a safely GOP district there or running in a nearby district outside San Diego with a slight Democratic lean, before deciding to retire again at the end of his term.

“There’s the obvious question of, is it ever a mistake to start a war? I don’t know,” Issa said Tuesday.

Other California Republicans got pushed into similar decisions. A little north of Issa’s district, Reps. Ken Calvert and Young Kim are running against each other in a member-versus-member primary in one of the few remaining GOP-friendly districts in Southern California.

Calvert, 72, in office since 1993, and Kim, 63, serving in her third term, have been two reliable allies for House Republican leaders. Both Republicans have defended swing districts in recent years and had been gearing up for another tough reelection in November.

Instead, they are battling it out in June’s so-called jungle primary, in which the top two vote-getters advance to November.

Rep. Kevin Kiley, who has won two tough races outside Sacramento, has been the rare Republican who denounced the Texas redistricting from the outset. He has pleaded with House Speaker Mike Johnson to take up his legislation to ban mid-decade redistricting and criticized White House aides for pushing GOP-led states to do so.

He decided to run in a seat heavily favored for Democrats, but in doing so renounced his membership in the national Republican Party to run as an independent, while still caucusing with the GOP for the sake of getting committee assignments.

“The best way to counter gerrymandering and its insidious impacts on democracy is simply to take partisanship out of the equation,” Kiley told reporters last month.

In Texas, Democratic and Republican incumbents found themselves on the outside looking in.

Rep. Marc Veasey, in his seventh term representing a Dallas-area district, had risen in influence as a senior member of the New Democrat Coalition and on the Energy and Commerce Committee. Instead, after Republicans carved up the Dallas-Fort Worth region, Veasey had few options left in Congress.

He briefly considered running for a county executive position, but is now going to retire from elected politics.

Two other incumbent Democrats, Reps. Al Green and Julie Johnson, are stuck in runoff elections next month in their primary nomination fights.

Texas Republicans had lots more options for politically safe seats, but quite a few simply decided it was time to move on.

Four GOP Texans decided to retire rather than seek reelection, two more sought statewide office rather than run for the House and another, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, lost to a far-right challenger in the GOP primary for his new district. Tony Gonzales resigned amid an ethics probe into an extramarital affair with an aide.

When the final runoff ballots are counted, almost a third of the state’s massive 38-member delegation could be heading for the exits.

In Virginia, where less than 52% of those voting favored new maps for House seats, the likely effect is to oust four fairly reliable Republican supporters of leadership: Reps. Ben Cline, Jen Kiggans, John McGuire and Rob Wittman.

Kiggans and either Cline or McGuire have a chance in two of the districts, which now swing more toward Democrats.

Issa lamented that the Supreme Court has never found mid-decade redistricting unconstitutional based on the fact that there was no new census performed to divide seats among the states and districts within each state in the even-handed manner that happens traditionally at the start of each decade.

“The right way to stop it is simply to say that, if you want to do it, you’ve got to figure out how to get a new census,” Issa said. “And if you don’t have an accurate census, I don’t think you have a right to do it.”

Issa acknowledged he never had the chance to make this argument to Johnson or Trump, but he called the entire mid-decade redistricting effort “inherently wrong” and bad for constituents who will not get consistent representation.

“My constituents deserve not to have their member of Congress, by the drawing of lines, changed every two years,” Issa said. “The representation, the quality of the representation by district, is an upheaval that they shouldn’t have.”