President Trump’s campaign to redraw House maps in GOP states around the country will make it tougher for Democrats to win back control of the chamber in next year’s midterms, but it won’t knock them out of contention altogether, according to leading election handicappers.

While Trump and his Republican allies are battling to pad their slim House majority through partisan redistricting — a rare, mid-decade project that launched in Texas but could expand to other GOP states — a number of other factors leave Democrats well positioned to seize the chamber, the election experts say.

Not only is California vowing to revamp its own map to counter the GOP advantage in Texas, but the national mood currently favors the more energized Democrats; Republicans are defending a razor-thin House advantage that leaves them little room for defeat; and historic trends predict significant midterm losses for the party of the sitting president.

"Democrats won 235 seats in 2018 on a map that was a little bit more skewed towards Republicans than the one that is in place currently,” David Wasserman, the senior elections analyst for the Cook Political Report, said in a phone interview. “And we're looking at a political environment that's similar to 2018, based on the enthusiasm gap between the parties and the off-year election results so far.”

That enthusiasm gap, by Wasserman’s tally, is a whopping 15 percent over the course of this year’s special elections, which include a long string of Democratic wins in races for state, local and judicial offices across the country. The figure represents the percentage difference between the Democrats’ vote totals in those contests relative to the number of votes won by Kamala Harris last November in the same regions (63 percent) and the Republicans’ vote totals relative to those secured by Trump (48 percent), Wasserman said.

“If you replicate that across the country, then Democrats would........

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