The GOP's gerrymandering frenzy is a sign of weakness
If you can't beat 'em, rig it.
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Thanks to Republicans, we’re suddenly in a irregular mid-decade redistricting arms race.
Even though Republicans won’t admit it, they know that they are extremely unlikely to prevail in the midterms if they compete fair and square. So they’re getting creative, which for them means rigging the game by picking their voters. Texas was the first Republican state to start working toward adding more safe GOP states, but now a number of other red states are being pushed by the administration to do the same. (The new map in Texas would add five safe Republican seats — a big deal considering Speaker Johnson’s slim three seat majority.)
Republicans have no positive platform to offer in the midterms. They’ve spent the last seven months signing on to anything President Donald Trump wants, sycophantically ceding their own power to him. But that’s not a selling point to voters as Trump’s poll numbers crater. “We stood aside so Trump could shutter vital agencies, take away your healthcare, and spend every last dime scooping up immigrants to help get Stephen Miller his 3,000 arrests a day” is not exactly a rallying cry that will turn out voters.
Normally, redistricting occurs every 10 years, as states are required to redraw their districts after census data is released. Indeed, Texas did just that in 2021, drawing districts that have been the subject of litigation for five years now because they inflated the power of white Republican voters even as the population of people of color in the state dramatically increased. Throughout that litigation, the state has always insisted that the maps were race-blind, meaning that legislators never looked at the underlying racial demographic data when drawing them up.
This is where Trump’s Department of Justice stepped in to lend a helping hand. Trump has been pushing the state to do a new and more extreme gerrymander since early June, but Gov. Greg Abbott must have felt like he needed some sort of fig leaf. So the DOJ obligingly sent Abbott a letter saying that four majority-minority congressional districts in the state are actually unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered. Abbott cynically seized on this as his reason to add a vote on new congressional maps to the agenda for a special session that was ostensibly about flood relief.
The 2021 maps already gave Republicans 25 of Texas’s 38 House seats, but those additional five seats would come in handy in the midterms, given that Trump’s brand is toxic and Democrats currently have an eight-point advantage on the House generic ballot.
The plan is to hand the GOP five more safe seats by diluting the power of voters of color by splitting those communities across several Republican districts. Trump isn’t even trying to pretend that this is about anything beyond a partisan power grab. To hear him tell it, Republicans are “entitled to five more seats” because he got “the highest vote in the history of Texas.”
Trump’s talking point is bogus on numerous levels. First, there’s no “entitlement” to additional House seats based on the results of the presidential race. The whole idea is nonsense and would render House races functionally nonexistent. Next, while Trump got the highest vote total in the history of Texas, that’s just because more people voted. His margin of victory in 2024 was 13.7 percent. That’s lower than Mitt Romney in 2012, who beat Barack Obama by 15.8 percent. It’s slightly above John McCain’s 2008 showing, where he beat Obama by 11.7 percent. And then there’s George W. Bush, one of Texas’s favorite sons. In 2004, Bush absolutely thrashed John Kerry, winning the state by 22.9 percent, improving over his 21.3 percent margin over Al Gore in 2000.
But Trump has a toddler’s understanding of numbers, so it isn’t surprising his lizard brain glommed onto “highest vote” and ignored everything else.
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The courts will not save us
Texas wouldn’t be able to undertake this obscenely partisan gerrymander if not for John Roberts, the worst chief justice of all time.
In 2019, Roberts penned the majority decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, where he threw up his hands and declared that it was beyond the reach of the Court to address partisan gerrymanders and it was the job of state legislatures to fix. Yes, the same state legislatures that create the partisan gerrymanders. So, in short, Texas Republicans don’t need to worry about the Roberts Court stepping in to stop these antics.
Texas also probably doesn’t need to worry that the Roberts Court will step in to stop its efforts to punish the Democratic state legislators who left the state to break quorum to thwart the redistricting efforts. That’s lucky for Texas officials, who are throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.
Abbott has filed a petition with the state Supreme Court to remove Rep. Gene Wu, chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus, saying that Wu has violated the state constitution and abandoned his office. Attorney General Ken Paxton favors a different approach, saying he will start proceedings to remove the Democrats from their seats and declare their offices vacant if they don’t return by Friday. Oh, and Texas House Republicans overwhelmingly voted to have the House sergeant-at-arms pursue and civilly arrest the runaway Democrats, an effort backstopped by Abbott, who directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to track the legislators down and arrest them.
Finally, for good measure, Abbott ordered the Texas Rangers to investigate Democrats for “potential bribery and any other potential legal violations connected to their refusal to appear for a quorum, conduct business, and cast votes.” Also, that investigation “should extend to anyone who aided or abetted such potential crimes.”
Abbott’s twisted logic here is that the Democrats may have fundraised to cover the fines they’re accruing while breaking quorum, and doing so is illegal because … well, that’s where things get a little muddy.
The Texas Supreme Court has already ruled that there is a constitutional right for legislators to break quorum. Another issue for Abbott’s crime theory is that Texas, unsurprisingly, has extremely lax campaign finance laws. Asking a wealthy person (or a lot of not-wealthy people, combined) to offset fines is no big deal, as the money doesn’t go into a candidate’s treasury.
The biggest problem with all of Abbott’s plans for vengeance is that neither the Texas Department of Public Safety nor the Texas Rangers nor any other state law enforcement agency can go into other states and arrest people, much as Abbott would wish it to be otherwise. But both Sen. John Cornyn and Donald Trump have hit upon a solution: get the FBI involved.
Cornyn wrote a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel urging him to have the FBI use its authority “to aid state law enforcement when parties cross state lines, including to avoid testifying or fleeing a scene of a crime.” Yes, the pretend crime here is still bribery. When asked about Cornyn’s move, Trump agreed that the FBI may have to help arrest the Democratic legislators.
Texas Democrats are doing one of the only things a minority party can do to thwart a vote. Yes, eventually they have to come home, and everyone knows that, but depriving Abbott of the ability to rig five House seats because Trump asked him to is anything but a crime. It’s a message, a declaration that they’re willing to fight.
Unfortunately, Democrats in the minority in other states are going to have to decide what to do when GOP gerrymandering fever comes their way. Word is that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would be on board with implementing a new map meant to squeeze out more safe GOP seats in his state. Republican legislators in Missouri have floated new maps because apparently having Democrats hold two of the seven House seats in the there is too much. Vice President JD Vance is being dispatched to Indiana to see if he can talk them into a special session to juice the GOP numbers there too. Thanks to the fact that Ohio’s 2021 districts were declared unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court, the state already needed to redraw its districts before the 2026 midterms. That gives the GOP another shot at padding its numbers.
Fighting fire with fire
Democrats have been struggling — and rightly so — to figure how to respond to all of this. Do they also engage in partisan gerrymanders where it’s possible to offset the GOP gains? The answer emerging from party leaders has been a resounding yes, but Democrats face more constraints than Texas Republicans do.
In recent years, Democrats have pushed for the use of independent redistricting commissions to combat partisan gerrymandering. Now, though, those attempts to do the right thing may hamper their efforts to fight back.
“I’m tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said during a news conference Monday where she endorsed disbanding her state’s redistricting commission. “With all due respect to the good government groups, politics is a political process, and to think we're gonna do this with a purity test ... we’re sick and tired of being pushed around.”
It doesn’t feel great to get in the mud with the GOP on this one, but there aren’t a lot of good alternatives. Right now, all eyes are on California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom is absolutely down to draw new maps if Texas moves forward with its redistricting efforts. However, under California law, Newsom would have to call a special election this year to vote on new maps.
New York Democrats are also contemplating mid-decade redistricting, but they’re even more hamstrung by state laws. New York would have to pass a legislatively referred constitutional amendment in two consecutive sessions and then go before the voters as a ballot measure. There’s no way that happens in time for the 2026 midterms.
Over in Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker is sheltering some of Texas’s runaway Democrats and said that “we’re going to do everything we can to protect every single one of them.” Pritzker has also said he’s open to redistricting in Illinois if Texas goes forward with its plans. The problem for Illinois is that Democrats already hold 14 of the 17 House seats.
There are a fistful of other states, both red and blue, where legislators are trying to figure out if mid-decade redistricting is feasible. It’s too early to say what would happen with Maryland, Louisiana, or Wisconsin, all of which might be in play depending on how gnarly things get in Texas. Overall, however, red states have more possibilities to gerrymander before the midterms, which does not auger well for Dem efforts to beat Republicans at their own game.
The current chair of the Democratic Governors Association, Kansas’s Laura Kelley, is backing her fellow governors in California, New York, and Illinois. Her support is full-throated, but, like many Democrats, Kelly doesn’t love sinking to the GOP’s level.
“If the other side is going to pursue this, regardless of the obvious unconstitutionality of it, then I don't think we have any other choice but to go there,” she said. “You just don't go to the front lines without your bullets.”
Trump’s abiding eagerness to erode the foundations of democracy poisons everything he touches. The GOP’s willingness to help him in that project at every step has led us here, where Democrats genuinely have no choice but to fight fire with fire, even as they acknowledge that it’s not ideal. But it’s the right thing to do when Republicans are trying to suppress the voting power of Democrats not just in their states, but throughout the country too.
That’s it for today
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The time is now. The line is here. Ours is a job to do. From New York Harbor, we heard the unarmed but alarmed Lady Liberty’s clarion call. I made us 100 protest signs, here. Atop the U.S. Capitol Building Lady Freedom heard her. It is Lady Freedom that holds this Nation’s sword .She pulled it, dismounting to lead us to the streets. They both pointed out clear ways without bloodshed: boycott and gerrymander. Yes, we can, Cesar, Sí se puede. Rise!
https://hotbuttons.substack.com/p/tone-telling-terror?r=3m1bs
You don’t fight fascists in a fair fight. Diplomacy and reasoning does not work with evil.
We fire bombed Germany. We dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan.
I wish it weren’t so.
We can retake the high ground later.