MAGA FAs and FOs

Get some.

Let me start off by saying that this is not an aviation post. If you clicked here to read about MAGA flight attendants and first officers, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but stick around because I’ve got some interesting thoughts on other subjects.

The FA and FO that I had in mind is a common phrase these days. If you don’t know what it means, it’s an acronym containing the same, not suitable for family values voters word that was in the “Let’s go, Brandon” chant. To clean it up a little, I’ll say it means “Fart Around, Find Out.” Essentially, it means that when something bad happens to someone, they had it coming.

Photo credit: Dan Burton/Unsplash.com

MAGA’s FAFO moment came on Tuesday when Virginia voters decided that they wanted to cast aside the state’s fair and balanced congressional districts and replace them with a new map that will likely net Democrats a total of 10 seats and leave Republicans with one. When the votes were counted on Tuesday, there was much weeping, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments from the MAGA set.

Ironically, most of the people who were upset on Tuesday were cheering last year when Texas redrew its congressional map. To hear the MAGA crowd talk about it, Virginia’s referendum was a shot fired out of the blue at constitutional democracy.

“Virginia is about 55 percent Democrats, and they want to force by majority vote that the state send 91 percent Democratic representation to Congress,” Republicans argue, but what they conveniently forget to mention is that Virginia was a response to Texas. Some probably really have forgotten about Texas, because I’ve seen several people online threatening to have Texas reconfigure its districts yet again.

For those who don’t remember, let me bring you up to speed. States typically redraw congressional districts after a census, which occurs every 10 years. After Republicans saw gains in Hispanic voters in 2024, Donald Trump urged Texas Republicans to redraw their lines again to gerrymander the state’s congressional seats in an attempt to blunt expected Democratic gains elsewhere in the midterms. It was abnormal, but not unconstitutional. The Texas legislature approved the new map in August 2025, and Gov. Gregg Abbott signed the measure into law.

In response, California Democrats put Proposition 50 on the ballot to draw new congressional districts that would gerrymander away several Republican seats. That measure passed in November and is expected to erase many of the extra seats Republicans hope to gain in Texas.

But it didn’t end there. Other states, including Maryland and New York, also considered action. Virginia actually put it to the voters, and the voters said, “Go for it.”

The redistricting war did not begin in New York in 2024, as some claim, by the way. New York’s map was approved in 2024, but the process started years earlier and was delayed by litigation. It was not a mid-decade redistricting attempt.

So the Republicans may (more on that later) get a handful of seats from Texas, but they will lose them in California, where redistricting used to be based on maps drawn by an independent commission, and Virginia, which formerly had one of the fairest maps in the country.

Republicans may have awakened a sleeping beast. Both states take advantage of gerrymandering, but of the states that try to draw fair maps, most are Democrat-leaning, while quite a few red states have only one or two congressional districts.

The Texas mid-decade gerrymandering war has moved us backwards from what I’d like to see: nonpartisan districts everywhere and a national gerrymandering ban. I think that gerrymandering is to blame for a lot of the extremism in both wings of American politics because politicians who don’t have a viable opposition party have no reason not to be as extreme as possible to win the primary.

But that dream is going to have to come from the legislatures because, as I said earlier, gerrymandering is not unconstitutional. As recently as 2023, the Supreme Court held that gerrymandering is permissible with the exception of drawing districts that are racially discriminatory, except to the extent that racial discrimination is required by the Voting Rights Act. If that sounds like a tight line to haul, it really isn’t because, to a great extent, racial lines are also political lines, at least for some groups. Gerrymandering usually faces a low bar for lawfulness.

So don’t fret about the recent injunction from a state judge that seeks to invalidate the results of Tuesday’s election. Remember that both Texas and California had legal challenges to their new maps. The Supreme Court affirmed both redistricting plans. In Virginia’s case, the state supreme court overturned previous rulings that would have killed the referendum.

I can also point out that both California and Virginia put their gerrymandered maps to the voters; Texas did not. If there are any complaints to be made about the lack of democracy in gerrymandered maps, they should be directed towards the Texas statehouse in Austin, but newfound Republican critics of gerrymandering never seem to have problems with the Texan casus belli.

And that brings us to the potential fly in Texas’s ointment, namely the looming possibility of a blue wave election amid what is turning out to be Republican unpopularity of historic proportions. You see, gerrymandering is often accomplished in a way that gives districts a lopsided partisan majority, making them safe for the party in power. However, Trump’s Texas redistricting did the opposite. Republicans assumed that Hispanic voters who voted Republican in 2024 were part of a new permanent majority and redrew lines to encompass their new red Hispanic voters. If that is a bad assumption, then Republicans may have just diluted their strength. turning safe districts into battlegrounds.

And it looks extremely doubtful that Hispanics will stay red. A recent AP-NORC poll found that Trump’s approval among Hispanics had fallen to about 25 percent after an estimated 42 percent voted Trump in 2024. Who could have imagined that treating Hispanics and immigrants like criminals who were presumed guilty would backfire at the polls?

The cratering among Hispanics is only part of public opinion turning against Trump and the Republicans nationwide. Trump’s overall approval is only 43 percent in Texas, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick recently said that Republicans will have a “tough time” keeping their majority in the state House.

When the full story of the redistricting war is written, it may be said that Trump broke norms to try to pick up a few seats and ended up losing several states, including Texas. People say that Texas will never go blue, but Trump may have found a way.

One of many lessons to be learned, both in Texas and Iran, is that bullying only gets you so far. When you make people angry enough that they start fighting back, things can go south pretty quickly.

FAFO.

WARNING AND REQUEST I noticed that things got a bit heated in the comments section of a recent post. I’d like to remind everyone to keep it civil and do not feed the trolls. We prize civil discussion and a friendly atmosphere here. We tend to be light on the moderation, both because Steve and I have real jobs and because our followers tend to be self-policing and decent people. Let’s try to keep it that way.

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