The Texas gerrymander mess

Popular parties don't need to gerrymander in the middle of a decade

One of the ongoing messes of the past few weeks is Gov. Gregg Abbott’s decision to gerrymander Texas congressional districts. Texas Republicans think that they might be able to pick up as many as six congressional seats by redrawing their state maps.

Isn’t that something that is relatively common, you might ask. The answer is both yes and no.

Graphic created by ChatGPT

Yes, gerrymandering is common among both parties. Unless you happen to live in one of four states (Arizona, California, Colorado, and Michigan) where redistricting is controlled by a nonpartisan commission or a state with only one congressional district, you probably live in a weirdly-shaped district that twists and turns through the state.

But also no. The Constitution mandates reapportionment after a census, but the census occurs at the turn of each decade. Typically, the only time redistricting occurs apart from a census is when it is ordered by a court. This usually happens when a court determines that a state’s congressional map is unconstitutional for some reason. The reason is often that a state has been found to have violated the Voting Rights Act.

What is unusual is that the Texas redistricting is an elective redrawing of the state’s congressional districts midway through the decade. This is a naked power grab at the behest of Donald Trump, but while the Texas plan violates established norms, at least in Texas, it doesn’t violate the law. That does not make it a good idea.

For starters, the Republican plan is borne out of weakness. Republicans currently have a small congressional majority (219-212), but they are undoubtedly aware of several concerning factors. First, the opposition party usually makes gains in off-year elections, and second, Trump and the GOP are not popular.

If you are a popular party with popular ideas, you don’t need to twist congressional lines to expand your congressional delegation. You just get more voters to vote for you.

In his first term, Trump and the GOP took heavy losses in the House in the midterms. In his second term, Trump’s agenda has been even more radical, and the trade war economic damage is accruing more quickly than the first time around. Already, Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 37 percent, a level near his historically unpopular bottom when he left office in 2021 amid the January 6 scandal. Likewise, as unpopular as Democrats are, they seem to have taken a growing lead in generic ballot polling for 2026. The gerrymandering of half a dozen or so seats in Texas seems more an effort to stave off disaster than to expand the House Republican caucus.

Unfortunately for Republicans, the plan has problems. Most obviously, if Texas Republicans can redistrict in the middle of a decade, so can Democrats in other states. California Governor Gavin Newsom has vowed that if Democrats lose seats in Texas due to redistricting, Republicans will lose more in California.

If you were paying attention earlier, you may remember that California is one of four states with an independent commission that draws congressional districts. While this means that Democrats don’t control redistricting in the short term, Newsom could call a legislative special session to change the law and the maps before next year. The nine Republican seats in California could be at risk.

Retaliation by California could spark a redistricting war in which states dominated by one party gerrymander the crap out of their congressional districts. We might see redistricting take place every two years in some states if the dominant party picks up a few percentage points of the vote. With Republican legislatures in control of 19 states compared to seven for Democrats, maybe Republicans see the conflict as an acceptable risk, but it would undoubtedly be a bad thing for the country and undermine trust in government.

From a structural perspective, the plan has hit a temporary dead end. Democratic Texas legislators fled the state to avoid being forced into providing a quorum for a vote they were sure to lose. It isn’t clear how long the Texas Democrats can delay the vote, but their exile has focused national attention on Abbott’s power grab and both united and fired up the Democratic base nationally.

There is also the possibility that courts will block the redistricting plan if and when it becomes law. Gerrymandering is not unconstitutional in itself, but in certain cases, gerrymandering to dilute minority voting power can be unconstitutional. Precedent on that issue is still evolving, and a Louisiana case currently before the Supreme Court could alter the playing field again.

And then there is the possibility that the seat grab could backfire. For decades, Texas Republicans have gerrymandered Republican-majority districts to build safe Republican seats. The Trump-Abbott plan would dilute the Republican vote from some of those districts to rope in newly Republican areas along the border that went for Trump in 2024, as our friend Andrew Donaldson and Eric Michael Garcia discussed on the Heard Tell podcast a few weeks ago.

Hear me out for a moment. What if Hispanic voters along the Texas border voted Trump in 2024 because they were concerned about the influx of illegal immigrants, but also suppose that the Trump Administration had so alienated those same voters that the 2024 results were a fluke rather than a permanent shift. Maybe if the Administration’s anti-immigrant tactics were so heavy-handed that they did things like considering being a Hispanic construction worker probable cause for stops, detaining American citizens based on their ethnicity and appearance, and deporting immigrants who have followed the law, voters might decide they made a mistake backing Trump and the GOP. All three of those things are happening with increasing frequency.

Republicans also have to contend with the economic fallout of Trump’s trade wars and tariff (i.e., tax) increases. Hispanic voters have the same pocketbook concerns as voters of other ethnicities, and rising prices with a depressed job market would be alarming for any incumbent. Just ask Joe Biden.

Exit polls show that Trump nearly won the Hispanic vote in 2024, but there are signs that the demographic is already wavering. One hundred days into Trump’s second term, 60 percent of Hispanic voters thought the country was headed in the wrong direction. Since then, polling has shown that Trump’s support among Latinos has had its ups and downs, but draconian ICE tactics that snare Americans and legal immigrants and a slowing economy don’t bode well for Republicans.

It is possible that by November 2026, the political picture looks so different that the seats that Trump and Abbott hoped to retain not only stay blue, but that Texas Democrats are able to pick off some previously safe Republican districts. It would not be the first time that a gerrymandering party overreached. There is even a term for it: “dummymandering.” It even happened in Texas as recently as 2018, Trump’s first term, when Texas Republicans lost a handful of seats around the Dallas suburbs thanks to Trade War I and Trump’s penchant for recklessness.

And that might be the best thing that comes from a redistricting war. If gerrymandered districts become less safe, there might be a real benefit to the country as congressmen have to become more appealing in general elections and not just primaries.

As I’ve written before, I’m not a fan of either primaries or gerrymandering. Both reward partisan politics and extremism at the expense of bipartisan compromise and intelligent political discourse. If the states dummymander themselves into more competitive districts, it would not be a bad thing. In the meantime, we should add reforming ( or better yet, outlawing) partisan gerrymandering abuse to the list of needed post-Trump congressional reforms to help prevent future flirtations with authoritarianism.

CONSPIRACY THEORIES KILL: Late last week, a gunman who blamed some of his problems on the COVID-19 vaccines attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Emory University in Atlanta, killing a police officer. Gov. Brian Kemp and others condemned the shooting, but as of this writing, there has been no response from the White House or the Department of Health and Human Services. The majority of the evidence is that COVID vaccines are safe and effective.

TRUMP MEETS PUTIN in Alaska this week to discuss the Ukraine war. The chances that the meeting will resolve the fighting while it excludes the Ukrainians are slim, but the chances that Trump asks Ukraine to cede territory to Putin are high. We have a Neville Chamberlain meme ready and waiting.

ANOTHER TRUMP TAX INCREASE: “Nvidia and AMD have agreed to share 15 percent of their revenues from chip sales to China with the U.S. government, as part of a deal to secure export licenses for the semiconductors,” reports the AP. The deal seems to represent a new federal pay-to-play philosophy similar to that of banana republics.

EPSTEIN FILES: Donald Trump has been president for 203 days, and the Epstein files have still not been released.

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