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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.
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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 everythin