The Redistricting Wars

Trump leaned in on gerrymandering, and the first salvos have now been fired, first by Texas and then by California. But where will the next big battles be?

Image courtesy of the Texas Monthly

Trump knows he’s in trouble in the midterms. His policies are unpopular, especially the “One Big Beautiful Bill” which has one of the lowest approval ratings of any major piece of legislation. He is underwater on every issue, including his supposedly strong suits, the economy and immigration.

Republicans remain behind Democrats in generic congressional polling, even though Democrats are themselves at historically low approval ratings, largely because their own base doesn’t believe they are doing enough to oppose Trump.

This would normally spell electoral disaster for any incumbent president at the next midterms. So Trump is doing one of the only things he can: He’s cheating.

Trump figures that if he can gerrymander enough new GOP seats through pressure on the red states, Republicans can hold on to their slim House majority, and he can escape accountability for another two years.

But will his plan work? Maybe. But there are some wild cards.

Tit-for-tat in Texas

The redistricting war began in Texas, where on Wednesday the state House approved a new mid-decade map which the state Senate is expected to approve today. This map’s approval got delayed by several weeks as Texas Democrats broke quorum and sought to bring national attention to the power grab in their state.

That new map could hand Republicans five House seats in Congress through an unconstitutional and illegal racial gerrymander. As State Rep. Vincent Perez stated on the floor, white Texans receive one congressional rep for every 445,000 people. But Hispanics get only one for every 1.4 million people, and Blacks only one for every 2 million.

That makes the map vulnerable to invalidation, and Texas Democrats are suing. But California Gov. Gavin Newsom isn’t waiting around.

Gov. Newsom has been the most outspoken and visible champion for democracy in the party lately, earning him high marks around the country for standing up to the MAGA threat. He backed up his words with actions yesterday when, at his urging, the California state legislature passed its own mid-decade map in response to Texas.

That map, while less aggressive than Texas’s redraw, moved five GOP-held seats to the “lean Democrat” or “likely Democrat” columns. But unlike Texas, it didn’t do so by cracking or packing minority voters, making it less likely to be struck down by the courts.

Republicans nevertheless challenged Newsom’s bill in court on grounds that it violated the notice requirements for legislation. But in a big win for Gov. Newsom and democracy, the state’s Supreme Court allowed the measure to be put to voters in November, without comment.

That leaves the battle for House seats at a draw, with Texas and California essentially canceling each other out.

Other Red States Prepare to Jump In

Sadly, this war isn’t over. Instead, it appears to be turning into an arms race. The White House is putting significant pressure on Florida, Ohio, Indiana and Missouri to squeeze out eight more GOP seats through new maps. In some cases, it is even threatening to withhold state funds unless the maps are redrawn.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these states.

Florida

Florida is already a heavily GOP-weighted state, with a 20-8 delegation. Its governor, Ron DeSantis, has been making noise about redoing the state’s maps because, he argues, the districts are “malapportioned” and the state’s population was undercounted in the census.

But it’s not clear how far Florida can go. There was a constitutional amendment in 2010 that outlawed partisan gerrymandering. As Bolts Magazine noted,

Championed by a bipartisan coalition and approved by more than 63 percent of voters in 2010, the Fair Districts Amendments were designed to stop politicians from drawing biased maps. They banned partisan gerrymandering and required compact districts that didn’t unnecessarily split cities and counties.

Crucially, this reform also copied two protections from the federal Voting Rights Act. The first, modeled off of Section 2 of the VRA, prevents map-drawers from locking a minority group out of electing their candidates of choice, which can happen when a community that is populous and compact enough to form a majority is instead spread across other districts. The second, non-diminishment, is based on Section 5 of the federal law.

While the state’s Supreme Court upheld the skewed 2021 maps (which cracked open Rep. Al Lawson’s majority-Black district—the very district the Florida Supreme Court had created in 2015 in response to a lawsuit—splitting it into three Republican districts), any further tinkering conceivably could get struck down under the Fair Districts Amendments if DeSantis goes for a purely partisan gerrymander.

Still, this is one of the most pliant, GOP-controlled state high courts in the country. That Court had permitted Lawson’s district to be broken up because it was, in its view, an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under federal law, and therefore it simply had to yield to that greater authority.

DeSantis and the Florida GOP have nothing to lose by trying to squeeze up to four more seats out of already gerrymandered maps, hoping their Supreme Court will roll over once again.

Ohio

Ohio has a terrible record when it comes to fair maps. After the 2020 census came out, the Ohio Supreme Court wound up rejecting Republican-backed maps no less than five times before the Ohio Redistricting Commission, which is controlled by Republicans, could game the system and adopt maps to be in use until 2026.

Now the Ohio legislature gets another crack at it, and they are preparing to follow orders from the White House and squeeze two or even three more GOP seats out of the maps.

The Ohio congressional delegation is 10-5 already. And GOP leaders such as Sen. Bernie Moreno think it should be 12-3, with each of the “C” cities—Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland—having its own rep.

By most accounts, it looks like there won’t be much to stop Ohio from handing two more seats to the Republicans in Congress.

Indiana

The White House dispatched Vice President JD Vance to Indianapolis last week. There, he met with Gov. Mike Braun and Republican state leaders to urge them to redraw the maps.

The Indiana Constitution limits redistricting of the state’s maps for the state legislature to the year or two after the decennial census. But only state law limits redrawing its congressional district lines to the first legislative session after that census.

That means the Republican supermajority could change the law if it wanted to. It currently sends nine House members to Congress from the state, only two of whom are Democrats. A new map could eliminate one of those Democratic seats, and possibly even two, according to most election experts.

Per Politico, the White House is in full court press mode, inviting Indiana Republican leaders to Washington for a meeting. Four dozen of the 70 state House representatives have agreed to go, indicating that they are at least willing to be talked into redistricting by the Trump regime.

There are some state representatives who aren’t playing ball, including Rep. Danny Lopez.

“Just a few years ago, our General Assembly undertook the complex redistricting process based on up-to-date census data, drawing fair maps that ensure every Hoosier vote counts,” Lopez, who took office last year, wrote on social media. “We should stand by that work.”

Lopez is under intense pressure, however. According to Politico, Lopez has been the subject of a battery of robo-calls, paid for by a group calling itself “Forward America,” where residents of his district were advised to call Lopez’s office because Gov. Newsom of California and Gov. Hochul of New York were bent on “ending the Trump presidency.”

Never mind that it was Texas that began the redistricting war.

A few other Republican state legislators have come out against redistricting in Indiana.

“I have had a lot of people ask me my thoughts on Indiana redistricting,” Rep. Jim Lucas (R-District 69), who represents Seymour, posted on Facebook. “So here are my thoughts; I am a hard (insert favorite Marine Corps word here) NO!”

Rep. Becky Cash, who represents Zionsville, responded to a constituent question on Facebook, saying, “I do not support redistricting and do not know of any reason why Indiana should redistrict.”

A handful of principled GOP legislators, however, aren’t likely to be able to stop a concerted effort by the White House for new maps.

Missouri

The balance of power is already highly skewed in Missouri in favor of the GOP. Republicans currently control six of the eight U.S. House seats, or 75 percent of the seats in a state Trump won with 58.5 percent of the vote.

Now a GOP-drawn map under consideration for a legislative session next month is targeting one of those two Democratic seats: the 5th congressional district in the Kansas City area, held by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. Cleaver has pledged to challenge any map that seeks to erase his seat.

A GOP supermajority in the state pretty much means a lawsuit is the only way to block this move.

The Challenge for the Blue States

When you add up these likely moves by the red states, it leaves Democrats in an unenviable position. Florida alone could conceivably move four seats to the red column, with another four or five coming from Indiana, Ohio and Missouri. That could mean eight, or possibly nine, GOP seats, all more or less guaranteed through partisan gerrymandering.

Are there enough Blue State countermeasures to undo this? The math isn’t mathing from where I sit.

The best chances lie in Illinois and Maryland, which conceivably together could squeeze out two new Democratic seats. But so far in Illinois, which is already gerrymandered 14-3 to favor Democrats, there isn’t much political appetite—at least not yet—to draw another map. Gov. Pritzker wants to fight, but it’s really up to the Illinois House Speaker to get the ball rolling. If neighboring Indiana does it, however, the state might find the will to respond in kind. Illinois politicians will have to hear from Democratic voters, and soon.

And while there is some movement by Maryland Democratic leaders, including Gov. Moore, to join with California and counter the GOP, that state doesn’t have much to offer: Maryland is already a 7-1 state in favor of Democrats, so even if it could mobilize in time, at most it could only gain the Democrats one seat. Again, this could still happen in response to an effort by Ohio or Florida to redraw their maps.

In New York, Gov. Hochul, who is facing reelection, talks big about redistricting. She gathered Democratic lawmakers from Texas to declare that the state should abandon its commitment to nonpartisan districts and instead let Democrats redraw maps to maximize their political power in the face of the threat from the GOP.

That’s great, but we need a political reality check. New York is hamstrung by its own state constitution, which assigns map drawing to an independent redistricting commission just like California does. This commission can get overruled, as it was in the last round of map drawing, but the map passed by the Democratic-controlled legislature is still subject to language that prohibits partisan gerrymandering. New York’s highest court tossed out the Democrats’ maps in 2022, which caused great confusion and contributed to a loss of three seats that the Democrats should have probably won.

Gov. Hochul wants to see the language about the independent commission stricken from the state constitution. But that process is involved and, unlike in California, wouldn’t be resolved in time for the 2026 midterms. So it remains unclear what, if anything, New York can really do. At best it could threaten to get the process going if other red states move, but that threat is weak because the effect is delayed, and the Republicans know it.

I should note, however, that New Yorkers themselves can move the needle a bit. Mike Lawler is a Republican who sits in a House district that Kamala Harris won. And in a Blue Wave year, not even Elise Stefanik’s district would be safe—which is in part why Trump insisted that she remain in Congress rather than have it go to a special election.

Breaking it down

There are admittedly a lot of unknowns as the arms race heats up, but Democrats are not in as strong a position because they control fewer state governments. Having unilaterally disarmed years ago through independent commissions, the Democratic states now have to scramble to meet this unprecedented threat.

One big wildcard is litigation. As I mentioned above, Texas’s maps are so racially skewed, and they destroy so many minority-majority districts, that they might not survive judicial scrutiny. How ironic it would be if California passed legal maps while Texas’s were struck down as improper racial gerrymanders. Not likely, but still within the realm of possibility.

Republicans are also taking a bit of a gamble that the midterm electorate will look like the 2024 electorate, which is probably not at all the case. If the voters who show up in November of next year look more like they did in 2018 during Trump 1.0, the maps the GOP are relying on to preserve their House majority could be their undoing, particularly along the heavily Latino corridor in Texas near the Rio Grande. Latino support for Trump has collapsed since the start of the year, and if economic conditions worsen while ICE raids ramp up, as is expected, the backlash could be severe.

Meanwhile, Democratic voters in places like Illinois and Maryland can make their voices heard in a way they haven’t had to before by demanding their leaders do all they can to counter the GOP threat by squeezing out as much as possible from new maps.

The time for the high ground is over. We need to fight as down and dirty as the GOP does, or we will quickly lose what remains of our democratic rights and freedoms.