Texas pushes redistricting into an era of ‘maximum warfare'

Boston Globe

2 days ago

'The Texas Republicans are taking us on a race to the bottom,' said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who lamented in an interview that his party must reluctantly participate in 'this rotten system.'
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Voters are the immediate casualty in this escalating arms race, reduced almost to bystanders as Republicans essentially admit to trying to determine the outcome of Texas races long before elections are held.
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The result is a democracy determined less by public opinion than by raw political might.
Trump has pressed Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Republican state legislators to redraw their lines, with a draft map released Wednesday that all but erased three urban Democratic seats and forced two other incumbents in South Texas into more Republican terrain. The special legislative session Abbott called lasts until late August, but votes could come in the coming week.
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And Texas could be just the beginning.
Trump and his allies are pressing other states to follow suit and remake their maps with more Republican seats. States under complete GOP control that could be targeted for redistricting include Missouri, Florida, Indiana, New Hampshire and Ohio.
'We're going to get another three or four or five, in addition,' Trump told reporters recently of new Republican House seats. 'Texas would be the biggest one, and that'll be five.'
The gerrymandering is deeply consequential at a time when a single House race can cost tens of millions of dollars. Republicans won control of the House in 2024 by only three seats, a margin the remapping in Texas alone would more than double.
One person close to the president, who insisted on anonymity to describe the White House's political strategy candidly, summed it up succinctly: 'Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.'
The redistricting push is only one element. Trump has targeted Democratic law firms with executive actions. He has threatened prosecutions of and ordered investigations into his political enemies, while the Justice Department has dropped lawsuits aimed at protecting voting rights. And his congressional allies are investigating ActBlue, the organization that processes an overwhelming share of online donations for Democrats.
When it comes to redistricting, Democrats are threatening to fight back. Democratic legislators in Texas are contemplating a potential walkout to deny Republicans the quorum they need to pass the new maps. Lawsuits are being readied. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, traveled to Texas on Thursday to rally opposition to what he called a 'scheme to rig the midterm elections,' and said all options were on the table.
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Democratic governors in several states, including California and New York, are contemplating rewriting laws or amending state constitutions to remake their maps in response to what is happening in Texas.
'California's moral high ground means nothing if we're powerless because of it,' Gov. Gavin Newsom said after meeting with Texas Democrats who traveled to Sacramento in late July.
Newsom is proposing that the Legislature put new maps up for a public vote in a special referendum this fall, without ripping up the state's independent mapmaking commission for 2030. His plan is far along enough that polling is being conducted to see how such a measure would fare.
Eric Holder, who was attorney general in the Obama administration, has been a vocal opponent of gerrymandering for years as chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, pressing blue states to adopt nonpartisan commissions and fighting red state gerrymanders.
But after Texas put out its maps this past week, Holder had a change of heart, calling for a 'temporary' embrace of gerrymandering to thwart Trump. He said he came to this new position after consulting other party leaders, including former President Barack Obama.
A failure to respond in kind to GOP gerrymandering, Holder said, could leave Trump with 'unchecked power' in the last two years of his term, with potentially disastrous results.
'It's like the Germans have invaded France,' Holder said. 'Are you going to just say, 'Well, we're against war and we're for the resolution of disputes in a peaceful way'? Sometimes you have to take up arms.'
Others reached that point long ago.
Marc Elias, one of the Democratic Party's most prominent lawyers, welcomed any converts to his brand of brass-knuckle politics.
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'I do not believe, when it comes to elections, that Democrats should ever engage in any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith,' Elias said in an interview.
Lines are typically redrawn once a decade after the census. Gerrymanders in the middle of a decade have been exceedingly rare, and seen as a nuclear option. But the precision that sophisticated software now grants to map-drawing reduces the chances that new lines backfire on the party in control.
Trump would have carried every new Republican-leaning seat carved out in the new maps by nearly 60% in 2024. And no existing Republican-leaning districts were watered down beyond that 60% threshold.
Raskin called the modern targeting technology a 'computer-assisted system' for cheating -- 'where the minority power gets gerrymandered into oblivion.'
'Redistricting is going from, like, a decennial bare-knuckle rugby match to an every-other-year 'Hunger Games,'' he said.
Democrats have certainly benefited from partisan gerrymanders before.
In Nevada, Democrats won three of the state's four congressional seats last year even as Trump carried the state. The Democratic-drawn map in Illinois gives the party 14 House seats, and Republicans three, though Trump won more than 43% of the vote there last year.
Today, Republicans are racing to consider even more audacious gambits. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has talked about giving fast-growing red states like his additional seats in Congress in the middle of the decade with a census 'redo,' a political and practical long shot that is legally dubious.
'If Texas can do it, the Free State of Florida can do it 10X better,' Rep. Jimmy Patronis, R-Fla., wrote on the social platform X. In a statement, Patronis said booming population growth made new lines 'only fair.'
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In his first term, Trump tried but failed to exclude people living in the United States illegally from the census, which determines the apportionment of congressional seats. Now, a close ally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has announced legislation that would order such a citizens-only census -- and would force districts to be redrawn everywhere.
The accelerating use of the most no-holds-barred tactics risks undoing decades of efforts to rein in the most egregious, explicitly partisan gerrymandering -- reforms that were often spurred by voters themselves.
After the 2020 census, the maps in four states -- California, Michigan, Colorado and Arizona -- were redrawn by independent commissions enacted by referendums. All four now are led by Democratic governors who face pressure to undo those reforms. And the willingness to battle Republicans is a key factor in who emerges as a presidential contender in 2028.
Other experts worry about the warfare spilling over into statehouses. While gerrymanders by red and blue states might roughly offset each other, no such safeguard exists in state legislatures, where the majority parties in many states have created permanent minorities in lower chambers.
'That backsliding would be terrible for progress at a local level,' warned Sam Wang, a professor at Princeton University who leads the school's Gerrymandering Project.
Historians have warned that both parties risk broader unrest if they gerrymander vast sections of the country so effectively that they neuter opposition at the ballot box, leaving voters without a real choice.
Yet politicians sometimes openly acknowledge that this is their aim. As Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, chair of the House Republican campaign arm, put it recently on CNN: 'Any seats that we gain before Election Day would be nice.'
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