Democrats Have Finally Found the Fight
It was gifted to them by a rattled Donald Trump
It’s a fair bet that Donald Trump had no clue what a Pandora’s box he opened when he demanded that Texas launch an off-cycle gerrymandering scheme to gain five Republican seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Trump is scared — scared for his majority and scared for how a Democratic Congress could at least slow some of his dangerous doings. He knows he may lose control of Congress because of his unpopular policies: throwing millions off Medicaid, pushing up prices with tariffs, rounding up people without due process. Trying to ensure that next year’s elections are not a clear defeat, he is attempting to rig the system.
Gerrymandering is the manipulation of electoral district boundaries to benefit a specific political party. Many states have nonpartisan redistricting commissions to counter the practice.
Normally — what a quaint notion these days — states update their congressional district maps after the national census, which takes place every decade. Many Republican and some Democratic state governments have previously gamed the system for advantage. But for a president to demand it of a state so blatantly, and mid-decade, is a dangerous new low.
Because they know what they’re doing is cheating, Trump’s negotiations with Texas Governor Greg Abbott were kept on the down-low. No surprise that Abbott quickly acquiesced to Trump’s insistence that Republicans are “entitled to five more seats,” because he won Texas big. This argument shows that Trump either has absolutely no idea how congressional elections work or knows and doesn’t care.
So Abbott called a special session of the legislature to approve the new map. In response, Democratic legislators left the state to stall the vote.
Trump 2.0 has been replete with issues Democrats need and want to fight, but with no majority in either congressional chamber, they have had few opportunities to move the needle. Trump’s latest norm-busting tactic is a gift to Democrats who have been searching for a unifying and actionable fight — emphasis on actionable.
Battling the president’s redistricting power grab is uniting centrists and progressives. Democrats are thrilled to have something to get behind, even as it means abandoning some of their ideals of good governance.
Common Cause, a governmental watchdog group that has long and vociferously opposed gerrymandering, said in a statement that it would “not condemn countermeasures” to combat Republicans’ “calculated, asymmetric strategy to redraw districts mid-decade.”
The front-line offense for the Democrats is a handful of vocal blue state governors: Gavin Newsom of California, JB Pritzker of Illinois, and Kathy Hochul of New York. The three have welcomed the Texas Democrats to their states, provided hotel rooms, held strategy sessions with them, and promised to redraw their own state maps to counter Texas.
Their actions have been buoyed by an uptick in national fundraising, heightened media attention, and public demonstrations. “For everyone who’s been asking, ‘Where is the fight?’ Well, here it is,” said Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, who is at risk of losing her seat because Abbott’s gerrymandering is aimed at Black-majority districts.
“This is nothing short of a legal insurrection. History will judge us on how we respond to this moment. You’re a leader of a great state like New York in 2025 when Donald Trump and Republicans decided to hijack our democratic process and twist it to meet their own ends, and what did you do? The answer has to be: We stood up and fought back,” Hochul told The New York Times.
“It’s cheating. Donald Trump is a cheater. He cheats on his wives. He cheats at golf. And now he’s trying to cheat the American people out of their votes,” Pritzker said on “Meet The Press.”
Redrawing the New York state map may be hard to accomplish by November because of state rules. In Illinois, it might not yield more than one Democratic seat, if that. But California is another story.
Governor Newsom quickly figured out a way to counter Texas’s seat snatch with his own in California. The aptly named “Election Rigging Response Act” is a ballot measure that will be triggered only if Texas goes ahead with its plans. It would shift five California Republican districts to the Democrats.
But Newsom hasn’t stopped with his ballot measure. He is now going toe-to-toe with Trump on the digital battlefield, parodying his writing style, trolling his social accounts, and pushing the president’s easily accessible buttons.
Newsom explained that his aggressive new social media strategy is speaking the only language Trump seems to understand.
“I hope it’s a wakeup call. The President of the United States — I’m sort of following his example. And if you’ve got issues with what I’m putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns about what he’s putting out as president … I think the deeper question is: How have we allowed the normalization of his tweets, Truth Social posts over the course of the last many years to go without similar scrutiny and notice?” said Newsom at a recent press conference.
Some in the press have taken Newsom to task for his glib posts. But many others understand that the governor is parodying the president for effect. He is exposing a double standard.
“[We] tried to take what he’s doing and push it back in his direction. Now everyone’s so offended. ‘It’s so unbecoming of your position.’ But not the president of the United States that calls people nicknames?” Newsom asked on “The MeidasTouch Podcast.”
In modern times Democrats often have avoided bare-knuckle political brawling, preferring to play by the rules, hoping they would be rewarded at the polls. But with Trump, there are no more rules and no referees. So for Newsom and his fellow governors, the gloves are finally off.
“This is not the Democratic Party of your grandfather, which would bring a pencil to a knife fight,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin said. One might say that this is not your grandfather’s Republican Party, either.
Governor Hochul understands what is at stake. “All this could change the power dynamic so quickly, really, not just for a few years, but for a generation, where Democrats will never have a chance to regain the power necessary to have a balance in Washington.”
Stealing congressional seats is the move that has, at minimum, united some major parts of the Democratic Party. They have been forced to fight back against a president willing to take ever greater steps to retain power.
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Dan
When you are dealing with a toddler throwing a hissy fit, no rational talk about stopping the behavior will make an impact. However, interestingly, if you start to mimic their behavior, they do stop. This is unfortunately what we are dealing with today. Kudos to Governor Newsom!
Today, Trump talked about no elections when a country is at war; he talked about only paper (easy to throw away) ballots- both of which will increase his chances of remaining President. We absolutely MUST think of more than one way, ie counter-gerrymandering, to secure a free and fair and reflective vote!