Starting last year, President Donald Trump persuaded eight Republican-controlled states to further carve up their electorate with unapologetic partisan gerrymandering. The goal was to offset the typical midterm losses of the party in charge and guarantee Republicans retained a House majority. America’s politics had shifted right in 2024 and, with their gerrymandering, Trump and his GOP cronies convinced themselves that they could lock their party into permanent power.
But their visions of a never-ending ascent came crashing down Tuesday. Democrats had their biggest night in decades. Republicans, despite having picked the voters they wanted with their gerrymanders, still got wrecked.
Because of hubris, greed and a plethora of bad assumptions from the White House on down, Republicans pushed for mid-decade redistricting.
Their biggest mistake seems to have been assuming that voters who supported them in 2024 always would and couldn’t become outraged over issues including inflation, the war in Iran, unbridled corruption and Immigration and Customs Enforcement shooting people dead in the street. By early June, there were at least 16 newly drawn districts that skewed more solidly Republican, and it looked like that gerrymandering might just hold together Trump’s fracturing coalition.
But as of Wednesday, Republicans had managed to flip at most one out of five redrawn seats in Texas, two out of four in Florida and one each in Tennessee and Louisiana. North Carolina’s revamped 1st District will still likely belong to its Democratic incumbent Rep. Don Davis; the Alabama seat held by Rep. Shomari Figures will certainly remain his. And Ohio’s newly drawn map, meant to give Republicans 12 safe seats and Democrats just three, has instead resulted in at least seven Democrats heading to Washington in January.
States typically have gone through the redistricting process after the Census. That makes sense as new population tallies could change how many seats each state has available. Even for those who have retained the same number of seats, the census could make clear demographic changes that might prompt an effort to redistribute voters more evenly. But because of hubris, greed and a plethora of bad assumptions from the White House on down, Republicans pushed for mid-decade redistricting. And the only new data available were 2024 vote tallies.
Along Texas’ southern border, where Trump had won bigger than expected among Hispanic voters, Texas state lawmakers chopped and remixed districts to shore up GOP incumbents and wipe Democrats out. Florida followed suit.
What these gerrymandering genteel didn’t recognize is that they were fighting the last war based on faulty analysis. Rather than interpreting the 2024 results as a response to anger at high prices, Republicans redistricted as if Latino voters who supported Trump then would be with them forever. This was a fatal misreading, especially because the administration’s hostility toward migrant communities and war against Iran made it much less likely that the new Florida and Texas districts would behave as the GOP expected.
Latino voters and farmers in rural counties drowning in debt because of Trump’s tariffs and higher fuel prices related to the Iran war contributed to the wave that shifted most counties blue this year. The Supreme Court further gutting the Voting Rights Act, giving southern states a fresh shot at erasing Black majority districts, likewise helped rally Black communities against the GOP’s redistricting efforts.
With many Republicans deeply unmotivated to vote, every Democrat who had been imported against their will into the newly drawn boundaries made a GOP incumbent less safe. Not even districts gerrymandered in past cycles, like Rep. Tim Moore’s in North Carolina, were safe considering the deluge’s strength. On Wednesday evening, with 99% of ballots tallied, Moore trailed Democrat Lakesha Womack by more than 6,400 votes. The dikes Republicans erected to prevent discontented voters from washing them out of office failed.
You may think California’s own Democratic-led gerrymander rejoinder is getting off easy here. Gov. Gavin Newsom didn’t start the fight, and at least California voters approved those redrawn maps, but adding five more Democratic-leaning seats to its 55-member House delegation still doesn’t feel great. But ironically, California shifting its seats wound up not making a difference in the shellacking the GOP has received. Democrats holding 250 seats at minimum, as MS NOW is projecting, is great — but 245 seats would have still been more than enough to clinch the majority.
If anything, Tuesday’s results show that none of the gerrymander fight that Trump demanded was necessary at all.
If anything, Tuesday’s results show that none of the gerrymander fight that Trump demanded was necessary at all. The redrawn lines not only failed to protect Republicans but also punished them for assuming to self-select their own constituents. The frantic scrambling to match the gerrymandering effort from Democrats was likewise a moot point in the end.
Alongside the House and Senate, Democrats managed to capture enough state legislatures and governorships as part of last night’s wave that the ball is now in their court as to what happens next. The best result would be everyone realizing what a dumb idea the gerrymandering fight was. A return to the trend of handing off the job of redistricting to independent commissions should resume.
Even better would be if this new Democratic majority in Congress finish the job Democrats started six years ago and disarm the gerrymander entirely. While states have control over running their own elections broadly, Congress has the final say on federal elections and could require states to adopt a uniform standard for redistricting. Of course, this would require the consent of members who themselves are overly reliant on heavily manipulated districts to retain their seat — but now seems like the right time for dreaming big.
The post The biggest takeaway from the GOP’s gerrymander failure appeared first on MS NOW.
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