Jul.16

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

Trump May Push Texas Gerrymander into Dummymander Territory

Donald Trump takes the view that if a little bit of a good thing is good, a LOT of a good thing is much better. He also gravitates toward simplistic "solutions," maybe because he doesn't really understand things that are complex, or maybe because he doesn't have the patience. Finally, he really does not want the Democrats to retake the House in 2026, in part because he would view this as a personal defeat, and in part because he knows that Democratic-led committees would investigate him and his administration six ways to Sunday. There would probably be a third (and maybe fourth, fifth, etc.) impeachment, and if the Democrats also retook the Senate, a long and embarrassing trial.

Add it up, and he is very, very excited about Texas' plans to (potentially) redraw the state's congressional district maps. As we noted when we wrote about this last week, the districts of Democrats Henry Cuellar (TX-28, R+2) and Vicente Gonzalez (TX-34, EVEN) are the obvious targets, as they are already very competitive, and adding something like 10,000 Republican voters to each district might be enough to swing them (for the record, Cuellar won his last election by 13,373 votes, while Gonzalez won his last election by 5,137).

However, stealing a couple more seats would only be a little of a good thing. That's not enough for Trump. And so, he is pushing for the target to be five seats. In theory, that would turn the current delegation, which will be 25R, 13D once the very blue seat vacated by the death of Democrat Sylvester Turner is filled, into a 30R, 8D delegation. This is a state, it should be noted, that is about 55% Republican voters, 45% Democratic voters.

To try to make this happen, Trump has put his personal law firm—the United States Department of Justice—on the case. And "Attorney General" Pam Bondi delivered, with her underlings sending a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and state AG Ken Paxton (R) advising that four of the state's districts—TX-09 (Al Green, D+24), TX-18 (vacant, D+21), TX-29 (Sylvia Garcia, D+12), and TX-33 (Marc Veasey, D+19)—are illegal racial gerrymanders, and must be redrawn.

This is not a serious legal argument. You can tell that it is not a serious legal argument because the current Texas maps were challenged in court for being an illegal racial gerrymander in favor of white voters/Republicans, and the state argued until it was blue in the face (red in the face?) that their process was entirely color-blind. A state cannot argue that race was not considered in the drawing of the maps, and then immediately turn around and insist that state officials (Republican state officials, mind you) knowingly drew maps that discriminated against white people.

The strategy here could not be more plain. Trump and Abbott want to redraw the maps in a way that they know will not stand up to court scrutiny, but that will (perversely) use the Voting Rights Act as an excuse for unseating a bunch of Democrats who represent heavily minority districts. The lawsuits will come, and will almost certainly be successful, but it takes time for the process to work, while the filing deadlines for 2026 are coming up soon. If the state can get away with crooked maps for the 2026 cycle, well, that's fine and dandy from Trump's perspective, because the 120th Congress will be the last one he has to deal with. And, as to other Republicans, they can hope that incumbency plus being past the usual midterm swoon will be enough to allow the Party to hold some of the seats in 2028, even under more legitimate maps.

All of this said, it's a very high-risk strategy. First, it is well within the realm of possibility that the courts will fast-track the lawsuits, and that Texas will lose, leaving the state with egg on its face and with a lot of headlines that it's trying to keep minority voters, and in particular Latinos, from being represented in Congress. That's not a great look heading into a midterm election that already figures to be bumpy for the GOP.

Second, even if the Texas legislature agrees to play ball, and agrees to re-draw a bunch of districts based on the spurious "racial gerrymander" argument, it would still have to come up with new maps. And it would have to do so facing at least three major unknowns: (1) How much of the Latino swing toward the GOP was actual realignment, and how much of it was just a temporary "Trump" vote?; (2) How has the population changed since the last census, which is now nearly half-a-decade old? and (3) Will the midterms see a blue wave, or just a blue trickle, or nothing at all?

The Texas GOP would need to make VERY good guesses as to the answers to all three of those questions, because there would be very little room for error. Here are the PVIs for all of the districts in the state occupied by Democrats (including the ones we've already named, and the one that's vacant but will undoubtedly be filled by a Democrat in the upcoming special election):

To convert those districts, particularly the ones that are double-digit Democratic, those Democratic voters have to go somewhere. And because federal law requires that districts have a roughly similar population, the effect is doubled—if you move 50,000 Democrats out of, say, TX-29, then you have to move 50,000 Republicans out of other districts, at least some of which will be red districts that will become much less red.

When a state gerrymanders its maps to the point that it begins giving away seats to the other party, then it's called a "dummymander." Presumably, readers can guess why. So, will Republicans in the state legislature tell Trump and Abbott to stop being dummies, and refuse to assume the risk of giving seats away? Or will they play along, so they don't end up in Trump's and Abbott's doghouses, and hope that the courts step in? Or will they play along, hope the courts remain silent, and then cross their fingers and hope that it all works out on November 3, 2026? Any of these three outcomes seems possible to us. (Z)