An Attempt at Blatant Election Manipulation

Via the AP: Trump tells Texas Republicans to redraw the state congressional map to help keep House majority.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he is pushing Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional maps to create more House seats favorable to his party, part of a broader effort to help the GOP retain control of the chamber in next year’s midterm elections.

The president’s directive signals part of the strategy Trump is likely to take to avoid a repeat of his first term, when Democrats flipped the House just two years into his presidency. It comes shortly before the GOP-controlled Texas Legislature is scheduled to begin a special session next week during which it will consider new congressional maps to further marginalize Democrats in the state.

Asked as he departed the White House for Pittsburgh about the possibility of adding GOP-friendly districts around the country, Trump responded, “Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five.”

This is, I must note, legal, and further, SCOTUS has long allowed for partisan gerrymandering. It would be a breaking of the norm of a ten-year reapportionment and redistricting cycle. It would not be unprecedented, but it is highly unusual.

I want to pause and note, yet again, that this just underscores how voters and their preferences are secondary to how the lines on the map are drawn. This highlights a significant flaw in the design of our system. In many ways, our country is governed by We the Maps and not We the People.

I would have to look at the maps more carefully than I have done to date, but I will note that this may not be as easy as it sounds. The state’s congressional districts are already heavily tilted towards the GOP.

For the sake of discussion, we could use the 2024 presidential vote as a metric of partisan preference in the state. It went roughly 56% for Trump and 43% for Harris.* With a House delegation of 38 seats, a proportional outcome would give the state 21 Republicans and 17 Democrats. After November, the House delegation was 25 Republicans and 13 Democrats.**

So, we can see that the Texas legislature has already squeezed some extra seats out of the population. It may not be as easy as Trump thinks (shocking, I know!) to find five more.

One way would be to make some districts that are currently slam-dunk safe for Republicans a bit more competitive so as to siphon Democratic votes from currently safe Democratic districts.***

Some Texas Republicans have been hesitant about redrawing the maps because there’s only so many new seats a party can grab before its incumbents are put at risk. Republicans gain new seats by relocating Democratic voters out of competitive areas and into other GOP-leaning ones, which may then turn competitive with the influx.

“There comes the point where you slice the baloney too thin and it backfires,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

[…]

Still, there are practical limits as to how many new seats any party can squeeze from a map. That’s why some Texas Republicans have been hesitant about another redraw. In 2011, the party’s legislators drew an aggressive map to expand their majority, only to find seats they thought were safe washed away in the 2018 Democratic wave election during Trump’s first term.

In response, the map in 2021 was drawn more cautiously, mainly preserving the GOP’s current outsized majority in its congressional delegation. 

Look, I am not going to make the call for more gerrymandering into a massive scandal, insofar as manipulating districts in an anti-democratic (note the small d) way is, unfortunately, a norm in American politics. It is, however, pretty crude and unusual for the President of the United States to actively, publicly, and oh-so-cavalierly ask a state to “pretty please make your state even less representative because I need seats in the House.”

It is just another clear example that the man is no democrat (again, small d).

Ohio is also about to engage in redistricting.****

Republicans in Ohio also are poised to redraw their maps after years of political and court battles over the state’s redistricting process. The GOP-controlled Legislature is considering expanding the party’s lead in the congressional delegation to as much as 13-2. It currently has a 10-5 advantage.

It is worth noting that Ohio went 55% for Trump and 44% for Harris, and so the delegation would look more like eight Rs and six Ds if the results were representative of partisan sentiment across the state.

Have I ever noted that we have a representativeness problem in the US?

Could Democratic states retaliate? Well, it seems unlikely.

Newsom on Tuesday afternoon floated the notion of California’s Democratic-controlled Legislature doing a mid-decade redistricting and arguing it wouldn’t be expressly forbidden by the 2008 ballot initiative. Democrats already hold 43 of the state’s 52 House seats. He also proposed squeezing in a special election to repeal the popular commission system before the 2026 elections get underway, but either would be an extraordinary long shot.

“There isn’t a whole lot Democrats can do right now,” said Michael Li of the Brennan Center for Justice. “In terms of doing tit-for-tat, they’ve got a weaker hand.”

There are a number of lawsuits in play that could result in some pro-Democratic outcomes.

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*A reminder that while we call states Red and Blue, even a state that is strongly conservative has a lot of voters who vote Democratic. Harris won almost 5 million votes in Texas. The red/blue discussion constantly obscures a deeper truth about American politics and makes us forget that our system is doing a poor job of representing us. I would note that Trump won 6 millionish votes in CA.

**The current D contingent is at 12 due to a death. A special election is pending.

***A devious corner of my brain wants them to try and please Trump and then muck it up to such a degree that it leads to Ds actually gaining seats in the House from Texas. But truth be told, I am not in favor of even more manipulation of already grossly problematic maps.

****And yes, as I have noted before, this kind of thing happens in Democratic states as well. I don’t like it there, either. We need serious electoral reform in this country if we really want representative government.