The gerrymander wars begin

Democrats fled Texas to block their Republican colleagues from being able to pass a new map that would gain Trump 5 seats. Now blue states are threatening to gerrymander Republicans out of existence.

This is a big week for two reasons:

1. The Democrats, who are notorious for bringing a plastic knife to a gun fight, are finally bringing the correct weapon to the correct fight in response to Trump demanding that Texas redraw its congressional map to give him five new seats ahead of the 2026 midterms, which he knows he will badly lose without cheating. And New York’s own feckless governor Kathy Hochul appears to be leading the charge from the left? WAT?!

2. Tomorrow is my birthday.

As a Leo (who learned upon moving to Brooklyn how to deploy astrology in conversation to disarm my opponents), I can’t help but feel like these two developments are related. Perhaps the former is my gift — one single week of hope and reprieve — from a party that has otherwise continuously shat the bed this year in response to the worst president in American history.

Let’s take a look at ~the gerrymander wars~, and what they might mean for next year’s midterms.

Last month, sensing that the 2026 elections were going to absolutely bury him, Trump instructed Texas Republicans to hastily redraw their congressional map to give him five new seats in the House. Gerrymandering used to be a kind of shameful thing that politicians would do in the shadows every 10 years while pretending their new maps were drawn for entirely fair and above-board reasons, but Trump pretty much just said out loud that he needs red states to erase Democratic seats quickly before the Dems are able to retake Congress next year and impeach him. “Texas will be the biggest one,” he told reporters. “And that’ll be five.”

Texas, of course, capitulated and redrew their maps to further shut out any real democratic participation in the state. Keep in mind that Texas is already gerrymandered by Republicans—so they’re just re-gerrymandering their own state harder to help Trump cheat. In fact, the new map is so transparently stupid that one of the district lines cuts right through the state capitol and gives its parking lot a whole new congressman.

In terms of representation, the proposed map would mean that while Democrats get 45% of the popular vote in Texas — making it more of a competitive state than most people realize — they’d only get 21% of the congressional seats going forward. Just the blue spots below.

Texas Republicans know full well that they are simply cheating democracy by giving Trump these extra seats and thereby silencing the voice of millions more voters in the state — which is why they arrested Democratic congressional candidate Isaiah Martin, 27, at their redistricting hearing last week for giving a barn-burner of a speech about it.

"Many of you that are Republicans, and I'm looking at you, you understand the game. You gotta get Trump's endorsement," Martin told the committee, right to their faces. "That's the name of the game to be a Republican nowadays. And you know very clearly that Trump told every single one of you that he needs five seats."

As security ripped the microphone off him and dragged him out of the room, Martin told the committee that "history might not remember you at all,” at which point one man lay fully on top of him to restrain him and shut him up. Here’s a video of the arrest:

That brings us to this week. Texas was supposed to pass its new map on Sunday, and Democrats used the only tool in their arsenal to delay the vote: fleeing the state to deny Republicans quorum to do legislative business. Instead of watching their colleagues rig the state against them further, Democratic state lawmakers escaped to Chicago to give a press conference with Gov. Jay Pritzker (D), who said the state is “going to do everything we can to protect every single one of them.”

“This is a righteous act of courage,” Pritzker said. “When you show people that you have the will to fight, well, they can muster the will to fight, too.”

Pritzker means he’s going to protect them from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has ordered their arrest in order to try and force them to come back and enable the vote to secure their own doom. Unfortunately for him, no “arrest warrant” he can sign for delinquent lawmakers is valid outside of Texas. Texas Democrats’ best hope is to delay the gerrymander until its deadline before the state’s 2026 March primaries, which would be December. “Come and take it,” State Rep. Gene Wu (D-Houston) said about his seat, speaking from a Chicago suburb. (I love the drama.)

Meanwhile, governors of blue states — including California, New York, and Maryland — are threatening to retaliate against Texas by redrawing their own maps to cancel out the red state gains. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul went so far as to suggest that we amend our state constitution to move up the redistricting deadline and disband our independent commission to allow for revenge gerrymandering, saying she’s “tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back.”

Hochul suddenly locating her spine must have scared the hell out of New York Congressman Mike Lawler (R), whose stands to be yeeted out of his swing district if Democrats are allowed to redraw the maps. Lawler and Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) have now broken with their party and called to impose nationwide limits on gerrymandering, because what’s good for Republicans in Texas is definitely not good for Republicans in New York and California.

And this brings to my final point: Republicans’ best argument in defense of gerrymandering, and one that J.D. Vance is trying to use now, is “the Democrats do it too.” Here he was on X last week pointing fingers at California’s map to deflect from what was happening in Texas.

Okay. Let’s first acknowledge that California is not even in the top 11 most gerrymandered states, 10 of which are Republican or GOP-leaning. Those 11 are: Arkansas (R), Kentucky (R), Louisiana (R), North Carolina (R), Ohio (R), Pennsylvania (mostly R), Utah (R), Texas (R), West Virginia (R), Wisconsin (R), and Maryland (D).

Further, Democrats in Congress tried to ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide in 2021, and every single Republican voted against it. So now, if the Democrats don’t participate in the redistricting war, they will simply lose every election til the end of time. Republicans have made it that way.

And so begin the great gerrymander wars of 2025. Just looking at Trump’s historically low poll numbers, the looming recession, and the horrible time Republican congressmen are having at their town halls these days, I personally do not see a way for Republicans to redraw their maps hard enough to avoid landslide losses next year. But I am looking forward to seeing how Texas Democrats adjust to their new life in Chicago over the next few months as Greg Abbott bursts a vein in his forehead trying to drag them back.