But it is still alarming that Governor Greg Abbott and the state’s GOP-controlled legislature are attempting to redraw congressional districts ahead of next year’s midterms and threatening to expel from the legislature Democratic lawmakers who have fled the state to stall this redistricting.
Texas Republicans, already holding 25 of the state’s 38 U.S. House seats, weren’t really looking to further gerrymander the state. (Kamala Harris won about 42 percent of the vote in Texas, suggesting truly fair maps would have Democrats at around 16 seats, not 13.) But then came orders from the boss. Aides to Donald Trump demanded Texas redraw its districts, believing that was the surest way to prevent Republicans from losing control of the U.S. House in next year’s midterm elections. And this message was not just delivered privately. An unnamed Trump aide told The New York Times in June that “the president would pay close attention to those in his party who help or hurt” this effort to win the midterms by any means necessary.
State and federal leaders in each party have pushed gerrymanders in the past. That’s causing the mainstream media to treat what’s happening in Texas as perhaps overly-aggressively partisanship, but not totally out of bounds. But the context matters.
Perhaps no gerrymander in American history will be as consequential as this one if it ensures continued Republican control of the House through the remainder of Trump’s second term.
But ultimately, “To entrench themselves in power, governments must do more—they must also change the rules of the game,” Levitsky and Ziblatt write. They then detail how authoritarian parties in Malaysia and Hungary redrew electoral districts to ensure they stayed in power.
In their 2023 book Tyranny of the Minority, Levitsky and Ziblatt explained how the U.S. Senate, the Supreme Court, and other features of American government were giving outsized power to a Republican Party that couldn’t win the national popular vote. Republicans had eroded abortion rights, weakened the Voting Rights Act, and accomplished many other longstanding conservative goals without much public support or even passing those policies through Congress.
It’s true that Republicans win the majority of votes in red states and occasionally in congressional and presidential elections. But even if Republican governance today isn’t always minority rule, it rarely reflects the popular will. It’s essentially “rule with only the amount of public legitimacy and support that is absolutely necessary.”
In Washington right now, Republicans currently control the House and the Senate. But instead of pushing his agenda through Congress, Trump is laying off federal workers, cutting university funding, and making countless other moves via aggressive and perhaps unconstitutional uses of executive power. Trump then bets (usually correctly) that the unelected, unaccountable Supreme Court will legitimize his actions. This strategy ignores the public, which would likely balk if Congress tried to dismantle the Department of Education, as Trump has done on his own.
Republicans are essentially assuming a public backlash to their agenda—and trying to change the election map so that they can keep the House while ignoring voter sentiments and perhaps even while again losing the popular vote.
When you combine the presence of Trump and the Republican Party’s longstanding aversion to honoring the public’s desires, what’s happening in Texas isn’t just a story of crazy legislators or hyper-partisan politics. It’s a party that doesn’t care what the public wants led by a person who only cares about what he wants. This is how democracy is dying.
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