Texas pushes redistricting into an era of ‘maximum warfare'
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
Voters are the immediate casualty in this escalating arms race, reduced almost to bystanders as Republicans essentially admit to trying to determine the outcome of Texas races long before elections are held.
Advertisement
The result is a democracy determined less by public opinion than by raw political might.
Trump has pressed Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Republican state legislators to redraw their lines, with a draft map released Wednesday that all but erased three urban Democratic seats and forced two other incumbents in South Texas into more Republican terrain. The special legislative session Abbott called lasts until late August, but votes could come in the coming week.
Advertisement
And Texas could be just the beginning.
Trump and his allies are pressing other states to follow suit and remake their maps with more Republican seats. States under complete GOP control that could be targeted for redistricting include Missouri, Florida, Indiana, New Hampshire and Ohio.
'We're going to get another three or four or five, in addition,' Trump told reporters recently of new Republican House seats. 'Texas would be the biggest one, and that'll be five.'
The gerrymandering is deeply consequential at a time when a single House race can cost tens of millions of dollars. Republicans won control of the House in 2024 by only three seats, a margin the remapping in Texas alone would more than double.
One person close to the president, who insisted on anonymity to describe the White House's political strategy candidly, summed it up succinctly: 'Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.'
The redistricting push is only one element. Trump has targeted Democratic law firms with executive actions. He has threatened prosecutions of and ordered investigations into his political enemies, while the Justice Department has dropped lawsuits aimed at protecting voting rights. And his congressional allies are investigating ActBlue, the organization that processes an overwhelming share of online donations for Democrats.
When it comes to redistricting, Democrats are threatening to fight back. Democratic legislators in Texas are contemplating a potential walkout to deny Republicans the quorum they need to pass the new maps. Lawsuits are being readied. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, traveled to Texas on Thursday to rally opposition to what he called a 'scheme to rig the midterm elections,' and said all options were on the table.
Advertisement
Democratic governors in several states, including California and New York, are contemplating rewriting laws or amending state constitutions to remake their maps in response to what is happening in Texas.
'California's moral high ground means nothing if we're powerless because of it,' Gov. Gavin Newsom said after meeting with Texas Democrats who traveled to Sacramento in late July.
Newsom is proposing that the Legislature put new maps up for a public vote in a special referendum this fall, without ripping up the state's independent mapmaking commission for 2030. His plan is far along enough that polling is being conducted to see how such a measure would fare.
Eric Holder, who was attorney general in the Obama administration, has been a vocal opponent of gerrymandering for years as chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, pressing blue states to adopt nonpartisan commissions and fighting red state gerrymanders.
But after Texas put out its maps this past week, Holder had a change of heart, calling for a 'temporary' embrace of gerrymandering to thwart Trump. He said he came to this new position after consulting other party leaders, including former President Barack Obama.
A failure to respond in kind to GOP gerrymandering, Holder said, could leave Trump with 'unchecked power' in the last two years of his term, with potentially disastrous results.
'It's like the Germans have invaded France,' Holder said. 'Are you going to just say, 'Well, we're against war and we're for the resolution of disputes in a peaceful way'? Sometimes you have to take up arms.'
Others reached that point long ago.
Marc Elias, one of the Democratic Party's most prominent lawyers, welcomed any converts to his brand of brass-knuckle politics.
Advertisement
'I do not believe, when it comes to elections, that Democrats should ever engage in any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith,' Elias said in an interview.
Lines are typically redrawn once a decade after the census. Gerrymanders in the middle of a decade have been exceedingly rare, and seen as a nuclear option. But the precision that sophisticated software now grants to map-drawing reduces the chances that new lines backfire on the party in control.
Trump would have carried every new Republican-leaning seat carved out in the new maps by nearly 60% in 2024. And no existing Republican-leaning districts were watered down beyond that 60% threshold.
Raskin called the modern targeting technology a 'computer-assisted system' for cheating -- 'where the minority power gets gerrymandered into oblivion.'
'Redistricting is going from, like, a decennial bare-knuckle rugby match to an every-other-year 'Hunger Games,'' he said.
Democrats have certainly benefited from partisan gerrymanders before.
In Nevada, Democrats won three of the state's four congressional seats last year even as Trump carried the state. The Democratic-drawn map in Illinois gives the party 14 House seats, and Republicans three, though Trump won more than 43% of the vote there last year.
Today, Republicans are racing to consider even more audacious gambits. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has talked about giving fast-growing red states like his additional seats in Congress in the middle of the decade with a census 'redo,' a political and practical long shot that is legally dubious.
'If Texas can do it, the Free State of Florida can do it 10X better,' Rep. Jimmy Patronis, R-Fla., wrote on the social platform X. In a statement, Patronis said booming population growth made new lines 'only fair.'
Advertisement
In his first term, Trump tried but failed to exclude people living in the United States illegally from the census, which determines the apportionment of congressional seats. Now, a close ally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has announced legislation that would order such a citizens-only census -- and would force districts to be redrawn everywhere.
The accelerating use of the most no-holds-barred tactics risks undoing decades of efforts to rein in the most egregious, explicitly partisan gerrymandering -- reforms that were often spurred by voters themselves.
After the 2020 census, the maps in four states -- California, Michigan, Colorado and Arizona -- were redrawn by independent commissions enacted by referendums. All four now are led by Democratic governors who face pressure to undo those reforms. And the willingness to battle Republicans is a key factor in who emerges as a presidential contender in 2028.
Other experts worry about the warfare spilling over into statehouses. While gerrymanders by red and blue states might roughly offset each other, no such safeguard exists in state legislatures, where the majority parties in many states have created permanent minorities in lower chambers.
'That backsliding would be terrible for progress at a local level,' warned Sam Wang, a professor at Princeton University who leads the school's Gerrymandering Project.
Historians have warned that both parties risk broader unrest if they gerrymander vast sections of the country so effectively that they neuter opposition at the ballot box, leaving voters without a real choice.
Yet politicians sometimes openly acknowledge that this is their aim. As Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, chair of the House Republican campaign arm, put it recently on CNN: 'Any seats that we gain before Election Day would be nice.'
Advertisement
This article originally appeared in
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
12 minutes ago
- The Hill
Johnson visits Jerusalem after Israel trip postponed
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) visited Jerusalem on Sunday after he previously postponed a trip to Israel earlier this year. Johnson was seen in footage visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem and joining a group of House Republicans to meet with Israeli officials. 'It is such a moving time for us to be here, to be here at the Wailing Wall. We've offered our prayers, we've put our notes into the wall, as is traditional and we're so moved by the hospitality of the people and the great love of Israel,' Johnson said in a video posted to Instagram by the Western Wall Heritage Foundation. 'Our prayer is that America will always stand with Israel and that we will — we pray for the preservation and the peace of Jerusalem. That's what Scripture tells us to do. It's a matter of faith for us and a commitment that we have,' he added. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar shared a photo of Johnson and other House Republicans including Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) meeting in Jerusalem. 'We discussed the alarming global wave of antisemitism, including efforts by countries like Ireland to delegitimize Israel. I also described the horrific attacks against the Druze in Syria, the same kind of barbarism perpetrated by Hamas,' Sa'ar wrote. Johnson postponed a trip to Israel back in June, when he was supposed to address the Knesset, due to the military conflict between Israel and Iran. Jewish Insider reported Sunday that Johnson does not have plans to address the Knesset on his trip this week.
Boston Globe
12 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Trump fired America's economic data collector. History shows the perils.
There is the case of China, where earlier this century local authorities manipulated data to hit growth targets mandated by Beijing, forcing analysts and policymakers to turn to alternative measures to gauge the state of the country's economy. Advertisement Perhaps most famously, there is the case of Argentina, which in the 2000s and 2010s systematically understated inflation figures to such a degree that the international community eventually stopped relying on the government's data. That loss of faith drove up the country's borrowing costs, worsening a debt crisis that ultimately led to it defaulting on its international obligations. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up It is too soon to know whether the United States is on a similar path. But economists and other experts said that Trump's decision Friday to fire Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was a troubling step in that direction. Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and chair of the Federal Reserve, said the firing was not what is expected from the most advanced economy in the world. Advertisement 'This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic,' Yellen said. Essential data The Bureau of Labor Statistics is officially part of the Labor Department, whose secretary is a member of the president's Cabinet. But the agency operates independently, producing detailed, nonpartisan data on employment, prices, wages and other topics. Economists say that reliable, independently produced statistics are critical to good decision making in both the public and private sector. Officials at the Federal Reserve rely on government-collected data on inflation and unemployment to decide how to set interest rates, which affect how much Americans must pay to get a mortgage or a car loan. 'Good data helps not just the Fed, it helps the government, but it also helps the private sector,' Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, said at a recent news conference. 'The United States has been a leader in that for 100 years,' he added, 'and we really need to continue that in my view.' Experts on government statistics say data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other agencies is unlikely to deteriorate dramatically overnight. The acting commissioner named to replace McEntarfer on a temporary basis, William J. Wiatrowski, is a longtime employee of the agency who is widely respected by experts inside and outside government. The career employees who collect and analyze the data remain in place, using the same methods and procedures they used before McEntarfer was pushed out. But experts who just days ago were defending the integrity of the statistical agencies now find themselves asking uncomfortable questions about the trajectory of economic data in the United States. Advertisement 'If the poverty numbers come in and look great, is the director of the Census going to get a raise?' said Amy O'Hara, a former Census Bureau official who is now a professor at Georgetown University. 'If the household income numbers don't look great what happens then? What about GDP? What about CPI?' Andreas Georgiou knows the challenges of standing up to such political pressure. After he took over Greece's statistical agency in 2010, he found that the country has been severely understating its budget deficits. Those findings ran afoul of Greek authorities, who spent years trying to prosecute him on a variety of charges related to his work, despite independent reviews that supported his conclusions. (He fared better, though, than Olimpiy Kvitkin, a Soviet census official who was arrested and executed when his population count came in lower than Josef Stalin had announced.) Georgiou refused to bend. Reliable statistics are important for policymaking, he said. But they are also essential to democracy. 'Official statistics, government statistics are a mirror that society holds up to itself,' he said. If that mirror is distorted, or broken entirely, then the accountability that is central to a democratic system cannot work. 'If society cannot see itself clearly, then it cannot identify its problems,' he said. 'If it cannot identify its problems, then it cannot find the right solutions. It cannot find the right persons to solve these problems.' Data integrity at risk Trump said he fired McEntarfer because the numbers produced by her agency were 'rigged' to hurt him politically. Experts on the government statistics, including former commissioners in both Democratic and Republican administrations, have called foul on that accusation. The commissioner, who is the bureau's sole political appointee, does not control the numbers that the agency publishes, or even see them until they have been finalized by a staff of career technocrats whose careers typically span multiple presidential administrations. Advertisement Erica Groshen, who led the bureau under President Barack Obama, recalled getting resistance from the agency's staff when she tried to liven up the language of the monthly jobs reports. The bureau's staff insisted that the agency's job wasn't to say whether the glass was half-full or half-empty, only to report that, 'It is an eight-ounce container with four ounces of liquid.' Groshen relented. That is not to say political interference would be impossible. Government statistics rely on hundreds of methodological decisions, many of them judgment calls with no obviously correct answer. A sufficiently sophisticated agency head might, over time, be able to nudge the data in a politically advantageous direction, without any single decision being so egregious that it led to a mass resignation of career employees. 'I could imagine a new commissioner coming in and trying to make changes to those methods and procedures that try to move those numbers one way or the other,' said Katharine G. Abraham, who led the bureau during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. 'They would have to know a lot in terms of where to put the finger on the scale.' Private alternatives There are also blunter approaches. In Argentina in 2007, the government of then-President Néstor Kirchner pushed out the mathematician in charge of the country's consumer price data, then released an inflation figure that was dramatically lower than the one the mathematician had calculated. The public wasn't fooled. Nor were international bond investors, who ultimately turned to alternative sources of inflation data, calculated by researchers outside the government. Advertisement But such alternative sources are inherently limited, said Alberto Cavallo, a Harvard University economist who developed one of the most widely used private inflation indexes in Argentina. 'Private alternatives can complement official statistics, but they are not a substitute,' Cavallo wrote in an email. 'Government agencies have the resources and scale to conduct nationwide surveys -- something no private initiative can fully replicate.' Recently, Cavallo has been publishing data on consumer prices in the United States, which has shown the impact of Trump's tariffs more quickly than the government's data. But while such real-time sources are valuable, they don't carry the 'institutional credibility' of government data. The trouble is that once that credibility is eroded, it is hard to repair -- particularly at a time when partisans on both sides of the political aisle are skeptical of numbers put out by members of the opposing party. Nancy Potok, a former Census official who served as chief statistician of the United States during the first Trump administration, said that in the past there had been strong bipartisan support for the statistical system in Congress and the business community. But partisanship seems to have eroded that support at a moment when a combination of political pressures and long-standing budget challenges are making it most necessary. 'There were some people who really understood the value of the economic data, and now that's not the conversation and those champions aren't there that were there in the past,' she said. 'There's no one leading the charge to make these kind of investments.' This article originally appeared in Advertisement
Boston Globe
12 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Breaking from his father, Josh Kraft criticizes Trump as having ‘stoked hatred and division'
Kraft, son of New England Patriots Owner Robert Kraft, has been tied to his father's connections to Trump during his campaign. Robert Kraft and Trump have a long history. In 2017, Kraft told the Globe that the two have 'been friends for years' and that during 'the worst time in my dad's life, [Trump] was there for him.' Advertisement Scrutiny over Robert Kraft's friendship with Trump increased after the Globe reported the After the meeting, Josh Kraft received campaign donations from four of the top attorneys at the firm, including its chairman, Brad Karp. At the time, a spokesperson for The Kraft Group denied any coordination between parties for the donation to the campaign. Advertisement Kraft said he is ready to deal with the consequences of the Trump presidency if he is elected mayor, amid 'a mountain of federal budget cuts along with a billion dollar tax credit shortfall.' He also spoke about Mayor Michelle Wu's criticism of his family's relationship with Trump. 'Michelle Wu wants to talk about me, I want to talk about all of you,' Kraft said. Wu could not be immediately reached for comment. Kraft also spoke out against Wu's handling of the Boston housing crisis, the White Stadium renovation, and the city's homelessness problem, saying, 'addiction does not discriminate.' Regarding housing, Kraft said his campaign promises to jump-start construction, implement ' 'Boston is going to be a place where families and young people have to leave the city, and only the wealthy can afford to live here,' Kraft said. Kraft also criticized Wu's comments about 'She's desperate to distract the voters from a record of broken and failed campaign promises and the failures of her policy plans, especially making it easier for the middle class to afford to live in the city of Boston,' Kraft said. Kraft said he proposes a plan to place White Stadium, located in Franklin Park, back in the hands of Boston Public Schools students and athletes. He previously criticized Mayor Wu for not disclosing the Advertisement The renovations, which were subject to lawsuits over alleged During the press conference, Kraft dismissed comments about Super PAC tax exemptions. Super PACs are not limited in their campaign contributions, and can donate more than the $1,000 limit. The Your City Your Future Super PAC that supports Kraft has donated more than $3 million to his campaign. He also did not discuss his tax returns, which his campaign promised to release before the preliminary vote on Sept. 9. His campaign revealed last week he earned $6.3 million in 2024 but declined to break down the sources of Kraft's income. Wu and others have criticized Kraft for his lack of income transparency and the possibility of conflicts of interest in his mayoral campaign. Kraft has already personally contributed $2 million to his campaign. Mayoral candidates are not required to release their tax returns, but it has become common practice to do so. Wu said she has disclosed her finances for the last 12 years. If elected, Kraft said he would not be involved with his family business to avoid conflicts of interest. Critics, including Wu, flagged The Kraft Group's proposed soccer stadium in Everett, to which The Kraft Group proposed mitigation payments of $750,000. Kraft served as the head of the family charity, the New England Patriot Charitable Foundation. The nonprofit reported that Kraft was not paid a salary for his role, but a spokesperson from the campaign said Advertisement Kraft was also the head of the Boston Boys and Girls Club for more than a decade, where he earned $350,000 in 2020, the year he stepped down from his leadership role. Maria Probert can be reached at
