Republicans want to rig the midterm elections. Will they succeed?

The Guardian

2 days ago

If one mark of an autocratic regime is the meaningfulness of elections, you can make an argument that the United States has been backsliding away from a properly democratic form of government for a long time. In 2013's Shelby county decision, the US supreme court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, clearing the way for states to impose a slew of restrictions on the franchise that were previously banned as part of an effort to prevent the re-establishment of Jim Crow; voting quickly became more burdensome and onerous in many Republican-controlled states.
Three years before, in Citizens United, the same court declared that corporate money counted as political speech, thereby opening the floodgates on money in politics in ways that allowed the rich to distort public discourses ahead of elections. Donald Trump memorably tried to interfere with the 2020 census so that it would count as few of those who were disinclined to support him as possible, hoping to create a skewed vision of America in the data that the government uses to apportion public resources and congressional representation alike. The result is a clear picture of the Republican party's approach to elections: that so long as they create a positive outcome for their candidates, they need not be strictly speaking fair, free or meaningful representations of the people's will.
Ahead of the 2026 midterms, Republicans are pursuing this agenda with renewed zeal. At Trump's direction, Republicans in Texas are looking to redraw their state's congressional maps to be more favorable to the Republican party, allowing the party to gain more seats in the House of Representatives not by persuading voters, but by choosing who their voters will be. The US supreme court, meanwhile, has chosen to continue its own efforts to rewrite election law in the Republicans favor, taking up a long-languishing case out of Louisiana challenging the remainder of the Voting Rights Act and accelerating argument so that a decision can be released in time for Republican-leaning states to redraw their maps ahead of the November 2026 contests.
In Texas, the effort to ensure that the voters' actual preferences will have no bearing on the outcome of the House races has unfolded in dramatic fashion. In early August, Trump told Texas's governor, Greg Abbott, to redraw his state's congressional district maps – an unusual move in the middle of the decade – to ensure that Republicans picked up as many as five additional seats in Congress. 'We' – the Republicans – 'are entitled to five more seats', the president said. Trump cited his own victory in Texas in the 2024 election as evidence that the state's congressional seats belonged to his party – furthering his claim, often amorphous but repeatedly asserted, that his victory in 2024 amounts to a total and permanent grant of authority over all American policy and political jurisdictions.
The Texas governor quickly called the state legislature into a special session to vote on a proposed new set of districts for 2016. In a bit of political theater meant to draw attention to the move, the state legislature's Democrats then left Texas in protest in order to deny the body a quorum to move on the vote, seeking sanctuary in Democratic-controlled Illinois. The standoff came to an end when the Democrats gave in and agreed to return to the state on Friday, following the announcement by the California governor, Gavin Newsom, that he would encourage legislators in his own state to redraw maps in Democrats' favor. The new Texas maps are likely to be passed by Labor Day, allowing the state to secure the outcomes in their 2026 congressional contests more than a year before a single vote is cast.
Such moves are likely to become more common in the near future. The supreme court, not satisfied with having declared large portions of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional in 2013, is now moving to strike down section 2, the law's last remaining edifice. The law allows states to draw so-called 'majority minority' districts, so that Black voters can express political power in areas where they are concentrated instead of having their voting preferences diluted by spreading their votes out across majority-white districts.
The justices are now poised to strike down this last remaining vestige of the monumental 20th-century law that was meant to remedially constitute Black voting power amid a long history of political repression, and finally make the 15th amendment meaningful in practice. Without this law, Republican-controlled states are likely to redraw their maps in order to eliminate 'majority-minority' districts, thereby making it all but impossible for Black voters to elect their preferred candidates in many states, particularly across the former Confederacy.
There was no need for the justices to take this case. The issue in question – a redistricting in Louisiana that created a second majority-minority congressional district in a state with six congressional districts that is more than 30% Black – had already been declared constitutional by an appellate court, in deference to the supreme court's longstanding precedent. But John Roberts – depressingly, now the court's moderate – has had a career-long vendetta against the Voting Rights Act, and will not resist an opportunity to finally strike it down in full. That the court expedited argument so as to be able to issue an opinion in June 2026 – just in time for states to redistrict before the midterms. It is yet another signal that the justices in the court's majority consider themselves to be Republican party operatives – and the Republican party, as a whole, is becoming less and less interested in running in competitive elections.
It is yet to be seen whether these efforts will succeed in swinging the midterm elections decisively in Republicans' favor. Maybe the redistricting in Texas and the retaliation planned by California will not prompt a nationwide tit-for-tat of gerrymandering across the states; maybe the supreme court will show uncharacteristic restraint, and not overturn a decades-old precedent in order to further erode Black Americans' voting rights.
But the odds are slim, and at any rate, the Republican party has already shown that its commitment to democratic elections – that is, the kind that they might lose – is paper thin. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is reviving their first-term effort to rewrite the rules of the census. In 2030, they hope, many Americans in Democratic-leaning districts simply won't count at all.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist