After the 2024 election, Republicans exulted over Donald Trump’s surprisingly strong performance among Latino voters. This was a “historic realignment” of the electorate, the National Republican Campaign Committee said, one that would produce GOP victories for years to come.
So when Trump ordered Texas Republicans last summer to redraw the state’s congressional districts in the hopes of putting as many as five more seats in GOP hands, they thought one way to do it was to increase the number of Latinos in key districts. But that strategy — in fact, the GOP’s entire mid-decade redistricting plan — may be unravelling.
The “realignment” Republicans were hoping for was almost certainly a phantom; meanwhile, their redistricting move isn’t going much better.
Texas’ primary elections on Tuesday drew a remarkable turnout, especially on the Democratic side. As Politico noted, “In five different rural majority-Latino counties, more votes were cast in Tuesday’s Democratic primary than for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.” Turnout in majority-Latino counties was almost twice as high for Democrats as for Republicans, though both parties had hotly contested Senate primaries. State Rep. James Talarico, who won the Democratic nomination, ran up strong numbers among Latino voters, overcoming Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s advantage among Black voters.
The “realignment” Republicans were hoping for was almost certainly a phantom; meanwhile, their redistricting move isn’t going much better. When Trump started this fight last July — first in Texas, then moving to other red states — he may have figured that Democrats, whether out of weakness or indecision, would simply fold. But Democrats fought back, first and most significantly in California, and then in Virginia.
While the redistricting battles are still playing out, it’s looking far from the Republican triumph Trump might have initially expected. The parties may fight to a draw; at most, Republicans might net a couple of seats. In a year that increasingly looks like we’re headed for a blue wave, that wouldn’t be nearly enough to save the House GOP majority.
Two things are notable in the face of this likely GOP own goal.
First, all this district rejiggering is possible because in recent years, the Supreme Court has given parties almost unlimited power to redraw lines for partisan advantage. While the court’s decisions over the past decade have left it up to states to be as fair or unfair as they want, Democrats have been more likely to promote independent commissions to draw district lines. These commissions are in use in 11 mostly Democratic states, while all but a few Republican states have stuck with partisan redistricting. But redistricting in the middle of the decade — not after a nationwide census delivers new data on the distribution of the population but just whenever a state legislature feels like it — is highly unusual, an assertion of raw political power upending an established norm.
Mid-decade redistricting has happened before, most notably in 2003, when Tom DeLay, then one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress, engineered a redrawing of the Texas map that swung multiple seats to the GOP. It has been rare ever since — but there’s no law against it. And that’s the kind of thing Trump loves: a tool of power that others hesitate to use, until he picks it up and starts smashing.
After Trump got Texas to begin its redrawing, he told other red states to follow suit. Missouri and North Carolina complied, adding one likely Republican seat each. Other states, including Florida and Georgia, are trying, though court challenges leave those efforts in doubt. Trump did suffer a setback in Indiana, where the GOP-dominated legislature resisted his pleas and threats, ultimately voting to keep their existing map.
But the real key moment happened within days of Trump’s first announcement. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California — which uses an independent commission — proposed a ballot measure to draw a Democrat-friendly map for the next three elections. The map would likely produce five more Democratic seats, nullifying what the Republicans had done in Texas. In November, California voters approved the measure by a nearly 30-point margin. The fact that it restores the independent commission after the 2030 Census allowed Democrats to say that they haven’t given up their opposition to gerrymandering but are responding to an emergency Trump created. That set the tone for other blue states, putting pressure on them to squeeze out every possible seat. In Virginia, Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed a bill creating a district map that could give Democrats a 10-1 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation, a dramatic shift from today’s 6-5 split. A judge has temporarily halted that redistricting (the state is appealing), and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s plan for another seat was thwarted when the president of the Senate refused to hold a vote. But for the most part, Democrats around the country and across the ideological spectrum — including progressives and ostensible moderates like Spanberger — decided to fight back when Trump and fellow Republicans sought to play hardball. Democrats should pay attention to what happened here. For a long time, Republicans have been the ones more likely to engage in procedural hardball. While Democrats worried about norms and propriety, Republicans took unorthodox steps such as refusing to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nomination for almost a year so the seat could be held open for Trump to fill, and destroying agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development whether or not they had the legal right to do so. Republicans understood that ruffling feathers doesn’t carry much of a political cost; what matters in the end is whether you seize power and what you do with it. It’s a lesson Democrats should carry with them, especially if they win majorities in November and the White House in 2028. Trump’s evisceration of the federal government won’t just take years to repair; it will also take the same kind of creative aggressiveness his administration has shown. That doesn’t have to mean breaking the law, but it is likely to entail doing things that haven’t been done before. In Congress, that could mean expanding the Supreme Court and getting rid of the filibuster. In the executive branch, it may require reconfiguring systems and structures that have stood for decades. When Trump sparked the redistricting push, Democrats decided they didn’t care if they’d be called hypocrites for doing today what yesterday they called problematic. Instead, they dug in and fought. It’s something they should keep doing.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. Recommended
