Donald Trump and his Republican party — fearful of being punished by voters in next year’s midterm election for their widely unpopular policies, such as major cuts to the nation’s social safety net program and inflationary tariffs — have taken the unprecedented step of pushing through mid-decade gerrymandering of Texas congressional seats. The GOP hopes redrawing Texas maps will give them five additional seats, helping the party retain control of the House. But beyond Texas, Republicans are encouraging the gerrymandering of districts in other states, including Ohio, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Kentucky and New Hampshire.
More than 50 Texas House Democrats recently left the state to deny Republicans the quorum needed to pass their gerrymandered maps. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has threatened to ask voters to approve a referendum to bypass his state’s nonpartisan Citizens Redistricting Commission, to redraw maps there, increasing the number of Democratic seats as a counter to Trump Republicans’ gerrymandering scheme.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with David Daley, former editor-in-chief of Salon.com, who’s the author of “Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections.” Here, Daley discusses his recent Nation article, “How the GOP Hopes to Gerrymander Its Way to a Midterms Victory,” and the U.S. Supreme Court’s right- wing majority’s role in methodically dismantling the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
DAVID DALEY: We start with a House that is essentially 219 Republican, 216 Democratic. So three seats ought to be able to flip the House and usually the party that’s not in power at the midterm (elections) gains somewhere between 12 and 20. So Republicans are not satisfied with the three-seat edge they have. They’re looking to pick up about five in Texas. There will be two more coming from Ohio, one from Indiana and Missouri most likely. Ron DeSantis is talking about three south Florida districts in addition to one in Orlando, one in Tampa. Don’t know if he can get all five, but he might be able to.
And then there’s a handful of other states that have been quieter, but could also remap if they would like to and erase the Democratic seat off the board. Kansas has one. Tennessee has one, New Hampshire, Kentucky. So if you add all that up, you’re looking at somewhere between 12 and 15 seats that Republicans could grab. And the thing about that, of course, is every time you grab additional seats, you’re also shrinking the map because there were only 37 districts in the country that were competitive back in 2024. And by competitive I mean within 5 percent. So when you start knocking these competitive seats off the board, it means the Democrats have to really dominate the handful of seats that are left. It shrinks the eye of the needle that they have. An already difficult path becomes that much harder.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that, David. Since 2013, the Supreme Court — and this was the Shelby County versus Eric Holder case — the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has been dismantling sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the extreme right-wing of the Supreme Court just accepted to hear a voting rights case from Louisiana about the legality of majority-minority congressional districts setting the stage for a further erosion of protections from voter suppression targeting voters of color. You mentioned the Louisiana case in your article. I wonder if you’d expand a little bit on what we know about this case and how it could impact further elimination of protections under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
DAVID DALEY: Yeah, absolutely. I’m glad we’re talking about this case. I’m glad we’re talking about the court and its role here in really putting the Voting Rights Act through the shredder. Over the course of the last dozen years, dating back to Shelby County. The Voting Rights Act is the most consequential piece of American civil rights legislation in our history. This is what makes us a multiracial democracy. The right has been targeting it ever since it was passed. The very first challenge to the Voting Rights Act comes the month after it was passed, South Carolina in September of 1965, saying we’ve fixed all of our problems here. Everything’s good. It took until 2013, it took until (Chief Justice) John Roberts in the Shelby County case ending pre-clearance for the arguments that South Carolina advanced in 1965 to become law. But that’s really what happened. John Roberts in 2013 embraced the arguments that South Carolina advanced 60 years earlier in trying to duck out from under the Voting Rights Act.
And Roberts and this court have over the last 15 years consistently on voting and election cases, pushed the country further to the right. You can start with Citizens United in 2010, unleashing unlimited dark money from billionaires into our politics. You can jump to 2013 and the Shelby County case. In 2019 is Common Cause versus Rucho, which has special relevance today because this is the gerrymandering case. This is the partisan gerrymandering case from North Carolina in which John Roberts and this court at precisely the moment that federal judges around the country said, “We have the tools to reign in the worst gerrymanders by Democrats in Maryland, by Republicans in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina. We can fix this and also if we don’t fix it, nobody else will because the politicians can’t and won’t.”
And John Roberts looked at this and said, “No” and he went a step further. He said, federal courts can’t be in the business of policing partisan gerrymanders. He closes the federal courts to all of these claims in the future. John Roberts is the father of this moment we are in right now, this chaos that has been unleashed from coast to coast. This all out mid-decade redistricting war was essentially created by the chief justice who declined to embrace a federal national standard for a national problem knowing, I imagine, that this chaos would reverberate to the advantage of the Republican party and the people who put him on this court.
Now there is one more case coming up, the Callais case from Louisiana. This case has the ability to really end what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. Roberts and the conservative super majority have not left much. There is one remaining piece of Section 2 having to do with majority-minority districts across the South. They are going to rule on the constitutionality of those districts. If as expected, they find a way to strike that down to say, as they did in Shelby County that things have changed, that these protections are not necessary anymore. It could wipe off the map black districts in Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, maybe Georgia. It would give them additional ability to go back into Texas and to eliminate some of these seats. You could see an additional half-dozen seats erased in addition to the dozen that could come off the board right now. So this is really a five-alarm fire that people need to be paying attention to.
For more information, visit Fair Vote at fairvote.org.
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