A Political Game Could Redefine Voting in America

Date:2025-08-08 07:55:56 Category:politics Views:2 Comment:0

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Activists and organizers like to say that the world is run by those who show up, so the fact that what Texas’s Democratic legislators need to do to further their agenda is not show up is inauspicious for them.

Those lawmakers, most of whom are currently holed up in Illinois, are seeking to prevent Republicans from drawing new, gerrymandered districts that would help them expand Texas’s GOP delegation in the U.S. House—and perhaps give the party a better shot at holding the House in the midterms, when the sitting president’s party tends to suffer (even with presidents far more popular than Donald Trump is currently). Democrats hope to deprive the legislature of quorum, thus blocking the passage of any new map.

Traditionally, states redistrict after the decennial Census, and those maps endure for a decade, unless courts order changes, as they sometimes do. Texas’s current maps were drawn by Republicans, and in the most recent election, they produced 25 GOP seats and 13 Democratic ones. That’s 66 percent of districts with 58 percent of the total House vote for Republicans—not bad. But under pressure from the White House, Texas Republicans are now trying to squeeze out a little more juice.

The attempt to redistrict is an unusual, brazen, and questionable move, though not entirely without precedent. In 2003, Texas Republicans redrew maps so as to give themselves a majority of the state’s House seats. Democrats, dubbed the “Killer Ds,” fled the state to prevent a quorum. They were initially successful, but a later attempt to prevent a quorum failed when a member broke ranks, and a new map passed. Texas Democrats are hoping they can learn the lessons of that attempt and win this time. They have a strategy, they have support from governors out of state, and, as Politico notes, they have the chance to run out the clock on a new map before a December deadline.

Still, if Democrats had any better options, they’d take them. Maintaining caucus discipline for the next four months will be no easy task. And that’s assuming some of the more draconian ideas offered to break them fail. State Attorney General Ken Paxton wants to have the Democrats removed from office for their absence. (Experts say this is legally dubious, and the idea of Paxton enforcing rectitude and duty is grimly hilarious.) U.S. Senator John Cornyn, whose reelection hopes are teetering precariously in a GOP primary against Paxton, tried to one-up that by requesting that the FBI help locate the Democratic fugitives. (Never mind that they haven’t obviously committed any crimes.)

All things being equal, legislators skipping sessions to prevent a state government from accomplishing business isn’t a good thing. Oregon Democrats were so sick of state GOP legislators doing so that they enacted a law blocking chronic absentees from running for reelection in the next term. Then again, opportunistic mid-decade redistricting isn’t a good thing, either. Gerrymanders produce worse governance because they are less representative; they also feed polarization by making elected officials dependent less on the general electorate and more on primary voters.

And what’s happening in Texas has already spread further. As soon as Republicans began talking about a Texas redistricting effort, Democrats in states including California and New York threatened to redraw maps to retaliate and push out Republicans. Now the GOP is looking at other red states, including Indiana and Missouri, to gain more seats. This is a disheartening example of what I’ve called total politics, in which officials try to use every legal tool to gain any advantage, no matter the long-term consequences. In this worldview, what matters is what’s possible, not what’s wise.

How successful these efforts outside Texas will be is not clear. Hoosier State Republicans appear unenthusiastic about redistricting, though the White House seems to believe it can twist their arm. Democrats, meanwhile, have challenges of their own. By some measures, the U.S.House map over the past two elections has had a slight Democratic advantage.

Moreover, as my colleague Russell Berman reports, Democrats have spent the past decade pushing good-government reforms such as independent redistricting commissions that are designed to make extreme gerrymandering more difficult. People such as former Attorney General Eric Holder, who has been the leader of Democratic advocacy for fairer districts, are now embracing the tactics they shunned and trying, somewhat painfully, to rationalize them. The explanations really come down to this: Democrats believe that they are losing an existential battle and must do whatever they can.

But what they can do is limited. Gerrymanders that use race as a basis are unconstitutional, but gerrymanders that use partisanship are not—although, in the South, Democratic affiliation is often a good proxy for Black voters. Chief Justice John Roberts has written that partisan gerrymanders are unfair, but the Supreme Court ruled that it has no authority to do anything about them. Roberts recommended that states handle the issue on their own.

This is where gerrymandering becomes a devilish, self-perpetuating problem. Voters who want to stop gerrymanders at the state level find their path blocked by … gerrymandering. Take North Carolina, which went from a 7–7 split in the U.S. House to a 10–4 GOP edge under a new map enacted ahead of last year’s elections. State legislators have also gerrymandered their own maps, so that although Democrats won narrow majorities of all the votes cast for both the state House and state Senate, they hold only two-fifths of the seats in both chambers.

For decades, the Voting Rights Act has provided a path by which Black voters are guaranteed representation, through the drawing of majority-minority districts that would be otherwise considered unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. (Texas has one of the highest proportions of Black voters among states.) Yet as the law professor Richard Hasen writes in Slate, the Supreme Court now appears to be considering throwing out majority-minority districts as unconstitutional.

This week marks the 60th anniversary of the VRA, but after years of hollowing out by the Roberts Court, the VRA seems to be nearing irrelevance. The Trump administration has indicated that the Justice Department will move away from prosecuting racial discrimination in voting and toward pursuing bogus allegations of voter fraud, while the Court may soon eliminate the ability of individuals and outside groups to bring claims under the law.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Texan who signed the VRA into law, once said, “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless.” If the shameless use of total politics to game districts is successful, it threatens to strip the meaning from that right.

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The day my brother died, the dogwoods were in bloom. I sat by my bedroom windowsill, painting my nails. Junior prom was just hours away. I was 16. My brother, Alex, was 18—just 22 months older than me.
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