Asked Sunday if he is considering a redraw of Maryland’s congressional districts, Gov. Wes Moore answered in the affirmative.
“Yeah, and I think we have to,” Moore told CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan during his appearance on “Face The Nation” Sunday morning.
Moore suggested President Donald Trump is responsible for the ongoing battle over congressional representation, which has seen Texas Republicans and California Democrats move toward redrawing maps to their advantage. He drew parallels between the GOP’s redistricting strategy and Trump’s call urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to help overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
“The President of the United States, very similar to what he did in Georgia … he called up a series of voter registrants and said ‘I need you to find me more votes,'” Moore said. “We’re watching the same thing now where he’s calling up [state] legislatures and saying, ‘I need you to find me more congressional districts.'”
Redistricting efforts, which states typically undertake every 10 years in accordance with population shifts, are often subjected to legal challenges and gerrymandering — the term for manipulating district boundaries to favor one party.
When Brennan asked Moore if he was concerned that drawing new maps could backfire politically, the governor responded that the majority of congressional districts nationally are not competitive. He said redistricting is fundamentally about ensuring voters can choose their politicians, not the other way around.
“If you look at the average win margin in our state, in so many states, the average win margin is upwards of 20% [or] 30%,” Moore said. “So that means we have so many gerrymandered areas, that we have to be able to add a measure of fairness in the way that it’s applied.”
As just one of its eight House members is a Republican despite the Trump winning more than a third of the vote statewide last year, Maryland is already ranked as one of the country’s “most gerrymandered states.”
While it is not clear what new Maryland maps would look like, any plan pursued by Moore would likely cost Eastern Shore Rep. Andy Harris his seat, meaning all 10 members of the state’s congressional delegation — both senators and eight House members — would be Democrats.
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