The redistricting war of 2025

 

Friday, August 15

THIS WEEK The Redistricting War of 2025 started in Texas Red states and blue states are readying to fight

TEXAS The Lone Star State is leading the redistricting war

As Democracy Docket readers know, we’ve been warning anyone who will listen: with President Donald Trump in the White House, Americans are going to have to fight tooth and nail for free and fair elections in 2026. That might sound abstract, but we’re tracking signs of trouble across the country, from the GOP takeover of North Carolina’s election operations to red states eliminating grace periods for late-arriving ballots and the Georgia GOP appointing conspiracy theorists to local election boards.   But in the weeks since the White House asked Texas to redraw its congressional map to add more GOP seats in Congress – a possible violation of the Hatch Act – the Republican strategy to rig the 2026 election has become so brazenly obvious that it’s now top mainstream national news.   Texas Republicans quickly abandoned Gov. Greg Abbott’s original pretext for putting redistricting on the legislative agenda – he had cited a U.S. Department of Justice letter claiming four Democratic districts are unconstitutional racial gerrymanders – and they’ve switched to a different script, telling Texas Democrats, who are trapped in some kind of surreal Twilight Zone episode, that they decided to do unusual mid-decade redistricting for no reason other than because Abbott put it on the agenda. The Texas House redistricting committee chair admitted he hadn’t even looked at any Census data, in an astonishing mockery of a normal redistricting process.   Republicans have filed every conceivable legal challenge (and some inconceivable ones) to punish a group of Texas House Democrats who left the state Aug. 3 to block a vote on the map. They’ve issued civil arrest warrants, requested FBI assistance to return Democrats to the state, petitioned courts in Illinois and California to enforce the arrest warrants, filed two separate lawsuits to remove Democrats from office and declare their seats vacant, asked state law enforcement to investigate Democrats for bribery, accused Beto O’Rourke of bribery and threatened to jail him.    The Texas Senate passed the redistricting map this week. Unlike Texas House Democrats, Senate Democrats were unable to break quorum because of members who refused to participate. For now, it’s still unclear where this conflict is headed, but we’re updating you on every development. Read more about Texas here.

This isn’t just a Texas story. It’s a warning for democracy nationwide. Our readers have told us they want more facts, more clarity and more ways to take action.   Upgrade today to power fearless reporting and in-depth coverage of redistricting battles in Texas and beyond — because what happens here affects us all.

JOIN THE FIGHT

NATIONAL     What happens in Texas isn’t staying in Texas

What we do know for sure is that the redistricting chaos won’t stop with Texas. Democracy Docket reporter Jim Saksa put together a helpful guide to everything we’ve heard about blue states that could redistrict in response to Texas and red states facing pressure from the White House to redraw their maps, as well. 

 

Republicans have defended their redistricting plan by arguing blue states are just as gerrymandered as Texas. (Jim’s story provides the numbers so you can decide for yourself, by the way.) Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, is using the same talking points. She warned in a weekend interview that “there will be consequences” for California and New York should they redistrict because they are already “gerrymandered to the hilt.” 

 

As Jim wrote: “Democrats may be abandoning the moral high ground in the gerrymandering wars, but Republicans have long enjoyed control of the strategic high ground.”

 

For now, we’re keeping an eye on Florida, Missouri and Ohio, as well as California, New York, Illinois and Maryland. Read more about the redistricting war here.

FEATURE Texas GOP redistricting plan courts Latino voters while cutting their growing political power

Democracy Docket reporter Yunior Rivas took a closer look this week at how Latino voters could be particularly impacted by Texas redistricting.  

 

The GOP’s proposed congressional map targets districts represented by Latino Democrats – so even as Republicans are courting Latino voters symbolically, they’re cutting off their actual electoral power.

 

And Republicans are making no secret about their strategy.

 

“We have three Hispanic-predominated districts in South Texas that we believe we can carve out for Republican leadership,” State Rep. Mitch Little (R) admitted on CNN. “It’s good for our party. It’s good for our state. And we need to ensure that Donald Trump’s agenda continues to be enacted.”

 

The bottom line is, if Republicans enact their new map in Texas, the number of districts where Latino voters can effectively elect their preferred candidates is projected to shrink. Read more here.

NEW VIDEO The Texas GOP Loves Their "Commander-in-Cheat" | Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer

Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer left Texas to deny Republicans a quorum and block their gerrymandered map. He sat down with Marc to discuss the threats to him and his colleagues, Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton's internal battle, and what’s next in the redistricting fight. Watch it on YouTube here.

What We’re Doing

When News Editor Sally Holtgrieve is not helping report on all of the above, she likes to go wander around nature to decompress. Frogs and newts have shown no signs of pond redistricting. Thus, Sally was thrilled to learn about the recent launch of Save Our Parks, an accountability initiative aimed at informing, exposing, and combating Trump and his cronies’ systematic dismantling of America’s national parks, forests, wildlife refuges and public lands.   Parks, a tip line AND Trump accountability? Hooray!

I am DIGGING IN my DAMN HEELS!!! Ben Meiselas and MeidasTouch Network Aug 15 By Ben Meiselas Before I start writing this, let me thank our subscribers. Please subscribe now if you can. I am digging in my heels. We all need to dig in our heels right now! We can’t give an inch right now. California Governor Gavin Newsom showed what fighting back looks like today. He wasn’t just holding a press conference to talk tough. He introduced a ballot initiative to redistrict California to counter the efforts by Donald Trump to rig the midterms. He showed action! We need people to meet the moment like Newsom did today. I demand leaders show us what they are doing to fight back against Trump. No more empty words. I don’t want to hear “it can’t be done” or “Republicans control all branches of government, so we can’t do anything.” Do something tangible and powerful or get out of the way. I am digging in my heels and tripling down on our coverage of leaders fighting against Trump’s fascism. MeidasTouch was the most-watched livestream of the Newsom rally today. We are the most-watched stream for the Bernie Sanders rally. We got an interview with Newsom today that has been viewed more than any other Newsom interview today. We have built the biggest news platform in the United States, and now we must put it all on the line and sacrifice everything to fight against the Trump regime. As protests grow, we will be the lead voice covering them. Trump will get increasingly dangerous and violent as his regime’s death spiral continues. We will never back down. We will dig in! All of the threats against us do not deter us for a second. If you like the independent reporting of the MeidasTouch Network, may I humbly ask you to subscribe to this Substack now? Let me be blunt. We need your help. We have grown with zero investors, and we need to expand our lead over Fox and Rogan. This is an existential moment, and subscribing to this Substack has been the biggest help for our growth. You can also gift subscriptions to people you know if you are already subscribed. We are so grateful for you. We appreciate you so much and all you do every single day! We will never stop fighting for you. Let’s keep fighting. Meidas+ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Ramble On: Colossal Wreck (video) Trump is so thirsty for prizes, so desperate for glory, he'd proudly accept the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence. Greg Olear Aug 15 Good morning! Hello, thank you, and welcome to my new subscribers. Here is today’s ramble: Every piece at PREVAIL is free to read and always will be. No paywalls, ever. Your generous support keeps it that way. Thank you! And here is the transcript, edited for clarity: Good morning. As you’re watching this, it’s Friday morning, August 15th. I’m recording it at nine o’clock at night on Thursday, August 14th. I guess right now Trump is probably nervous, anticipating his big summit meeting in Alaska with his overlord. And it will be interesting to see how that turns out. We’ll talk about that on the show tonight, which I hope everybody watches: The Five 8 at eight o’clock tonight. That’s where we’ll talk about the more heavy-duty things, but for now, I want to talk about something a little more light. So I always had this running joke, when we used to do The Weeklings, which is my old arts and culture site that I did with some friends of mine—a blog, I guess you can call it. I used to joke that I wanted to win the MacArthur Genius Award. And I would say, “Another year goes by and I’ve not been recognized as a genius by the MacArthur people. Oh well.” And you know, that was joke—a running joke. Although part of me likes the idea of this group of people, nobody even knows who they are, but they have MacArthur Powers, and they just decide that somebody is going to get money this year, and be acknowledged as a genius, for their body of work. Which struck me as probably the only way I would ever be able to win anything. I’m still holding out hope for the MacArthur Award, but I’m not, like, lobbying for it. However, I did win a Genius Award, and I want to share it with you. This is the Electronic Football Genius Award, which I won because I won my Fantasy Football League, and this is what I got. I get to keep this for a whole year. It is a trophy, is an honor, it is a privilege, and it means that I did something. I went out and I beat eleven other guys at fake football. I did that! Now, the reason I’m bringing this all up, of course, is because the President of the United States—among all the many other things that we’ve discussed on this website, on the show, on the podcast—is obsessed, Donald Trump is obsessed, with winning awards. He’s obsessed with this weird glory—you know, he wants the laurels. I think he fantasizes about that the time in old Rome when he could have the parade and literally get his flowers. I think that he fantasizes about that time, which doesn’t really exist anymore. So he’s, like, inserting himself into these awards—lobbying for him to win awards. There was a report in The Guardian, which actually came from a report in the Norwegian press, that Trump last month called up the finance minister of Norway, just out of the blue one day, and was like, “Hey, yeah, tariff, tariff—hey, Jens, tell me about the Nobel Prizes because, I don’t know if you know, but I’ve been nominated for a Peace Prize,” blah, whatever he said. There’s nothing more gauche than lobbying for a Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, it’s really next-level gauche. Who does something like that? I think you should be ineligible to receive that particular award just for cultivating it in the way that he’s cultivating it. But it’s not just that. You know, it’s also the Kennedy Center Honors. He wants to host the damn thing. He wants to hand out the awards himself. He wants the thing to be named after him, probably. This is a guy who basically spent his entire career putting his name on everything. He literally made money by licensing other people to put his name on things. So he’s big into this vainglory, right? This kind of “Me, me, me! I want to be the best. I want to be acknowledged as the greatest, as the genius, as the peacemaker, as the best supporting actor,” whatever. That’s what he wants. And maybe Putin will give him the Lenin Medal or whatever the fuck it’s called in Alaska today. And he can have that too. But he wants these things. I guess it’s a strongman thing. These dictator types all have their stupid medals all over their jackets and stuff. But Trump doesn’t have any medals, Lord knows, because there’s no medal for bone spurs. But he wants to win these awards so badly, he’s so thirsty to be acknowledged. He’s thirsty, and it’s the same kind of need that he had growing up in Queens and wanting to be accepted by the elite in Manhattan. And even though he is the President of the United States for the second time, he’s never going to get the recognition that he wants—because he sucks, and everyone knows it. So what he’s going to do is, he’s going to use the presidency to build up his own legacy. He wants to put his name on things. You think Trump doesn’t want a monument in Washington named after him? I think he’d like to name the whole city after himself, honestly, and would if he could. And it reminds me of a poem, one of my favorite poems, by Shelley, called “Ozymandias.” It’s a sonnet. It goes like this: I met a traveler from an antique land who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things—the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal, these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.” And that’s it. The decay of that colossal wreck. I can’t think of a more poetic descriptor of Donald Trump than that. He is a colossal wreck. And he’s not going to win his damn awards. Nobody likes him. And he can commandeer stuff. He can take it over and award himself things all he wants. It doesn’t make any difference. It’s never going to fill the deep need that he has, the unscratchable itch he has, for people to actually think that he’s good, smart, artful, whatever it is. It goes with the gold stuff in the Oval Office too. The whole place now looks like a bordello. It’s ridiculous—maybe appropriate, but ridiculous nonetheless, for the President of United States to be meeting with heads of state in a place that looks like it should smell of Lysol and cheap perfume. So I think the words of the day are colossal wreck. And I hope that the Nobel Committee stands firm and does not award any of the Nobel prizes to this asshole. Which reminds me, and I’ll end with this, of another quote. And I can’t remember who said it. It was the filmmaker, I think, Luis Buñuel, who said, “Awards are like hemorrhoids. Sooner or later, every asshole gets one.” And with that, have a great weekend everybody, if such things are possible, and remember: we shall prevail! TONIGHT! 8PM ET! Join me and LB for a new episode of The Five 8, because: Alaska. Photo credit: Rhett Miller. I preen with The Landry, because: I prevailed!

 

Dispatches of alarm and hope, on politics and society, democracy and justice. Because silence is not an option. We may read and write alone, but we drive change together.

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Trump's Essential Weakness

We must hold onto our ability to recognize that Trump's despotism is built on a throne of lies—and it will not endure

Steven Beschloss Aug 15

The American Eagle knows the truth. (A video screenshot)

He called his social media platform Truth Social. He said Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs. He said his mass deportation operation would target only dangerous criminals. He rejected the weak job data and fired the labor statistics chief responsible for reporting it. He signed an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity in American History” with a plan to take over the Smithsonian Institution and rewrite history. He deployed the military in Washington, D.C., claiming it was an emergency driven by bloodshed and bedlam, while the city’s actual crime rates are declining. He plans a meeting on American soil with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, claiming he wants to bring peace, yet doesn’t invite Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. He says his tariffs are raising not billions but trillions of dollars. He boasts that he doesn’t take a presidential salary, yet exploits his public office to rake in billions to stuff his own pockets. He asks why shouldn’t he accept Qatar’s “gift” of a 747 jet, but doesn’t mention that it will cost upwards of a billion dollars to make it usable as Air Force One. He said he wanted to cut government costs, yet pushed the passage of a bill that adds over three trillion dollars to the national debt and hands his rich buddies over two trillion in tax cuts. He whines that the voting system is rigged, then pushes Texas to rig its system. He demands a “new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures” because he doesn’t like the numbers, even though the last one happened in 2020 and the Constitution decrees census-taking every ten years. He says he won in 2024 by a landslide and earned a mandate, even though he only won by one-and-a-half percentage points. He still says he won in 2020, even though he lost by three-and-a-half percentage points. He still says Russian interference in the 2016 election was a hoax and climate change is a hoax. He wants to destroy NASA satellites that track climate change data. Any time a reporter asks a question that he doesn’t like, he calls them fake news. He calls his regime “a perfect administration.” He says America is the world’s “hottest country,” even though layoffs are rising, costs are soaring and global opinion toward America is cratering. He called the Jeffrey Epstein story a hoax and “total bullshit,” while the FBI deployed a thousand agents to dig through all the files to identify references to Trump. He calls himself the President of the United States, even though he says he vehemently hates Democrats, who comprise nearly half of the country. He calls himself the President of the United States, yet he despises the Constitution and is turning the country into a gangster state led by a mafia boss.

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I’ve surely skipped plenty of other examples. But this is not about providing a comprehensive list of all the ways in which Donald J. Trump ignores or openly rejects the truth and pushes lies to elevate himself and his ill-informed opinions. This is about looking squarely at his effort to advance a dictatorship in which facts, data and knowable reality are replaced by his desperate need to look strong and be a winner.

Our beloved country is being held hostage by this malignant narcissist who stokes fear, hate and division and who relies on his sycophantic operatives to repeat his lies and degrade the public’s capacity to know what is true or false. Note the comments in recent days made by his bloodless Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, after Trump pushed lies about crime in D.C. and reporters questioned them. “Crime stats in big blue cities are fake,” Miller declared. “The real rates of crime, chaos and dysfunction are orders of magnitude higher.”

It’s no wonder that the guy Trump wants to insert as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, E.J. Antoni, is a hack economist who kowtows to Trump, despises the bureau, rejects its work and has already said he would drop the monthly jobs report and go quarterly. Of course, Trump is all for a guy who is not committed to informing the citizenry but instead to doing his bidding: “Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE,” Trump said in announcing this selection. This follows his previous comments rejecting the jobs data earlier this month: “In my opinion, today's Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”

I share these points not to discourage you. Quite the contrary. The more untethered Trump is from reality and the more obvious are his lies, the more his weakness is revealed, his decline will be hastened and his end assured. Do you doubt that the allies of America—and I don’t mean Trump’s America—can see through the obvious bullshit? Do you doubt that most of our fellow Americans can grasp that he’s trying to rule on his throne of lies? It’s up to us to hold onto our capacity to know what’s true and to maintain our capacity for independent thought.

Yes, we are undermined by cowards who have chosen to capitulate to this bloviating con artist—and it’s demoralizing that many of them represent once-respected schools, law firms, businesses and legacy media organizations. But every day the lies mount, I take strength from the knowledge that they can’t sustain this house of cards. The regime may succeed in adding to their list of surrender monkeys. But as our economy continues to decline, our body politic becomes more fractured and their hostility toward our democratic system and basic humanity becomes more vivid and unavoidable, I expect public outrage and public protest to grow. That means all of us recognizing our collective power and remembering that we are participants—not just spectators—in this 249-year-old democratic experiment and its survival.

One last note: California Gov. Gavin Newsom made a powerful case today for putting redistricting on California’s ballot in November to fight back against Trump’s push through Texas to grab five additional Republican House seats. His forceful speech represented his vivid commitment to fight “fire with fire,” recognizing that California is the nation’s fourth largest economy and can provide outsized influence.

“California will not sit idle as Trump and his Republican lapdogs shred our country’s democracy before our very eyes,” Newsom said. “In just six months, Trump’s unchecked power has cost Americans billions and taken an ax to the greatest democracy we’ve ever known. This moment calls for urgency and action: That is what we are putting before voters this November, a chance to fight back against his anti-American ways.”

And more: Trump “doesn’t play by a different set of rules—he doesn’t believe in the rules. And as a consequence, we need to disabuse ourselves of the way things have been done. It’s not good enough to just hold hands, have a candlelight vigil and talk about the way the world should be. We have got to recognize the cards that have been dealt, and we have got to meet fire with fire.”

This is the kind of urgency that I have missed from too many of our Democratic leaders who have seemed stuck in the old ways of doing things. Newsom’s push is a promising sign that—out in America, at the state level, among the laboratories of democracy—we just might find the necessary firepower to overcome Trump and his hostile takeover.

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Democrats finally bring a gun to the gun fight

Joyce Vance Aug 15

It’s a serious moment; we all get that. But sometimes we just need to breathe a little life into it. That’s why California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Press Office account imitating Donald Trump on X felt pretty life-giving.

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Newsom has asked state legislators to put proposed new congressional maps on the ballot in a special election this November, as a counter to Republican redistricting efforts in Texas, which were presented as an attempt to obtain more safe seats in the House ahead of Democrats’ expected gains in the midterm elections. Republicans didn’t even try to disguise it, with President Trump leading the charge and saying he believed they could get five more seats out of Texas. Newsom’s press office account tweeted, “Donald Trump does not play fair! So California will fight back — to make it fair for voters all across this country.”

So many times in the Trump era, Democrats—trying to take the high ground—end up bringing a knife to a gun fight. Sometimes they are accused of showing up with nothing more than a glass of lemonade. It’s challenging to be the adults in the room, the ones who try to live by the Constitution and follow the law, when the other side has abandoned any pretense of fair play.

Take, for example, the fight for voting rights. Ahead of the 2016 election, Governor Pat McCrory of North Carolina, who was up for reelection, tried to change his state’s rules for his own benefit. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected his blatant efforts at voter suppression, writing, “The asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the State’s true motivation. ‘In essence, … the State took away [minority voters’] opportunity because [they] were about to exercise it. … This bears the mark of intentional discrimination.’” The court overruled the new laws McCrory had signed in an effort to restrict access to the right to vote, holding that they targeted African-Americans with “almost surgical precision” and “discriminatory intent.”

Despite the Justice Department’s successful challenge—decided months ahead of the election—McCrory and the Republican party still made it more difficult for many Democrats to vote. And when McCrory lost by more than ten thousand votes, instead of conceding, he made false claims of voter fraud to try to hold on to the office. Rather than giving his successor, Roy Cooper, a smooth transition, McCrory signed two bills designed to strip Cooper of powers the governor has traditionally held over state election boards. By all accounts, McCrory played dirty politics.

Texas Democrat Greg Casar recently accused his party of bringing a butter knife to a gunfight when Trump called for redistricting, which Texas’s Republican Governor Greg Abbott seemed eager to deliver. Then Casar got a pleasant surprise. Texas Democrats decided to fight back in an unorthodox manner by leaving the state to deprive Texas House Republicans of the quorum they would need to vote on the measure to redraw the state’s congressional maps.

Not everyone was sure it was the right thing to do at first. Democrats, as a party, believe in following the rules. But there was a higher rule at work here: the principle that every American citizen should be able to exercise their right to vote. Texas legislators realized the only way to do the job their constituents had elected them to do was to use fresh tactics to combat yet another effort by Republicans to deprive them of their rights.

The first time I had a serious conversation about the need for Democrats to respond in kind was with Marc Elias. It was something of a gut punch, because while I hated the idea of Democrats responding to Texas by offering their own plans to redistrict and gerrymander in California, I understood it was a practical necessity. If Republicans are able to rearrange the maps so they have perpetual control of Congress, democracy would be lost.

We are now at a crossroads where Democrats understand we cannot sit back and let democracy be unraveled. And that is a good thing. It is the fight so many of us have been hoping for. It’s not a happy moment, but it’s a necessary one. And as long as we do it with an understanding of why we are doing it—that it is, and must always be, about protecting voting rights—I believe we will come out okay.

Today, former President Barack Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder held a call with Texas Democrats, who are still in absentia. In a statement, an Obama spokesperson said the former president “lauded their fight against the Republican efforts to enact an even more egregious gerrymander in Texas ahead of the midterms.” The spokesperson continued that Obama “made clear that they are part of a bigger effort to protect free and fair elections and commended them for inspiring others with their actions.”

We cannot let MAGA take away our ability to determine the outcome of American elections. Voters must be free to choose their elected officials; it is not the job of politicians to select their voters. Democrats are finally fighting to win, not just to enter the fray. The Supreme Court has said it will not interfere with political gerrymanders, no matter how offensive it is to democracy—a decision of questionable wisdom. But when Republicans engage in blatant efforts to suppress the vote, as they are in Texas and they are preparing to do elsewhere ahead of 2026, Democrats must stand up for democracy. They’re doing that now.

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We’re in this together,

Joyce

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