Back in August, state Representative Mitch Little, Republican of Lewisville, had an admirably masculine sound bite for CNN’s Brianna Keilar. The TV anchor had asked Little why Texas Republicans were trying to redraw the state’s congressional map in the middle of the decade to deliver the president more seats in the upcoming midterm. “Because we can,” Little said. “We have the votes.”
Little, to his credit, and unlike many of his colleagues, didn’t hide the ball. He explained to Keilar that his party wanted a handful of congressional districts it currently couldn’t win. This had a whiff of Thucydides about it—“the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”—and apart from the general preference Panera Bread–frequenting state lawmakers have for a little classical grandeur from time to time, it had the added benefit of making the Texas Legislature look like the tough-guy mover in the equation. This bluster obscured what had actually happened. Texas Republicans had received, and submissively obeyed, marching orders from the political arm of the White House to find five more Republican congressional seats, even though at least some of them knew mid-decade redistricting in this political environment was a bad idea for them.
It was hard not to remember the Republican legislative braggadocio of last summer when President Trump spoke to a Virginia radio station on Monday before that state’s redistricting referendum. (Citizens got to vote on it—isn’t that cute?) Virginia was about to approve maps that are designed to give Democrats four seats currently held by Republicans, and Trump offered mewling and uncharacteristically beta complaints about our wonderful Norms and the integrity of the Process. “I don’t know if you know what gerrymandering is, but it’s not good,” he told the host. Not good, he says. Won’t Mitch Little have egg on his face?
When it comes to taking a whole pile of busywork hypothetically aimed at making things better and then producing no substantive forward motion, the Texas Legislature is God’s own machine, perfect and sublime. Not infrequently, months of effort put into making something better will end up making it worse. This is the gang, you may remember, that accidentally legalized dirty, lab-prepared THC products while keeping the real thing, God’s green herb, illegal.
The White House probably did not know about the deeply ingrained hopelessness that pervades the Texas Legislature, or it probably would not have ordered state leaders to spearhead the gerrymander charge. It was hoping to encourage red states across the country to follow in Texas’s wake. It was hoping Texans would start a prairie fire, and it asked the state to move first and early—which is significant in part because the president’s approval rating was much healthier-looking than it would be six months down the road.
Texas made sense as the first state to move, because it had famously done power-grab mid-decade redistricting before, in 2003, at the behest of Sugar Land Republican Tom DeLay. That redistricting was deeply shocking to many Americans at the time for its cynicism, and it led Texas Democrats in both the House and Senate to leave the state for a while to try to block it. When Dems returned to the Capitol and the new map passed, the whole thing succeeded in weakening the Democratic Party in Texas, but when it came to affecting the balance of power in the U.S. House, the move was mostly futile. Between 2004 and the end of the decade, the new Texas districts never made the difference in the control of Congress.
This round of mid-decade redistricting, which Texas House Democrats also left the state in response to, appears to be something worse than futile: It is shaping up to have been a top-to-bottom omnishambles for the GOP. Texas did set off a redistricting wave, as intended: Six other states have now redrawn their maps. But the nationwide struggle Texas incited, it turns out, was one that Democrats were much more eager to contest than Republicans.
The five Republican seats that were hypothetically won in Texas were quickly neutered by five Democratic districts carved off in California. A bungled process in Utah actually led to Democrats gaining a district there. Missouri, Ohio, and North Carolina could give Republicans one new seat each. Virginia gave Democrats four. If every gerrymandered seat is won by the party it was designed for, the fight Texas started will result in Trump losing a few seats. Even worse for the GOP, the president’s cratering popularity could mean that the party doesn’t win all or even most of the districts it drew for itself.
Trump’s approval rating is currently hovering near Jimmy Carter’s and Richard Nixon’s at their worst. The president’s sinking political fortunes—exacerbated by Epstein and the Strait of Hormuz crisis and worsening economic indicators—were bad when Texas leaders decided to redistrict last June, but they have become more obvious with each passing month. In Texas, the Texas Politics Project has it, Trump went from a plus-fourteen-point net approval rating in February 2025 to minus seven in December. That has encouraged Republican lawmakers like those in Indiana (also furious about Trump’s treatment of Mike Pence) to shy away from their own rounds of follow-up gerrymandering, while Democratic legislatures, able to justify it by pointing to Texas, have leaned in.
The five Texas seats the Legislature was supposed to secure for the president include one each in Houston and Dallas that likely will go to Republicans. The other three, though, are in South Texas. They were drawn with the belief that Trump’s success with the region’s Hispanic voters in 2024 was part of a lasting realignment. There are growing reasons to doubt, though, that there was indeed a realignment, and the president’s actions now look a little desperate. Trump pardoned the Democrat incumbent in one district, Henry Cuellar, only to slam him when he failed to switch parties and run as a Republican. It seems increasingly likely that Trump may only pull two or three seats out of the five he asked Governor Abbott to give him.
Texas Republicans, in other words, seem to have unintentionally joined the Resistance. This was not really unforeseeable, though. When I wrote last June about Trump’s redistricting call that “the president has packed a howitzer full of cow dung and aimed it at Texas lawmakers [and] is now asking them to light the fuse themselves,” I was in part reflecting what I was hearing from Texas Republicans, which was confusion. Republicans here gained little by going along, and going along promised to be difficult, time-consuming, and, because it would require one or multiple special sessions, expensive. But they goed along anyway.
There’s an additional problem. When Texas needs something from the Feds—say, disaster aid after a hurricane—it benefits from having both Democrats and Republicans from its congressional delegation in senior positions in Congress. Republican state lawmakers advocated for the gerrymander by arguing that it was in the state’s core interest to ensure that the next Congress was Republican-controlled. But Democrats are likely to win control of the House—likelier to do so now because of what the Texas Legislature did—so the Legislature has weakened the negotiating position of the state in D.C. by shrinking the number of Democrats in the delegation and knocking out at least a few more well-regarded Democratic incumbents.
This doesn’t quite round out the reasons the Legislature should feel shame about all this, though. What it did—inviting the rest of the nation to try to rig the midterm through mid-decade district drawing—wasn’t just self-defeating. It was bad for the country. If states begin regularly redrawing maps in between each election, Texas will have helped make the American system of government meaningfully worse and more craven.
There just might be a silver lining to this mess. If, after the midterm, there is national momentum toward a kind of grand bargain on redistricting, a meaningfully good thing will have come out of the Texas Legislature. The nation could, in theory, work out some kind of compact to limit redistricting to set intervals, say, or task independent commissions with drawing district lines on common criteria—proposals that are already favored by Democrats. But the change will have come from Texas lawmakers themselves learning the hard way that when you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
Back in June, I wrote that the question to be resolved regarding Trump’s demand of the Legislature’s Republicans was “whether they are so broken in that they [follow him], at meaningful risk and no real reward to themselves.” They were totally broken in, it turned out. The irony—a telling one for second-term Donald, surrounded by sycophants—is that the president would be better off today if they hadn’t been.
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