A familiar strategy among authoritarian leaders is unfolding in the United States. In that strategy, strongmen are willing to subject themselves and the political parties they lead to electoral accountability only if they are sure of what the results of elections will be.
Around the world, they have shown themselves to be both determined and skillful in that endeavor. Their tactics are numerous and often inventive.
Sometimes they smear or jail political rivals. Sometimes they tried to intimidate supporters of opposition parties to keep them from showing up at the polls and registering their preferences. Sometimes they try to change the laws governing elections in a way that favors them and their parties.
This playbook helps explain why President Trump has asked the state of Texas and other red states to redraw their congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm election. He wants them to do what they can to ensure that Republicans retain control of the House of Representatives before any votes are cast.
But no matter what happens in Texas or anywhere else, the president and his MAGA allies will come out winners. Win or lose in the effort to get that result, they will have succeeded in further shaking the confidence of Americans in elections, the key pillar of democratic political systems.
That has been part of their strategy for a long time. The redistricting/gerrymandering ploy is just its latest iteration.
Let’s start by understanding the way partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts works. Legislators in Texas and other states know that it can be achieved, YouGov’s Alexander Rosell Hayes explains “through the simultaneous practices of packing and cracking: packing or cramming supporters of one party into a few districts that vote overwhelmingly for its candidates, while favoring the other party by cracking or spreading its supporters across many districts that just barely give its candidates a majority.”
In this way, “state legislators can give one party a far greater share of seats than its share of votes.”
This is not something that governors would be trying to accomplish this year, but for the president’s intervention. As the Texas Tribune reports, “Before he called lawmakers back to Austin to redraw Texas’ congressional maps, Gov. Greg Abbott was initially resistant to the plan pushed by President Donald Trump’s political team to pick up new GOP seats through a rare mid-decade redistricting….Then, Trump placed a call to Abbott during which they discussed redistricting. The governor subsequently agreed to put it on his agenda for the special session.”
Abbott, the Tribune continues, “justified the redistricting by saying it was needed to address ‘constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice’ about the current maps, which were drawn in 2021 and are the subject of an ongoing court challenge.” The governor has also said that people who voted for President Trump in 2024 should have the opportunity in 2026 to make sure that they elect representatives who will back his agenda.
“This is not just rigging the system in Texas, it’s about rigging the system against the rights of all Americans for years to come,” Pritzker said Sunday night.
Democrats are not taking this lying down. They understand the stakes.
As Illinois Governor JB Pritzker puts it, “This is not just rigging the system in Texas, it’s about rigging the system against the rights of all Americans for years to come.”
They are hatching their own plans to gerrymander in states they control, and I am glad they are doing so. But I think the president and his MAGA allies have much to gain, no matter how the redistricting drama plays out.
They will win because the very public battle in which political leaders of both parties tinker with voting districts to gain partisan advantage will further erode the public’s already shaken confidence in our electoral system. That can only strengthen the forces who want Americans to think that the system is rigged, that votes don’t get counted correctly, and that elections don’t matter in shaping what the winners do when they take power.
Evidence of diminished confidence in elections is plentiful. For example, in October 2024, “the share of Americans who said they were very confident in their 2024 general election vote counting as intended was (just) 43%.”
Confidence increased a bit after the election because, unlike 2020, there were few claims about election fraud or other irregularities. But, looking at it over time, a 2024 Report of the American Bar Association Task Force for American Democracy found “reduced confidence in recent elections.”
They argue that “Voter confidence is disproportionately dependent on their in-person experience at the polls…. Likewise, ‘confidence that one’s own vote has been counted typically outpaced confidence in the counting of the nation’s votes by approximately 40 percentage points over the past two decades.’”
In addition, the ABA says, “voter confidence is consistently higher among members of the winning party.”
Still, last year, large majorities of both parties did not think that the opposing party was “committed to making elections fair.” Trump supporters were “more likely to say that the Democratic Party is not at all committed (47%) than Harris supporters…(were) to say this about the GOP (39%).”
Gerrymandering makes this situation worse.
A YouGov survey conducted at the beginning of this month found that “many Americans don’t know a lot about gerrymandering.” However, “when it is described, large majorities view it as unfair (76%), a major problem (76%), and something that should be illegal (69%).”
Indeed, “Most Americans prefer for the districts in their state not to give an advantage to either party (67%), and few would support gerrymandering even if it countered partisan redistricting in Texas (24%) or California (19%).”
Trump’s involvement underscores the immense power he holds over Texas Republicans. It shows how far the president will go to protect his Washington trifecta that has handed him sweeping legislative wins, even if that means irritating those who are voting to approve his agenda in Congress.
In a 2021 survey, ”Nearly 9 in 10 voters oppose(d) the use of redistricting in a manner that aims to help one political party or certain politicians win an election.”
How happy are those people likely to be as a gerrymandering spectacle unfolds and is given great prominence in news reports and social media?
And we know that gerrymandering reduces turnout in elections.
Writing in 2019, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan explained that “partisan gerrymanders…(have) debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.” She concluded that they “imperil our system of government.”
That is why the president likes them and why, no matter what Texas or other states do, he will have succeeded in delivering another blow to the cause of democracy.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
