President Donald Trump is actively urging Texas lawmakers to redraw congressional districts in what’s fast becoming a national showdown over electoral fairness. If successful, the effort could yield five additional safe Republican seats — boosting the GOP’s control to nearly 80% of Texas’s 38-member congressional delegation.
Texas already ranks among the worst offenders in the country for gerrymandered districts. As The Fulcrum reported in December 2024, two of its congressional maps are textbook cases in manipulated representation. The latest maneuver threatens to deepen that problem.
Sam Wang, director of the Electoral Innovation Lab, framed the danger bluntly:
“People think of gerrymanders as consisting of funny-shaped individual districts. But that’s not true… A clever expert with mapping software can lasso voters wherever they live… Gerrymandering is not a single-district offense. The offense arises from a skew in the statewide plan as a whole.”
“Lassoing voters” is exactly what Trump is advocating. He’s pressed Texas Republicans to redraw five competitive Democratic districts into safe GOP territory, calling it a “very simple redrawing” with major consequences for the 2026 midterms. According to The Texas Tribune, Trump’s team is collaborating directly with state legislators to engineer the switch.
Speaking to reporters on July 15, Trump declared:
“Texas will be the biggest one. Just a simple redrawing — we pick up five seats.” He added: “There could be some other states — we’re going to get another three, or four or five in addition.”
His broader national strategy remains somewhat opaque, but several states are reportedly in play:
- Missouri: Considering a redraw to flip one or two seats.
- Ohio: Legally required to update its maps — with potential GOP gains.
- Florida: GOP-favorable court rulings pave the way for future redraws.
- Utah: Legal challenges could prompt map tweaks that fortify Republican control.
- Wisconsin: Liberals won control of the state Supreme Court, but redistricting efforts have stalled — for now.
A Nationwide Tit-for-Tat looms on the horizon. Democrats are preparing their countermove. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has floated a bold response: redrawing maps to favor Democrats if Texas proceeds. "Two can play that game," he said, suggesting special sessions, ballot initiatives, or even constitutional amendments could pave the way for 5–7 new blue-leaning districts.
According to Politico, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has joined the conversation, meeting with California lawmakers to discuss strategic responses — including locking in safe Democratic seats through mid-cycle redistricting.
This battle might expand across the country as other blue states, such as New York and Illinois, consider putting mid-decade redistricting on the table.
One only has to look at Illinois to realize that both sides play the gerrymandering game. As reported in the Fulcrum in December, there’s a narrow strip of Illinois that is the worst example, the 13th district, which connects disparate pockets of Democratic voters in Champaign, Urbana, Decatur, Springfield, and East St. Louis. The district splits six counties, as well as multiple townships, cities, and even precincts, contributing to a 14-3
Analyst Khaled Shoucair called it “the most aggressive Democratic gerrymander in the country,” reducing GOP seats from five to three through creative vote allocation. As he put it:
“A large number of Republican votes are wasted — either packed into overwhelmingly Republican districts or diluted in Democratic strongholds.”
The Bigger Picture
This is not just a turf war between parties — it’s an erosion of public trust. When only 10–15% of congressional districts are competitive, as is the case in the 119th Congress, the result is a landscape where 370 to 390 seats are virtual locks for one party. That’s roughly 85–90% of the House.
In non-competitive districts, general elections are perfunctory. Real contests happen in primaries — often shaped by low turnout and ideological extremism. Voters outside the dominant party feel powerless, their ballots reduced to symbolic gestures.
This moment demands attention. Gerrymandering is about nothing other than control. And when both parties distort district lines to preserve power, voters lose their voice. If our democracy is to survive, we must confront the consequences of a system where representation is predetermined and competition is the exception.
David Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.