The campaign operation backed by Barack Obama and Eric Holder is expanding its sights.
The National Democratic Redistricting Committee was created by the former president and his attorney general to elect more Democratic legislators who could help the party in the coming nationwide remapping of congressional districts. Now it's growing its ambitions to include some judicial elections.
The first target is a pair of Supreme Court contests in Ohio. That's because winning both this fall would tip the partisan balance of the court, and those justices are likely to end up deciding the lines for the 15 House districts that the seventh largest state is likely to have in the coming decade, one fewer than today.
The organization has been a prominent critic of partisan gerrymandering, but its efforts to combat the practice have occurred almost exclusively in states run by Republicans.
That has opened Obama and Holder to criticism that their effort — which they portray as a crusade against one of the biggest obstacles to a more representative and better functioning democracy — is motivated entirely by something different: a desire to get more fellow Democrats in position for the 2020s to maximize their power through mapmaking, the same way the GOP did so effectively in the 2010s.
Ohio is among the dozen states the NDRC is targeting and, like eight others, the state government is now under the control of the GOP. Democrats seizing control of the General Assembly this fall is highly unlikely. But under changes approved by the voters in 2018, the minority party will have more influence over redistricting, especially if their caucuses get a bit bigger, which could result in a deadlock a year from now that kicks the process to the state's high court.
That's why the NDRC may invest in both races for the bench this fall, spokesman Patrick Rodenbush told the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
"Because it was so gerrymandered after 2011, we want to try as much as possible to make that map more fair for the next 10 years," he said.
The partisan gerrymander of Ohio a decade ago has worked just as well as the GOP could have hoped. The party has held 12 of the states 16 seats all decade, even in the 2018 midterm, when Republican candidates took just 52 percent of the congressional vote statewide.
Since its 2017 founding, the NDRC and its affiliates have raised $52 million, much of it from liberal millionaires and labor groups who were generous donors to Obama's campaigns.
The other states on its target list are:
- Texas, Florida and North Carolina, all states that are going to gain House seats after the census and where the GOP is currently in control.
- Michigan and Pennsylvania, which like Ohio have GOP state governments and expect to lose one seat each.
- Minnesota, which has the only politically divided legislature in the country and will lose a seat.
- Kentucky, Georgia and Louisiana, which have Republican legislatures and are expecting to keep the same number of seats.
- Virginia and New Hampshire, where the state capitals have just recently titled Democratic and the congressional delegation sizes won't change.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.