| |
Trump Redistricting Complicated for GOP11/19 06:24
Trump's plan is to bolster his party's narrow House margin to protect
Republicans from losing control of the chamber in next year's elections.
Normally, the president's party loses seats in the midterms. But his
involvement in redistricting is instead becoming an illustration of the limits
of presidential power.
As President Donald Trump laid it out to reporters this summer, the plan was
simple.
Republicans, the president said, were "entitled" to five more
conservative-leaning U.S. House seats in Texas and additional ones in other red
states. The president broke with more than a century of political tradition in
directing the GOP to redraw those maps in the middle of the decade to avoid
losing control of Congress in next year's midterms.
Four months later, Trump's audacious ask looks anything but simple. After a
federal court panel struck down Republicans' new map in Texas on Tuesday, the
entire exercise holds the potential to net Democrats more winnable seats in the
House instead.
"Trump may have let the genie out of the bottle," said UCLA law professor
Rick Hasen, "but he may not get the wish he'd hoped for."
Trump's plan is to bolster his party's narrow House margin to protect
Republicans from losing control of the chamber in next year's elections.
Normally, the president's party loses seats in the midterms. But his
involvement in redistricting is instead becoming an illustration of the limits
of presidential power.
Playing with fire
To hold Republicans' grip on power in Washington, Trump is relying on a
complex political process.
Redrawing maps is a decentralized effort that involves navigating a tangle
of legal rules. It also involves a tricky political calculus because the
legislators who hold the power to draw maps often want to protect themselves,
business interests or local communities more than ruthlessly help their party.
And when one party moves aggressively to draw lines to help itself win
elections -- also known as gerrymandering -- it runs the risk of pushing its
rival party to do the same.
That's what Trump ended up doing, spurring California voters to replace
their map drawn by a nonpartisan commission with one drawn by Democrats to gain
five seats. If successful, the move would cancel out the action taken by Texas
Republicans. California voters approved that map earlier this month, and if a
Republican lawsuit fails to block it, that map giving Democrats more winnable
seats will remain in effect even if Texas' remains stalled.
"Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned -- and democracy
won," California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, posted on X after the Texas
ruling, mentioning his Republican counterpart in Texas along with the president.
Rep. Kevin Kiley, a Republican whose northern California district would be
redrawn under the state's new map, agreed.
"It could very well come out as a net loss for Republicans, honestly when
you look at the map, or at the very least, it could end up being a wash," Kiley
said. "But it's something that never should have happened. It was ill-conceived
from the start."
For Trump, a mix of wins and losses
There's no guarantee that Tuesday's ruling on the Texas map will stand. Many
lower courts have blocked Trump's initiatives, only for the conservative
majority on the U.S. Supreme Court to put those rulings on hold. Texas
Republicans immediately appealed Tuesday's decision to the high court, too.
Republicans hope the nation's highest court also weakens or eliminates the
last major component of the Voting Rights Act next year, which could open the
door to further redraws in their favor.
Even before Tuesday, Trump's push for mid-decade redistricting was not
playing out as neatly as he had hoped, though he had scored some apparent wins.
North Carolina Republicans potentially created another conservative-leaning
seat in that battleground state, while Missouri Republicans redrew their
congressional map at Trump's urging to eliminate one Democratic seat. The
Missouri plan faces lawsuits and a possible referendum that would force a
statewide vote on the matter.
Trump's push has faltered elsewhere. Republicans in Kansas balked at trying
to eliminate the state's lone swing seat, held by a Democratic congresswoman.
Indiana Republicans also refused to redraw their map to eliminate their two
Democratic-leaning congressional seats.
After Trump attacked the main Indiana holdout, state Sen. Greg Goode, on
social media, he was the victim of a swatting call over the weekend that led to
sheriff's deputies coming to his house.
Trump's push could have a boomerang effect on Republicans
The bulk of redistricting normally happens once every 10 years, following
the release of new population estimates from the U.S. Census. That requires
state lawmakers to adjust their legislative lines to make sure every district
has roughly the same population. It also opens the door to gerrymandering maps
to make it harder for the party out of power to win legislative seats.
Inevitably, redistricting leads to litigation, which can drag on for years
and spur mid-decade, court-mandated revisions.
Republicans stood to benefit from these after the last cycle in 2021 because
they won state supreme court elections in North Carolina and Ohio in 2022. But
some litigation hasn't gone the GOP's way. A judge in Utah earlier this month
required the state to make one of its four congressional seats
Democratic-leaning.
Trump broke with modern political practice by urging a wholesale, mid-decade
redraw in red states.
Democrats were in a bad position to respond to Trump's gambit because more
states they control have lines drawn by independent commissions rather than by
partisan lawmakers, the legacy of government reform efforts.
But with Newsom's push to let Democrats draw California's lines successful,
the party is looking to replicate it elsewhere.
Next up may be Virginia, where Democrats recaptured the governor's office
this month and expanded their margins in the Legislature. A Democratic
candidate for governor in Colorado has called for a similar measure there.
Republicans currently hold 9 of the 19 House seats in those two states.
Overall, Republicans have more to lose if redistricting becomes a purely
partisan activity nationally and voters in blue states ditch their nonpartisan
commissions to let their preferred party maximize its margins. In the last
complete redistricting cycle in 2021, commissions drew 95 House seats that
Democrats would have otherwise drawn, and only 13 that Republicans would have
drawn.
Gerrymandering's unintended consequences
On Tuesday, Republicans were reappraising Trump's championing of
redistricting hardball.
"I think if you look at the basis of this, there was no member of the
delegation that was asked our opinion," Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas
told reporters.
Incumbents usually don't like the idea of radically redrawing districts. It
can lead to what political experts call a "dummymander" -- spreading the
opposing party's voters so broadly that they end up endangering your own
incumbents in a year, like 2026, that is expected to be bad for the party in
power.
Incumbents also don't like losing voters who have supported them or getting
wholly new communities drawn into their districts, said Jonathan Cervas, who
teaches redistricting at Carnegie Mellon University and has drawn new maps for
courts. Democratic lawmakers in Illinois and Maryland have so far resisted
mid-decade redraws to pad their majorities in their states, joining their GOP
counterparts in Indiana and Kansas.
Cervas said that's why it was striking to watch Trump push Republicans to
dive into mid-decade redistricting.
"The idea they'd go along to get along is basically crazy," he said.
|
|
