Trump’s Texas Power Grab

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From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro.

This is the daily.

In a dramatic act of protest on Sunday night, Democratic lawmakers in Texas began to flee their own state.

It's a last-ditch attempt to stop President Trump and Texas Republicans from redrawing the state's congressional maps in a way that will eliminate Democratic seats and could help lock in a Republican majority in next year's elections.

Today, my colleague Shane Goldmacher on a new chapter in the era of unvarnished partisan warfare:

it's Monday, August 4th.

Hey, hello.

Join me, sit here, right?

Yeah, the place you've always sat for years.

I'm just checking.

I don't know.

For years.

Okay.

Thanks for being here, Shane.

Thank you.

As we speak, the eyes of the country, or at least the eyes of lots of people in politics, are on Texas because dozens of its state Democratic lawmakers have literally fled the state.

So let me start this episode with a simple question.

Why is all of this happening in Texas and why is all of this happening right now?

Let me start this episode with a very simple answer because Donald Trump wants it and he wants it now.

What Donald Trump wants is to keep control of the House of Representatives after the 2026 midterms, because he knows that if Democrats take control of Congress, that his agenda is suddenly put on ice, that investigations that his administration has been launching is going to be the subject of Democratic investigations.

The investigations will be investigated.

Absolutely.

He could be impeached again, right?

He was impeached twice in his first term.

If the Democrats take the House, they might impeach him for something else a third time.

And so long before the midterms, even before there are candidates in some of these races, Donald Trump and his political operation are looking at how do they shape the battlefield for 2026.

Right.

How do they keep this presidency on the rather astonishingly smooth, empowered track that it's on?

Yeah.

And so Trump looks at Texas, where there are 38 congressional districts and 13 Democratic-held seats.

And he imagines a future.

Well, maybe there doesn't need to be so many Democratic-held seats in Texas.

What if there are fewer than, say, 10 Democratic-held seats?

What if we just delete some of them?

What if we just redraw those lines?

And And so Trump begins making his wishes known.

On Texas, how many more seats do you want the Republicans to draw five?

And then what if.

He and his team get in touch with the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, with the Republican congressmen from Texas, and says, this is what I'd like you to do.

Texas would be the biggest one, and that'll be five.

And I think it's worth putting in context what is five seats.

Republicans' slim, historically slim majority after 2024 was three seats, right?

If Democrats retake the House next year, they will try to reverse all of the progress that we've made, which is record-setting progress.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So Democrats could take back the Congress by flipping three seats.

If Donald Trump gets five new seats in Texas, that majority becomes eight seats.

It is more than doubling the entire cushion of the current Republican majority.

Trevor Burrus: Right.

And it's worth saying, even for a president who does many things atypically and unconventionally, publicly announcing that you are going to basically compel state Republican leaders to make a map that benefits your political fortune as president and redraw it along those lines, that's unusual.

Aaron Powell, also, It's not usual to redraw the maps just whenever you want them.

These maps are typically drawn once a decade.

There's a census.

The census counts how many people are in every corner of America.

The country divides up its congressional districts and every state is charged with drawing these lines in response to the census.

And so what Trump is saying is, actually, we don't have a new census, but I have a need.

But I have a need and I want new lines.

And so Greg Abbott calls a special session and has convened Texas lawmakers.

And one of the explicit goals of this special session is doing exactly these lines.

So once this special session is underway, what do Texas Republicans do with this pretty unusually timed marching order from President Trump to give him something like five safe Republican House seats that do not currently exist?

What you don't hear is very many objections from Republicans in Texas to this, but you also don't hear a whole lot of cheerleading.

They're not overly eager to tear up these maps.

They hold...

Just explain why not.

For for the members of Congress, they like their districts, right?

These are members who have won their existing districts, right?

They know their areas.

They're not necessarily eager to see lines redrawn.

And if you are trying to carve out new Republican seats, well, where are you getting those Republican votes from?

You're taking it from existing Republican members of Congress's districts, right?

You are potentially diluting.

some of the voters in their districts to shore up new Republican seats.

There's actually a fun name for this.

So in general, this process where you redraw lines politically for partisan gain is called gerrymander.

But there's actually another name for a gerrymander that goes so far that it backfires, and that's a dummymander.

Dummy Mander.

That's a new one.

Yeah.

A dummymander is basically you dilute your existing seats so much in an effort to draw new ones that in a wave election, you end up losing more seats than you gained.

Right.

And in theory, a wave election in which Democrats really outperform is entirely possible given the aggressiveness with which the president has pursued his agenda in this period.

Yeah.

And so there is some mostly private concerns about, well, how aggressive is the president and the Republicans going to be in redrawing these seats?

Because these members are okay with new Republicans, but they don't want it to come at the cost of their own district.

And do these Texas House Republicans have any say whatsoever in what the new versions of their own districts look like when this process is over?

I mean, the answer is no, remarkably little, right?

It is the president coming up with this idea and it's state legislators and the governor in Texas actually drawing and signing these maps into law.

And these maps are not being drawn in public.

They're being drawn entirely behind closed doors.

And then on Wednesday last week, they posted the maps online online.

And everybody quickly began looking to figure out what exactly they had done.

We'll be right back.

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So, Shane, tell us about the new maps that Texas Republicans ended up releasing just a couple of days ago.

So what we learned pretty quickly is that Republicans did what President Trump asked them to do, which is carve out as many as five new, fairly safe Republican districts in Texas.

And how do they do that?

Well, Texas is a big state and it has a lot of big metro areas.

And so the way I break it down is that there are three big metro areas.

And in each of them, the Republicans carved out a new Republican seat.

So in Houston, they took what had been a Democratic seat and they made it more Republican.

In Dallas, the same thing.

And also in San Antonio.

So that's three of the five.

That's three of the five.

And the other two are in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas border.

And this is an area that has swung.

about as sharply toward Trump as any part of the entire country.

And it's an area with two incumbent Democratic members of Congress who have won in that area, even as Trump won their districts last year.

They took those two Democratic members of Congress and said, guess what?

You're going to have to win an even more pro-Trump district now.

And when you look not just at those two seats, but in fact, all five new seats, there's sort of a new magic number that Republicans seem to have settled on.

And that's 60%.

Just to explain, 60% of what?

That is that Trump won 60% of the vote in all of these new five districts that they've carved out.

Republicans seem to think that a district where Trump carried 60% of the vote in 2024, that is going to be a place where Republicans are going to safely be able to win in 2026.

I wonder if you can give us an example of one of these districts that's been redrawn so that a Democrat really has not much of a shot.

In fact, Republicans have that 60% chance of winning.

Yeah, I think that of the three big cities we talked talked about, the one that is most striking to me is the new San Antonio seat.

So the old district, this is the 35th district in Texas, actually stretched between two cities.

It took in blue parts of Austin and then took in blue parts of San Antonio.

And this is a safe Democratic seat represented by a safe Democratic congressman.

And that old district has basically disappeared.

And it's been replaced by a seat that only takes in parts of blue blue San Antonio and then a whole bunch of red areas all around the city and dropped the Austin part entirely.

And so that change takes this district that had been solidly Democratic and makes it a pro-Trump new Republican seat.

And along the way, they took the two Democrats who used to represent parts of Austin and have basically stuffed them into a new single district, probably forcing them to run against each other.

And somehow, somehow Republicans did what you're describing more or less five times over and without creating a whole lot of risk for themselves.

Yeah, that's 60%.

It's not just for the new districts.

It's actually for the old districts too.

So all the Republicans, none of their seats were watered down below that margin either, right?

So if you're an incumbent Republican in Congress and you were nervous that, oh my goodness, they're going to take too many of my voters and put them in these new seats.

Well, they did take some of your voters, but they didn't put you below that 60% margin either.

That's why it's this sort of magic number across basically the entire state.

Every Republican is at a 60% Trump district.

So from everything you're describing here, it sounds like these new maps do a very successful job at avoiding the dreaded dummy mander.

But I want to return for just a moment to the two new districts along the southern border that, as you said, have swung toward President Trump during presidential elections, but are still held by Democratic House members.

Even with these new lines, could those two seats still be winnable by Democrats?

Look, the way the Republicans have drawn this map, it's basically all upside.

But those two districts are an example of the sort of assumptions that the Republican Party has put in doing this map.

And the assumption is that Latino voters that swung very heavily in Trump's direction and very, very heavily in the Rio Grande Valley are going to continue to be Republican voters.

And that is not at all guaranteed.

And Democrats are studying whether there's shifts back already happening.

And so

those two Democratic members of Congress are saying that, yes, Trump might have won by 60% of these districts, but that doesn't mean that Republicans have been winning these areas for years and years and years.

And as I've talked to Democrats who are a bit depressed at the lack of opportunities in these maps, they are buoyed by the fact that in some of these places, they need to go back to not so many years ago performance levels for Democrats to still have a chance.

Aaron Trevor Brandon So what Democrats are hoping, and we'll get an answer to whether that hope is realistic, is that Hispanic support for Republicans in 2024 was unique to Donald Trump, and that when he's not on the ballot, which he won't be in the next midterm, Hispanic voters will not show up for some generic, even Trump-supported House Republican in those those two districts.

Absolutely.

And look, I mean, we haven't talked about this, but there's a lot of things happening in the world politically that are not looking good for the Republican Party.

The big bill that he passed has not been popular so far.

It takes away potential Medicare coverage in the future for people in Texas.

Those are heavily used programs in poorer parts of the state.

And so how this plays out is really open.

But the big political advantage for Trump and for Republicans in redrawing these seats is they basically are guaranteeing themselves extra districts anyway.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right.

You were saying that even if Democrats somehow hold onto those two border seats, big if, but they could, Republicans still pretty much are guaranteed to win the other three new gerrymander districts.

And that leaves Democrats with precious few options, which I think brings us to what happened on Sunday night, just within the last couple of hours.

So just describe that.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So Texas Democratic state legislators have been discussing privately and a little publicly a nuclear option for a couple of weeks.

And that's if enough of them leave the state, they can prevent Republicans from even voting on the maps that they've drafted.

That if there aren't enough Democrats in Texas, when the legislature meets, enough of them at the Capitol, the Republicans can't formally vote.

They don't have a quorum.

And so they shut it all down.

They just shut it down.

And if they're in Texas, they can be brought to the Capitol, right, by state police.

And so a pretty dramatic thing happened on Sunday, which is these Democratic legislators gathered in secret and then got on a chartered plane to leave Texas and they flew to Chicago.

And

how long do they anticipate staying there?

How long do they hope to wait out the Republicans back in the Texas Capitol who just want to get enough votes to pass these maps?

Presumably, they cannot stay outside the state until the next midterm election in like a year and a half.

Yeah, this is the challenge.

This is why it's a tactic and maybe not a long-term strategy.

These lawmakers are certainly willing to potentially stay out for the rest of this special session, right?

So the governor, Greg Abbott, called a session for one month.

And so, sure, they can wait out a couple of weeks.

So let's say they wait out this special session.

Well, guess what?

The governor can call another special session for 30 days immediately again.

And they're not just, you know, on vacation out of the state.

They are facing fines, a $500 a day fine for exiting the state when they are supposed to be there and voting.

This is something the Republicans put in place to prevent this kind of quorum break.

And so we don't know how long.

they're willing to stay out.

But because of the drama of this, because of the act of saying, this is so bad, we are willing to leave the state we're supposed to serve.

They're hoping to draw attention.

And so these Texas state legislators on Sunday evening held a news conference telling the public why they left the state.

And they're trying to bring attention to this because the Democrats don't have the votes to stop this right now.

The best they can do is try to rally public support behind them and against the Republican plan.

Got it.

Let's assume, Shane, for the purposes of this conversation, that

Democrats in Texas can't stop this.

I'm curious whether Republicans elsewhere in the country are trying to replicate the Texas strategy that you just described before the midterm election in order to guarantee even more seats through map redrawing.

I mean, the short answer is yes, absolutely.

And other states are not as far along as Texas, but they're talking about places like Missouri where there's a Democratic district they could help disappear.

Florida, there's really a lot of pushes to do this all over the country.

I actually spoke with a person who's close to the president who described the White House's approach as maximum warfare everywhere, all the time.

When it comes to redrawing districts wherever he can.

Absolutely.

And so I think it's worth thinking about Texas as the beginning of this process and not necessarily the end.

Where Where does that leave Democrats?

We've talked about this on the show before.

The Democrats have struggled to keep up with the way Republicans gerrymander for all kinds of reasons.

Some, they've just been outmaneuvered.

Others, they've had real objections to the idea that this is the way the democracy should work.

Yeah, there's a big swath of the Democratic Party who has opposed partisan gerrymandering overall.

And some of the biggest and and bluest states, New York and California in particular, have adopted commission models where non-partisan groups redraw the lines once a decade.

Are they taking it out of the hands of Democratic state legislators?

Yeah, but Gavin Newsom has come out and said, they're not screwing around.

We cannot afford to screw around either.

We have got to fight fire with fire.

We are willing to try to do anything we can to respond to what Texas has done,

even though the state constitution, as approved by voters, created lines that are drawn.

This is not an idle threat to our democracy.

This is real.

And we not only have the backs of Texans, but we may be back to the ballot here in California trying to right this wrong.

And so Newsom is going about a process now where he is talking about having the legislature draw new lines.

and put it on the ballot for a vote to have the voters overturn their own constitution on a one-time basis to respond to Texas's lines.

Wow.

And let Democrats get in the gerrymandering game.

And carve out another four or five seats in retaliation for what Texas did.

We can sit back and act as if we have some moral superiority and watch this 249, almost 250-year experiment be washed away.

We are not.

going to allow that to happen.

As Newsom was talking about this the other day, he said something that was really striking to me and applies, I think, not just to his case.

He says, California's moral high ground means nothing if we're powerless because of it.

It's this the ends justify the means approach.

And you hear this from other governors, too.

I'd like them to understand that if they're going to take this drastic action, that we also might take drastic action to respond.

J.B.

Pritzker in Illinois, where they already have a partisan gerrymander helping Democrats has talked about maybe we can squeeze an extra seat out of this.

I'm not surprised that they're trying to break the rules to get an advantage, but that's undemocratic.

And not only are we calling them out, we're also going to see what our options are.

Kathy Hochwell in New York, where again, it is prohibited to do this in the middle of a decade in between censuses, is saying maybe we too need to push the boundaries.

What I'm going to say is all's fair and love and war.

That you can't just stand by as the Republicans go about this process.

Right.

So suddenly that quote from somebody near the president who had said, partisan warfare everywhere all the time,

that mantra could now

well be the message from both parties when it comes to the kind of new era of endless partisan redrawing of congressional districts that we're now expecting to be upon us.

Yeah, the idea of gerrymandering itself is not new, right?

It's almost as old as the country.

And both parties have done this.

Democrats have gerrymandered and Republicans have gerrymandered.

But what we have here is the redrawing of lines nowhere near a census for basically explicit partisan gain.

Yeah, it's a power grab.

And the aggressiveness of this has caused a break glass moment for a lot of Democrats who have been concerned about engaging.

in gerrymandering.

And the one that really comes to mind is Eric Holder, who is the former Attorney General under President Obama, who has led basically a democratic redistricting arm seeking to take this power away from lawmakers all across the country.

His message, and he's delivered it on the daily.

We interviewed him, is there's one right way to do this, and it's non-partisan, to depoliticize it.

And right now he's saying there's actually another right way to do this, which is temporarily to get in the game and start drawing districts even more aggressively.

And he used a pretty fascinating analogy with my colleague, Nick Corsinidi.

And he said that this is like when the Germans invaded France and you're just going to say, oh, we're against war.

And so we're for resolution.

So we're going to just lay down arms.

He's like, no, sometimes you have to take up arms.

And this is that moment for redistricting.

So what we're talking about, Texas, I think that it's important not to think of Texas as the end, but as the beginning, the beginning of a series of Republican efforts to redraw the maps ahead of 2026 and a potential series of Democratic responses back and forth.

Aaron Powell, and this ends where?

Well, Congress already has extremely few genuine swing districts.

If you look back compared to decades, it's a really tiny map.

And

partisan gerrymandering is an explicit attempt to make that map even smaller, sort of vanishingly small number of genuinely competitive seats between the two parties.

Right.

And lawmakers who therefore represent moderation, compromise, the ability to cross party lines.

Yeah.

If you are a Democrat in a safe Democratic seat, the only way you can lose your election is if you lose a primary.

And if you're a Republican in one of these new safe Republican seats, guess what?

You're never worried about angering Democrats.

You only are concerned about angering the right wing of your own party.

And so it makes it harder and harder to bring people together once they're in Congress, which as we already see is pretty hard for most recent Congresses to do.

At the most basic level, though, elections are about voters having their voices heard.

And if you draw lines so only partisans' voices are heard, then you are sort of muting the moderates.

And in America, moderates are the people whose opinions often change, right?

They're the ones who are swinging between the two different parties.

And so, if you end up in a system with safe Democratic and safe Republican seats, then you get a system that's less accountable to swings in public opinion.

Right.

And that's what elections are.

They're measuring whether public opinion has been.

That's what they can be.

That is what they're doing.

That's what they once were.

And so, what you can end up with is a democracy that's less responsive to public opinion and more a measure of which political party has more raw power and a willingness to use it.

Well, Shane, thank you very much.

Thank you.

We'll be right back.

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