The Redistricting Wars (Ft. Joe Dye)

Democrats bring a knife to the map fight.

In July, President Trump pressured Texas to redraw its congressional maps to squeeze out five more Republican seats. Texas Democrats left the state in protest, breaking quorum and temporarily blocking the legislature from gerrymandering the state even further.

Although the walkout lasted just two weeks, it stiffened Democratic resolve.

“We don’t want this fight, and we didn’t choose this fight, but with our democracy on the line, we cannot and will not run away from this fight,” said California Assemblyman Marc Berman.

Ultimately, that fight became California Proposition 50, which passed by a 30-point margin just two weeks ago. And yesterday a federal court struck down Texas’s aggressive Republican gerrymander.

Are Democrats finally learning to play hardball? I spoke with our electoral map expert, Joe Dye.

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Donald Trump is wildly unpopular. He’s very concerned that he is going to lose the midterms. And a call went out over the summer to Republican red states to redraw their congressional maps to help the Republicans hold onto the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms.

Well, if you ask Trump, his 42 percent approval rating is great and everything is affordable. But Texas was the the first red domino to fall, if you will. The prior congressional map had 25 Republicans and 13 Democrats, which was already very gerrymandered. Because of pressure from Trump, Texas decided to make a 30 to eight congressional map.

Trump’s plan was “hey, we’re going to do this in all of the red states.” We’re going to do it in Indiana. We’re going to do it in Missouri. We’re going to do it in Florida. We’re going to do it in Kansas. Any place we can squeeze these out, we’re going to do that.

And from a strategic perspective, I actually don’t know this is a terrible plan. Because, with the exception of Utah, almost all of the states that have independent redistricting commissions are states run by Democrats. And as such, Democrats are not maximizing every seat that they possibly could.

You want to start in Utah, since it’s kind of the warm-up act for Texas and California?

Sure. In 2018, the voters of Utah passed Proposition 4, which banned partisan gerrymandering and established an independent redistricting commission to draw the state of Utah’s maps for the 2020 cycle. It was supposed to have a seven-member commission, and they were supposed to draw maps using all these partisan fairness metrics.

And the Utah legislature just ignored the voters and passed a gerrymander that was 4-0 Republican. Which, okay, Utah is a very red state. But the way they did it was to split Salt Lake County, which is basically the lone Democratic area, in four. Under the new map, you could walk two or three blocks around Salt Lake City and be in four different congressional districts.

That got challenged in court. And eventually, the Utah state Supreme Court ruled that the legislature couldn’t just disregard the will of the people. They have a right to “alter and reform” their government.

Right. So the case got sent back to a district court judge, who adopted a map with a competitive congressional district in Salt Lake City.

Is that going to hold?

The state is appealing to the Supreme Court of Utah right now. However, the Supreme Court of Utah has not been willing to play ball with the legislature at all so far. So I don’t know that they’re going to win on appeal. But even if they do, practically speaking, we are past the November 10th drop dead date. There’s no way they can get a new map drawn for 2026.

So Utah’s fair map will hold for 2026?

Yes. That seat is going to flip Democratic no matter what.

Okay, so now let’s talk about Texas. A few days ago, the Republican map was preliminarily enjoined in a case called LULAC v. Abbott. What happened there?

So the practical strategy and the actual smart legal strategy for gerrymandering are completely different things, because it’s really hard to go to voters and say, “Yep, we’re partisan gerrymandering for the sake of partisan gerrymandering.” But in the post-Rucho v. Common Cause world, that’s that that is what you should do.

You should say, “We’re gerrymandering because we want more Democrats. We’re gerrymandering because we want more Republicans.”

But Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, was not that smart. So she sent this letter to the governor and attorney general of Texas, and it’s littered with references to race. Now, that was all a pretext for partisan gerrymandering. But she didn’t say that.

I don’t know why lawyers, especially six years after Rucho, insist on sending these memos that say, in effect, “hey, this is a racial issue,” when all they really want is a more partisan map.

Particularly in light of the 1986 Supreme Court case Thornburg v. Gingles that set out the test for vote dilution claims under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The minority group must be sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a reasonably configured single member district. The group must be politically cohesive. And they must be able to demonstrate that the white majority votes as a bloc to enable it to defeat the minority group’s preferred candidate

So to back up, as Latino voters in this country have gained steam and grown as a portion of population, particularly in Texas, they were cohesive under the Gingles factors. A lot of districts were drawn where Black voters and Latino voters would be put together in these seats called coalition districts, which would satisfy the Gingles factors.

Texas had a bunch of these, including one in Galveston County, which is just south of Houston. Every county commission has four districts, no matter the size. So Loving County with 60 people has four, and Harris County with six million has four. And the Republicans in 2021, I believe, split up the Galveston County Commission so that Black voters and Latino voters were in different districts. And this had the effect of moving the Galveston County Commission from 3-to-1 to 4-nothing Republican. And so the plaintiffs there challenged under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. And the Fifth Circuit said, no, these districts are actually unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, because race is the predominant reason for this map, and that goes against the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

That’s Petteway v. Galveston County. An en banc bare majority of the Fifth Circuit reversed their prior 1988 decision and said previously we had blessed coalition districts as meeting the Gingles test, but now we’re going to overrule and say that coalition districts do not qualify under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, right?

Petteway is not a super important Voting Rights Act case, but it’s very, very important to Texas. And just so we’re clear, the Texas legislature didn’t draw these districts because they were trying to comply with the Voting Rights Act. The reason that all these districts existed was to pack as many Democrats into them as possible so that they didn’t impact the Texas congressional delegation.

Because in Texas, for all intents and purposes, white voters monolithically vote for Republicans. Black voters, for Democrats. Latino voters, depending on where you are are, either very Democratic, or in some places very Republican. And there’s a lot of Asian voters as well in Texas, too. But the Texas legislature, when they drew these districts, did not have race in mind. They had partisanship in mind.

But then Trump told Texas to redraw the congressional map to find five more Republican seats before the midterms. And when they dragged their feet, Harmeet Dhillon, sent that letter to Texas saying that coalition seats were illegal under Petteway. What is that argument and why is it wrong?

Because what they wanted was five more Republican seats. But they did it in a way that was very race conscious. They didn’t care about the Petteway case or anything else.

And that is essentially what the preliminary injunction says, right? It begins with a quote from John Roberts from a 2007 decision that says, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” And then it goes on to show that Texas racially gerrymandered this map by deliberately breaking up the coalition districts.

So the panel enjoined the August 2025 map. What is the practical consequence of that?

Ordinarily when maps get struck down, the legislature goes back in and redraws what’s called a remedial map, and then the court approves it. But, because Texas already had a constitutional map going into this voluntary redistricting, the court said, the proper remedy is to return to the 2021 map. And Texas has very early primaries — I believe they’re the earliest in the nation for the midterms. Their qualifying date is December 8th. As we sit here recording on November 19th, that’s not a lot of time. So, rather than have the legislature rush through another map, they just said, “we’re going to return to the 2021 map because it’s constitutional.”

Today, Governor Greg Abbott filed a Notice of Appeal to the Supreme Court. They’re entitled to appeal directly to the Supreme Court. But this Supreme Court is a dumpster fire.

You don’t make a lot of money predicting what the Supreme Court is going to do.

I mean, it hasn’t been hard in 2025.

I guess not. The Supreme Court has a couple options. Number one, they can stay the preliminary injunction and figure out what to do after.

That would allow the August 2025 map to go into effect.

The other option is that they could deny the stay and leave the 2021 map in place, at least until it gets decided on the merits in 2027 or 2028. If I had to guess, I think they probably will stay the preliminary injunction, just based on the partisanship of the Supreme Court. But if the Supreme Court doesn’t stay it, the Trump redistricting wars will almost certainly have backfired on Republicans. If Texas runs its election under the 2021 map, good God is this a mistake for them!

And part of that is because the public backlash to gerrymandering Texas pushed voters in California went to overwhelmingly approve Proposition 50 just a couple of weeks ago.

California has an independent redistricting commission, but it has a very quick way they can get things on the ballot. They came up with a map that drew out five Republicans, and put that on the ballot. Roughly 65 percent of California voters supported drawing new districts to counteract Texas’s gerrymander. And just so we’re clear, the California legislature did this really in a smart way, where basically the whole justification for it is: “we want to counteract Texas’s gerrymandering, and we’re gerrymandering our state to benefit Democrats.”

That did not stop Republicans from immediately filing their own lawsuit. Tangipa v. Newsom, challenging the Proposition 50 maps. They’re represented by Harmeet Dhillon’s law firm, the Dhillon Law Group. Here it’s the same theory that the Texas court just rejected in the LULAC case, right? That is, they’re arguing that the existence of majority-minority districts violate the 14th and 15th Amendments.

Yeah, if you’re going to sue arguing that the map is a racial gerrymander, don’t put — as they did on page twelve of the complaint — that the legislature did not draw these lines, it adapted a map created by a partisan-aligned consultant and submitted by the DCCC. I don’t know that the California legislature did a perfect job in drawing these maps. But their primary justification for this was “we are partisan gerrymandering to stop Texas.” So putting in your complaint that this was a partisan gerrymander drawn by the DCCC – which it was! – is not helpful to your claim that this is a racist map.

Is one potential audience for this complaint the U.S. Supreme Court? Kind of an implicit claim of, hey, look, like don’t let them get away with this. You’ve got to do something to give us back Texas because they’ve gotten California?

I don’t see the Prop 50 map getting thrown out, and I don’t really think that was the goal of this. But even if it did, the California legislature through their ballot initiative process can just go back and do it again. I guess crazier things have happened, but I would be fairly surprised if California’s map was not in effect for 2026, 2028, and 2030.

I think the whole point of this lawsuit was to create a press release.

And that gets us to the terminal question, which is, if the Prop 50 map holds, as you and I expect that it will, what are the political implications of that? How many congressional districts does it put into play? What are the midterm races going to look like?

So when the redistricting war started, it was sort of conventional wisdom that Republicans were going to net a lot of seats. And Governor Newsom, to his credit, pushed for Proposition 50 and got it passed. And so even if the (even more) gerrymandered Texas map goes into effect in 2026, California and Texas are more or less a draw. Personally, I don’t think it will be a draw. But let’s just say it’s a draw. Democrats win five extra seats out of California, and Republicans get five extra seats out of Texas.

The prevailing narrative was that Democrats were going to get slaughtered in all these other places. Places like Missouri, and Florida, and Indiana where Republicans could have drawn out all these Democrats and created really, really gerrymandered maps for the 2026 cycle. Politically, that’s just not going to happen. In Indiana yesterday, on November 18th, their state Senate president said, no, we’re not going to redistrict, in a rebuke of Trump.

Now, again, I’m not going to believe it until it doesn’t happen. But that’s two seats right there that they could have drawn out — and they didn’t. Utah is going to have a new, guaranteed Democratic seat.

We’ll see what happens in my lovely home state of Florida. But the prevailing narrative that the Democrats weren’t going to redraw their own maps was completely wrong. All the Republican states that are going to move on this are done, with the exception of Florida. But after Virginia Democrats had their big night, they’ve already started the process of redistricting. Right now they have a 6-5 delegation. I would be stunned if it’s not 9-2 at minimum by 2026, which is going to completely zero out Florida. Maybe New York will do it.

If Texas’s 2025 map is in effect in 2026, it’s basically a wash. The GOP might net out a seat or two depending on what happens, but the maps are functionally the same and the balance of power doesn’t change.

If Texas’s new map is not in effect for 2026, Republicans will almost certainly lose seats in the redistricting wars, which no one saw coming when this all started. The narrative was that Democrats were going to have to win an extra ten seats. And I don’t think anyone, myself included along with every political analyst in this country, thought that was possible.

I think we will leave it there. That’s a great summary. The Republican redistricting wars backfired, and have the chance to backfire bigly. Joe Dye, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. We’ll be out the Friday after Thanksgiving. But paid subscribers will get the extended version of this interview as a podcast next week.