Karen Tumulty, Chief Political Columnist, The Washington Post
Last week, CNN anchor Brianna Keilar challenged Texas state Rep. Mitch Little to explain why the Republican Legislature was planning to slam through a redrawn electoral map aimed at giving his party five more safe congressional seats ahead of next year’s midterms.
Little’s reply began with three words of crystalline truth: “Because we can.”
Texas has kicked off what could become a political gang war. Governors of blue states, including California, Illinois and New York—which can hold their own when it comes to the dark art of gerrymandering—say they may respond in kind by reworking their own maps to squeeze out a few more seats for Democrats. This is likely to bring more Republican strongholds such as Ohio, Missouri and Florida into the fray.
Vice President JD Vance was in Indianapolis last week in part to urge Gov. Mike Braun and GOP legislative leaders to redraw Indiana’s congressional maps. Already, Republicans represent seven of the state’s nine districts. Publicly, Indiana leaders have so far been noncommittal.
All of it, in part, is an effect of the norm-shattering presidency of Donald Trump, who in July pressed Texas for “just a very simple redrawing, we pick up five seats.” In a close national election, that could be the difference between Republicans holding or losing the U.S. House.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the judiciary could not stand in the way of gerrymandering for political purposes—that is, stretching and distorting district lines to entrench the party in power. But typically, states perform these exercises only once a decade, after a census, and increasing numbers of them have turned that power over to various forms of commissions, rather than legislators.
Trump claims Republicans are “entitled” to the additional congressional seats, based on his performance in the Lone Star State in the 2024 presidential election, which he says was “the highest vote in the history of Texas.”
But that dramatically overstates his performance. In 2004, George W. Bush’s margin of victory in Texas was 22.9 percentage points, far exceeding Trump’s 13.7-point edge over Kamala Harris. Ronald Reagan won the state by 27.5 percentage points in 1984.
Regardless, Trump’s hold on the Republican Party is all but absolute, and he is going beyond dictating that red states draw new maps. On Thursday, Trump called for a do-over of the census, which last occurred in 2020; U.S. Code: Title 13 stipulates it should happen “every 10 years.”
This time, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform: “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS.” It has historically tallied all residents of the country; changing that could affect not only the distribution of congressional seats but also how federal money gets distributed among the states.
The corrosive forces that brought the nation’s politics to this point long predated Trump, however. They have been building for decades as the by-product of the intense polarization and the close divide of the electorate.
Even before the first shots were fired in the latest gerrymandering skirmishes, 2026 was on track to become “the least competitive election in modern American history,” with more than 90 of congressional districts already looking to be a lock for one party or the other, notes Ross Sherman of the election reform organization Unite America.
Fast-growing and increasingly diverse Texas, where no Democrat has won statewide office since 1994, is a good example of the depressing effect of one-party domination. Last year, voter registration in Texas reached a record, but turnout fell. It was the second-lowest rate in the country. As Rodney Ellis, a former state senator and current Harris County commissioner, once told me: “Texas is not a red state. It’s a blue state that doesn’t vote.”
The current drama, in which more than 50 Democratic legislators have fled the state to deny the House the quorum it needs to redraw the maps, appears preordained to end in a Republican victory. But Democrats across the nation are heartened to see their side putting up a fight.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of ideas for how to make elections fairer, more engaging and more likely to produce lawmakers who have an incentive to work together and across party lines.
In Congress, Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., has been something of the Don Quixote of election reform. In every one of his five terms, he has introduced the Fair Representation Act.
Instead of winner-take all elections, Beyer’s legislation would require, among other things, that representatives be elected in multimember districts drawn by independent redistricting commissions. Voting would be by ranked choice, which means people would be able to cast ballots in order of their preferences among the candidates. All of which could, at least in theory, create space for candidates to direct their appeal beyond the two-party system.
No surprise, though, that members of Congress are not overly eager to upend the system that got them there. “The most co-sponsors I’ve ever gotten is about 20, and all Democrats, even though I’ve always presented it to my Republican friends and pointed out that it would help them in Maryland and in Massachusetts and in Connecticut and places that are gerrymandered for Democrats,” Beyer said.
“Institutional change is slow. However, I think the silver lining is that Americans seem so upset by this gerrymandering war, which is about the only thing stupider than a trade war,” he added. “So maybe now there’s a window for anti-gerrymandering on a national basis.”
If there is indeed a backlash, how much it will matter in November 2026 remains to be seen. “Wave” elections are harder to achieve when so few seats are competitive, but they are possible. Midterms, in particular, tend to crest on how the public feels about the president and his policies, as well as on the quality of the candidates that each party puts forward.
Gallup’s latest analysis has Trump’s job approval at 37, a low point in his second term, and finds that few Americans outside his Republican base are pleased with his achievements.
In Nebraska, GOP Rep. Mike Flood endured 90 minutes of voter outrage as Democrats crowded a town hall last week in which he tried to explain his vote for the One Big Beautiful Bill extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and slashing health care and food programs for the poor. Still to be seen is the effect the Trump tariffs will have on an economy already showing signs of weakening.
At the same time, however, a recent Wall Street Journal poll had the Democratic Party’s favorability at only 33%, its lowest point in 35 years.
America went through something similar during the Gilded Age, spanning the 1870s to the 1890s. It was a time of intense partisanship and closely fought elections that is also remembered for widespread corruption.
What finally broke the dynamic was the realigning presidential race of 1896, in which William McKinley was elected and inaugurated an era in which one party—the Republicans—dominated the government for 30 years, almost without interruption. McKinley’s 1901 assassination brought the ascension of his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, one of the great progressive reformers of American history.
“I think one of the challenges, and this may be an impossible challenge, is getting a leader out there who is determined from the beginning to unite the country,” Beyer said. “We keep wanting that person to emerge, and you need minor versions of them to arise in the House and the Senate, the governor’s mansion.”
What Beyer suggests is a call for a new generation of politicians, one that would do things “because we should”—instead of “because we can.”