Rigged

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, August 07, 2025

 

It’s Tax Hike Day in America, a moment for revelry and rejoicing, but it figures that an Eeyore like me can’t get in the mood to pop the champagne. Instead of relishing the new golden age of everything being more expensive, today I’m thinking about redistricting.

 

Redistricting is a very Dispatch-y topic insofar as it’s a quintessential “both sides” issue. It may be the “both sides” issue, in fact, apart from the evergreen cynicism around whether to keep or scrap the Senate filibuster. However you feel about Texas Republicans trying to squeeze a few more red House seats out of their state by suddenly redrawing the lines of its congressional districts, there’s no disputing that Democrats have also been ruthless in this area.

 

Various blue-state legislatures, including California’s, have made it so that the local majority party controls a considerably higher percentage of House seats than its statewide share of the presidential popular vote would logically prescribe. Even the noblest Republicans aren’t safe when liberals redraw House districts: In 2021, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger was rewarded for his courage in opposing Donald Trump’s coup plot with a new Illinois map so daunting that he announced his retirement within 12 hours of its release.

 

Occasionally legal challenges will cause a state’s map to be thrown out in court, and when it is, Democrats seize the opportunity to redraw the lines more aggressively in their favor—even if that opportunity arises in the middle of a decade. They’re no saints.

 

What’s different about what Texas is doing is that there’s no legal pretext for Republicans there to revisit redistricting right now.

 

House districts are typically drawn at the start of each decade in response to population data gathered by the decennial Census and remain in place for 10 years. Texas is redrawing them in 2025 for reasons that are solely—even nakedly—political. “We are entitled to five more seats” in Texas, the president said earlier this week, using a verb politicians don’t often use in a democracy. He’s worried about losing the House next fall and looking to stack the deck for his party in any way he can, and as usual he’s making no bones about his motives.

 

Democrats have reacted precisely the way you’d expect them to react.

 

Why is this latest episode of cutthroat redistricting worse than every other episode of cutthroat redistricting?

 

A rational strategy.

 

Whatever else one might think about Trump’s interest in this subject, it is rational. Which is not something one can always say about a guy who’s pushing a protectionist agenda that might end up making it cheaper to build cars overseas than to build them here.

 

House Republicans in blue states like California and New York have warned the president that starting a partisan redistricting arms race could lead to them being Kinzinger-ed out of their seats. But … so what? An America where Republicans can win only in red states is an America that would suit Donald Trump fine so long as that’s an America where he enjoys a consistent majority in the House. He’ll gladly trade five new GOP seats in Texas for four new Democratic ones on the coasts.

 

No right-winger in America cares whether New York Rep. Mike Lawler keeps his seat except Mike Lawler. In the House, it’s all about numbers. Trump understands that.

 

His strategy is rational in a second way. When you’re the head of a cult masquerading as a party, a ruthless redistricting gambit makes more sense than it would under a traditional political leader.

 

A traditional Republican president who saw midterm storms gathering would worry—justifiably—that pulling a stunt like the one being pulled in Texas might cause more trouble than it’s worth. Not only would he be attacked for trashing electoral norms and exposing the Lawlers in his party to blue-state reprisals, his scheme might fail on the merits. “Soft” Republican voters who are unhappy with how he’s governed might tilt toward the Democrats in the next election, defeating the purpose of the stunt.

 

That’s less of a risk for Trump. It isn’t zero, but I understand why he might believe that creating new districts where Republicans outnumber Democrats is worth the political pain involved. However bad things get over the next 15 months, the zombified American right of 2026 will be more likely to sustain its enthusiasm for a failing leader during hard times than the right of, say, 2006 was. Districts drawn to be red have a better chance of staying that way. Fanaticism has its advantages.

 

There’s one more way in which the president’s strategy is rational. To some extent, Democrats have disarmed unilaterally in the redistricting wars.

 

They’re no saints but they have tried to remove the district-drawing process from bareknuckle partisanship by handing it over to independent redistricting commissions in places like New York and California. In Texas, all Gov. Greg Abbott had to do to start remaking the map was to call a special session of the state Legislature. California will need to hold a special election in November to rescind its redistricting commission, by contrast, while New York will need to pass an amendment to its state constitution to do so—which can’t happen until after the 2026 cycle at the earliest.

 

Republicans have a momentary advantage in this arms race, in other words, and Trumpism is all about pressing one’s advantages. Even if that means rewriting the rules.

 

What he’s doing makes sense. But the intense Democratic freakout over it makes sense too.

 

Anti-democratic.

 

There’s a sort of hyper-partisan conservative that will look at what Texas is doing, feel a tremor of misgivings, and then retreat into whataboutism to ease his discomfort. Both sides do it. All’s fair in love and war.

 

If by “it” we mean “behave ruthlessly in redistricting,” then yes, that’s true—although Texas flipping the table in the middle of the decade without any legal prompting is a bold new frontier in ruthlessness. But the “both sides” argument has an obvious limitation: One side, not both, tried to overturn an election in recent memory.

 

To ignore that when appraising what Trump and his Texas toadies are up to is to grant him a benefit of the doubt that he forfeited in 2021. He isn’t just playing “hardball politics” here. He proved on January 6 in the most spectacular way that he doesn’t want to be accountable to American voters, period. An impromptu redistricting push in the middle of the decade, legal though it may be, is another flagrant attempt by a strongman cretin to insulate himself from democratic accountability.

 

I mean, having seen what you’ve seen over the last six months, do you think reducing voters’ power to check Donald Trump by scrapping a longstanding norm of electoral “fair play” is a good idea?

 

“Politicians shouldn’t be picking their voters,” one unnamed House Republican complained recently to Axios about Texas’ mid-decade redistricting ploy. The president would prefer not to have voters at all, but getting to pick his voters by drawing lines that guarantee his continued hold on power is a nice consolation prize. He’s doing his best to “rig” the election toward that end—lawfully (probably) in this case, yet destructively.

 

We don’t need to make this about him specifically to see why the precedent would be poisonous. “The logical conclusion of the gerrymandering arms race is for every state with a unified legislature and governor to redraw its district boundaries before every House election,” economist Jessica Riedl correctly observed. “Moreover, gerrymandering 90 percent of House districts into uncompetitive seats has not served democracy well. We’re electing too many unqualified lawmakers with no ability or incentive to work with the other party because winning their seat requires appealing only to the fringe of one party.”

 

Do you want a House full of Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Jasmine Crocketts? Trump does, so that’s what Texas is teeing up. It’s a paradigm case of selfish American idiots wreaking long-term civic ruin on the country for the sake of short-term electoral advantage.

 

But Democrats have special reason to abhor it in this case because it’s part of an authoritarian pattern, as I’ve said, surely only the first of several envelopes that the president intends to push to try to handicap the opposition’s chances of a comeback. Already he’s talking about conducting a new Census (the timing is unclear) that would exclude illegal immigrants from the count, which is a defensible position in the abstract—but a highly suspicious one under the circumstances.

 

After all, who thinks that a MAGA government, in which delivering data that displeases Trump is cause for immediate termination, would fairly calculate the populations of blue strongholds like California after being instructed to subtract illegals?

 

I would frame the stakes this way: What the president and Texas Republicans are aiming to do is less a matter of undermining the other party’s electoral chances than of nullifying Congress as a branch of government. So long as Trump’s GOP remains in charge of both chambers, we don’t have a functioning federal legislature. Tax Hike Day in America is a sublime example: The GOP majority in Congress has the power and, I’d bet, the desire to undo the president’s new tariffs but they don’t dare. Republicans are too rotten, servile, and cowardly to ever meaningfully check him.

 

And that’s how he likes it.

 

He’ll pull out all the stops to lawfully rig the next election because the outcome in the House will determine whether he spends the second half of his term governing as an autocrat with modest restraints on his authority or with no restraints at all. And if he succeeds, there’s no reason to think he won’t press his luck in 2028 and contrive some pretext not to transfer power even if Republicans lose that year’s election.

 

That’s not a “both sides” problem. Although it may soon be on its way to becoming one.

 

War.

 

I feel like we’re approaching a point of no return with respect to “norms” in which the Democratic base ends up so incandescently irate over Trump’s relentless power grabs that it demands tit for tat across the board once its party returns to power.

 

“Democrats already hate norms,” Texas-defending conservatives will say to that, not unfairly. There’s “both sides” juice to be squeezed here too. It’s not Republicans who call for ending the filibuster and packing the Supreme Court whenever they control the Senate and pipe down the moment they don’t, for instance.

 

But things can always get worse, and in 2025 America it’s a safe bet that they will.

 

Yesterday I noted that the left has thus far managed to avoid the right’s habit of shutting down the government in hopes of extracting concessions from the other side. They’ve upheld the “norm” against hostage-taking—but that might change next month, and if it does it won’t be because Democrats stand a good chance of getting something valuable out of Trump in return for funding the government. It will change because a party faced with opponents who glorify ruthlessness as a political and moral ethos is running out of reasons not to behave precisely the same way.

 

That’s what California Gov. Gavin Newsom and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul are anticipating in how they’ve responded to Texas, not coincidentally. They’re vowing to fight fire with fire and understand keenly how much Democratic voters will relish it if they do.

 

“If Texas wants to rig the maps, California will make sure they pay a price,” Newsom told Politico. “They want to steal five seats? We’ll match and secure more—and turn the tables on their entire strategy.” Hochul sounded like Andrew Breitbart circa 2011 when she framed the stakes of the redistricting standoff as “a war. We are at war. And that’s why the gloves are off, and I say bring it on.”

 

No Democratic president of my lifetime has treated politics as war to the degree Trump has and none has fought that war on as many fronts. My strong suspicion is that any Democrat who contends seriously for the party’s nomination in 2028 will need to promise to use some of Trump’s most loathsome authoritarian precedents to punish the right as remorselessly as he’s punished the left.

 

That doesn’t mean accepting gold bars from titans of industry in the Oval Office in full view of television cameras if elected, hopefully. A President Gavin Newsom (probably) won’t be launching his own cryptocurrency or securing jumbo jets as tribute from foreign powers or otherwise emulating Trump’s full-spectrum graft. But will he use his leverage over education funding to throttle conservative universities and force them to awaken to the virtues of “wokeness”? You bet he will.

 

Will he exploit presidential tariff powers (assuming they survive legal challenges) to favor businesses and industries that support him and to wound those that don’t? Of course.

 

Will he appoint unfit left-wing cronies who make Sonia Sotomayor look like Oliver Wendell Holmes to the federal bench and to the Justice Department? Without a doubt.

 

Will he lay waste to federal agencies that were beefed up under Trump by ordering DOGE-style layoffs, beginning with ICE on day one? Indubitably.

 

Will he bully the living hell out of corporate America, delighting progressives by threatening federal repercussions for businesses that don’t “voluntarily” boost wages and benefits for workers? The question answers itself.

 

Yet before he does any of those things, he’s going to throw himself full force behind the tit-for-tat redistricting effort in blue states that aims to punish Texas for its norm-breaking. Doing so won’t be good for America, just as Democrats mimicking Trump’s worst conduct in office won’t be good for America, but both sides (there it is again!) will be past caring about such things in 2028.

 

We’re entering the age of political mutually assured destruction. And if you’re familiar with nuclear simulations, you know that that strategy can produce only two possible outcomes. I’m skeptical that this one ends with Republicans being deterred by Democratic ruthlessness, as the modern GOP isn’t built for such things. Which means the other outcome is the likely one.

 

I end by inviting you to ponder why Trump and his party persist in behaving as they do despite the many ways Democrats might abuse the precedents he’s setting once they’re back in power. Is it because Republicans are too stupid to foresee what’s glaringly foreseeable? Or is it because the (mostly) unspoken premise of postliberalism is that liberals cannot and will not be allowed back in power? That’s not a “both sides” matter either.