The Democratic Delusion

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, August 07 2025

 

Say what you will about Texas’s attempt at reapportioning its congressional districts in the middle of the decade, but it seems to have had a profound psychological effect on Democratic partisans.

 

Sure, Texas’s move is muscular politics. One might even call it an expansion to the rules of political engagement, though the maneuver is hardly unprecedented. Indeed, mid-decade redistricting was said to have “saved the Democratic House majority” for the first half of Joe Biden’s term in office.

 

Beginning in 2016, “North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Pennsylvania discarded maps that were favorable to Republicans and replaced them with plans that were more generous to Democrats,” the Center for Politics analyst J. Miles Coleman observed in 2021. “If no maps changed throughout the decade, Republicans would likely now hold a narrow majority.”

 

Some of those GOP-favoring maps were the result of Republican overreach, and they were thrown out not by Democrats but the courts. Still, if the old maps had prevailed, there would have been no “American Rescue Plan,” no “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,” no “Inflation Reduction Act,” and, probably, a lot less inflationary pressure to which all these big-spending bills contributed. History hinges on those maps.

 

It seems Democrats are incapable of acknowledging that their party, too, benefits from partisan redistricting. They certainly cannot confess that they and their allies designed those maps only to secure grubby political advantage. Thus, the mere threat that Texas plans to push redistricting forward — ostensibly to address the 2020 Census discrepancies that left a variety of red states, including the Lone Star State, underrepresented based on its population growth, but, really, to shore up the GOP’s House majority — has driven Democrats to articulate the cognitive dissonance they’re now experiencing.

 

Illinois Democratic Representative Mike Quigley insisted that failing to follow Texas’s lead with the explicit intention of drawing as many Republicans out of the state’s congressional delegation would amount to “unilateral disarmament.” Democrats “have to fight fire with fire.” Otherwise, he said, “Republicans will rig the election.” The representative must have momentarily forgotten his state is already so aggressively gerrymandered that there aren’t many options available to vengeful Democrats looking to take their frustrations out on the nearest Republican.

 

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey suffered a similar stress-induced memory lapse. Texas Republicans and Donald Trump “have left us no choice,” she told reporters when asked if she, too, would attempt to redraw the state’s congressional districts to get rid of its GOP representatives. She seems to have forgotten that each of the Bay State’s nine congressional districts are already represented by Democrats. Indeed, Republicans occupy just 30 seats in both chambers of the Massachusetts state legislature to the Democratic Party’s 200 — which is to say that the GOP represents 15 percent of a state that voted for Donald Trump to the tune of 36.5 percent.

 

New York Governor Kathy Hochul may have been the most egregious peddler of happy falsehoods designed to ratify Democrats’ sense of grievance. “I’m tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back,” Hochul barked at reporters in a performance meant to project passion but managed to convey only instability. “We’re sick and tired of being pushed around when other states don’t have the same aspirations that we always have.” Hochul mourned the end of an age of political restraint and decency — “Donald Trump eliminated it forever,” she declared. But it was only three years ago that New York’s Democratic legislature drew up a map so brazenly contemptuous of basic rules that govern a districts contiguousness that the state’s Democrat-dominated Court of Appeals threw it out.

 

The conundrum that these Democrats refuse to confront was pithily articulated by CNN’s Aaron Blake: “Dems have already gerrymandered where they could,” he observed, “and can draw many fewer districts than GOP. Adding Dem opportunities is legally difficult.” That’s another way of saying that Democrats have already pushed as many Republicans out in the states they control as they possibly can without disenfranchising Republican voters.

 

Politico agreed that, in their effort to satisfy the activist class’s desire for vengeance, “Democrats don’t have many options.” Their best chance to draw GOP blood is in, of all places, California — “a heavily blue state with a huge number of congressional districts.” This is where the party’s cloying need for the gratification of its loudest and most uncompromising activists comes into play.

 

California Governor Gavin Newsom has latched onto Texas’s redistricting maneuver as Marc Antony did Caesar’s bloody tunic. The scene-chewing high dudgeon that typifies his approach to the issue has been such a strained performance that even Politico called him out. “For Newsom,” its report read, “the showdown is an opportunity to feed red meat to Democrats across the country.” That dispatch, from reporter Melanie Mason, contains some insights into how the party conceives of itself.

 

“It’s the No. 1 requirement for whomever becomes our de facto head in 2028,” onetime Democratic National Committee chairman and current podcast host Jaime Harrison told her while reflecting on Newsom’s suddenly uncompromising rhetoric. “You have to be willing to fight.” Not just fight, in fact, but fight dirty. “People’s anger over what they do [in Texas] is going to lead them to say, ‘All’s fair in love and war,’” warned the former Democratic governor of South Carolina, Jim Hodges. “This is a ‘f*** you, we’re going to match your scorched earth with our scorched earth,’” Democratic pollster John Anzalone agreed. “The fact is that collectively we’re just tired of playing by the rules.”

 

What a story these Democrats have told themselves. It is a tale in which Republicans and Republicans alone stretch the bounds of political propriety, and the Democratic Party forever fails to follow suit — partly because its members are just too pure of heart, but, also, because Democrats just cannot summon the requisite gumption to see their will made manifest. It’s nonsense, but it’s nonsense Democrats have been telling themselves for decades.

 

To hear them tell it, Democrats didn’t do nearly enough to stop the Supreme Court from ruling as it did in Dobbs, and they didn’t respond to that decision with the appropriate fervor. “Fundamentally, people, especially young people, want to feel like the president is fighting for them,” read Ben Davis’s 2022 call for “radical resistance” to the GOP in The Guardian. “The majority of Americans are under attack by a minority, and they need a president who recognizes this and will respond in kind.” But what exactly is to be done? That part was left unsaid — perhaps even unthought.

 

Senator Elizabeth Warren campaigned for the White House on a similar premise. “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” she said in 2019. “I get a little bit tired of Democrats afraid of big ideas.” Throughout her campaign, she promised to “fight” to secure Medicare for All, to “fight for women’s issues,” to “fight every injustice,” and to “fight for a bold progressive agenda.” The implication, which she occasionally made explicit, is that all your wildest dreams will come true if Democrats would just elect candidates who refuses to acknowledge the existence of procedural obstacles or political impediments.

 

Even Barack Obama was not immune to criticisms from his left that he was too accommodating toward his Republican rivals. “Progressives feel betrayed,” Politico reported within Obama’s first year in office. They were burned by the Democrat-led Senate’s failure to engineer the nationalization of the American private health-insurance industry. “They blame Reid and Obama for not exercising their power to fight for the provisions.” A year later, progressives were still agonizing over Obama’s capitulatory nature. As Politico reported when Democrats decided not to scrap all the Bush tax cuts at once, the left balked. “[L]iberals are convinced that they have the high ground on policy and politics on this issue,” the report read, “if only the president would stop giving away turf every time they seize it.”

 

The left is forever disappointed by the fact that it gets exactly what it asks for from its elected officials. These calls for “fight” from the Democratic political class are not all that different from today’s Democrats promising to radically gerrymander their already gerrymandered states. The activist class demands emotion from their representatives, so that’s what is on offer. The most vociferous progressives don’t want just emotion, of course; they want radical, quasi-revolutionary political reforms. They tell themselves (and are told by their more irresponsible representatives) that the obstacles in their way are constructs — paper tigers that haunt the imaginations of quislings and cowards.

 

America is hardwired to thwart the ambitions of revolutionary reformers. Achievable and lasting legislative accomplishments are the product of unsatisfying compromise — incremental and circumspect initiatives. Progressives don’t want that. They want to see their political enemies driven before them. They want big changes, and they want them now. And when they don’t get any of that, they get mad — so they redirect their ire inward. At some level, the activists resent seeing their anger reflected in the politicians who pander to them, but that is the only realistic deliverable those politicians can produce. What progressives really want, they cannot have.