Trump Redistricting Complicated for GOP11/19 06:24

   Trump's plan is to bolster his party's narrow House margin to protect 
Republicans from losing control of the chamber in next year's elections. 
Normally, the president's party loses seats in the midterms. But his 
involvement in redistricting is instead becoming an illustration of the limits 
of presidential power.

   As President Donald Trump laid it out to reporters this summer, the plan was 
simple.

   Republicans, the president said, were "entitled" to five more 
conservative-leaning U.S. House seats in Texas and additional ones in other red 
states. The president broke with more than a century of political tradition in 
directing the GOP to redraw those maps in the middle of the decade to avoid 
losing control of Congress in next year's midterms.

   Four months later, Trump's audacious ask looks anything but simple. After a 
federal court panel struck down Republicans' new map in Texas on Tuesday, the 
entire exercise holds the potential to net Democrats more winnable seats in the 
House instead.

   "Trump may have let the genie out of the bottle," said UCLA law professor 
Rick Hasen, "but he may not get the wish he'd hoped for."

   Trump's plan is to bolster his party's narrow House margin to protect 
Republicans from losing control of the chamber in next year's elections. 
Normally, the president's party loses seats in the midterms. But his 
involvement in redistricting is instead becoming an illustration of the limits 
of presidential power.

   Playing with fire

   To hold Republicans' grip on power in Washington, Trump is relying on a 
complex political process.

   Redrawing maps is a decentralized effort that involves navigating a tangle 
of legal rules. It also involves a tricky political calculus because the 
legislators who hold the power to draw maps often want to protect themselves, 
business interests or local communities more than ruthlessly help their party.

   And when one party moves aggressively to draw lines to help itself win 
elections -- also known as gerrymandering -- it runs the risk of pushing its 
rival party to do the same.

   That's what Trump ended up doing, spurring California voters to replace 
their map drawn by a nonpartisan commission with one drawn by Democrats to gain 
five seats. If successful, the move would cancel out the action taken by Texas 
Republicans. California voters approved that map earlier this month, and if a 
Republican lawsuit fails to block it, that map giving Democrats more winnable 
seats will remain in effect even if Texas' remains stalled.

   "Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned -- and democracy 
won," California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, posted on X after the Texas 
ruling, mentioning his Republican counterpart in Texas along with the president.

   Rep. Kevin Kiley, a Republican whose northern California district would be 
redrawn under the state's new map, agreed.

   "It could very well come out as a net loss for Republicans, honestly when 
you look at the map, or at the very least, it could end up being a wash," Kiley 
said. "But it's something that never should have happened. It was ill-conceived 
from the start."

   For Trump, a mix of wins and losses

   There's no guarantee that Tuesday's ruling on the Texas map will stand. Many 
lower courts have blocked Trump's initiatives, only for the conservative 
majority on the U.S. Supreme Court to put those rulings on hold. Texas 
Republicans immediately appealed Tuesday's decision to the high court, too.

   Republicans hope the nation's highest court also weakens or eliminates the 
last major component of the Voting Rights Act next year, which could open the 
door to further redraws in their favor.

   Even before Tuesday, Trump's push for mid-decade redistricting was not 
playing out as neatly as he had hoped, though he had scored some apparent wins. 
North Carolina Republicans potentially created another conservative-leaning 
seat in that battleground state, while Missouri Republicans redrew their 
congressional map at Trump's urging to eliminate one Democratic seat. The 
Missouri plan faces lawsuits and a possible referendum that would force a 
statewide vote on the matter.

   Trump's push has faltered elsewhere. Republicans in Kansas balked at trying 
to eliminate the state's lone swing seat, held by a Democratic congresswoman. 
Indiana Republicans also refused to redraw their map to eliminate their two 
Democratic-leaning congressional seats.

   After Trump attacked the main Indiana holdout, state Sen. Greg Goode, on 
social media, he was the victim of a swatting call over the weekend that led to 
sheriff's deputies coming to his house.

   Trump's push could have a boomerang effect on Republicans

   The bulk of redistricting normally happens once every 10 years, following 
the release of new population estimates from the U.S. Census. That requires 
state lawmakers to adjust their legislative lines to make sure every district 
has roughly the same population. It also opens the door to gerrymandering maps 
to make it harder for the party out of power to win legislative seats.

   Inevitably, redistricting leads to litigation, which can drag on for years 
and spur mid-decade, court-mandated revisions.

   Republicans stood to benefit from these after the last cycle in 2021 because 
they won state supreme court elections in North Carolina and Ohio in 2022. But 
some litigation hasn't gone the GOP's way. A judge in Utah earlier this month 
required the state to make one of its four congressional seats 
Democratic-leaning.

   Trump broke with modern political practice by urging a wholesale, mid-decade 
redraw in red states.

   Democrats were in a bad position to respond to Trump's gambit because more 
states they control have lines drawn by independent commissions rather than by 
partisan lawmakers, the legacy of government reform efforts.

   But with Newsom's push to let Democrats draw California's lines successful, 
the party is looking to replicate it elsewhere.

   Next up may be Virginia, where Democrats recaptured the governor's office 
this month and expanded their margins in the Legislature. A Democratic 
candidate for governor in Colorado has called for a similar measure there. 
Republicans currently hold 9 of the 19 House seats in those two states.

   Overall, Republicans have more to lose if redistricting becomes a purely 
partisan activity nationally and voters in blue states ditch their nonpartisan 
commissions to let their preferred party maximize its margins. In the last 
complete redistricting cycle in 2021, commissions drew 95 House seats that 
Democrats would have otherwise drawn, and only 13 that Republicans would have 
drawn.

   Gerrymandering's unintended consequences

   On Tuesday, Republicans were reappraising Trump's championing of 
redistricting hardball.

   "I think if you look at the basis of this, there was no member of the 
delegation that was asked our opinion," Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas 
told reporters.

   Incumbents usually don't like the idea of radically redrawing districts. It 
can lead to what political experts call a "dummymander" -- spreading the 
opposing party's voters so broadly that they end up endangering your own 
incumbents in a year, like 2026, that is expected to be bad for the party in 
power.

   Incumbents also don't like losing voters who have supported them or getting 
wholly new communities drawn into their districts, said Jonathan Cervas, who 
teaches redistricting at Carnegie Mellon University and has drawn new maps for 
courts. Democratic lawmakers in Illinois and Maryland have so far resisted 
mid-decade redraws to pad their majorities in their states, joining their GOP 
counterparts in Indiana and Kansas.

   Cervas said that's why it was striking to watch Trump push Republicans to 
dive into mid-decade redistricting.

   "The idea they'd go along to get along is basically crazy," he said.