President Trump’s Texas gerrymandering scam may not reap the political gift he imagined. Trump totally ignored what the voters want. Instead, he ordered Texas Republicans to squeeze out five more Republican House seats in a brazen effort to rig a GOP 2026 midterm House victory.
Trump’s backroom deal undermines the traditional norm of redistricting only once every 10 years following the national census. The entire scheme reeks of unfairness and overreach.
Trump’s gambit assumed the cumbersome process in the two biggest Democratic controlled states, California and New York, would negate the Democrats ability to respond in kind.
California and New York Democrats, unlike Texas, cannot without voter approval mandate a new electoral map. This is because both states actually reformed the redistricting process. They enshrined in their respective state constitutions independent redistricting commissions that can only be reversed through a constitutional amendment approved by voters.
Last week, California proved Trump wrong. It carried out its first step for voters to amend its constitution and adopt a new House map, eliminating five Republican House districts, and replacing them with five new Democratic House districts.
For this new House congressional map to be effective, California voters must now show up at the polls to adopt this new map in a special election called for on Nov. 4. This electoral process is what makes what is happening in California more politically powerful than the change engineered exclusively by the Texas GOP politicos.
This upcoming special election allows the Democrats to educate and focus California voters, as well as voters across the country, on Trump’s authoritarian scheme to rig the midterm elections in favor of the House Republicans. For the Democrats, this can be a potent issue, along with the hostility against the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which can deliver them the House majority.
New York, however, is a heavier lift than California. Any amendment to the New York Constitution cannot by law take effect until the 2028 elections, but the same voter education process must take place. Nonetheless, New York’s role could be critical if Trump convinces other Republican states to shut out Democratic House members with new electoral maps.
Voters rarely focus on elections for members of the House of Representatives. As part of this lack of engagement, fewer Americans traditionally vote in midterm elections than in presidential election years. However, continuing voter attention on Trump’s election chicanery has the potential to change this traditional paradigm.
When Trump first concocted this scheme, he must have thought the Texas Republicans would simply enact his new electoral map, and the Democrats would be powerless to respond, considering the obstacles they face in California and New York. Recent events have proven him wrong. The drip-drip of this issue has begun resonating with the electorate and not just in California.
Trump’s plot to rig the districts in Texas has already generated nationwide interest in the midterms. It started with the Democratic members of the Texas state legislature fleeing their state to deprive the Republican members with a voting quorum to pass the redistricting. It followed with the successful California legislative effort to place its new congressional map on a ballot for the voters to approve in November.
Most significantly, the Democrats have framed this highly charged issue to continue through the November California special election with a high-spirited and well-publicized political campaign to gain passage of the new California House district map. The excitement and urgency created by this campaign will likely persist into the midterms in November 2026 with New York acting as a backstop to affect the 2028 election presidential cycle.
Other Republican states may yet join Texas in the arms race to gerrymander out more Democratic seats in the midterms. The Democrats can only neutralize this Republican advantage by mobilizing greater Democratic turnout in 2026. If history is any measure, Democratic turnout in the 2018 midterms, during Trump’s first term, was greater than Democratic turnout in 2022, when Joe Biden was president.
What does all this mean? Increasing Democratic voter turnout in the 2026 midterms, resulting in the election of a Democratic House majority, is the opposite of what Trump’s Texas vote rigging ploy was designed to accomplish.
Akerman was formerly an assistant special Watergate prosecutor and an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
