Texas Republicans: It’s About Power, Yes—but Also Their Radical Agenda

Even if Republicans are driving gerrymandering today, Democrats certainly did it in the past. Redistricting in the middle of a decade, as opposed to waiting for the next U.S. census, isn’t totally unprecedented either. It turns out a precedent for today’s Texas Republicans was, well, Texas Republicans, who rigged maps in their favor in 2003 to win more U.S. House seats the next year.

But it is still alarming that Governor Greg Abbott and the state’s GOP-controlled legislature are attempting to redraw congressional districts ahead of next year’s midterms and threatening to expel from the legislature Democratic lawmakers who have fled the state to stall this redistricting.

The Texas gerrymandering scheme combines two elements of the modern Republican Party that are eroding American democracy: personalist, autocratic leadership and a pattern of gaining and wielding power with little regard for the views of the broader public.

Texas Republicans, already holding 25 of the state’s 38 U.S. House seats, weren’t really looking to further gerrymander the state. (Kamala Harris won about 42 percent of the vote in Texas, suggesting truly fair maps would have Democrats at around 16 seats, not 13.) But then came orders from the boss. Aides to Donald Trump demanded Texas redraw its districts, believing that was the surest way to prevent Republicans from losing control of the U.S. House in next year’s midterm elections. And this message was not just delivered privately. An unnamed Trump aide told The New York Times in June that “the president would pay close attention to those in his party who help or hurt” this effort to win the midterms by any means necessary.

A special session of the legislature was quickly called by Abbott. Many Texas Democratic legislators have fled the state, robbing Republicans of the quorum they need to pass this provision. But I suspect it will eventually be approved. Republicans would be favored to win an additional five seats (30 in total) under the new maps. Those five could really matter when you remember that Republicans won 220 seats and Democrats 215 in last year’s elections.

State and federal leaders in each party have pushed gerrymanders in the past. That’s causing the mainstream media to treat what’s happening in Texas as perhaps overly aggressively partisanship but not totally out of bounds. But the context matters.

The conflict between the two parties is more intense than ever. Most states and even congressional districts are almost always won by the same party every election these days. The number of voters who swing between the parties keeps shrinking. Redistricting a few seats in Texas in 2025 could be the difference between a Republican U.S. House that lets Trump continue on the path of being the most unrestrained and powerful president in recent memory and a Democratic House that is aggressively trying to rein him in.

Perhaps no gerrymander in American history will be as consequential as this one if it ensures continued Republican control of the House through the remainder of Trump’s second term.

And while he may not be the only president to have gotten involved in congressional redistricting, this president getting involved in that process is particularly worrisome. In chapter 4 of their 2018 book How Democracies Die, Harvard professors Steven Levitksy and Daniel Ziblatt list strategies used by autocratic leaders in Argentina, Hungary, and other nations. Firing civil servants, trying to get either support or neutrality from powerful institutions and elites, and numerous other tactics used by Trump in the last six months appear in this chapter.

But ultimately, “to entrench themselves in power, governments must do more—they must also change the rules of the game,” Levitsky and Ziblatt write. They then detail how authoritarian parties in Malaysia and Hungary redrew electoral districts to ensure they stayed in power.

But what’s happening in Texas is troubling beyond how it potentially helps Trump and feeds his authoritarianism. It shows a Republican Party that will do anything to gain and keep power—except heed the public’s demands. This is an approach that Trump has adopted, but it actually predates him.

In their 2023 book Tyranny of the Minority, Levitsky and Ziblatt explained how the U.S. Senate, the Supreme Court, and other features of American government were giving outsize power to a Republican Party that couldn’t win the national popular vote. Republicans had eroded abortion rights, weakened the Voting Rights Act, and accomplished many other long-standing conservative goals without much public support or even passing those policies through Congress.

A year later, though, Trump won the popular vote, becoming the first Republican to do so since 2004. That silenced the conversation about Republicans being the minority party and led to some talk that Trump had a mandate from the public for his agenda.

It’s true that Republicans win the majority of votes in red states and occasionally in congressional and presidential elections. But even if Republican governance today isn’t always minority rule, it rarely reflects the popular will. It’s essentially “rule with only the amount of public legitimacy and support that is absolutely necessary.”

In red states, Republicans gerrymander state legislatures to ensure massive majorities that then pass abortion bans, tax cuts for the rich, school vouchers, and other policies that polls show the majority of voters don’t want. When advocacy groups work around the legislatures and get popular ideas such as paid sick leave passed via ballot initiative, Republican legislators and GOP governors often ignore or override those initiatives.

In Washington right now, Republicans currently control the House and the Senate. But instead of pushing his agenda through Congress, Trump is laying off federal workers, cutting university funding, and making countless other moves via aggressive and perhaps unconstitutional uses of executive power. Trump then bets (usually correctly) that the unelected, unaccountable Supreme Court will legitimize his actions. This strategy ignores the public, which would likely balk if Congress tried to dismantle the Department of Education, as Trump has done on his own.

Republicans could have tried to pass bills in Congress this year that helped them win the midterms. Instead, they insisted on pushing through a deeply unpopular domestic policy bill that cut taxes for the rich and health care for the poor. So to ensure victory in the midterms, they want to redraw district lines in Texas and potentially other states.

Republicans are essentially assuming a public backlash to their agenda—and trying to change the election map so that they can keep the House while ignoring voter sentiments and perhaps even while again losing the popular vote.

When you combine the presence of Trump and the Republican Party’s long-standing aversion to honoring the public’s desires, what’s happening in Texas isn’t just a story of crazy legislators or hyperpartisan politics. It’s a party that doesn’t care what the public wants, led by a person who only cares about what he wants. This is how democracy is dying.