Republican hopes to keep the House in 2026 include redistricting
Quite a few states are potentially involved:
The Speaker is clearly referencing the announcement of the new Texas GOP redistricting plan for the U.S. House seats in Texas, which was announced recently and could change a 25 Republican to 13 Democrat House delegation edge to a 30 Republican to 8 Democrat edge. This would be a net gain of 5 seats, if the five new seats that are all pro-Trump by double digits vote Republican. But a lot depends on whether the Hispanic voters in those districts continue their electoral march towards the GOP.
This is not the only redistricting plan that Johnson may be relying on. We are also waiting on the Ohio GOP to redistrict, which may net 2 or 3 more seats. It is also possible that Republicans will redistrict in Indiana, Georgia, Kansas, Missouri, New Hampshire and Florida.
Democrats are outraged, of course, as though they have never engaged in anything of the sort. In Texas, Democrat legislators plan to leave the state in order to make it so that a vote on the proposal is stymied by the lack of a quorum, despite a Texas law designed to prevent an action like that:
By fleeing the state to deprive the Legislature of enough members to function, Democrats would each incur a fine of $500 per day and face the threat of arrest. Deep-pocketed donors within the party appear ready to cover these expenses, according to three people involved in the discussions.
The donors’ willingness to foot the bill eliminates a major deterrent to walking out — the personal financial cost — and could embolden Democrats who might otherwise hesitate.
But first, the donors and absconding members would need to figure out how to skirt a potential roadblock: Texas House rules prohibit lawmakers from dipping into their campaign coffers to pay the fines. Republicans approved the $500 daily punishment in 2023, two years after Democrats fled the state in an unsuccessful bid to stop Republicans from passing an overhaul of the state’s election laws.
Two people involved in the latest Democratic fundraising strategy sessions, who were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations, claim their legal teams have found a way to disburse the funds to the members but declined to provide any additional details.
Our Democracy is to thwart the will of the majority and evade the rules. I wonder what that undisclosed method might be.
There will, of course, be several court challenges by the Democrats of Texas. The first will involve challenging the law establishing the penalties. Another will be the tried and true method of saying the Republicans’ redistricting plans are racist.
NOTE: This is my very first post with the “Election 2026” tab. Sigh.
Kurt Schlichter had a column up on this a few days back. He basically said that the Ds have zero problem with gerrymandering for their benefit, so he said now to gerrymander the hell out of them. The GOP has to stop being wimps in politics.
It’s not that difficult to design a mechanistic way of drawing legislative districts which avoids manifestly contrived districts and partisan gamesmanship. You cannot do it the way judges want it done because, (1) there will be some variation in district populations and (2) it does not maximize the number of black majority districts. Both the Voting Rights Act as implemented and the string of judicial opinions on this topic have led us to this morass. Judges ruin every policy question they touch.
The Democratic Party is a thoroughly mendacious outfit. We have wildly excessive use of postal balloting, balloting on Tuesdays instead of Saturday because in 1855 Tuesday was market day most places, voter rolls chock-a-block with relict entries (which ACORN types can use to cast bogus votes by post), voter rolls laden with aliens, voter rolls laden with people with disqualifying criminal convictions, sketchy networked tabulation machines, a hopeless electoral calendar which has people voting on a baffling jumble of offices, offices which are elective because a critical mass of people around about 1835 thought they should be, outfits like ActBlue hoovering up donations from foreigners, and (of course) gerrymandering by Democratic legislators and judges alike. But the real problem is the Republican redistricting plans in Texas, North Carolina, &c.
According to what I’ve read, the Dems’ problem is that all of their deep blue states are already gerrymandered to the max. Now they’re squealing when Republicans plan to return the favor.
Several commenters have pointed out that Democrats gerrymander themselves, making their denunciations of Republican gerrymandering rather amusing. Take the great state of Illinois (Ellanoy, according to relatives from that state.).
Governor Billionaire-Heir-Lardbottom of Illinois objected to Texas’s proposed redistricting, a.k.a gerrymandering. One comment I read pointed out that the percentage of Congressional votes versus percentage of Congressional seats in Illinois was 52 percent of Democrat votes versus 83 percent of Congressional seats that Democrats won. I checked the vote, district by district, and got 53 percent, so the 52 percent is accurate.
Note that the proposed Republican redistricting/gerrymandering in Texas (30-8) would give Republicans 79% of the seats, when they got about 58% of the vote for Congress. Slightly less gerrymandered than Illinois.
physicsguy on Kurt Schlichter’s recent column, calling for R hardcore.
Thems are the New Rules. Payback must be a made to be a bitch.
If not, the benefit will only accrue to rule violating defectors (ie, Dems) in the game of tit-for-tat, as game theory proves.
I saw a video clip by Dinesh D’Souza making Schlichter’s point last night.
There are a few states that don’t gerrymander. Washington is one of them, but the population has self-sorted geographically and is overall deep blue so there’s been no real need for the Dems to try to gerrymander it further. Most of the others have only one Congressman and thus cannot gerrymander their Congressional districts.
Google translate says
Factio Democratica delenda est
Washington state doesn’t need gerrymandering. Vote fraud ensures Democrats win most races.
@Alan Corbo:Vote fraud ensures Democrats win most races.
I’m sure it happens, but in statewide races they don’t need it, they’re just padding the total. Last Republican Senator elected in 1994, last Republican governor in 1980, last Republican for President in 1984. Only the 2004 governor election and the 2000 Senate election were close. They usually go at least +10% for the Dem.
But even if fraud was so entrenched that every election was decided by it, that would be another reason they didn’t need to gerrymander.
2004 wa gov election was stolen. It took two tries but two separate bags of uncounted ballots? I mean come on, really? Left uncounted and forgotten in two different car trunks? No, the idiot judge help rig the election. Ballots in King County at that time were scanned when dropped into the ballot box. Then the bag of ballots, a red bankers type bag, was sealed with a metal embossed loss prevention type seal. The memory module of the already counted ballots was removed and sealed separately.
Seattle lets the homeless vote. How are those voter rolls remotely verifiable?
This is such a typically “stupid” move by the Republican Party that’s it’s hard not to laugh at how open they are to helping the Democrats. This is a deliberate move to lose the House in 2026. Democrat operatives in the 2020 Census Bureau subverted the count and let some Democrat states keep representatives they shouldn’t have and stopped some Republicans from getting the representatives they should have had. What has been the Republican response to this outrageous crime? Crickets! Our War of Independence was fought over Representation and here we are; the Republicans don’t give one damn. Instead of doing a new apportionment that rights this wrong (and limit the gerrymandering to a handful of States) the Republicans are proposing to kick off a gerrymander war that they will lose – intentionally. There are some Democrat states that have enough of a super majority that they can possibly exclude all Republican representation. And there’s not a federal judge in those States that would stop it. Trump is threatening the graft of 535 criminals and they will not put up with that!
I sure hope the dumbpublicans do very well in the 2026 elections, but given their proclivity to screw up, I am not holding my breath.
@Chases Eagles:2004 wa gov election was stolen.
Very likely, but car trunk ballots and homeless people aren’t 10% of the statewide vote, and that’s how lopsided they typically are. Ferguson won in 2024 by ten times as many votes (440,000) as there are homeless in Washington (about 32,000).
On Feb 1, 2022 an audit report on the 2020 election entitled “Evaluating Washington’s Ballot Rejection Rates”, Report Number: 1029711 was released. They were looking for bias at the county level on ballot rejections based on ethnicity, gender, etc.
They didn’t find that but they did find that a percentage of ballots that should have been rejected for failed signature match were counted. They ran a representative sample of the ballots through signature matching software which rejected about 7% of the sample. They then went through using teams and finally got the number of ballots that were counted that should have been rejected to about 2%.
They also noted that some counties counted ballots received after the election deadline.
Niketas C. is right, that the state has become so liberal that there is no need to go to extraordinary lengths to cheat, but there is at best sloppy handling of the ballots, and in a close race could tip any election to the leftists.
But 5% of 3.8 million ballots cast is around 180,000 votes. This audit was only done in counties that scan and create images of the envelope signatures– which are only the larger counties, which are also the more liberal.
The election was stolen in 2004.
It’s certainly funny that many news agencies are writing that IF the Reps do it, they’ll be sorry because Then the Dems will do it.
CA & MASS were two noted in one report with far fewer representatives that were R, 17% and 0 Zero%, than the votes.
So, like Kate says, the Dems will problem is that the Dems have already done it first. Thus, the correct R response to news folks should be that Dems did it, so now Reps are doing it. And, as predicted, the ones who did it first are now sorry.
The gauntlet is thrown but they’re making a mistake.