After Texas Republicans' intial success in redistricting, President Donald Trump's gerrymandering strategy is starting to backfire, writes Salon's Heather Digby Parton, and as Democrats have the last laugh, Republicans are starting to doubt their "overconfidence" in Trump's strength.
Texas Democrats fled the state on two separate occasions — once in 2021 and once in 2025 — to block Republican legislation by denying the state House a quorum.
Their protests in 2021 centered on a restrictive voting bill, while the 2025 action was to oppose a new congressional map they condemned as a partisan gerrymander.
And while Digby Parton notes that the Texas Democrats were "forced to capitulate down the road," she also says that their taking a stand was well worth it.
"Although the Texas Democrats didn’t succeed in stopping the Republicans, their doomed strategy achieved something just as important: It brought national attention to the Machiavellian tactics the GOP was employing to maintain its congressional majority in 2026," she writes.
"And that has resulted in a state-by-state battle that just may end up backfiring on the Republicans," she adds.
Pointing to the success of California Governor Gavin Newsom's (D) win on his redistricting efforts known as Prop. 50, Digby Parton notes, "The risk paid off — California’s new map will effectively cancel out the five seats Texas added, and instead of being engineered in a backroom, it was done with the explicit approval of Californians."
Newsom traveled to Texas to thank Democrats for their inspiration.
“You woke us up. You didn’t just have your back here, you had our back in the state of California," he said.
Other states are now following Newsom's lead, Digby Parton writes, with Democrats in Virginia, Illinois and Maryland signaling they are taking a look at their congressional maps.
"Republican-led states had been expected to immediately follow Texas’ lead. But it’s been a rockier road than they had hoped," she writes, citing a redrawn map in Ohio that may end up benefiting Democrats. As Parton notes, Kansas backed out of its effort to redraw maps, while Indiana and Missouri face challenges to theirs
Republicans are starting to get nervous, NBC reports, with a strategist explaining that, “[T]he president understands intuitively, in a way that other Republicans don’t … that Democrats are always assaulting us, always, and mostly much of the Republican Party never fights back. The redistricting fight is proof that they are not that way. So this is in his DNA in a way that is not in other Republicans’ DNA.”
Democrats, meanwhile, are seeing positive signs for them in the redistricting fight. According to Dave Wasserman, an electoral expert at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, “[b]etween Ohio, Kansas, California, Virginia and now this huge win in Utah, Democrats have quietly strung together an impressive streak of victories over the past few weeks that have, surprisingly, pushed the mid-decade redistricting war closer to a draw.”
Digby Parton notes that "the Texas redistricting was largely based on the idea that Trump’s 2024 win marked a massive, permanent shift of Latino voters to the GOP column," which proved untrue.
"Latino voters are not a monolith; there are regional and cultural differences. But the recent elections indicated large numbers in New York, New Jersey and Virginia had returned to the Democratic camp, a swing that could very well be equally reflected in Texas and any other state with a large Latino population," she writes.
Texas Republicans were so sure of themselves, she says, that they "indulged in what the political types call 'dummymandering'— diluting some of their safe seats where Trump won by large margins to ones where he would have won by less, and leaving themselves vulnerable, in a wave election, to losing seats instead of gaining five."
John Eakin, a Republican consultant and data scientist, told NBC News that some Republicans are regretting their overconfidence after Trump’s 2024 victory.
Pointing to a recent result special election for a state Senate seat representing Dallas where the Democrat significantly over-performed the 2024 results, Republicans are starting to sweat.
“Nobody wants to go against Trump in this district map because they fear him,” Eakin said. “They’ve pushed the envelope and it’s going to come back to bite them in the a——.”