With Texas Republicans convening a special legislative session this week to create five new Republican congressional seats and Democratic states such as California poised to retaliate, the redistricting battle is entering a phase of open political warfare.
Wiley Nickel knows what that means from firsthand experience — a North Carolina Democrat, he lost his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2024, through a similar GOP gerrymandering scheme,
He has a message for fellow Democrats: Things are going to get even tougher for the party, particularly after the 2030 Census leads to blue states losing and red states gaining seats in Congress.
“It’s absolutely horrible, and it’s no way to run a democracy,” Nickel told Raw Story. “It’s going to get worse.
“The main thing for the American people is we need a fair system by independent redistricting.
“That’s the only way our democracy will survive.”
Nickel was elected to Congress in 2022, in a tossup district that incorporated parts of Raleigh, N.C. and a swath of suburbs to the south, under a court-ordered map.
But less than a year into Nickel’s first term in Washington, the GOP-run North Carolina legislature approved a new map with such a strong partisan tilt that Nickel and two other Democrats were unable to compete.
Already a lame duck, Nickel sponsored legislation that would require states to draw congressional maps through independent redistricting commissions, but it didn’t go anywhere in the Republican-controlled Congress.
The current outbreak of redistricting hostilities was triggered by Texas Republicans seeking to redraw their map halfway through the usual 10-year cycle, a plan pushed by the Trump White House and designed to add five Republican seats.
Texas Democrats took dramatic action, fleeing the state — but they have now returned.
Given that the Texas move “is very likely to determine control of Congress,” Nickel supports a tactical retreat from principle.
“Democrats must respond in kind,” he said.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom is attempting to do so, championing a plan to add five Democratic seats in his state, thereby cancelling out the Texas move.
‘No way to run a democracy’
Gerrymandering is named for Elbridge Gerry, a 19th-century Massachusetts governor and U.S. vice-president who oversaw the drawing of electoral maps so distorted for partisan gain that one district was said to look like a salamander.
Modern Republican-controlled state legislatures are not the only offenders in the gerrymandering game: hat-tip to blue states Illinois and New Jersey.
But a 2024 study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that Republicans hold a net 16-seat advantage in seats artificially engineered through creative mapmaking.
Assuming Democrats are able to fight back against Republican efforts to rig the midterms and manage to retake control of Congress — a big if — Nickel argues that members will have a small window in which to rebalance the scales.
He argues that it will be imperative for Democrats to legislate to mandate fair and independent redistricting across the country. That’s because after the 2030 Census, analysts project that the political terrain will get significantly more hostile for Democrats.
Nickel points to another Brennan Center study, published last December, that projects that based on current population trends, the South will gain nine seats, with four each for Texas and Florida and one for North Carolina.
In contrast, the Democratic strongholds of California, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Oregon are set to lose a combined eight seats.
“We will get hit incredibly hard,” Nickel said.
The Brennan Center study found that the population growth in the South that is poised to deliver political gains for the GOP is “overwhelmingly driven by communities of color,” specifically Latino, Black and Asian people.
These groups have traditionally leaned Democratic but, in the past two presidential election cycles, they’ve trended towards Donald Trump.
Regardless of who such voters favor after the 2030 Census, Republican mapmakers have the ability to carve up traditional Democratic constituencies.
The 2030 Census will also change the math for the Electoral College in the 2032 presidential election.
It will no longer be enough for the Democratic candidate to carry the so-called “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, wrote Michael Li, the author of the Brennan Center study.
The declining population in the Midwest and Northeast puts more pressure on Democrats to compete for Southern states such as Georgia and North Carolina, along with Arizona and Nevada, as part of a winning coalition.
