And now, Trump looking at an election wipeout next year as he destroys the economy, deploys gestapo-like secret police, and engages in foreign policy that may well plunge the world into WWIII is demanding that Texas, Ohio, Indiana, and other Red states make their existing gerrymanders so extreme that theyll essentially lock out most all House Democrats from those states.
Finally, it seems to be waking up Democrats. Californias Governor Gavin Newsom wrote a sternly-worded letter to Trump saying:
You are playing with fire, risking the destabilization of our democracy, while knowing that California can neutralize any gains you can hope to make. This attempt to rig congressional maps to hold onto power before a single vote is cast in the 2026 election is an affront to American democracy.
If you will not stand down I will be forced to lead an effort to redraw the maps in California to offset the rigging of maps in red states. But if the other states call off their redistricting efforts, we will happily do the same. And American democracy will be better for it.
Will he follow through? If he does, itll be a huge departure from past Democratic Party practices of simply ignoring Republican voter suppression efforts.
Similarly, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said of the proposed Texas gerrymander:
I think cheating the way the president wants to is improper. What Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is doing is trying to cheat middecade here. Theyre attempting to change the map.
But Pritzker wont commit Illinois to re-gerrymandering. At least not yet.
And even if they do, gerrymandering California and Illinois is a good beginning but frankly is weak tea. Democrats should never have abandoned gerrymandering when Republicans were hanging onto it; it was a stupid form of unilateral surrender in the name of fairness and good government. Theyre noble ideas, but theyve also stripped the Party of its political power.
Every Democratic state should begin gerrymandering right now, regardless of what Republicans do in Texas, Ohio, Florida, etc. Its necessary to undo the impact of REDMAP, if nothing else.
But Democrats shouldnt stop there. An analysis by reporter and statistician Greg Palast using numbers exclusively from official federal and state sources found that 4,776,706 mostly-Democratic (and mostly minority) voters were purged from the election rolls in the months leading up to the 2024 election.
Republicans had also organized a nationwide campaign to have partisan election judges sit with vote-counters in swing states where mail-in ballots were counted. They challenged so many signatures or found small errors in ballot markings that an additional 2,121,000 mail-in ballots (again, mostly Democratic) were disqualified from being counted.
Additionally, Republican election officials made sure that 1,216,000 provisional ballots were rejected and thus not counted, and 3.24 million new 2024 voter registrations gathered by Democrats in Get Out The Vote campaigns were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time to vote.
As Palast writes, using official US Election Assistance Commission, Federal Election Commission, and state-level official numbers:
Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.
And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass vigilante challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trumps official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.
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