The cutthroat political maneuvering in Texas seemed to begin quietly in June, when President Trump’s political team urged Republican leaders in the state to squeeze more G.O.P. seats out of the state’s already-lopsided congressional map.
A person close to Trump, my colleagues J. David Goodman and Shane Goldmacher wrote at the time, wanted them to be “ruthless.”
Barely two months later, Texas Republicans have used a special session called by Gov. Greg Abbott to advance a plan they hope will help their party pick up five seats in the narrowly divided House — and dozens of Democratic legislators have fled the state to try to stop it from becoming law. It’s a gambit that could shape the outcome of next year’s midterm elections, and turn the nation’s redistricting battles into an all-out war.
Trump is getting the bare-knuckle tactics — and most likely the five more favorable districts — that he wanted. The groundwork for this moment, however, was laid well before June. Today, I’ll explain how we got here, and why Democrats looking to fight fire with fire may have their hands tied.
A pivotal Supreme Court decision
Gerrymandering is nothing new. The term itself goes back to 1812, when Gov. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, signed a bill that created Boston-area State Senate districts so contorted, one was said to look like a salamander. Partisan map-drawing reduced competitiveness, turning more and more races into blowouts for one party or the other. By 2024, just 8 percent of congressional races were decided by fewer than five percentage points, according to an analysis by my colleagues this year.
A key moment came in 2019, though, when the Supreme Court — which at that point had a narrow Republican majority — ruled that federal courts were powerless to hear cases about partisan gerrymandering. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged that the results of “excessive partisanship” in drawing districts “reasonably seem unjust,” but said that ultimately, the issue was political rather than constitutional.
My colleague Adam Liptak, who covers the Supreme Court and wrote about that case at the time, explained to me that the case effectively allowed the court to wash its hands of the issue and leave the matter to states, which take vastly different approaches to redistricting.
The dissenting justices warned that the ruling’s consequences for democracy could be dire. “The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote.
A lopsided fight
With federal courts essentially out of the business of reviewing partisan gerrymandering, it was up to state laws and state courts to determine what was allowed — and there, Republicans had an advantage, one stemming from years of gains they had made in state legislatures.
By the 2022 redistricting cycle, Republicans controlled congressional mapmaking in 19 states, while Democrats did so in just seven, according to a 2022 analysis by the Brennan Center.
Democrats aggressively gerrymandered some of those states, including Illinois, Maryland and the politically purple Nevada.
But in several states where Democrats are in a position of power, including Arizona, California, Colorado and Michigan, voters have established independent commissions to draw fair maps, which will make it harder for them to try to cancel out Texas’ gains by drawing new maps elsewhere. In New York, an aggressive attempt at gerrymandering was thrown out by a court in 2022; the party ultimately drew a fairly restrained map in 2024.
The whole thing has prompted some soul-searching among Democrats who have spent years trying to fight gerrymandering, including former Attorney General Eric Holder. Last week, he said he believed Democrats needed to respond to Republican gerrymandering in kind.
“We’ve got to take these extraordinary steps, with the hope that we can then save democracy and ultimately heal it,” he told my colleague Nick Corasaniti.
Where next?
Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, told Shane and Nick that what comes next is a “race to the bottom.”
Trump and his allies are pushing for more gains. Republicans have total legislative control in states like Florida, Indiana, Missouri and New Hampshire, which could make them targets for the push to remake their own maps.
Democrats are trying to do the same — although some of them may have to find ways around their states’ own reforms first.
On Monday, standing alongside some of the Texas Democrats who had left the state, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York vowed to follow suit and redraw the maps in New York — even if that required her to amend the state’s Constitution to kill her state’s independent redistricting commission. (Any such effort, though, would be deeply complicated and may not take effect until after the midterms.)
“I’m tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back,” Hochul said. “With all due respect to the good-government groups, politics is a political process.”
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed a public vote on new maps this fall — although he would keep plans in place for independent mapmaking in 2030.
IN HIS WORDS
‘Woke is for losers’
Trump is jumping on another culture war bandwagon. My colleague Minho Kim, who keeps an eye on his social media feeds, explains.
For nearly two weeks, parts of the internet have blown up over Sydney Sweeney — a Hollywood actress known for her ubiquitous ad presence — and a controversial American Eagle ad that declared she had “great jeans.”
The president, who has been busy traveling overseas and reordering the global trading system, left the matter untouched — until today.
The advertisement was criticized by some who believed it teetered onto the territory of eugenics. Online, apparently MAGA-affiliated accounts rallied around her.
On Monday, the president himself chimed in, calling Sweeney’s ad the “hottest.”
“Go get ‘em Sydney!” he cheered on Truth Social.
He then quickly pivoted to throwing shade at other brands that he found too “woke,” including Jaguar, the British carmaker whose rebranding efforts featured racially diverse fashion models, and Bud Light, which faced backlash after an Instagram promotion featured a transgender celebrity.
And he didn’t forget to downplay Taylor Swift, who endorsed Kamala Harris last year, calling her “no longer hot.”
“The tide has seriously turned,” he proclaimed. “Being woke is for losers, being Republican is what you want to be.”
In One Graphic
President Trump’s top officials said they would initially prioritize the deportation of criminals, and since January, ICE has routinely publicized the deportation of migrants convicted of crimes or accused of belonging to gangs.
But a review of cases and new data analyzed by The New York Times underscores how the crackdown quickly expanded to those without legal status, whether or not they had been convicted of a crime.
In New York City, more than half of immigrants arrested had no criminal charges or convictions on their record, my colleagues Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Ashley Cai reported.
ONE LAST THING
When society loses a ‘mirror’
President Trump shocked economists when, late last week, he fired the person responsible for producing monthly jobs numbers he didn’t like. He hasn’t yet named her replacement.
My colleague Ben Casselman, the chief economics correspondent for The Times, took a deep look at the perils of political leaders meddling in government data. He spoke with several former officials around the world who were themselves responsible for producing unbiased data — and they helped explain why the episode matters.
One of them in particular stuck with me. Andreas Georgiou took over Greece’s statistical agency in 2010, and found that the country had been severely understating its budget deficits — much to the chagrin of Greek authorities, who tried to have him prosecuted.
Georgiou described government statistics as “a mirror that society holds up to itself.”
“If society cannot see itself clearly, then it cannot identify its problems,” he said. “If it cannot identify its problems, then it cannot find the right solutions. It cannot find the right persons to solve these problems.”
Minho Kim, Ben Casselman and Jacob Reber contributed reporting.