On Sunday, Politico’s Gregory Svirnovskiy regurgitated talking points by Illinois Democrat governor J.B. Pritzker and Attorney General Eric Holder to suggest Democrats’ gerrymandering is permissible, while smearing Republicans’ attempt to redistrict in Texas as a Trump-backed “attempt to cheat mid-decade.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called a special legislative session to, in part, consider new maps “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.” This came right after the DOJ expressed “serious concerns” that four Texas districts were unlawfully gerrymandered on racial grounds. Last week, close to 60 Texas House Democrats abandoned the state and headed to Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts to protest a new redistricting proposal that could give Republicans five more congressional seats.
As The Federalist reported, Illinois is the most gerrymandered state in the country. In fact, as Nathaniel Rakich and Tony Chow wrote in 2022 in FiveThirtyEight, Illinois’ “gerrymandered congressional map seems hell-bent on making Republican congressmen from Illinois an endangered species.” Democrats — who were in charge of redistricting in the state — “drew a map that packed all five Republicans” in Illinois’ U.S. House delegation “into just three.” And despite Democrats not winning even 60 percent of the popular vote in 2024, the party holds 14 out of the state’s 17 congressional seats.
In New York, Democrats at the state level blocked a proposal drawn by the state’s bipartisan Independent Redistricting Committee (IRC) last year and instead approved a map which, as NBC News’ Jane C. Timm wrote, gave “Democrats a slight boost.”Notably, New Yorkers passed a constitutional amendment in 2014 creating the IRC, which is tasked with drawing new maps every 10 years. Democrats had previously been shot down by the courts after they, as Timm described, passed maps “that so significantly boosted their congressional prospects” in 2022.
In Massachusetts, there are a total of zero Republican congressional districts despite the state swinging more than 36 percent for Trump in 2024.
Nonetheless, Svirnovskiy suggested that the real problem isn’t Democrats’ gerrymandering, it’s Republicans’. He used comments from Pritzker and Holder to essentially smear the redistricting efforts in Texas as an attempt to rig elections “on the whims” of Donald Trump.
“You talked about how rare it is to do what he’s doing,” Pritzker told Kristen Welker during a Sunday interview, as noted by Svirnovskiy. “Yes, it is. What’s even rarer is to do it at the behest of the president of the United States, who’s clearly attempting to and says that he deserves to have five more seats.” Pritzker defended Illinois’ gerrymandered map in the interview, Svirnovskiy indicated, by noting it “came at the end of the decennial census” and “state officials held public hearings and ensured that it followed the Voting Rights Act.”
As recently pointed out by Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, “the claim that engaging in mid-decade redistricting is somehow illegal is complete nonsense.”
“No federal or state law, constitutional provision, or court precedent limits states to redistricting just once every 10 years. More frequent redistricting is simply rare because it often results in brutal political fights and years of litigation by those unhappy with the results,” Spakovsky wrote, adding that “Texas is acting to bring its districts in line with federal law and court decisions.”
Svirnovskiy concludes by referencing Holder, who told Welker that Trump’s alleged involvement reminded him of a 2021 phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
“[Trump] said, ‘Find me 11,780 votes.’ [Trump] calls Texas now and says, ‘Well, find me five seats so that we can save the House in 2026’,” Holder told Welker, as noted in Svirnovskiy’s piece. As The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland has reported, Trump never asked Raffensperger to “find” these votes. Rather, Trump’s legal team said it “had solid evidence of illegal votes easily exceeding the official margin of Biden’s victory of 11,779,” and Trump “spoke of his own desire ‘to find 11,780 votes'” in the context of highlighting this evidence.
Svirnovskiy’s framing is clear: He wants readers to view the Texas Republican effort as illegitimate precisely because Trump supports it, while dismissing Democrats’ gerrymandering as just good, “tactical” politics.
Trump has promoted the redistricting proposal in Texas. But as Spakovsky said in a statement to The Federalist, it is “absurd” that a sitting president cannot comment on the clearly “unconstitutional gerrymanders” in Texas.
“The fact that the Justice Department has acted to enforce [federal law] should be commended and the president has every right to comment on that,” Spakovsky continued.
As Vice President J.D. Vance noted in a recent interview on Fox News, Democrats “have fought very dirty for a very long time” and “have tried to rig the game … against Republicans.” Under Trump’s leadership, “you finally see some backbone in the Republican party to fight back against these very aggressive Democratic dirty tricks” like aggressive gerrymandering, he continued. However, the only way to do that is to “reset the scales a little bit.”
“What we want to do is redo the census, but, importantly, we want to redistrict some of these red states. And we want to make the congressional apportionment fair in this country. Again, you cannot do it unless Republicans actually take some very decisive action in the months to come,” Vance said.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2