Trump Has a Plan to Rig the Midterms. Are Democrats Going to Do Anything About it?

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What would it take for you to kill a long-held dream in the most cynical way possible?

For Democrats, it's the prospect of two more years of an unchecked Donald Trump.

The president is pushing a plan this summer that would tilt the all-important 2026 midterm elections into Republicans' favor. Specifically, he's ordering Texas Republicans to redraw the state's congressional maps to tip five more House seats to the GOP. This is an emergency for Democrats, and for democracy. The House is narrowly divided, and Republicans adding five relatively easy wins would go a long way toward Trump keeping Congress under his thumb for the duration of his presidency—sinking Democrats' hopes of slowing Trump's far-right rupture.

Democrats' early response has been to fight in Texas, trying increasingly desperate gambits to stop Republicans from redrawing the state's maps. But while they may succeed in delaying the move, the most likely outcome, in a conservative state where Republicans control basically everything, is that the GOP will get its way. Democrats' more promising avenue is to fight back outside of Texas, using their control of states such as California, New York, and Illinois to redraw the maps in their favor. The wheels to do so are already turning, but the moves are complicated and come at a steep cost.

For years, a constellation of democratic-leaning government reform groups and well-meaning legislators have attempted to make the drawing of congressional maps either bipartisan or nonpartisan. The goal was to draw the maps that honestly reflect the states' voting populations, rather than using the redistricting process as a perpetual effort to cement one's own power. But if Democrats in blue states mirror Texas Republicans—engaging in fiat overhauls of state law with an obvious political goal—they're effectively giving up on those reforms for generations.

Ultimately, Democrats have a choice: They can abandon their principles in the hopes of preventing Trump from continuing to run rampant—or they can keep their principles intact and congratulate themselves on a morally pristine loss in 2026. And when you frame it like that, it's not really a choice at all.

Abha Khanna, a partner at the Elias Law Group with litigation experience in voting rights and redistricting, broke it down for me: “The idea that we can do [redistricting] in a nonpartisan or even a bipartisan manner is over.”

For now, the maelstrom is centered in Texas. What Trump is requesting is exceptional: States usually redraw their maps once a decade, updating them to reflect demographic changes. But Trump wants lawmakers, for partisan reasons, to do a mid-cycle restructuring to help him hold on to the House. In response, Democratic state legislators have fled the state, trying to deny Republicans—led by Gov. Greg Abbott—the quorum they need to redraw the maps. Some of them have taken refuge in Illinois, where Gov. JB Pritzker is vowing to protect them even as Abbott threatens to remove them from office (although his options are actually far more limited than Abbott is projecting).

Ultimately, Democrats' plan is a stall tactic, meant to garner national attention on a GOP power grab. In the long run, Republicans control big majorities in both chambers of the Texas Legislature, and it seems almost certain that they'll find a way to get these new maps drawn.

So Democrats' actual hope for keeping a balance of seats lies in other states.

In California, the state most likely to throw the biggest redistricting counterpunch if Texas Republicans are successful, Gov. Gavin Newsom said he would likely call a special session to redraw his state's maps.

That wouldn't be easy: California's districts are drawn by an independent redistricting commission, the result of previous “good government” reforms. For California to make a retaliatory change, the state Legislature would need to first approve a measure to change the districts, then a special election would be held in November to make the changes. The timeline for this would be tight. California legislators come back from their summer recess in the middle of August, meaning they would have just about a month to debate and vote on the ballot language and the new maps. (And let's be real, American legislative bodies rarely, if ever, move quickly—particularly when Democrats are involved.) Newsom, in the bizarre Democratic tradition of giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt, said earlier this week that he would make sure legislators would set “a trigger” so that the new ballot measure would only happen if Texas moved ahead with its change.

“It would be really expensive. It would probably be litigated on the front end because you'd have to submit something to the AG, get a title and summary, that whole thing would be litigated, and then you'd have to run a campaign to pass it,” a keyed-in California Democratic strategist told me. The strategist added that such a race would turn into a national fracas, with GOP megadonors pouring money into defeating Democrats' efforts.

Elsewhere, other Democratic governors say they've had enough. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Monday said the state's independent redistricting commission should be disbanded . “I'm tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back. With all due respect to the good government groups, politics is a political process,” she said at a press conference. “But I cannot ignore that the playing field has changed dramatically, and shame on us if we ignore that fact and cling tight to the vestiges of the past. That era is over—Donald Trump eliminated it forever.”

Disbanding the redistricting commission would be a first step toward letting Democrats redraw the state's maps in their favor, but subsequent steps—including an amendment to the state Constitution—mean Hochul's state cannot get new maps ready in time for 2026.

Hochul's sentiment, however, is quickly becoming Democratic consensus, as the party comes to terms with the idea that a “fair” map is a naive response to a president hell-bent on grabbing as much power as he can.

Likely 2028 presidential candidates like former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg set up a live Instagram discussion for Monday to talk about how Democrats could “fight back.” The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee is urging that “all options” should be on the table. At a meeting of Democratic governors over the weekend in Madison, Wisconsin, a number of them vocally backed Newsom's efforts to do whatever he could to counter Republicans' maps.

Even among donors there's movement. The National Democratic Redistricting Committee will host an August fundraiser on Martha's Vineyard featuring former President Barack Obama, former Attorney General Eric Holder, and House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, a person involved confirmed to me. The funds raised from that event will be used to support Texas Democrats fighting Republicans' redistricting efforts.

Not well!