According to recent reports, President Trump has pressured Texas Republicans to do a mid-decade redistricting. The drawing of new district boundaries is done after each decennial census, as required by the U.S. Constitution to (re)allocate voting power based on population changes. However, with the U.S. House Republican majority at risk in the 2026 elections, pressure is building to further gerrymander an already-unfair map in Texas, to potentially gain as many as five seats in the chamber. This would probably be done by packing even more likely Democratic voters into a smaller number of districts and would also likely be a racially gerrymandered map.

While this Texas change has not yet been done, the fact that it is being pursued has evoked a rapid response from prominent progressives, ranging from Governor Newsom in California to Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias and Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin. They have all pointed out that Democrats, too, can play the same game, potentially manipulating congressional district boundaries in a mid-decade gerrymander in strongly blue states like California, matching the effect of Republican efforts in Texas, Ohio, and elsewhere. 

Mid-decade redistricting, undertaken with the explicit goal of achieving a partisan advantage, will undermine the democratic process, stifle genuine representation, and further erode public trust in the integrity of our elections. Texas Republicans want to capture votes, not earn them. As undemocratic as this effort is, in Texas, it is legal. But that does not make it right, or even smart. It could easily fail. 

For the record, the Princeton Gerrymander Project gave the existing congressional map an “F” for partisan fairness, giving Republicans 25 seats and Democrats 13. The Texan Republicans had already gerrymandered this map to extreme partisan advantage. A more aggressive re-do threatens a “dummymander” — a loss of seats because you are greedy.

Sam Wang, author of Fixing Bugs in Democracy, has this to say: “… analysis by the Electoral Innovation Lab suggests that Trump’s redistricting push could backfire spectacularly. Indeed, in 2026, such an aggressive map could end up giving Democrats 25 out of 38 seats.”

To paraphrase Newton, every action has an equal and opposite reaction: Voting rights champions are getting on board with the idea of retaliatory gerrymandering. Marc Elias says, “Finally, states with Democratic trifectas should restart their redistricting processes now to explore the feasibility of reducing — or eliminating — Republican leaning congressional districts in their states. There will no doubt be barriers, legal and political, in some places, but now is the time to think creatively and strategically about how we overcome them.”

This tit-for-tat strategy may be rational when considering the rapid-(d)evolution of the Roberts court’s refusal to protect voting rights for racial minorities in redistricting, coupled with their passive or supportive views on redistricting for partisan advantage. It seems like every day, there is a new detail or analysis on the likely success or impact of such actions. Lawyers and pundits will be busy for months. 

We do hope that these reactions don’t signal the end of a trend toward the creation of Independent Redistricting Commissions (IRCs), which can, in principle, generate district maps that lead to fairer representation. Perhaps reactive Democratic gerrymanders can be implemented explicitly as temporary measures. Or perhaps when there is a better federal government in place, a law can be passed mandating IRCs (one of the provisions of the “Freedom to Vote Act” introduced in 2019 and again in 2021), removing the temptation for politicians to choose their preferred voters. 

As non-lawyers and Arizonans, we can only offer a “big picture” perspective. Government exists to serve the needs of the community, not the other way around. While Texas Republicans are busy seeking ways to retain and expand their political power in the next election, they are failing the citizens of their state to meet their needs right now. And this is not confined to electoral politics — for instance, recent flooding in Texas was a natural disaster, but the slow FEMA response was purely manmade and political. 

Fair elections start with fair maps; fair maps lead to a responsive democracy. If we want a better government, we need to elect people who want to govern for the common good: those who will do the right thing. 

Deborah Howard served as a special assistant in the U.S. Department of Labor under President Reagan and is a candidate for the Arizona House of Representatives, LD27.

Nelson Morgan is a retired University of California at Berkeley faculty member and research scientist, and is the chair of the Census and Redistricting Committee for the Arizona Democratic Party.