A Post About Redistricting With A Kid Drawing A Dick
After Texas fired the first shots, the race is on to save Democrats' House seats.
The midterms are now exactly a year away, and predictably, Republicans have been working every move they can get away with to grab power and snatch away the possibility of losing their six-member House of Representatives majority, with aggressive ought-to-be-illegal off-cycle redistricting. They see the writing on the wall, and it says if they can’t dilute Democratic votes like mom’s stolen vodka on prom night, they and their shitty policies will lose, bigly, and Trump’s days of having his way with the House via his buttpuppet Mike Johnson will be all over.
Trump’s approval ratings have now deflated to 37 percent, and his disapproval is at the highest ever at 63 percent, the worst of any president since Nixon’s final poll. And support for the GOP itself has dropped nine points since January. People are pissed about The Groceries and the erosion of democracy, and in spite of the administration screaming from every airport television and web site that Democrats are to blame for the government shutdown, most voters have noticed who is actually in charge of all three branches of government right now, and correctly blame the Republicans instead. And as the shutdown goes on, and tariff pain gets worse, those numbers for the GOP and Donny Two-Dolls are not going to improve. So Republican representatives would prefer to choose their own voters, rather than the other way around!
And Republican lawmakers are feeling freshly emboldened because all signs point to the Supreme Court letting them do it; the certain six who are determined to let Trump get away with anything up to and including murder are clearly poised to scrap every last vestige of the Voting Rights Act and do away with racial gerrymandering altogether in Louisiana v. Callais, sometime next year. So Republican state governments reckon, why wait?
And so here we are! Today, California will vote on Proposition 50, which if passed would make five new seats which are more favorable to Democrats, offsetting the five seats that Texas stole when they started off-year gerrydoodling back in August, threatening to arrest Democratic lawmakers down there if they didn’t show up to let them do it and holding them hostage in the Capitol building. You remember that ugly scene.
And then in September Missouri pulled the same move, gerrymandering to squeeze out one more GOP seat.
Then a week and a half ago North Carolina Republicans did the same thing, pinched out one more seat for themselves. And then on Friday, Ohio’s bipartisan redistricting commission approved a new congressional map that gives Republicans a better chance to flip two seats, making even redder Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s district, which Trump won by about seven points in 2024, and turning Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman’s seat Republican-leaning.
And now Florida has formed a redistricting committee in the state Legislature, too, to try to add up to four new Republican seats.
Republicans have their sights on other states as well, including Indiana and Kansas. Trump and JD Vance personally rang up lawmakers in Indiana to pressure them to hurry up with redrawing their maps.
Who will win this battle? Well, probably not Democrats. Even if blue-leaning California, Illinois, New York, Maryland, and Virginia all succeed in re-districting in time, that still leaves Republicans with an advantage of between two and six seats. So while Democrats could theoretically wind up slightly better off than they are at the moment, probably still not in control.
And then there’s the other efforts to push Democratic voters off the rolls, and whatever other shenanigans Trump, Cleta Mitchell, and his lackeys have planned, what with demanding voter information from the states while squealing his 2020 stolen-election lies. He’s also trying to place new quick-reaction National Guard forces in every state. And Pam Bondi’s already sent special DOJ poll watchers ahead of the vote in California, for “security,” and which Governor Gavin Newsom has called “about voter intimidation. This is about voter suppression, period. Full stop.” So Newsom and state Attorney General Rob Bonta have sent in their own watchers to watch the watchmen. Just what is the old man laying the groundwork for, hm? Stealing votes by any means necessary would be a safe bet!
Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the DOJ / former(?) Trump personal lawyer and also a grown-ass 56-year-old adult woman, responded to Newsom’s concerns like a 13-year-old 4Chan Stan:
LOL. BRO.
But, still, and, try as Republicans might to scare off voters and prune them from the rolls, Trump sure does have a way of fucking up and pissing people off, and now even half of white people disapprove of how he’s handling things. It is not yet a given that they will succeed! We will see!
[NPR / Politico archive link / New York Times gift link / Legal Defense Fund / Washington Post archive link]
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Maybe I'm genuinely being Pollyanna-ish about this, but there's a part of me that genuinely feels like if they felt like they had some kind of an election-rigging scheme in the bag, that they wouldn't be falling all over themselves to do these transparently ludicrous things to redistrict and gerrymander and fuck about at the last minute.
Does that make sense, or is that naïve of me?
Hey Wonkers! Allow me to F your whole day by sharing this very trenchant and terrifying comment on the shutdown that I heard from a nice historian lady on Instagram.
"The shutdown is the coup."