Last year, Donald Trump rolled out what he thought was a surefire strategy to staying in power: Just order big red states to redistrict in the middle of the decade instead of as usual after the Census, so they could send more Republicans to the House and he’d be spared the embarrassment of big Republican losses in the midterms.
No, of course it wasn’t Trump’s own idea; it originated with Trump’s then-Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair, who later stepped aside from his White House job to run Trump’s midterm strategy. Trump thought highly of Blair, giving him the nickname “Brilliant James,” although as the Washington Post noted days before the election (gift link) sometimes Trump said “brilliant” with a sarcastic tone.
If Trump hasn’t already shitcanned Brilliant James following Tuesday’s elections, we can probably expect a social media post soon, explaining that Trump barely knew the guy, maybe he brought coffee to Cabinet meetings, Trump couldn’t say.
Anyhoo, that scheme really didn’t pay off for Trump, what with Democrats winning back control of the House with Crom knows how many total seats (somewhere around 260, plus or minus, once all the California votes are counted). More to the point, Republicans took a solid thumping in most of the gerrymandered congressional districts that were supposed to protect Trump from impeachment.
And while everyone is going nuts over the national outcomes, let’s also spare some cheers for big changes in state governments, since states control what the electoral maps look like in future elections. Tuesday’s voting resulted in five new Democratic trifectas, in Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Yes, in freaking Wisconsin, which since 2012 has been saddled with one of the most extreme GOP gerrymanders in the nation despite long having a roughly even split in voter registration. Then in 2022, the already skewed Republican majority engineered an even more extreme partisan advantage, making elections almost an afterthought. The resulting artificial GOP skew in the 2023 Wisconsin Lege gave House Republicans a 64-35 majority, just one seat shy of two-thirds, and a veto-proof 22-11 supermajority in the state Senate.
In 2023, the state Supreme Court, finally freed by voters of a Republican stranglehold, threw out the gerrymandered voting maps. Wouldn’t you know it, once the maps were unfucked, people elected Democrats: in 2024, voters whittled down the Republican legislative majority, and this year, with fair maps, Wisconsin voters threw the Republicans out of power completely for the first time in 16 years.
Lest anyone whine that the new maps just swapped in a Democratic advantage, we’ll note that both houses now look a lot like Wisconsin’s closely divided electorate: The 99-seat House will now have 53 Democrats and 46 Republicans, while the split in the 33-seat state Senate is a tidy 18 Dems and 15 Rs. That’s a hell of an improvement over 2023!
This is what restoring democracy looks like, and it’s beautiful.
Incredibly, though, Wisconsin Public Radio reported the return of fair representation as if it were a friggin’ authoritarian takeover, with the headline “Democrats flip Wisconsin Legislature, setting up single-party control.” Jesus.
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North Carolina: Play Stupid Gerrymander Games, Get Your Ass Beat And Lose Your Majority
In October last year, North Carolina Republicans, whose majority in the Lege was of course the product of previous rounds of gerrymandering, tried to redraw congressional maps to knock off Democratic US Rep. Don Davis, adding enough Republican territory to his district to create a 12-point GOP advantage, at least per the 2024 vote. That didn’t work and Davis was reelected Tuesday night in what may have been the most expensive US House race known to the galaxy, defeating Republican challenger Laurie Buckhout in a replay of their close 2024 contest.
But the Democratic voting surge didn’t just return Davis to Washington. It also elected Democrat Jamie Ager to Congress, flipping the seat previously held by creepy sex pest Chuck Edwards (and prior to that, by also-creepy Madison Cawthorn).
And just to prove that a Blue Tsunami swamps all dummymanders, all those highly motivated voters flushed out the NC Lege, flipping the state House and falling just one seat short of flipping the NC Senate, too. The votes are still being tallied, but it looks like overall, Republicans lost a whopping 22 seats in the state House — just one seat shy of a supermajority — and four seats in the Senate.
Again, a few of the US House races remain too close to call yet, and the one-seat Republican majority in the Senate isn’t yet decided for sure; Republican incumbent Danny Earl Britt Jr. leads Democratic challenger Catina Hamm by just 268 votes and his cartoonishly Southern given name.
Meanwhile, there’s South Carolina, where the Republican-led Lege decided NOT to dummymander last year.
Despite some pressure to try to eliminate the state’s single majority-Black district, in hopes of forcing Jim Clyburn into retirement, Republicans had uncharacteristically accurate worries that they’d spread their safe districts too thin — dreaded dummymander — so they left Clyburn’s district alone. Not out of any sense of decency, mind you, but out of craven self-preservation.
Craven turned out to be the smart choice, since as VoteHub Data Nerd Josh Metcalf points out by mapping Tuesday’s actual SC turnout for the Senate election onto the proposed gerrymander map, the blue wave could have resulted in Democrats not only reelecting Clyburn, but also flipping four or five R House seats, leaving just one or two Republicans in the congressional delegation. Here’s Metcalf’s hybrid map (real voter turnout, proposed district boundaries) showing what a South Carolina dummymander would have looked like:
South Carolina Republicans have to be pretty glad they came out of Tuesday relatively unbloodied. Clyburn was easily reelected, and Dead Lindsey Graham’s Senate seat was of course won by Democrat Dr. Annie Andrews.
In addition, it looks like the GOP will give up the seat formerly held by hellspawn Nancy Mace to retired Vice Admiral Nancy Lacore, who was shitcanned by Drinky Drunky Pete Hegseth last year for the crime of being a woman. The race hasn’t been called yet, but Lacore has a very close 3,350-vote lead over Republican Jenny Costa Honeycutt.
In the SC Lege, Democrats flipped 10 seats in the House, ending Republicans’ supermajority but leaving them with a plain ol’ majority. An 11th seat is too close to call, too. Democrats had hoped to flip six seats, so that was fun, but nothing like the blue romp through North Carolina’s Lege.
Please draw your own Goofus and Gallant parallels.
OH, Hi, Yo!
Ohio has, like Wisconsin, long been a seething pit of Republican gerrymandering, with constant ratfucks by elected Goopers — including the state supreme court — to negate every attempt by voters to rein in the relentless fuckery. In 2025, the state’s Republican-controlled redistricting commission unleashed another rat orgy, putting in place a map that gave Republicans an advantage in 12 of the state’s 15 congressional districts. (At the time, Ohio House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn, D-Cincinnati, said Democrats accepted that gerrymander only to avoid a far worse 13-2 map Republicans could have passed.)
Tuesday night, the Blue Tsunami hit and voters flipped three Republican seats, and come January, Ohio will have eight Democrats and seven Republicans in the House. Good!
Among the GOP casualties was loathsome domestic abuser creep Max Miller, who lost to Democrat Brian Poindexter. Don’t go congratulating Ohio Republicans too much, since Poindexter won with 54.9 percent of the vote, a fine margin, but it also means 45 percent of the electorate were fine with sending a credibly accused spouse- and child-abuser back to Congress.
At the state level, not only did Ohioans pick Amy Acton for governor over ickygross Vivek Ramaswamy and send Sherrod Brown back to the Senate, they also took three of the four other top statewide offices (attorney general, secretary of state, and treasurer) and held onto one state supreme court seat while picking up another. Republicans still hold the other five seats, but the return of democracy in Wisconsin also started with Dems chipping away at that state’s Republican-dominated SCOTUS (there, I got the mandatory joke in).
In the Ohio Lege, voters sent 42 Democrats and 52 Republicans to the state House, breaking a gerrymandered Republican supermajority that had festered since 2013. The state Senate is still stank all up with a 22-11 Republican supermajority, however. But then, it took some time for the Berlin Wall to come down, too.
Texas: Redraw Map, Lose Republican Seats
When Texas kicked off the festival of fuckery by redrawing its congressional map to please Great Leader, Trump explained that it was a “simple redraw, we pick up five seats,” no problemo. The Supreme Court gave the ratfuck its approval, and leaders in blue states got to work preparing to redistrict right back, to counter the threat.
It didn’t go so great. Democrats won four of Texas’s five newly redistricted seats, and Republicans lost two seats they could probably have held if the R voter base hadn’t been diluted. So instead of having 30 Republicans and just eight Democrats in next year’s congressional delegation, it will actually be a 24-14 split. The fuckery reduced the GOP representation by one seat.
In South Texas, Democratic incumbents Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez fought off challenges even though Republicans had new majorities in their redrawn districts. And in a nice win, Tejano musician Bobby Pulido sent two-term incumbent Republican Monica De La Cruz packing.
And in Rep. Al Green’s former (and redrawn) Ninth District, environmental advocate Leticia Gutierrez whooped oil and gas executive Alex Mealer, so that’s a victory for both Texas Dems and people with lungs. Gutierrez got her start in politics supporting children’s health after one of her two children developed asthma; that son later served in the US Army. Say, did I mention we’re book clubbing Bill McKibben’s Here Comes the Sun (Wonkette affiliate link), which is about how transitioning off fossil fuels to clean energy will make the entire planet healthier? Yay for the clean air mom, and for cleaner air for Texans of all ages.
And yeah, Democrats also flipped the Texas House, which had been controlled by Republicans since 2003. They needed to flip 14 seats, but if current vote counts hold (not guaranteed), may pick up as many as 21 seats. Whole lotta blue under the Pink Dome. Republicans held on to the state Senate, but hey, there’s still 2028, right?
Florida: Four New R Seats? How About NONE? Does None Work For You?
Florida redrew its districts in April, in a plan designed to disenfranchise minority voters even further and cram four more Republican seats into the state’s already outrageous 20-8 delegation. Tuesday night ended with three of the new districts still held by Democrats, and the fourth too close to call but leaning toward the Democrat as well. Rep. Kathy Castor’s 14th District was redrawn to give Republicans an 11-point advantage, but she won handily (51.2 percent to 45.9 percent) against former state Rep. Dan Beltran. Goofball mostly good-guy Jared Moskowitz (D) held off a challenge from Boca Raton Mayor Scott Singer, and first-time candidate Pia Dandiya, a former high school principal, took a paddle to Republican bidnissman and former Marine Casey Askar in a newly drawn district that went for Trump by 10 points in 2024. The daughter of parents who came to the US from India, she’ll become Florida’s first South Asian member of Congress right when Republicans are whipping up their latest “white genocide” panic, this time against Indian Americans.
And in the fourth newly dummymandered district, the AP has Democratic incumbent Rep. Darren Soto holding on to a narrow lead (50.3 percent to 49.7 percent) ahead of MAGA fuckstick Dan Green, whose chief qualification for Congress seems to be the fact that he was working in the Pentagon when it was hit on 9/11. He went on to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, and spouts the usual line of crap about how he fought “radical extremists overseas” and damned if he’ll “stand by and watch left-wing extremists attack our freedoms,” yadda yadda.
Tennessee Disenfranchised Black Voters And Got No New Votes In Congress
In Tennessee, it looks like the gerrymander worked as planned, sort of. In a fit of open racism, the Lege in May split Memphis apart, dismembering the state’s last remaining Black-majority congressional district. (In 2022, Nashville was split up into three separate districts, too.) After that, national Dems gave substantial fundraising and voter mobilization help to the Democrats running in the rump Memphis districts — Columbia Mayor Chaz Molder in one, and Wonkhero Justin Pearson in the other. Neither was able to get the win, although both lost by very narrow margins.
But in the kind of dummymander surprise you get when you spread one party’s votes too thin, Tennessee will still have one Democrat in its congressional delegation after Democrat Victoria Broderick appears to have knocked out Republican Scott “Abortions for My Mistresses But Not for Thee” DesJarlais in a squeaker.
In the state House, which has run roughshod over any attempts at civilizing Tennessee, Democrats flipped six seats, increasing the number of Dems in the body to 30, but Republicans still have a supermajority with which to continue their fuckery.
Alabama Dems Keep Calm, Carry On, Too
In Alabama, Rep. Shomari Figures held on to the seat he’d just won in 2024 before the state Lege tried to redistrict it for Republicans by 14 friggin’ points. Figures defeated state Rep. Rhett Marques solidly, 58.8 percent to 45.2 percent, in yet another slapdown of a gerrymander aimed at turfing out a Black incumbent. Instead, Figures will return to Congress along with Rep. Terri Sewell of Birmingham, maintaining the George Wallace State’s ratio of five white Republicans and two Black Democrats.
California Reamin’
After meeting Texas’s Trump Gerrymander with a constitutional amendment to temporarily redraw its congressional maps, the Great State of California promptly elected Democrats to all five of the newly created seats, SO THERE. When the temporary strategic defense gerrymander ends following the 2030 Census, California will go back to letting a nonpartisan commission draw voting districts, as is just and proper. You know, assuming MAGA remains buried with garlic sewn into its mouth.
So congratulations to all the Democrats who held on to their seats despite the Trumpfuckery. Now go back to Washington and kick some ass. We’d love to see the new Democratic majority in Congress revive some version of the Freedom to Vote Act, which required redistricting to be nonpartisan and representative of the state population, and banned gerrymandering of congressional districts. With Trump still in office and the filibuster still in place, it would for now only be a “messaging” bill, but it would send a hell of a message: Elect Democrats in 2028 and get a fairer, more small-d democratic post-Trump America.
[Politico / WaPo (gift link) / Atlantic (gift link) / Stateline / NBC News / Carolina Public Press / NPR / KERA / The Hill / Guardian / Al Jazeera / Florida Politics / Tennessean / Tennessee Lookout]
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NO GAS CHAMBER FOR YOU:
@yashar 3m
BREAKING:
California Governor Gavin Newsom is moving to commute the death sentences of all 548 people on California’s death row, replacing them with life in prison without the possibility of parole.
NV - 02 as well. Northern Nevada had NEVER elected a Democrat in that seat…up till now.
YES!