Democrats Might Finally Be Tired Of Losing
Hardball tactics have to be met with hardball tactics, no matter what the norms adorers say
Those who live to defend the rotting corpse of American political norms say gerrymandering is a race to the bottom.
Well, let’s race.
These norms respecters, or institutional maximalists, or whatever you want to call them, are panicked about elected Democrats considering extreme, Republican-style gerrymanders to prevent Republicans from once again stealing the House of Representatives. High-profile Democrats like Gavin Newsom and norms-adjacent representatives like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut – finally, at long last – are all in on creating electoral maps that make it nearly impossible for Republicans who compete in blue states.
Fire might finally be fought with fire and the norms warriors are losing their minds.
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Gathered around the stinking remains of what was once our political norms, telling anyone who will listen that the body can be reanimated if we only try – just a few more volts of electricity – the folks who have tricked themselves into believing we can return to a pre-Trump normal seem unmoved that the current House majority is a direct byproduct of the GOP’s blatantly unconstitutional and discriminatory gerrymanders created in a lab to wash away the concept of One Person, One Vote. Various Republican gerrymanders in red states over the past fifteen years netted the party more than twenty House seats in the 2024 election, enough to give them a tiny majority that has been brutally whipped into submission in ways that make one wonder just how compromised they are.
Without those Republican gerrymanders, there is no Big Beautiful Bill, no barbaric gutting of Medicaid, no tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy, no slashing of basic social safety net measures, no holes in the bellies of poor children, no young folks who can no longer afford higher education, no acceleration of the climate’s collapse, no destruction of the nation's public lands. Republicans like to win, so they cheat, because if you’re not cheating, you’re not really trying.
Denny Carter
This Democratic dalliance with gerrymandering comes as Republicans in Texas – a state that in no way resembles a representative democracy – try to further fuck their already fucked electoral maps to squeeze out five more GOP seats for the 2026 midterms, which are sure to be a bloodbath for the party intentionally destroying the country’s capacity to govern and manage itself. This new Texas gerrymander probably won’t be enough to prevent a Democratic House majority come 2027, but that shouldn’t matter. What matters is Republican-held states – authoritarian petri dishes –are disenfranchising communities of color by drawing the most absurd electoral maps anyone has ever seen. Democrats would have to win the 2026 midterm election by upwards of fifteen points to overcome the new Texas gerrymanders, designed to withstand the power of public opinion.
There’s no way to stop those maps from implementation since far-right Supreme Court justices have said (in bad faith) that there’s nothing they can do about politicians carefully and strategically destroying the voting rights of black and brown and poor Americans.
“We want to play the game on the terms where everybody is playing by the same set of rules,” Newsom said in announcing his push to crush California’s Republican House representation. “That’s no longer the case. We have to disenthrall ourselves that that’s the case. Not with Donald Trump. The game has changed. This is a five-alarm fire for democracy in the United States of America.”
The plan is to hold a referendum in November asking Californians if district drawing powers could be returned to the state legislature after voters in 2008 approved an independent redistricting commission. This would be a temporary move that would expire in 2030. The California referendum is likely to be close: 52 percent of poll respondents said they would approve the measure, 41 percent said no, and 7 percent are undecided. The referendum, according to early wording considered for the measure, would "retain California's original congressional district maps if Texas or other states also retain their original district maps."
Newsom, for better or worse – better, I think – has normalized the idea of fighting gerrymanders with more gerrymanders until Republicans are ready to end their war on American democracy and discuss fair electoral maps. “I think there’s a growing recognition in this country … that de facto the Trump presidency ends in November of next year, if the American people are given a fair chance, and a voice, and a choice. The president recognizes that so he wants to rig the election.”
With no 2026 path to electoral fairness, Newsom’s proposal – also being considered in New York by Governor Kathy Hochul – is the only way to stop that rigging. Newsom speaks for a lot of Americans who have had enough after watching Republicans steal at least one presidential election, the Supreme Court majority, and at least two House majorities this century.
That Newsom is leading the Democrats’ gerrymander charge is tough to celebrate considering he was one of the prominent Democrats who gave into the entirely fictitious idea that the 2024 election marked an irreversible cultural turn toward the right after people of color and queer folks were given (temporary) platforms during the good old woke days of 2020-2022. Before Newsom immediately boosted his anti-work bonafides, he had always struck me as one of the only big-time Democrats crazy enough to engage in all-out war with a radicalized Republican Party that no longer recognizes constitutional limitations on its power. Newsom, who looks like American Psycho in a Cialis ad, has always operated like a Republican, with the ends always justifying the means. It’s an approach I’ve quietly wanted for some time, and if polling is any indication, I’m not alone.
New polling from the Associated Press finds about one-third of registered Democrats describing their party negatively in open-ended questions. Words like “weak,” “apathetic,” and “disorganized” were common when Democrats were asked about how their party has responded to the nation’s first mad king and his anti-constitutionalist court jesters running the country via meme.
“They’re spineless,” Cathia Krehbiel, a 48-year-old Democrat from Iowa, said of the party. Cathia is right. Listen to Cathia. People desperate for a pro-democracy movement to counter the authoritarianism leaking into every crevice of American life want hardball tactics to be met with hardball tactics. We’re so very tired of being smacked in the face with a hammer and being told there’s nothing anyone can do about the hammer that’s crushing your cheekbones and your jaw and your teeth. We’re bloodied and furious and we want our own hammer, so to speak.
The hammer to the face has become intolerable. There are no more bones to break.
"Republicans," as CNN data analyst Harry Enten said, "are playing hardball at this particular point. And right now it seems to me that Democrats are actually playing close to little league peewee."
There are, thankfully, elected Democrats who understand the contours and complications of the competitive authoritarian system in which we live today. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, among the leaders of what might be called the Fight Caucus, is one of the Democrats who gets it. In what could (easily) be interpreted as a sign that the United States is balkanizing during this stretch of authoritarian upheaval, Pritzker is safeguarding Texas Democratic lawmakers who fled the state to stop Republicans from approving the maximally fucked electoral maps. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has pledged to send cops to arrest the fleeing Democrats; Pritzker has responded by urging Patrick and Governor Greg Abbott to bring it the fuck on.
"We Democrats can't live by the old rules," Pritzker said, urging every Democratic governor to gerrymander their respective states. "We have to make choices right now on whether you're going to be on Team Fight or Team Cave. ... We've gotta react and fight."
Back in November 2022, after Democrats had staved off what was supposed to be a red wave election, I wrote through gritted teeth about how Democrats and so-called independent voters – people with no fixed principles who enjoy feeling above it all – value the concept of fairness in politics. Fair maps designed and approved by an independent commission in Michigan, after all, led the first Democratic Michigan legislative majority in generations. The GOP cheating undone, Michigan Democrats swept to power and quickly approved a series of progressive policies that had had no oxygen under Republican control.
Denny Carter
What Michigan Democrats did not consider – at least not publicly – was gerrymandering the shit out of the state as soon as they won the state house and state senate. That was the move, as dishonest as it would have been after touting independence in the creation of the electoral maps that led to their historic victory. They should have immediately and without hesitation redrawn the maps to give Democratic candidates permanent advantages in the state legislature and in the U.S. House of Representatives. Send the message to Republicans, and be clear about it: This is what you wanted. You practically begged for it. You’ll never win here again.
It’s what Republicans would have done – it’s what they did in Iowa and Wisconsin and Ohio and Florida. If we want Democrats to fight, there is no better way than to box the opposition out of power until they’re ready and willing to come to the table for good-faith negotiations on crafting the legitimate districts that dominated before Republicans had their entire asses handed to them in 2008 and abandoned any and all pretenses of a small-d democratic organization.
How do I know gerrymandering New York and California and other blue states is the right strategy in opposing competitive authoritarianism? It’s not so much the numbers – which are downright delightful – but the reaction from high-ranking Republicans who have grown accustomed to wielding the hammer against their defenseless opponents.
JD Vance and other leading Republicans have thrown a week-long temper tantrum at the mere suggestion that their House representation might be diluted in states controlled by Democrats. This was never part of the plan. Elected Democrats were to forever take the hammer to the face and ask for more, to keep spitting blood and abiding by the eviscerated norms, and keep operating in an entirely different political reality while their opponents took control one bloody inch at a time until there was nothing left to have.
The right wing's reaction to Newsom's gerrymandering war has been one of shock tinged with panic. Democrats were never supposed to wake up to the coup against the republic, they were never supposed to see what was really happening, the Republican plan – so public, so outrageously evident – to capture every major institution until Democrats existed in name only. It's been that way in the states for some time, and national Democrats seemed not to care for fear of violating long-dead norms and offending Aaron Sorkin. President Bartlett wouldn't go along with this gerrymander shit.
That's exactly why it has to be done. The elections analysts and institutionalists begging Newsom to reconsider, standing guard over the vanishing remains of American political norms, have to be sidelined, maybe permanently. They lost. They were wrong in their predictions that Democrats had a way back to pre-Trump America. It was a catastrophic prediction, one that cost us a decade. The only path toward fairness today is cheating, stopping the next hammer blow and saying no more.
Ignore the blathering superego at the end of history. It's talking nonsense.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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