Now Is The Time To Maximize Republicans' Political Pain
It shouldn't matter that the Texas gerrymander might be dead. Democrats have to stay on offense.
A half century of the American right wing dismantling representative democracy – sometimes incrementally, sometimes with big, bloody swings at the motionless husk of our institutions – has left pro-democracy folks no choice but to hurry toward rock bottom.
A two-party system in which one party has hardened into something that has no place whatsoever in a functional republic doesn’t offer much in the way of options when it comes to beating back authoritarianism and rebuilding all we’ve lost over these many decades, and especially over these past ten months of government destruction. This is the whole idea behind a pro-democracy back burn, a fight-fire-with-fire approach to ensuring a radicalized Republican Party can no longer use democracy against itself with the political bad faith it wields so naturally.
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It’s why elected Democrats don’t really have a choice today in the gerrymandering wars: They have to push forward with carving up U.S. House of Representatives districts even after a Trump-appointed judge struck down Texas’ gerrymandered 2026 maps as the most racist shit he’d ever seen.
Democrats’ initial reaction to Republicans going nuclear with their gerrymandering was to play defense: California Democrats pushed a ballot measure, backed by avowed institutionalists like Barack Obama, that would add five or six Democrats to the House. Then Virginia Dems committed to destroying safe GOP seats. New York Democrats might do the same. Maybe Maryland will join this pro-democracy charge and boot traitorous insurrectionist Andy Harris from his comfy House seat. This has all been very nice and good to see if you have any interest in beating back the one-party state that has been the Republican Party’s goal for at least fifteen years, since they stopped with the small-d democratic niceties following the 2010 midterm elections.
Denny Carter
Democrats, I hope, will learn that they can play offense if they choose to play offense over the next year. And they can do just that if they simply ignore the court ruling against the Texas gerrymander and keep going in their defense of the country. It’s even more important now that Democratic-majority state legislatures go full bore with unfair districts, for fairness has no place here anymore. It shouldn’t matter that Texas Republicans – after sending the cops to arrest the state’s Democratic lawmakers – tried to steal the House majority with a map so wildly racist that it may have qualified as a so-called dummymander, unless you believe the 2024 Trump electorate is a permanent one (it's not).
The country’s descent into competitive authoritarianism calls for uncomfortable solutions to intolerable problems. Democrats implementing extreme gerrymanders in states they control, I think, is comparable to an addict hitting rock bottom. We tried to function for a while with Republicans gaining a couple House seats here and there via racist electoral maps made possible by the captured, deeply compromised institution that is the Supreme Court. No more half measures can save us. Democrats cannot appease Republicans forever. This is no game.
People only change their minds when the pain of not changing surpasses the pain of changing. Republicans have to be made to feel extraordinary political pain if they are to cry uncle and say enough, please stop, we’re ready to talk about the independent redistricting our opponents have wanted for so many years (and voters have wanted in many purple states). They have to be turned into nothing more than a regional party that can't compete in blue and purple states before they have their come-to-independent-redistricting-loving Jesus moment.
Elected Democrats – if they want to come out of this authoritarian nightmare one day – have no choice but to make Republicans squeal with political agony. Every elected Democrat needs to follow the lead of Virginia Senate President Louise Lucas, who takes great pleasure in the prospect of fucking over her state’s Republican representatives via gerrymander. Lucas believes – correctly, I think – that her party can destroy the opposition with their own weapons. Lucas knows her opponents will refuse to stop this anti-democracy gerrymandering war until the political pain is too much to bear. She appears ready to explore Republicans’ pain tolerance.
Hellraiser’s Pinhead nods with approval.
Democrats Are Looking Powerfully Into Power
I understand that California’s Prop 50 was designed to counter the seats Texas Republicans would gain with their new Jim Crow maps. I get that Gavin Newsom and the state’s Democratic leaders said they would not have taken this path if their hand had not been forced by an opposition beholden to a strongman who recognizes no limits on his power, and who asked them to cheat and retain the House majority.
That Prop 50 passed with a two-thirds majority speaks to the veracious appetite of pro-democracy voters. There was an urgency in the run-up to the 2025 off-year elections that I haven’t seen since the 2006 midterms, though back then – with anger against the failed Bush administration boiling over – it did not feel like American democracy was at stake. People were mostly mad at the dummy failson in the White House. That urgency can be seen in the Trump electorate of 2024 coming apart at the seams, with Latinos and young folks fleeing the Republican Party in New Jersey and Virginia this month. The same thing unfolded in California, where Democratic support among zoomers and Latinos voters returned to 2020 levels. Support for Prop 50 in California counties with larger Latino populations was stronger than the vote for Kamala Harris in 2024.
Permission to counter the Republican democracy ratfucking machine was given to California Dems with something close to glee. Fuck these guys, California voters said, let’s get to winning. It’s quite the turn for a party that does not usually value winning or the power that comes with winning.
Denny Carter
It calls to mind Martin Luther King, Jr.'s musings on political power: "Power without love is reckless and abusive," he said, all but begging American liberals to stop cowering before the forces of segregation, "and love without power is sentimental and anemic. "Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
Californians who backed Prop 50 seemed to understand the end goal of ratcheting up the gerrymandering wars: Huge majorities of Prop 50 backers supported the state's independent redistricting commission and wanted to give power back to that commission one day. "If Prop 50 had involved a permanent end to the commission—instead of a temporary pause in response to the partisan redistricting in Texas—it might have had a much harder road to victory," according to an analysis from the Public Policy Institute of California.
Gerrymandered House districts in blue states and the disastrous legal fate of the Texas gerrymander, along with a voting population that has discovered that the stove was in fact hot could (should) combine for an historic wipeout in the 2026 midterms – unless the doomers are correct and the regime will somehow end all elections in the US.
Combine this with that and man … total landslide/wipeout situation for Republicans
— Denny Carter (@dennycarter.bsky.social) 2025-11-20T22:54:36.538Z
Democrats have every reason to push gerrymanders as hard and fast as they can over the next year. Not only can they counterbalance the already-existing Republican gerrymanders that turned Democrats' 2018 midterm blowout win into something less dramatic; they can also create durable House majorities that won't vanish the minute one of our fascist tech demigods decides to use his algorithm to advance the Republican cause. Enough redistricting in blue states in 2025 can all but ensure a Democratic majority that lasts into 2028 and 2030. Imagine that.
Let's not be naive about the Supreme Court's role in all this. Let's not pretend that John Roberts and his anti-constitutionalist court majority won't at least toy with the notion of intervening and ensuring Texas Republicans can box out Democratic House representation with districts that dilute the power of black and brown people. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has already appealed the court ruling against the racist maps, saying Texas Republicans have every right to be racist with their map drawing because the Roberts Court has said (in bad faith) that there's simply nothing the Court can do clear violations of the Voting Rights Act, landmark legislation the Court's right wingers are about eviscerate under the (bad faith) logic that systemic racism in the US is over.
Democratic leaders in bright blue states should operate under the assumption that Roberts and Alito and Thomas will see the GOP bat signal and get off their asses to make things right for Big Daddy, who they live to serve. These are the same people who granted kinglike power to Large Father when he faced the real prospect of prison. These are the same black-pilled people who supported the 2021 attempt to overthrow the United States government, and who do not see Democrats as legitimate leaders of the country.
I would guess Alito and Thomas and the rest are well aware of the tantrum thrown by a Reagan-appointed Texas judge who lambasted the Trump-appointed judge who ruled against the Texas maps as a left-wing activist operating from the bench. The foundation for their interference has been laid.
It's not in liberals' nature to turn the pain dial up to 11 for their opponents. Liberals want to get along, they want everyone to be rational actors. There has always been a hope among the Democratic Party's largely out-of-touch elites and large swaths of the rank-and-file that Republicans' fascist fever would eventually break and everyone could get back to technocratic management of a nation in decline. Thankfully there is no going back. Making it (almost) impossible for Republicans to win House seats in blue states is the one sure path to rock fucking bottom, and to see how much political agony Republicans can handle before they're ready to talk about fairness and the restoration of a functional democracy in the US.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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