The Dummymander: A Manifestation of Bad Faith Politics

Internal Republican polling for the 2026 midterms must be a fucking nightmare.

The right wing is wailing online and offline about Democrats' push to redistrict California and possibly New York to counter Texas' planned gerrymander on top of its current gerrymander to squeeze another five House seats for the anti-constitutionalist GOP. The right-wing hollering about Democrats playing by the new rules of this awful little game – as I wrote the other day – is proof it's a worthwhile strategy if Democrats are finally serious about winning and wielding power.

The president says his cult-of-personality party is "entitled" to another five congressional seats because he did well with Texas Latinos in 2024. Big Boy hasn't taken a peak at how Latinos see him today.

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Everything points to Republicans knowing they're facing an electoral bloodbath in 2026, which would be no different than the 2018 sweep election. First, the president demanded Greg Abbott further erode Black and Latino representation in Texas. Then JD Vance scurried to Indiana to talk with its governor about doing yet another gerrymander to get another seat or two if things break right for the American fascist movement in November 2026. Missouri lawmakers are also making noise about toying with ways to carve up districts with large populations of color in search of another couple House seats. Ohio Republicans could get back to the distorted, racist gerrymanders they had before the 2024 elections, perhaps the most galling gerrymander on record.

They're panicked, they're flailing, and all their plotting might be for nothing. Even worse for a Republican Party that has seen its member dressed down in every public venue since February, further gerrymandering their states could result in what's known as a dummymander, a funny word and an even funnier outcome.

Election data analysts have tested whether a new gerrymander of Texas House districts would guarantee success for the GOP and the answer is, well, no. The state's current unfair maps have given Texas Republicans a 25-13 edge in House seats. The idea behind the dummymander is that a party can only fuck up districts so much before they start accidentally making other districts a little more competitive and susceptible to the opposition party in a sweep election cycle – like the one we might see next year. Texas Republicans might think they're creating five new GOP seats in a normal election year; what they might be doing is creating a few more Democratic seats if voters reject Republicans the way they have every time Trump – that magical being, that American talisman – is not atop the ballot.

A party can only cheat so much with the way it creates House districts. There's only so much juice to squeeze, and Republicans have squeezed every goddamn drop out of their states over the past twenty years or so. Democrats, meanwhile, haven't even begun to squeeze. Illinois Governor JB Pritzer and other members of the Fight Caucus are begging their fellow elected Democratic leaders to squeeze and squeeze now and squeeze hard. There are a lot of Republican districts to destroy and not much time to do it.

Squeeze, you idiots. Squeeze.

The right's reaction to Democrats playing their gerrymandering game and Republicans' willingness to create electoral maps so convoluted and unfair that they could actually backfire and cost them House seats exposes their bad faith around what we used to call redistricting. If they were truly aghast at Gavin Newsom and other Democratic governors reshaping districts to boot Republicans hanging on for dear life, they would accept Democrats' invitation to the negotiation table and start talks about independent redistricting commissions that have proven popular and successful in some so-called swing states like Michigan. If Vance and Mike Johnson and California Republicans were – in good faith – horrified by Newsom's proposal (which, happily, has the support of Democratic leaders in the state assembly), they would say fine, you get your way, we'll do the independent commission thing and come up with fair maps approved by experts and judges and anyone else you want to involve in the process un un-fucking state maps. Newsom, after all, said he would only go forward with the California gerrymander if Texas followed through with theirs. He has said, rightly, that Democratic governors have been left with no choice as the constitutional order falls to pieces (thanks largely to the captured Supreme Court).

But no. Republicans were never going to negotiate an end to this gerrymander nuclear arms race because they do not value fairness and are intent on undermining small-d democratic self rule in the United States. Even when judges have demanded Republican-held legislatures redraw maps, they have either refused or come back with maps that are somehow even more fucked. Their whining about Newsom's plans were, like everything else they do, in bad faith. Because they hate the United States – they hate its founding documents, they hate its progress, they certainly hate its people. And they know in the grist of their souls that fair maps across the country would make them a permanent minority in the House of Representatives. Why else would the reddest states in the country eliminate all competitive House districts, as we've seen in the South? Seventy-five of 111 southern districts in 2024 were decided in favor of Republican candidates by eye-watering margins of 25 points or more, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. That's by design. That was the plan, and it's worked beautifully.

The White House is pushing for the Texas GOP to steal another handful of seats based on Trump's aforementioned, inexplicable success with Latino voters in the state nine months ago. The whole plot is based on that support holding up after Trump's vicious authoritarian regime has racially profiled Latinos across the country, snatching legal immigrants, undocumented people, and American citizens from courthouses and cars and grocery stores, stripping them of their constitutional rights, and shipping them to concentration camps in third world nations and out own lawless dictatorship known as Florida. Regime officials have obsessively posted online and talked on TV about the dangers of what they call Latino gang members. Stephen Miller and his toadies have used every wildly racist trope imaginable to demonize Latinos in the United States. When a group of men were recently arrested in Alabama for a series of heinous crimes, including human trafficking and child abuse, the regime highlighted the only Latino man involved in the crimes. I guess this shouldn't be surprising considering the explicitly fascist messaging the regime has used on the X platform.

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They have created a environment of total fear for anyone in the US who might just be mistaken for Latino. People aren't going to work or school or church because they fear being kidnapped by the regime's secret police, operating outside the law.

It's in this environment that Trump and his allies believe his support among Latinos will stay strong in 2026 and beyond. It's certainly a theory. A bad one, but one nonetheless.

The potential for a dummymander in Texas and other Republican-dominated states that in no way resemble democracies should offer us a little hope if or when Republican officials get their way and deliver new gerrymanders to the mad king, who knows his shit is cooked if Democrats take Congress next year. Combine one or two dummymanders with legit gerrymanders in blue states and you might have a cushy Democratic House majority come January 2027. Republicans are seeing something in early polling and it's clearly scaring the shit out of them. The mander could be very dumb come 2026.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.