Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.
The California Legislature has approved a special election to redraw congressional district lines. Democrats stand to pick up five seats to offset a recent Texas gerrymander. The war is spreading, but the GOP plans is running into problems.
Republicans appear to have all but abandoned their efforts to defeat a Democratic gerrymander of California’s House districts one week before it goes before voters.
As Democrats pummel the state with Yes on 50 advertising, the Republican side of the battle has gone quiet. Major GOP donors and party leaders have effectively vanished from the front lines.
At the urging of the White House, Republicans have already drawn seven new GOP-leaning House seats via mid-decade redistricting in three states, with more on the way. But the nationwide remapping effort is losing steam, largely due to these state-level Republicans refusing to blink at the Trump team’s threats of primaries. And while cracks are forming in Trump’s strategy, Democrats are waking up to the dangers ahead, POLITICO reported this week.
The few Republicans willing to defy the president constitute a dying breed in a party that’s become solidly MAGA under Trump’s thumb.
“If they want to threaten me with something, I don’t know what it’d be,” Kansas Republican Rep. Mark Schreiber, who is among holdouts in the state, said in an interview. “I’m fine with the stance I’m at.”
As Trump desperately tries to cling to control of Congress for the remainder of his term, he’s leaned heavily on redistricting congressional lines to block Democrats from their coveted takeover of the House. They need to net just three seats to regain a measure of influence in Washington.
But despite support from within Congress and the broader base, Republicans in state houses are showing that Trump and his team cannot coerce veteran local politicians, many of whom are elderly, in safe seats and unconcerned with the national political landscape.
