The Redistricting Whoopsie

by Rick Wilson

In related news, the Red Court was hoisted by its own legal petard this week. They defended the Texas gerrymander as political and not racial, saying that made it legal.

While the Texas gerrymander was racial, the California map is political, and overtly so. So is Virginia’s new proposed map. The brilliant GOP masterminds will have a net loss of almost 10 seats because of the Texas whoopsie.

So it turns out that playing fuck-you hardball pays off.

Imagine that.

For us map-staring, precinct-obsessed lunatics, we’ve reached the part of the cycle where the Texas GOP’s “brilliant” plan to gerrymander their way into a permanent House majority has officially transitioned from a masterstroke to a multi-car pileup in slow motion.

Back in the Before Times of 2025, when the 47th President decided he needed five more seats from the Lone Star State because Chris LaCivita and Tony the Pollster were, even then, fearful of danger on the road ahead, the brain trust in Austin dutifully got to work. They took a chainsaw to the maps, slicing up communities with the surgical grace of a drunken butcher. They thought they were building a fortress; instead, they built a demographic electric chair.

Here is why this is blowing up in their faces like a cheap cigar. First, they triggered a Gerrymander Arms Race. California looked at Texas’s mid-decade power grab and said, “Hold my kombucha.”

By passing Proposition 50, Gavin Newsom played hardball, essentially neutralizing every single gain the Texas GOP squeezed out. For every seat Texas tried to steal, California took one back. It’s a zero-sum game played with the lives of voters, and the MAGA party lost.

But the real disaster is internal. As Lincoln Project co-founder and legendary GOP strategist Mike Madrid has been screaming into the void for years, the Republican Party is operating on a 1990s understanding of Latino voters. Madrid notes that while the GOP is high on their own supply, convinced that every Hispanic voter who voted for Trump in 2024 is a fully converted MAGA acolyte, the reality is far more wobbly.

Madrid’s point is simple: Demographics aren’t destiny, but math is. By “packing and cracking” Latino districts to create “safe” GOP seats, Republicans have actually made themselves more vulnerable to shifts in suburban sentiment. They’ve traded long-term stability for short-term Trumpian vanity.

Texas GOPers banked on 2024-level margins among Latinos holding forever. If those numbers soften even by 3%, those “new” GOP districts become overnight traps…and the numbers are deadly.

In places like the DFW Metroplex, the MAGA GOP is losing the college-educated voters it used to rely on. By stretching those districts into rural counties to compensate, they’ve created sprawling, unmanageable territories that are one “bad candidate” away from flipping.

The Texas GOP tried to play God with the census, and they ended up proving Mike Madrid right: you can’t map your way out of a brand problem. They’ve spent millions in legal fees and political capital only to end up in a stalemate with Hakeem Jeffries’s favorites in California.

It’s not a masterstroke; it’s a suicide pact in a Stetson. They’re fighting the last war with maps that were obsolete the moment ICE started its reign of terror.

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Sia: It looks bad for the GOP even without this potentially major whoopsie! The gloves are off and some of the younger, more vocal DEMs are no longer worrying about the high road because all they reap are losses against a party that embraces MAGA tactics.

Let the GOP reap what they've sown in allowing trump free reign to destroy this country. Most Americans, on all sides, want a FREE America.