The rumble that has been generated in Texas with 51 Democrats at the escape and the Republicans shouting their detention is due to a relatively common practice in the United States: the gerrymandering. This is the redesign of the electoral districts in order to benefit one of the matches. In the case of Texas, the Republicans have presented a proposal that could seal Donald Trump's control over Congress in the 2026 elections. Of achieving it, the last hope of the Democrats would vain to effectively stop the president's agenda effectively before the 2028 elections.
Since the Republican returned to power on January 20, he has relentlessly deployed his agenda because he enjoys the so -called TRIFECTA: Trump controls the Executive, the Legislative and has a Supreme Court of conservative majority. During these six months, the judicial route has been the only resource that Democrats and activists have had to stand up to the Republican agenda. And it is expected to be so until at least 2026, when the legislative elections will take place.
Republicans currently control Congress thanks to a very tight majority in a country where there is no mandatory vote discipline for legislative members. In the camera of the representatives, their domain depends only on five seats and in the Senate it is supported thanks to six. With these numbers, the Democrats focus all their energies on the elections next year, where the 435 lower house seats and one third of the upper house (35) will be at stake.
The objective of the Democrats is to recover at least the control of the House of the representatives, so that they could avoid policies such as the newly approved fiscal plan: the Big Beautiful Bill. This standard, which passed with difficulty the voting of the Congress, will extend the tax cuts approved by Trump in 2017 at the expense of leaving some 11 million Americans without medical coverage, among other things.
The urgency for Democrats to recover at least one chamber of the Legislative is even greater after the Supreme Judgment in June that limits the power of federal judges. The High Court determined that magistrates cannot issue judicial blockages nationwide. So far, the main firewall in its possession have been these precautionary suspensions nationwide. This allowed a single judge of a state to block an executive order throughout the country. Now, at the outset, you can only do it within its own state and to have a national scope it will be necessary to follow more complex roads through collective demands.
In this context, where Trump has already won the first pulse to the Judiciary, the 2026 medium mandate elections are even more crucial for both parties. For Republicans it is necessary to strengthen its majority to allow the president to display his agenda without problems. For Democrats it is the only letter they have left to recover some margin and exercise a minimum opponent against a president who has already shown several authoritarian tics.
Five crucial seats in Texas
The redesign of the Texas electoral districts that the Republicans have presented would subdue five seats from the Democrats to add them to their ranks by introducing territories with broad republican support in electoral districts with Democratic majority (and who currently have a Democratic representative in Congress). This reconfiguration would further make the Democrats snatch Trump the legislative control, so they are going until the end with their opposition. What has resulted in a escape from Democrats to other friends to make sure that the new electoral map cannot be voted.
The reform of Texan Republicans, which is clearly a case of gerrymanderinga priori is not illegal. Although it has been proposed outside the ordinary cycle of each decade, which links the update of the electoral map to a new census of the population, and after numerous pressures by Trump to the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, to carry out the redistribution.
The Constitution establishes that every ten years – when the census of a State is renewed – the map of the electoral districts must be reviewed so that they faithfully represent the population. The problem comes when each party tries to redesign these districts in the most convenient way to facilitate their victory. The first time this situation occurred was in 1812, when the governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, redrawed the districts of his state, blatantly favoring his party. The case was so scandalous that he won satirical vignettes and the play was baptized with his last name: gerrymandering.
Since then, both Republicans and Democrats have been using this practice to get electoral slice. In 2019 a resolution of the Supreme on a case of gerrymandering In North Carolina, it concluded that the judges have no authority to decide when a partisan use of the redesign of the electoral districts goes too far. The president of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, wrote: “The Constitution does not provide an objective measure to assess whether a map of districts treats a political party fairly.”
The only limitation known to this practice was a case of 2023 in Alabama where the Supreme Court concluded that the redesign of the electoral map violated the Electoral Rights Law by diminishing the vote power of the black population.
Historically, Republicans have always controlled the redesign of the electoral map of more states than the Democrats. An analysis of Associated Press of the 2010 Census revealed that, in that decade, the Republicans had a greater political advantage in more states than the one that had had either party in the last 50 years.
In fact, given the threat that Texas applies these changes, California Democrats have already warned that they will take similar actions in the redesign of their districts to also favor their party and thus compensate, despite the fact that the State itself, as well as the New York Democrat, endowed with mechanisms to avoid redesign with clear political intentionality. The proposal that is being considered to snatch five seats from the Republicans in the state of the west coast.
