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TEXAS REPUBLICANS: IT’S ABOUT POWER, AND THEIR RADICAL AGENDA  
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Perry Bacon
August 5, 2025
The New Republic
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_ Of course this gerrymandering plan is about keeping power. But
it’s about keeping power to a specific end: to pass laws people hate
and block ones they want. _

Texas Governor Greg Abbott , Brandon Bell/Getty Images

 

Even if Republicans are driving gerrymandering today, Democrats
certainly did it in the past. Redistricting in the middle of a decade,
as opposed to waiting for the next U.S. census, isn’t totally
unprecedented either. It turns out a precedent for today’s Texas
Republicans was, well, Texas Republicans, who rigged maps in their
favor in 2003
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to win more U.S. House seats the next year.

 
But it is still alarming that Governor Greg Abbott and the state’s
GOP-controlled legislature are attempting to redraw congressional
districts
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ahead of next year’s midterms and threatening to expel from the
legislature Democratic lawmakers who have fled the state
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to stall this redistricting.

The Texas gerrymandering scheme combines two elements of the modern
Republican Party that are eroding American democracy: personalist,
autocratic leadership and a pattern of gaining and wielding power with
little regard for the views of the broader public.

Texas Republicans, already holding 25 of the state’s 38 U.S. House
seats, weren’t really looking to further gerrymander the state.
(Kamala Harris won about 42 percent of the vote in Texas, suggesting
truly fair maps would have Democrats at around 16 seats, not 13.) But
then came orders from the boss. Aides to Donald Trump demanded Texas
redraw its districts, believing that was the surest way to prevent
Republicans from losing control of the U.S. House in next year’s
midterm elections. And this message was not just delivered privately.
An unnamed Trump aide told
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_The New York Times_ in June that “the president would pay close
attention to those in his party who help or hurt” this effort to win
the midterms by any means necessary.

A special session of the legislature was quickly called
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by Abbott. Many Texas Democratic legislators have fled the state,
robbing Republicans of the quorum they need to pass this provision.
But I suspect it will eventually be approved. Republicans would be
favored to win an additional five seats (30 in total
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under the new maps. Those five could really matter when you remember
that Republicans won 220 seats and Democrats 215 in last year’s
elections.

State and federal leaders in each party have pushed gerrymanders in
the past. That’s causing the mainstream media to treat what’s
happening in Texas as perhaps overly aggressively partisanship but not
totally out of bounds. But the context matters.

The conflict between the two parties is more intense than ever. Most
states and even congressional districts are almost always won by the
same party every election these days. The number of voters who swing
between the parties keeps shrinking. Redistricting a few seats in
Texas in 2025 could be the difference between a Republican U.S. House
that lets Trump continue on the path of being the most unrestrained
and powerful president in recent memory and a Democratic House that is
aggressively trying to rein him in.

Perhaps no gerrymander in American history will be as consequential as
this one if it ensures continued Republican control of the House
through the remainder of Trump’s second term.

And while he may not be the only president to have gotten involved in
congressional redistricting, this president getting involved in that
process is particularly worrisome. In chapter 4 of their 2018 book
_How Democracies Die_
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Harvard professors Steven Levitksy and Daniel Ziblatt list strategies
used by autocratic leaders in Argentina, Hungary, and other nations.
Firing civil servants, trying to get either support or neutrality from
powerful institutions and elites, and numerous other tactics used by
Trump in the last six months appear in this chapter.

But ultimately, “to entrench themselves in power, governments must
do more—they must also change the rules of the game,” Levitsky and
Ziblatt write. They then detail how authoritarian parties in Malaysia
and Hungary redrew electoral districts to ensure they stayed in power.

But what’s happening in Texas is troubling beyond how it potentially
helps Trump and feeds his authoritarianism. It shows a Republican
Party that will do anything to gain and keep power—except heed the
public’s demands. This is an approach that Trump has adopted, but it
actually predates him.

In their 2023 book _Tyranny of the Minority_, Levitsky and Ziblatt
explained how the U.S. Senate, the Supreme Court, and other features
of American government were giving outsize power to a Republican Party
that couldn’t win the national popular vote. Republicans had eroded
abortion rights, weakened the Voting Rights Act, and accomplished many
other long-standing conservative goals without much public support or
even passing those policies through Congress.

A year later, though, Trump won the popular vote, becoming the first
Republican to do so since 2004. That silenced the conversation about
Republicans being the minority party and led to some talk that Trump
had a mandate from the public for his agenda.

It’s true that Republicans win the majority of votes in red states
and occasionally in congressional and presidential elections. But even
if Republican governance today isn’t always minority rule, it rarely
reflects the popular will. It’s essentially “rule with only the
amount of public legitimacy and support that is absolutely
necessary.”

n red states, Republicans gerrymander state legislatures to ensure
massive majorities that then pass abortion bans, tax cuts for the
rich, school vouchers, and other policies that polls show the majority
of voters don’t want. When advocacy groups work around the
legislatures and get popular ideas such as paid sick leave passed via
ballot initiative, Republican legislators and GOP governors often
ignore or override those initiatives.

In Washington right now, Republicans currently control the House and
the Senate. But instead of pushing his agenda through Congress, Trump
is laying off federal workers, cutting university funding, and making
countless other moves via aggressive and perhaps unconstitutional uses
of executive power. Trump then bets (usually correctly) that the
unelected, unaccountable Supreme Court will legitimize his actions.
This strategy ignores the public, which would likely balk if Congress
tried to dismantle the Department of Education, as Trump has done on
his own.

Republicans could have tried to pass bills in Congress this year that
helped them win the midterms. Instead, they insisted on pushing
through a deeply unpopular domestic policy bill that cut taxes for the
rich and health care for the poor
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So to ensure victory in the midterms, they want to redraw district
lines in Texas and potentially other states.

Republicans are essentially assuming a public backlash to their
agenda—and trying to change the election map so that they can keep
the House while ignoring voter sentiments and perhaps even while again
losing the popular vote.

When you combine the presence of Trump and the Republican Party’s
long-standing aversion to honoring the public’s desires, what’s
happening in Texas isn’t just a story of crazy legislators or
hyperpartisan politics. It’s a party that doesn’t care what the
public wants, led by a person who only cares about what he wants. This
is how democracy is dying.

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Perry Bacon is a staff writer at _The New Republic_.

* Texas Politics; Gerrymandering; Greg Abbott; Authoritarianism;
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