Democrats are torn between their long-standing wish for independent redistricting commissions and wanting to play the same redistricting game as Republicans.
The issue is that those are mutually exclusive desires.
“It’s not the way we should be doing it,” Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont told NOTUS of Democrats’ efforts to redistrict blue states in response to Republicans. But when “the president decided to do the redistricting in Texas, he gave us no option but to fight fire with fire.”
“It’s not good for democracy, and it’s just another indication of all the norms collapsing,” Welch said. Still, he argued, “This is bad in the long run, but necessary in the short run.”
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In Virginia, one of the states that is trying to draw Democratic-friendly seats in response to Republican efforts to keep their majority in the House of Representatives, Rep. James Walkinshaw said that Democrats “have to pursue every legal avenue.”
“I’m someone who supports nonpartisan redistricting,” Walkinshaw told NOTUS. “Unfortunately, with Donald Trump commanding Republicans in red states to try to change their maps in the middle of the cycle because he feels he’s losing the midterm elections, it’s the reality that states where Democrats have the ability to keep that option on the table, we have to do something.”
That’s the conclusion many in the party have come to: Democrats need to lock in and pick up seats, or face an election landscape in which they’re made irrelevant.
“I want to see every Democratic governor in this country getting out of bed and eating glass and basically saying, if you’re not willing to come to the table for federal, nonpartisan redistricting committees, we are going to redistrict you into oblivion,” said the Texas Democratic Party’s chair, Kendall Scudder.
“And the reason that I want them to do that is not because I think redistricting is good or this gerrymandering is good; I think it is very, very bad. But it’s because if Democrats continue to operate by a separate set of rules than Republicans, then we’re going to continue to get shellacked across the board,” Scudder said.
Republicans in several states, including Texas, Missouri, Indiana and North Carolina, have taken steps to shift congressional district maps to help their party pick up seats. Democrats have struggled with how to respond, but now have some states lining up to try to pick up seats ahead of 2026.
In California, voters will decide on Proposition 50 on Nov. 4, a ballot initiative which has the potential to net Democrats five more House seats in the midterm elections. On Monday, Virginia lawmakers voted to consider an amendment focused on redistricting, which could lead to a gain of as many as three seats. And on Tuesday morning, Illinois congressional Democrats released a statement urging their state Legislature to consider redrawing congressional lines.
One of the states that national Democrats have been pushing to get involved is Maryland. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland argued that each state must consider its own “costs and benefits” of wading into the redistricting battle.
“Our party is unified around the proposition that it’s an ethical, moral and political imperative to fight back against the Texas extreme gerrymander sequence that has been unleashed here by Republicans. The question in every Democratic legislature, including Maryland, is basically a tactical one involving what are the costs and the benefits of going forward, and I think that’s what the Legislature is looking at now. So I believe the wheel is still in the spin.”
“We have an obligation to act, but there’s a hard factor of political math now: The Republicans control a lot more state legislatures than we do,” Raskin went on. “So they’re in a position to do a lot more gerrymandering than us.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been campaigning to help push for redistricting, recently traveling to California and Illinois to make the case for it.
“It’s an all-hands-on-deck effort across the country, and we will continue to forcefully push back against Republican efforts to gerrymander the congressional map,” Jeffries told NOTUS on Tuesday.
But even in those states, where the pathway to seats is most clear, there has been hand-wringing. In California, Democrats worried that voters would balk at taking power away from an independent commission, and made a point of creating a proposal that would return power to it in 2030.
For Rep. Julia Brownley, measures like Proposition 50 are some of the “only tools” Democrats have left, despite concerns.
“We are in a place today where it is now or never in terms of saving our democracy, and this is one of the only tools in our toolbox right now to win in 2026 and then to go on to win in 2028. For me, it’s that simple,” Brownley told NOTUS. “I hope the rest of the states are doing the best that they can do to draw the lines as fairly as possible, but if we can eke out a Democratic seat in one state or the next, we need all of that.”
And in Illinois, legislators have expressed concern that the revised maps could dilute the voting power of Black communities in the state. But the pressure is mounting for the state to also jump in the fray.
“I believe we should have fair math; gerrymandering doesn’t help the broader public,” Rep. Brad Schneider of Illinois told NOTUS. “But I also believe that Republicans are trying to flip seats everywhere they can, under any circumstance they can, and we need to fight fire with fire.”
California’s ballot initiative has become a crucial test case for Democrats both in the state and nationally. National figures are tracking it carefully as a potential blueprint.
“It’s pretty clear that Prop 50 was put on the ballot to get back the five seats that Texas stole. Other states are doing redistricting action now,” Rep. Mike Thompson of California, who spent part of his weekend campaigning for Proposition 50, told NOTUS. “I would prefer that we had commissions in every state and they put an end to the redistricting, especially mid-decade redistricting.”
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This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and NewsWell, home of Times of San Diego and Stocktonia.
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