hrough a Truth Social post dated Aug. 20, 2025, at 11:47 p.m., President Donald J. Trump celebrated Texas picking up five additional Congressional seats and suggested redistricting and ending mail-in voting would pick up 100 seats for Republicans in the 2026 mid-term elections. Instead of empowering voters to decide who represents them, the U.S. Department of Justice accused the State of Texas of unconstitutional race-based congressional districts in Districts 9, 19, 29 and 33 in a letter dated July 7, 2025 with a requested response by July 7, 2025.

In response to what happened in Texas and Governor Gavin Newsom’s Prop 50 to replicate what happened in Texas in the Democratic-controlled California legislature, former President Barack Obama shared “if Democrats “don’t respond effectively, then this White House and Republican-controlled state governments all across the country, they will not stop, because they do not appear to believe in this idea of an inclusive, expansive democracy.”

Prop 50 in California, also known as the Election Rigging Response Act “authorizes temporary changes to congressional district maps in response to Texas’ partisan redistricting.” In reading the Official Voter Information Guide for California, the argument for supporting this proposal was “to counter Donald Trump’s scheme to rig next year’s (2026) congressional election and reaffirms California’s commitment to independent, nonpartisan redistricting after the next census.”

Were there downsides to Prop 50? Sure, if, according to the Official Voter Information Guide one was interested in “dismantling safeguards that keep elections fair, remov[ing] requirements to keep local communities together, and eliminat[ing] voter protections that ban maps designed to favor political parties.” According to the California Secretary of State’s website, Prop 50 passed 7,453,339 to 4,116,998.

Instead of limiting the manipulative gerrymandering tools of packing and cracking to create favorable legislative districts once every 10 years, political parties are taking advantage of the legal and unusual opportunity to redistrict to impact mid-term elections for partisan gain. In essence, they are gerrymandering democracy at the expense of engaging and winning voters through their public policy platforms.

In addition to Texas and California, Missouri, Ohio and North Carolina have enacted partisan maps to gain an advantage for the 2026 congressional elections to gerrymander democracy. However, The Indiana State Senate, where the Republicans hold a supermajority, rejected a plan that would have fractured the black community in Indianapolis to increase more congressional districts for Indiana.

“Competition is healthy my friends,” said Indiana State Senator Fady Qaddoura. “Any political party on earth that cannot run and win based on the merit of its ideas is unworthy of governing.”