The Democrats Are Blowing a Big Opportunity Right Now

Speaking to CNBC’s Squawk Box on Tuesday, President Donald Trump insisted that the current congressional map must change. “I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know,” Trump said, “and we are entitled to five more seats.” Trump did get the most votes in Texas history in the 2024 election, though that hardly matters given that Texas is consistently one of the fastest-growing states in the country. (Its population is more than five times larger than it was when Trump was born in 1946.) But Trump’s share of the vote—56 percent—was hardly remarkable historically. In fact, it is the sixteenth-highest, coming in behind such luminaries as Grover Cleveland, who twice won the state by a higher margin.

So Trump is not “entitled to five more seats” and wouldn’t be even if he had scored margins as high as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who won the state four times, once with nearly 90 percent of the vote. It’s an undisguised power play—Trump won’t shut up about it—and it is one with potentially dramatic consequences: Those five seats could decide control of the House of Representatives in next year’s midterm elections, and thus could keep Democrats out of power for another two years at least. They would also put Republicans in a commanding position heading into the 2028 presidential election, where they could interfere with voting tallies to Trump’s liking—something that wasn’t the case in 2020, when Democrats narrowly controlled the chamber.

This is, in other words, a story with huge national ramifications. And yet, the Democratic Party is largely keeping its distance from this Republican gambit and letting Texas Democrats—and a gaggle of governors with presidential aspirations—take the lead in opposing it. This is utter negligence on the part of national Democrats, even as we’ve come to expect it.

But let us first praise the Texas Democrats who have fled the state, robbing the state’s Republicans of the quorum they need to redraw the maps. They are currently over 1,000 miles away in Illinois, thanks to the largesse of JB Pritzker, the state’s governor, and Beto O’Rourke, who narrowly lost a race for Senate in Texas in 2018 and whose political action committee is helping to bankroll this self-imposed exile. (O’Rourke is contemplating a Senate run in 2026.) State governors besides Pritzker have also stepped up. California Governor Gavin Newsom—who, like Pritzker, has his eye on 2028—has pledged to redraw his state’s districts if Texas redraws its. So has New York Governor Kathy Hochul—a shockingly proactive turn for a politician who otherwise seems to wake up most days surprised to find herself in a position with any authority whatsoever.

The decision to fight fire with fire is, to be fair, a new development among Democrats. For years, the party has shied away from taking more drastic measures, like abolishing the filibuster, in favor of parliamentary maneuvers (Chuck Schumer’s convoluted horse trading of judicial nominees) and political rope-a-dope (see: Democrats twiddling their thumbs, hoping America will wake up to Trump’s authoritarianism). It hasn’t worked. The Republican Party has grown more extreme, and whenever in power it has taken a maximal approach to ensuring that Democrats have little political authority ever again. It’s working.

So for someone like Hochul to say, “I’m tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back,” suggests that Democrats are learning from their nemeses. What’s missing from this fight, though, are national Democrats. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called out Texas Governor Greg Abbott as a “cowardly fake bully”—the equivalent of a sternly worded letter—on CNN earlier this week, but that’s about it. His counterpart in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, expressed solidarity with Texas Democrats but made it clear that they were taking the lead.

There are signs that other generally noncombative Democrats are waking up. On Wednesday afternoon, Barack Obama called the redistricting push a “power grab that undermines our democracy.” He’s right. Even Eric Holder, Obama’s onetime attorney general and the chair of an anti-gerrymandering organization, has come out in support of Democratic states retaliating with their own gerrymandering. But Democrats are still behind the messaging curve, as usual. Trump is openly admitting that he wants Texas to steal five seats so he can continue his fascist rule, without meaningful opposition, through the end of his presidency. And in doing so, he’s made this a national story, even if Democrats are slow to realize it.

This is a story whose salience is worth raising, as it reveals the authoritarian lengths to which the Republican Party will go to amass more power. It has also arrived at a moment where Democrats have little to lose. Congress is out of session. The Epstein saga is merely simmering at the moment, though it will probably boil over again soon. The “big, beautiful bill” and the bleak state of the economy are animating issues but will remain so until the midterm elections. Talking about Texas won’t get it in the way of either story. What it will do is show voters that what’s happening in Texas matters in every state—and very well could help decide the future of American democracy.