The Dictatorship
What Democrats should learn from the GOP’s own goal on redistricting
After the 2024 election, Republicans exulted over Donald Trump’s surprisingly strong performance among Latino voters. This was a “historic realignment” of the electoratethe National Republican Campaign Committee said, one that would produce GOP victories for years to come.
So when Trump ordered Texas Republicans last summer to redraw the state’s congressional districts in the hopes of putting as many as five more seats in GOP hands, they thought one way to do it was to increase the number of Latinos in key districts. But that strategy — in fact, the GOP’s entire mid-decade redistricting plan — may be unravelling.
The “realignment” Republicans were hoping for was almost certainly a phantom; meanwhile, their redistricting move isn’t going much better.
Texas’ primary elections on Tuesday drew a remarkable turnout, especially on the Democratic side. As Politico noted“In five different rural majority-Latino counties, more votes were cast in Tuesday’s Democratic primary than for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.” Turnout in majority-Latino counties was almost twice as high for Democrats as for Republicans, though both parties had hotly contested Senate primaries. State Rep. James Talaricowho won the Democratic nominationran up strong numbers among Latino votersovercoming Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s advantage among Black voters.
The “realignment” Republicans were hoping for was almost certainly a phantom; meanwhile, their redistricting move isn’t going much better. When Trump started this fight last July — first in Texas, then moving to other red states — he may have figured that Democrats, whether out of weakness or indecision, would simply fold. But Democrats fought back, first and most significantly in California, and then in Virginia.
While the redistricting battles are still playing out, it’s looking far from the Republican triumph Trump might have initially expected. The parties may fight to a draw; at most, Republicans might net a couple of seats. In a year that increasingly looks like we’re headed for a blue wave, that wouldn’t be nearly enough to save the House GOP majority.
Two things are notable in the face of this likely GOP own goal.
First, all this district rejiggering is possible because in recent years, the Supreme Court has given parties almost unlimited power to redraw lines for partisan advantage. While the court’s decisions over the past decade have left it up to states to be as fair or unfair as they want, Democrats have been more likely to promote independent commissions to draw district lines. These commissions are in use in 11 mostly Democratic stateswhile all but a few Republican states have stuck with partisan redistricting. But redistricting in the middle of the decade — not after a nationwide census delivers new data on the distribution of the population but just whenever a state legislature feels like it — is highly unusual, an assertion of raw political power upending an established norm.
Mid-decade redistricting has happened before, most notably in 2003, when Tom DeLay, then one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress, engineered a redrawing of the Texas map that swung multiple seats to the GOP. It has been rare ever since — but there’s no law against it. And that’s the kind of thing Trump loves: a tool of power that others hesitate to use, until he picks it up and starts smashing.
After Trump got Texas to begin its redrawing, he told other red states to follow suit. Missouri and North Carolina complied, adding one likely Republican seat each. Other states, including Florida and Georgia, are tryingthough court challenges leave those efforts in doubt. Trump did suffer a setback in Indianawhere the GOP-dominated legislature resisted his pleas and threatsultimately voting to keep their existing map.
But the real key moment happened within days of Trump’s first announcement. Gavin Newsomthe governor of California — which uses an independent commission — proposed a ballot measure to draw a Democrat-friendly map for the next three elections. The map would likely produce five more Democratic seats, nullifying what the Republicans had done in Texas. In November, California voters approved the measure by a nearly 30-point margin. The fact that it restores the independent commission after the 2030 Census allowed Democrats to say that they haven’t given up their opposition to gerrymandering but are responding to an emergency Trump created.
That set the tone for other blue states, putting pressure on them to squeeze out every possible seat. In Virginia, Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed a bill creating a district map that could give Democrats a 10-1 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation, a dramatic shift from today’s 6-5 split. A judge has temporarily halted that redistricting (the state is appealing), and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s plan for another seat was thwarted when the president of the Senate refused to hold a vote. But for the most part, Democrats around the country and across the ideological spectrum — including progressives and ostensible moderates like Spanberger — decided to fight back when Trump and fellow Republicans sought to play hardball.
Democrats should pay attention to what happened here. For a long time, Republicans have been the ones more likely to engage in procedural hardball. While Democrats worried about norms and propriety, Republicans took unorthodox steps such as refusing to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nomination for almost a year so the seat could be held open for Trump to fill, and destroying agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development whether or not they had the legal right to do so. Republicans understood that ruffling feathers doesn’t carry much of a political cost; what matters in the end is whether you seize power and what you do with it.
It’s a lesson Democrats should carry with them, especially if they win majorities in November and the White House in 2028. Trump’s evisceration of the federal government won’t just take years to repair; it will also take the same kind of creative aggressiveness his administration has shown. That doesn’t have to mean breaking the law, but it is likely to entail doing things that haven’t been done before. In Congress, that could mean expanding the Supreme Court and getting rid of the filibuster. In the executive branch, it may require reconfiguring systems and structures that have stood for decades.
When Trump sparked the redistricting push, Democrats decided they didn’t care if they’d be called hypocrites for doing today what yesterday they called problematic. Instead, they dug in and fought. It’s something they should keep doing.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture.
The Dictatorship
Monday’s Campaign Round-Up, 6.22.26: Why Trump backed both Republicans in a key S.C. race
Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* In South Carolina’s gubernatorial raceDonald Trump endorsed Lt. Gov. Pam Evette last month. Last week, however, ahead of this week’s primary runoff election in the race, the president published an online item telling voters that “you can’t go wrong” with either Evette or state Attorney General Alan Wilson.
If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because Trump has done this before. Around this time two years ago, for example, he endorsed both Republicans running in a congressional primary in Arizona. And two years before that, he endorsed two leading contenders in a Senate primary in Missouri.
Only the president can say for sure why he ended up endorsing Evette and Wilson in the South Carolina race, though it’s worth emphasizing for context that GOP primary voters have already ignored his direction into two gubernatorial primaries this month, and it stands to reason that he hoped to avoid a third.
* We’re one day away from a variety of notable racesincluding but not limited to South Carolina’s gubernatorial race. There are also some congressional primaries in a handful of statesincluding Maryland, New York and Utah.
* In took a while, but the ballots have been tallied under Maine’s ranked-choice systemand we now know that Democrat Hannah Pingree, the former state House speaker, will face off against Republican Bobby Charles, who worked at the State Department during the Bush-Cheney era.
* As for Maine’s closely watched congressional racestate Auditor Matt Dunlap won the Democratic nomination in the battleground 2nd District, defeating state Sen. Joe Baldacci, who enjoyed the backing of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Dunlap will run in the fall against a familiar figure: former Republican Gov. Paul LePage, who had moved to Florida a few years ago, but who returned to run for Congress.
* In California’s congressional special electiontwo Democratic candidates — state Sen. Aisha Wahab and Melissa Hernandez, a Bay Area Rapid Transit director — have advanced to an Aug. 18 special general election. The winner will fill the vacancy left by disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell, who resigned in April.
* In a new commercial shared first with MS NOWDemocrat James Talarico has launched his campaign’s first multimillion-dollar ad buy in Texas’ gubernatorial race. In the 30-second spot, Talarico focuses on affordability and the cost of living. The state lawmaker will face scandal-plagued state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the fall.
* And in New Jersey, Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr.who has been missing from Capitol Hill since early March, will reportedly return to work on June 30according to a statement from his spokesperson. Neither Kean nor his office have offered any public information about why he has been away.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
The Dictatorship
Trump tries dual endorsement in South Carolina as his pick for governor flounders in polls
After President Donald Trump’s pick for governor in Iowa lost in the Republican primary earlier this month, the president argued that he “would have endorsed the other person” if he had “the proper information.”
Trump is taking no chances in the South Carolina gubernatorial primary. Over the weekend he rescinded his exclusive endorsement of Pamela Evette, the lieutenant governor, announcing instead that he would support both Evette and her runoff opponent, Alan Wilson, the state’s attorney general.
The move put Evette’s political future in jeopardy: Even before Trump’s dual endorsement, she trailed in limited public polling and was seen by political observers in South Carolina as a weak candidate with little to show besides the president’s coveted endorsement.
“Her chief distinction from Alan Wilson was that Trump endorsed her,” said Dr. Dubose Kapeluck, a professor of political science at the Citadel Military College of South Carolina.
Trump’s dual endorsement “was a kiss of death,” he told MS NOW.
Evette, who moved to South Carolina from Ohio to found a successful payroll and HR company in 2000, has been lieutenant governor since 2019, serving under Gov. Henry McMaster, who is term-limited.
In office, she has pursued meaningful but little-celebrated policies, like a key tort reform bill, according to Gil Gatch, a Republican member of the South Carolina state House and an Evette supporter.
But voters could be forgiven for knowing little about Evette besides the fact that Trump endorsed her, which he did just days before the June 9 primary. Visitors to her campaign website are greeted with a full-screen message labeling Evette as “Trump-endorsed.” The first line in her X bio states the same. Pro-Evette television ads are quick to tout the endorsement.
An accomplishment like tort reform, while noted on Evette’s website, “maybe could have been something that was highlighted more heavily,” Gatch told MS NOW.
The political makeup of South Carolina nearly guarantees the next governor will be whoever emerges on Tuesday between Evette and Wilson. They survived a crowded primary field on June 9, and nearly every challenger who fell short of the runoff publicly endorsed the attorney general.
“She’s just not a good candidate,” Josh Kimbrell, a state senator who failed to make the runoff and has since said he’d back Wilson, said of Evette.
“She kind of assumed this was a coronation, and that was never going to go over that well,” he added.
Even some pro-Trump voters were confused by the president’s initial endorsement of Evette, whom he called “a good friend, fighter, and WINNER” in a social media post in May.
“I have no clue why Trump would endorse Pamela Evette,” Leland Lemmons, a 30-year-old Trump supporter told MS NOW as he exited a polling site in the Greenville suburb of Easley on June 9.
“She’s served, you know, a decent time. I just haven’t seen much fruition of what she’s done in office,” he added.
In a post on Truth Social Friday announcing his dual endorsement, Trump wrote, “I can’t hurt one of them by only Endorsing the other, so, therefore, I am going to Endorse, for Governor of South Carolina, both Pam Evette and Alan Wilson!”
In a subsequent statement on X, Evette said, “I was proud to come in first as [Trump’s] endorsed candidate for Governor on June 9th. Looking forward to doing it again on June 23rd.”
After The Washington Post foreshadowed the dual endorsement last Tuesday, allies of Evette were quick to denounce the possibility.
“I would guess that’s fake news,” Suzanne Pucci, a member of Evette’s finance committee, told MS NOW of the chance Trump would also endorse Wilson. “She’s probably not real worried about it.”
Another close ally and supporter told MS NOW at the time the report was “a total, fabricated lie.”
“[Trump] is invested in Pamela Evette because she invested in him. He’s a loyal guy. That kind of stuff is important to him,” added the supporter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“With or without Trump, I think she is going to win,” they said.
On Thursday, a senior campaign aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, brushed off the idea of a dual endorsement, telling MS NOW in a statement, “Pamela Evette has earned the complete and total endorsement of President Trump. She is the only Trump-endorsed candidate in this race and we look forward to delivering a big win for the president on Tuesday.”
Roughly 24 hours later, Trump retracted the exclusive endorsement.
Will McDuffie is a reporter for MS NOW.
As last week’s G7 summit in France got underway, a reporter asked Donald Trump whether his purported deal with Iran was final. “No, it’s not final,” the president replied. Later that day — during a visit to Versaillesof all places — he signed the framework anyway.
But moments after signing his name to the memorandum of understanding, Trump offered an unsubtle hint about what he was thinking at the time. Amid applause from those around him, the American president pointed down and then up while saying“Oil down, stocks up.”
In other words, Trump’s focus had nothing to do with natural security and everything to do with the economy. What’s more, the four-word phrase was part of a larger and underappreciated pattern. The Washington Post reported:
In the more than 100 days since President Donald Trump launched a war with Iran, he has offered a shifting list of reasons for why he started the conflict. But in explaining his push for peace, he named a priority much closer to home: protecting the stock market.
“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe,” Trump told reporters gathered in the Alpine spa town of Évian-les-Bains, France, after the Group of Seven summit.
As the summit wrapped up, the Republican similarly said“I’ve studied presidents, some good, some bad, some great. Not too many are great and some really bad. … And the one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover. I didn’t want that and who knows what would have happened.”
He pushed the same point in an interview with Axios, which was released over the weekend.
“If I went further, the stock market would be much lower,” the president said. “Now think of this: I have one primary wish as president, in terms of people: I never want to be the late, great Herbert Hoover.”
The comments came days after Trump similarly argued“The alternative to this deal was a global recession. There are stupid people who want to see a global recession. They are just stupid people.”
Whether the president fully appreciates the implications of his own rhetoric, this string of comments doesn’t just shed light on his motivations for accepting a defeat, it also suggests he saw his failed policy in Iran as pushing the global economy toward a dangerous cliff.
In other words, based on Trump’s own comments, the war he started was poised to create an “economic catastrophe,” which he was desperate to avoid — and which led him to accept a framework that empowered Iran to get what it wanted in exchange for effectively no concessions at all.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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