Sometimes you can’t win. But it’s better to go down fighting.
For weeks, Texas Democrats have been doing everything in their power to draw national attention to a radical Republican plan to try to hang on to the House of Representatives in next year’s midterms by gerrymandering the state’s already heavily skewed maps even further.
They started by giving floor speeches, holding press conferences and meeting with Democratic governors of other states and national Democratic leadership. Then, dozens of Democratic lawmakers took the dramatic step of fleeing Texas to prevent the Legislature from legally convening.
Democrats are signaling that they might return to Texas now that the first special session is ending and California lawmakers have introduced their own redistricting plan to try to offset any new safe seats in Texas.
It’s too soon to tell whether any of this will stop the brazen Republican plan to keep power in the House amid polls showing GOP lawmakers are massively unpopular. But it has already succeeded at the real goal, which was to help voters realize what Republicans are attempting, understand the stakes and know that Democrats are trying to do something to stop it.
The spectacle wasn’t a tactic; it was the whole point.
The spectacle wasn’t a tactic; it was the whole point. It’s a lesson that Democrats have been slow to learn since President Donald Trump’s first term, but one that may finally be breaking through.
James Talarico, a new breakout star of the Democratic Party, told me progressives have forgotten that getting attention for the cause helps to change the entire playing field. But you can’t do it unless you first grab folks’ attention. And if that means borrowing a few tricks from the president, so be it.
“Trump is the master of the attention economy,” Talarico told me. “He is a prime example of how in this new attention economy, you have to be able to break through. And of course, he does it by being cruel and chaotic and incompetent. But there are ways to do it where you’re inspirational or you’re saying something true and different.”
Talarico added that despite some national media coverage, “regular people” weren’t really talking about the redistricting effort in Texas: “But once we did this quorum break, suddenly you saw Google searches for gerrymandering go through the roof, right? And now everybody is just talking about that.”
If you’ve watched Democrats closely over the last decade, you’ve seen the party struggle to break through, send a message and put up a fight in the new Trump-era attention economy. Senior members of the party admit that they are handcuffed by their loyalty to institutions that need to remain standing long after Trump is gone. Someone has to be adult in the room, they argue.
But voters have been making it pretty clear they don’t see it the same way. Forget Michelle Obama’s famous advice to “go high.” Voters are telling Democrats that when the other side goes low, they should be willing to go to the depths of hell to fight back.
Democrats seem to be getting the message, as their own low approval ratings are forcing some self-reflection and a shift in strategy. And that starts with putting up a fight.
Rep. Jolanda Jones, another Texas Democrat who has gone viral for being blunt and ready to tussle, told me her goal is stopping the map from going through, period. She often brings up the fact that the Montgomery bus boycott went on for months and that Texans should see things through until they are able to stop this “racist redistricting” — but she stills sees the political benefit in Democrats fighting back even if they lose.
“Am I proud that we’re finally fighting? Absolutely. Do I believe that’s why the Democrats have lost a lot of Democrats, because we don’t fight? Absolutely. If Trump doesn’t know how to do anything, he knows how to fight. Even if he’s fighting for idiotic, hateful, anti-everything stuff, he’s fighting,” Jones said. “Everybody wants their person in the ring to fight. Who goes to a boxing match and the person they’re cheering for, they don’t want ’em to fight? So I think it is a paradigm shift for the Democrats.”
That Texas grit has proved to be catching.
That Texas grit has proved to be catching. As Democrats have rallied around the stand those dozens of state lawmakers have taken, they have decided to fight fire with fire, or at least talk about it that way. Instead of shaking their fingers at Trump and Texas Republicans for calling a special session to gerrymander, they’ve threatened their own.
And that’s really how spectacles change things. They grab voters’ attention, which gives politicians a mandate to go further. That can happen even with politicians who aren’t known for taking bold stances, as when New York Gov. Kathy Hochul threatened to have the state do its own gerrymandering. And it helps make an idea mainstream. California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, two politicians who are fairly obviously thinking about presidential runs one day, both jumped on the issue. Newsom, who in the past has flirted with a more conciliatory, centrist response to Trump, has even taken to urging voters to support him going further, as a new poll from Politico shows nearly two-thirds of Californians want to keep their independent redistricting commission, which would foil his plan. Even if Newsom loses, he’ll be able to make the case that he tried. “[Trump] doesn’t play by a different set of rules. He doesn’t believe in the rules. And as a consequence, we need to disabuse ourselves of the way things have been done. It’s not good enough to just hold hands, have a candlelight vigil and talk about the way the world should be. We have got to recognize the cards that have been dealt. And we have to meet fire with fire,” Newsom said in his press conference announcing the Election Rigging Response Act. But the question is, will the spectacle be enough to keep momentum going for Democrats through the rest of the Trump presidency and really turn the tide for the party? That’s a little less clear. The party has done this before, getting on an impressive tear only to return to business as usual once things cool back down. The most recent example came during the “No Kings” protests in June, which unleashed an anger and excitement that briefly spurred the party on and then fizzled out. Ammar Moussa, a veteran of the DNC and both the Biden and Harris presidential campaigns, says the party is on the right track, but he worries that it still doesn’t come naturally. “It’s about Democrats being smart and strategic in terms of driving that message and picking real moments,” Moussa said. “If you’re manufacturing them, voters can tell. … People can tell when you’re bulls—-ing them.” That means finding more ways to keep pressing Republicans and “drive the ball forward,” he says. “In this attention economy where you really don’t get more than a few seconds of people’s time, what are the battles that you’re going to pick and how are you going to pick them?” he added. For more thought-provoking insights from Eugene Daniels, watch “The Weekend” every Saturday and Sunday from 7 to 10 a.m. ET on MSNBC.
Eugene Daniels is an MS NOW senior Washington correspondent and co-host of "The Weekend." Recommended
