As 2025 got underway and Republicans began to worry about losing their narrow majority in the U.S. House in the upcoming midterm elections, Donald Trump and his White House team launched a radical operation: The president started to direct GOP-led state legislatures to launch mid-decade redistricting schemes, abandoning the usual process.
The goal, of course, was to gerrymander district maps so Republicans could win 2026 elections the year before voters started casting ballots.
The gambit was an immediate success: GOP policymakers in Texas redrew their map to give Republicans five additional seats; Missouri Republicans rigged their map to deliver one additional seat to the party, and GOP legislators in North Carolina delivered another seat to Republicans soon after.
Roadblocks, however, soon emerged. For one thing, key Democratic officials started pushing back in the opposite direction: California is moving forward with a plan that would match Texas’ scheme, and related efforts are under consideration in Maryland and Virginia. A newly redrawn map in Utah, meanwhile, is likely to deliver another seat to Democrats.
For another, some red states have resisted the White House’s demands. A Trump-backed scheme in New Hampshire stalled; Kansas Republicans have balked, at least for now, in response to a redistricting plan; and GOP officials in Indiana, who’ve been the target of intense White House lobbying, are apparently walking away from the idea. Roll Call reported:
Republicans in the Indiana state Senate will not move forward with a plan to redraw the state’s congressional map next month, the chamber’s GOP leader said Friday. ‘Over the last several months, Senate Republicans have given very serious and thoughtful consideration to the concept of redrawing our state’s congressional maps,’ Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray said in a statement. ‘Today, I’m announcing there are not enough votes to move that idea forward, and the Senate will not reconvene in December.’
The president did not take the news well. In fact, Trump published on Saturday morning a lengthy harangue to his social media platform, condemning specific state senators by name and chastising Mike Braun, Indiana’s Republican governor, “for not working the way he should to get the necessary Votes.”
Trump concluded that opponents of the mid-decade redistricting scheme “should DO THEIR JOB, AND DO IT NOW! If not, let’s get them out of office, ASAP.”
Hours later, one of the state legislators called out by the president, Republican state Sen. Greg Goode, was targeted by a swatting, according to local law enforcement.
Vigo County Sheriff Derek Fell said that around 5 p.m. Sunday “an email was sent to the Terre Haute Police Department advising harm had been done to persons inside a home, located in southeastern Vigo County. This information was immediately relayed to the Sheriffs Office, at which point deputies responded to the home, which was the home of Senator Greg Goode.”
Fell added that Goode and others “were secure, safe, and unharmed. Investigation showed that this was a prank or false email (also known as ‘swatting’).”
Trump has not yet commented on the incident. As for the bigger picture, The New York Times reported two weeks ago that the Republican White House is responsible for what is effectively “an all-out gerrymandering war,” adding that election lawyers and experts “say that what is happening now is a crisis with few parallels in American history.” The result is a multifaceted partisan scramble, with Trump and his allies targeting election data, mail-in ballots, voter ID laws, the census, voter registrations and indefensible gerrymandering — not because it’s responsible or because it’ll benefit the public, but because of Republicans’ desperation to hold onto power and to prevent Democrats from gaining a toehold that could lead to any degree of accountability for the president. The stakes, in other words, are high, and if the redistricting arms race can result in a net gain of a half-dozen or so seats for the GOP — ensuring wins long before voters have their say — it might very well keep Republicans in power for the rest of the decade, no matter what the American people actually want. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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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