Commentary: With midterm vote starting, here's where things stand in national redistricting fight
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Donald Trump has never been one to play by the rules.Whether it’s stiffing contractors as a real estate developer, defying court orders he doesn’t like as president or leveraging the Oval Office to vastly inflate his family’s fortune, Trump’s guiding principle can be distilled to a simple, unswerving calculation: What’s in it for me?Trump is no student of history.He’s famously allergic to books.
But he knows enough to know that midterm elections like the one in November have, with few exceptions, been ugly for the party holding the presidency.With control of the House — and Trump’s virtually unchecked authority — dangling by a gossamer thread, he reckoned correctly that Republicans were all but certain to lose power this fall unless something unusual happened.So he effectively broke the rules.Normally, the redrawing of the country’s congressional districts takes place once every 10 years, following the census and accounting for population changes over the previous decade.Instead, Trump prevailed upon the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, to throw out the state’s political map and refashion congressional lines to wipe out Democrats and boost GOP chances of winning as many as five additional House seats.
The intention was to create a bit of breathing room, as Democrats need a gain of just three seats to seize control of the House.Voters in a prime congressional battleground are sharply divided over Trump.Beyond that, they can’t fathom how others can possibly believe what they believe or see the president the way they do.In relatively short order, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, responded with his own partisan gerrymander.
He rallied voters to pass a tit-for-tat ballot measure, Proposition 50, which revised the state’s political map to wipe out Republicans and boost Democratic prospects of winning as many as five additional seat...