Democrats’ Failed Bueller Strategy on Voting Rights

Gavin Newsom, Kathy Hochul and J.B. Pritzker have had it. Texas wants to steal five US House seats and boost the GOP’s midterms hopes through a mid-decade gerrymander. Blue-state governors have delivered furious press conferences. They’re not bringing a knife to a redistricting gunfight this time, no sir. They’re packing bazookas. They’re fighting fire with fire.

Forgive us if watching them brings to mind the inept Principal Ed Rooney in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. When Rooney realizes Ferris is playing hooky after already missing class nine times, he grits his teeth and insists to his secretary Grace that this occasion will be different. This time, the truant will be caught. This time, Ed Rooney will teach him a lesson.

“Oh, Ed, you sounded like Dirty Harry just then,” marvels an admiring Grace. A pleased Rooney makes his meanest Clint Eastwood scowl. It’s easy to imagine Newsom, Hochul, and Pritzker practicing similar faces in a mirror. They’re making vigilante promises they can’t keep.

We have spent the last decade warning about the GOP’s norm-shattering authoritarianism, and the need to battle back through every available constitutional mechanism. Don’t get us wrong: It’s about time that Democratic leaders, at long last, recognize the urgency and the stakes. No one wants to surrender to mid-decade map rigging.

The best way to prevent mid-decade redistricting, of course, would have been to understand the math and exercise Democratic trifecta power to outlaw everything associated with this antidemocratic scourge during the first two years of the Biden administration. When Democratic voting rights bills went down to the filibuster, this needed to be a stand-alone effort. Reader: It wasn’t.

So here we are. These governors are at least fighting, but we must recognize it’s a battle they cannot win. They are cosplaying Fight Club for the base. They are readying for yesterday’s war, already lost.

Democrats can’t gerrymander themselves out of their gerrymander problem. The numbers don’t add up. All the gunfight metaphors can’t change that simple reality. Newsom, who has proposed suspending the state’s independent commission and retaliating for the five Texas seats, at least holds cards and may well win, but it’s hardly a perfect hand. Tough-talking Hochul and Pritzker, however, might as well channel the bedraggled Ed Rooney. Constitutional amendments that change the process for 2028 in their state won’t help anyone now. They’d need a time machine.

Maybe that time machine could be set for 2010, when the Democrats’ real redistricting problems began.

Here’s the issue: Ever since then, Republicans have a whole lot more states where they can rig maps than Democrats. It’s not that effective to fight fire with a birthday candle.

In most states where mid-decade redistricting is possible, the legislature and the governor control the maps. The problem for Democrats is that they lack trifecta control in as many states as the Republicans have it. Much of this is their own fault. Democrats fell asleep on redistricting 15 years ago, surrendered the process to the far more motivated and ruthless GOP, and have not sniffed control of a state legislative chamber in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Ohio, Georgia, or Florida, among others, ever since.

Let’s say—and it’s hardly a given, despite the way Democratic leaders talk—that California voters will accept Newsom’s plan to counteract the Texas gerrymander by pausing their independent commission and enacting a gerrymandered map with five new blue seats. The GOP won’t stop with Texas. Democrats have nowhere else to go.

Republicans must draw a new map in Ohio that’s likely to erase two competitive seats currently held by Democrats. GOP leaders in Florida, Missouri, and Indiana have already said they also plan to re-gerrymander districts in those states. That’s an extra six seats in the GOP column. It means that Democrats will have to flip nine seats to win control of the House instead of three.

Yet Republicans can march on, if they please. If desperation takes hold, Republicans could go into Kansas, Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and New Hampshire. They may also retake seats held by Black Democrats across the South if the US Supreme Court grabs another opportunity to shred the Voting Rights Act this fall in a case from Louisiana involving the constitutionality of minority-majority districts. (If you’re betting on whether it’s more or less likely that John Roberts will grab this chance, as usual, take the over.)

Anyone can do a great Dirty Harry impression in the mirror. It’s tougher to win vigilante justice without ammo. Hochul has declared war, but New York’s state Constitution stands in the way of mid-decade redistricting and can’t be changed before the 2028 cycle. J.B. Pritzker already gerrymandered Illinois about as much as it can be; Democrats control a 14–3 map there, which works out to 82 percent of the seats, with 53 percent of the two-party vote. Most experts think he can’t squeeze out anything else. Maryland’s state court has already nixed an 8–0 map. Oregon’s governor says she won’t go any further than the state’s 5–1 gerrymander.

Newsom? Well, he has to convince 50 percent of California voters—Democrats, Republicans and independents—to allow for a wild 48–4 Democratic gerrymander. Voters, however, especially California Democrats, generally oppose gerrymandering in ballot initiatives, and no one has ever explicitly asked them to greenlight more of it as Newsom will be doing here. Early polls suggest this is polling at 52 percent, nowhere near where a “yes” vote wants to be at this point, before opposition mounts. It’s coming.

Cue shot of Principal Rooney approaching a teenager in an arcade, convinced he has found Bueller. It is actually a short-haired French girl. She blows her soda in his face, just as a game of Pac-Man ends and emits a sad, slow wah-wah, the international sound of defeat.

This is not to say that all is lost. It’s certainly not to say that it is fair. But if Democrats are going to do anything about it, they need to accept now that the only way to flip the House will be to win elections. This will not be easy. Only 37 seats were within five percentage points in 2024. There will be fewer competitive districts and fewer viable targets this time around, as the ones in Texas, Ohio and California come off the board.

There’s a small path. If Democrats ultimately need to gain 10 to 12 seats to take the House, they will need to identify flippable districts, relentlessly focus on them, fully fund challengers, and persuade voters to come along—even in long-ignored states where their brand is toxic.

The road looks something like this:

• Arizona’s first and sixth, both drawn to advantage Republicans, but both within four percentage points in 2024
• Michigan’s 10th, captured by GOP Representative John James in 2024 with 51 percent, but now open as James seeks a US Senate seat; and Michigan’s seventh, won by Tom Barrett with just 50.3 percent
• Two seats in Iowa, a razor-thin 2024 victory in the 1st by Republican Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, and then a 15,000 vote margin in the 3rd for her conference colleague Zach Nunn
• Three seats in Pennsylvania, the seventh, eighth and 10th, all won by the GOP with margins of about 5,000 votes in 2024
• Virginia’s second, won by Republican Jen Kiggins in 2024 with 50.8 percent, and a margin of 16,000 votes
• Wisconsin’s third, held by Republican Derrick Van Orden in 2024 by approximately 11,200 votes
• New Jersey’s seventh, a 23,300-vote win in 2024 for moderate Republican Representative Tom Kean
• Colorado’s eighth district, where a Republican newcomer, Gabe Evans, knocked out a Democratic incumbent in 2024 by 2,500 votes

Then Democrats must also look at the three districts that went for Kamala Harris in 2024, but elected a Republican to Congress. Those won’t be easy either. New York’s 14th went for Harris but also reelected GOP Representative Michael Lawler by 24,000 votes. Voters in PA-1 split their ballot, yet favored Republican Representative Brian Fitzpatrick by 60,000 votes and almost 13 percentage points. The clearest shot on paper would be the Omaha, Nebraska seat held by the retiring GOP moderate Don Bacon. But that’s a seat that the GOP mildly strengthened through redistricting before the 2022 cycle, and could take another crack at before 2026.

That’s 16 seats. Democrats may need to sweep them all.

If you lack faith that the party’s current leadership and consultant class can execute this plan, consider what the Republicans built outside the party structure in 2010.

The hypercharged redistricting strategy began with what had been a tiny shop, the Republican State Leadership Committee. Republicans, shell-shocked after a 2008 defeat that elected not only the nation’s first Black president but an almost unfathomable (by 2025 standards) Democratic supermajority in the US Senate, found themselves facing the potential of a generational realignment. A handful of savvy RSLC strategists recognized that while the 2008 election was historic, the 2010 election could be much more consequential. Not only would 2010 be a midterm election that historically benefits the party out of power, it fell during a census year. The decennial redistricting process follows the census.

The crucial insight was this: win control of state legislatures in 2010, dominate redistricting, draw lines that bake in a GOP advantage for the next decade.

Karl Rove laid out the plan in a March 2010 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. The headline gave it all away. “The GOP targets state legislatures.” The subhead: “He who controls redistricting can control Congress.”

Rove outlined the contours of something called REDMAP, short for the Redistricting Majority Project. You can’t understand modern politics without grappling with its consequences. REDMAP remade the nation and reinvented gerrymandering, the oldest trick in the book, as a high-tech, blunt-force partisan weapon. The GOP, Rove wrote, would target 107 state legislative seats in 2010 across 16 states. He then named some of the exact small towns where the Republican fight for congressional dominance would begin with a sleepy state legislative race.

Democrats didn’t need to come up with an imaginative gambit like this on their own. They just needed to play defense in a handful of state legislative races that had been specified in one of the nation’s leading newspapers. They failed to do even that. Chris Jankowski, one of the REDMAP architects, told one of us that he couldn’t believe that Democrats never showed up anywhere and that he had the playing field to himself.

The Republican State Leadership Committee invested $30 million into these state races. They focused on the exact seats they needed to take control of state legislatures in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, even Alabama, then under Democratic control. And then they ran the board. Every legislative chamber REDMAP targeted fell to the GOP. In 2011, Republicans had a free hand to draw more than 190 congressional seats in addition to all of those state legislatures. Democrats narrowly managed 40. Fifteen years later, the numbers have barely changed.

Republicans studied where power was held, then focused on how to win it. That’s the piece Democrats never seem to fully grasp—and don’t seem to understand now, as the gerrymandering wars erupt yet again. Republicans won’t fall asleep in these 16 districts next year. But Democrats need to develop the same single-mindedness that the GOP brought to REDMAP. Democratic donors love to send millions to whoever is running against Ted Cruz or Marjorie Taylor-Greene—regardless of whether or not that election can actually be won. Often it feels as if the most heavily resourced Democrats have the lowest chances of actually winning. The consultants get rich either way.

This is an awesome, endless grift. It also drains dollars from the races that need them most. And it feels sanctioned, since the consultant class is also the permanent party establishment. This must stop. It won’t on its own. Small-dollar donors will have to say no: When these hustlers target MSNBC viewers with ads targeting Greene or Lauren Boebert or whoever the bogeyman of June 2026 may be, Maddow viewers need to keep the ActBlue account focused on Iowa..

Yes, Iowa. Maybe these states seem tricky. Some districts may have gone for Trump by double digits. Fox News viewers outnumber New York Times readers. But if Democrats can’t extend the map, if they can’t find ways to persuade voters to their side, the future is bleak. When the nation reapportions the US House after the 2030 census, early estimates suggest four seats leaving California, two being subtracted from New York, and Rhode Island, Michigan and Minnesota in danger of losing one. They’re headed to Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida. These are states where Republicans draw the lines.

This is one more reason why gerrymandering the hell out of New York and California is such a short-term play—there will be far fewer seats there a few short years from now. Democrats will need to figure out how to win elsewhere just to survive. They have no choice but to get better at persuasion and politics. The US Senate map is just as tough as the House: The 25 states that voted for Trump three times have 50 GOP senators. If Democrats want a shot at a majority ever again, they will soon need to extend the map someplace, somehow. And, of course, as House seats move to the Sun Belt, Electoral College votes go with them. Democrats in 2032 will need to win states far beyond what would have been necessary to win in 2024.

All of which is to say: The Democratic strategy has to be winning elections, not gerrymandering. Fight fire with fire—in these 16 districts. If Democrats think they can out-Republican Republicans on maps, they’re finished. It’s a suicide mission. This might sound unsatisfying. But the times demand a strategy based in reality, not rhetoric.

Big reforms will take persuasion, followed by bold action. It’s time to begin convincing Americans that the way out of this is through a more proportional House, a national solution that brings fair representation everywhere. Instead of a hopeless “we’ll gerrymander too” strategy, let’s prepare DOGE 2 for reinventing American democracy for everyone. The current administration has shown how quickly government can be transformed, if those who hold power decide that they will use it. Imagine a first 100-days project to transform the way we elect the House, reform and expand the US Supreme Court, add states, and restore voting rights. This time, get it done. Democracy first; everything else second.

If the plan remains out-toughing the GOP, or winning press conferences rather than swing districts, it will end with Democrats as defeated as the pathetic principal at the end of Ferris Bueller: suit tattered, shoes lost to a dog, car towed, hitching a ride on a school bus. With Mike Johnson and the Republicans still wielding the gavel in the US House—and with the reactionary, unhinged GOP wielding power in a consolidated autocracy for the next generation.

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