Trump is pushing for it after someone has told him Texas could get as many as Four more House Seats….
Democrats seem to NOT be as worried as you’d think…
Trump’s polling numbers (And Republicans helping Trump, NOT them) reflect a LOT of Americans, Even in Texas, NOT happy with Trump’s last 6 months in office….
Hmmmmm?
U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat who represents a slice of the Rio Grande Valley along the border with Mexico, won his last congressional election by just over 5,000 votes.
That makes him a tempting target for Republicans, who are poised to redraw the state’s congressional maps this coming week and devise five new winnable seats for the GOP that would help the party avoid losing House control in the 2026 elections. Adjusting the lines of Gonzalez’s district to bring in a few thousand more Republican voters, while shifting some Democratic ones out, could flip his seat.
Gonzalez said he is not worried. Those Democratic voters will have to end up in one of the Republican districts that flank Gonzalez’s current one, making those districts more competitive — possibly enough so it could flip the seats to Democrats.
“Get ready for some pickup opportunities,” Gonzalez said, adding that his party is already recruiting challengers to Republicans whose districts they expect to be destabilized by the process. “We’re talking to some veterans, we’re talking to some former law enforcement.”
Texas has 38 seats in the House. Republicans now hold 25 and Democrats 12, with one seat vacant after Democrat Sylvester Turner, a former Houston mayor, died in March….
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Trump’s push comes as there are numerous political danger signs for his presidency, both in the recent turmoil over his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case and in new polling. Surveys from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research show most U.S. adults think his policies have not helped them and that his tax cut and spending bill will help the wealthy.
Republicans risk putting their own seats in jeopardy
The fear of accidentally creating unsafe seats is one reason Texas Republicans drew their lines cautiously in 2021, when the constitutionally mandated redistricting process kicked off in all 50 states. Mapmakers — in most states, it’s the party that controls the legislature — must adjust congressional and state legislative lines after every 10-year census to ensure that districts have about the same number of residents.
That is a golden opportunity for one party to rig the map against the other, a tactic known as gerrymandering. But there is a term, too, for so aggressively redrawing a map that it puts that party’s own seats at risk: a “dummymander.”
The Texas GOP knows the risk. In the 2010s, the Republican-controlled Legislature drew political lines that helped pad the GOP’s House majority. That lasted until 2018, when a backlash against Trump in his first term led Democrats to flip two seats in Texas that Republicans had thought safe….
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“It’s politically and legally risky,” Li said of the redistricting strategy. “It’s throwing caution to the winds.”…
Note…
Methinks a HUGE Trump backlash IS forming in the wings and WILL felt in the coming months and year….
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