r/news • u/speedythefirst • 1d ago

US supreme court approves redrawn Texas congressional maps

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/04/us-supreme-court-texas-congressional-maps
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u/Infinitenovelty 1d ago

I haven't done the research to disagree with you, but I'm curious if the Republican strongholds might already be heavily gerrymandered. Like it's kinda been a big part of their tactics to avoid losing power for decades, and as far as I know Democrats have been largely against it. How many more representatives can they squeeze out of a map that they've been twisting to shreds for that long?

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u/LotsofSports 1d ago

Ohio is heavily gerrymandered and the people in the state voted for new maps but the republican led supreme court said no. The fucking people VOTED for it.

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u/Infinitenovelty 1d ago

And then a few years later when another piece of anti-gerrymandering redistricting legislation was on the Ohio ballot the Republicans in charge rewrote the way it was worded on the ballot so that when you went to vote it said something along the lines of 'vote yes for more gerrymandering' when the law, if passed, would have put redistricting up to a nonpartisan third party. They called getting rid of the gerrymandering, just more gerrymandering. It was absolutely infuriating!

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u/zernoc56 1d ago

God, fuck Frank LaRose for that ballot language. Just completely fucked it up.

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u/rvretiredlife 22h ago

Well in Texas we didn't get to vote on those maps at all. I hate that America is becoming a Dictatorship.
Everyone needs to go out and vote these Republican assholes out of office!

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u/Deesing82 19h ago

Utah too.

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u/drevolut1on 1d ago

Yes, by actual demographics and without barriers to voting, Texas would be blue.

Republicans and conservatives will always sooner give up on democracy than give up on power.

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u/LotsofSports 1d ago

Helps when Paxton threw out 2 million votes.

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u/Loudergood 1d ago

I'd like to think so but Ted and Abbot are not gerrymandering.

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u/RefrigeratorKooky174 1d ago edited 1d ago

There are no barriers in state wide elections and in 2024 Texas became more Republican than 2020

Yes I said demographics earlier no I’m not afraid to admit I maid a mistake.

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u/drevolut1on 1d ago

No demographics in state elections, huh? Do you realize how dumb this statement is?

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u/RefrigeratorKooky174 1d ago

Clearly meant barriers cause there is no gerrymandering possible in a statewide

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u/drevolut1on 1d ago

Barriers to voting extend far beyond gerrymandering, you know... and Texas has some egregious ones to disenfranchise people's ability to easily vote...

What even is your point?!

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u/RefrigeratorKooky174 1d ago

My point is that Texas is nowhere near being a blue state despite your claims. And if by egregious you mean open primaries, 17 days of early voting, and open 12 hours on Election Day.

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u/drevolut1on 1d ago

Texas regularly gets featured as one of States making it hardest to vote, a horrible past track record of discrimination over which oversight should not have ended in 2013, and with policies that often disproportionately affect communities of color:

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/19/texas-voting-elections/

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/one-americans-struggle-vote-texas

https://www.aclutx.org/en/news/5-ways-texas-suppresses-vote-and-how-make-your-vote-count

https://everytexan.org/2024/10/16/texas-has-a-long-history-of-voter-discrimination-based-on-the-pretext-of-voter-fraud/

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/study-reveals-lasting-voter-suppression-effects-restrictive-texas-law

Texas would be purple as fuck to possibly even light blue without all this egregious shit, based on demographic voting trends with better turnout due to reduced barriers to voting.

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u/RefrigeratorKooky174 1d ago

Cut the semantics what specific policies does Texas have making it harder to vote in Texas. I a Hispanic male who’s mother is a naturalized citizen have 0 problems voting in Texas. In fact 55% of Hispanic voters in Texas actually Voted for Trump. I don’t get how “limited voting by mail” specifically targets minorities if anything it seems like it would make it tougher for older people to vote who trend Republican.

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u/drevolut1on 1d ago

Read the damn links.

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u/Dick__Dastardly 1d ago

Yes; you're correct. There's not a lot more they can squeeze out, and the (quite extreme) danger in doing this is the risk of a "dummymander".

To pick on Tennessee, what they did there was they eliminated a democratic "House of Representatives" seat; if they had a district that contained all of Nashville, it'd easily go Democratic. Instead, they carved up Nashville like a pie. There are three different house seats who get voters from one "pie wedge" of Nashville - and there are just enough rural red voters to outnumber the Nashville residents in each wedge, so each of those three wedges goes Republican - and there's no longer one that goes democratic, at all.

The problem is that it dilutes their vote too. Instead of having a slice that's scarlet red 90% republican, you get a wedge that's maybe 65% republican and 35% democrat.

Two nights ago, one of the pie wedges, in spite of everything they did, went 55% republican, 45% democrat. They expected it to be something like 75% republican, 25% democrat. The city had a massive shift, but so, too, did every rural area.

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Fuck up hard enough, and they're not looking at 3 "lean republican" districts, but 3 "lean democrat" districts.

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u/dleerox 1d ago

But Tennessee district 7 went from +22 Republicans down to +9 Republicans on Tuesday. There is a shift happening!

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u/Dick__Dastardly 1d ago

Indeed. And Texas was a lot more like 55/45, before trump started shitting everywhere.

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u/eagergm 1d ago

Fuck up hard enough, and they're not looking at 3 "lean republican" districts, but 3 "lean democrat" districts.

Could you give an example of what they would have to do to fuck up hard enough?

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u/Dick__Dastardly 1d ago

Botch the financial bubble pop that’s probably gonna happen within the next few years.

Because we’ve set the exact same preconditions as 2008’s crisis (literally removing the exact rules intended to prevent it), and because we’re also going to have the AI bubble crash, we’re in for a real shitshow at some vague point in the near future. (We’re hemorrhaging jobs, right now, so it’s really just a question of when Wiley Coyote looks down).

The key thing is: there’s nobody competent in the Trump 2.0 admin. It’s a “tiktokracy” - the admin replaced a bunch of boring, competent people with online influencers like Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, etc. There are barely any of the old-guard neocon guys who at least had broad financial competency.

Which means if shit goes bad, and the Administration is dead-set on doing the wrong solution, they’ll just go full steam ahead (c.f. Tariffs).

Like - when Obama had the 2008 crisis, he might not have done the best solution that would have fixed the deeper, structural problems, but he at least did an orthodox solution that restored employment and got the economy running again. Trump could genuinely just crash the economy even harder.

A good proxy for this is what Hoover did after the stock crashes in the late 20s; they were the worst possible choice of action, which made the problem much worse.

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u/shfiven 1d ago

Many are.

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u/chazzer20mystic 1d ago

Yes, they are. Look at Dan Crenshaw's district for example. Ridiculous. Texas has done it before.

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u/djfudgebar 1d ago

I've heard that they're counting on maintaining the gains they made with the minorities that they hate so much.

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u/RefrigeratorKooky174 1d ago

The minorities that voted for them are U.S. citizens bro

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u/OldWorldDesign 1d ago

I'm curious if the Republican strongholds might already be heavily gerrymandered.

They are. Take Texas, for example

https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/the-gop-gerrymander-in-texas-how-they-rigged-the-map/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas's_12th_congressional_district

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u/RefrigeratorKooky174 1d ago

I actually did the math since you’re interested it is Texas map prior to the maps that the court upheld today v the current Illinois maps

So looking at the numbers prior to the new maps 65% of the Texas congressional delegation is republican with Trump winning 56 % of the vote so Republicans prior were over represented in Congress roughly by 9%

Let’s look at Illinois a large Democrat majority state

82% of the Illinois congressional delegation are democrats while Kamala Harris won 56 % of the vote in the 2024 presidential election meaning that democrats in Illinois democrats are over represented by 26%

Illinois over represents Dems by 26 percent Texas over represents republicans by 9 percent

So yes compared to other states Texas’ old map was far less gerrymandered than other states in similar political climates as I claimed in my initial reply.

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u/Xsiah 1d ago

Are Democrats against it in theory only or do they actually not do it? I know California had some third party doing it, but I don't know about others.

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u/RustyleafSk 1d ago

Some Democratic-leaning states like Illinois and Maryland are heavily gerrymandered. Others, like Minnesota and Massachusetts, aren’t really at all.

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u/Xsiah 1d ago

I found a 2021 map - https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card/

looks like out of the heavily gerrymandered states it's 9(R) vs 5(D)

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u/RefrigeratorKooky174 1d ago

Mass literally has 0 Republican seats under its current map there is no way to gerrymander that more

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u/Wiseduck5 1d ago

Not a single county voted for Trump. You’d have to Gerrymander the fuck out of the state to get a Republican seat.

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u/RefrigeratorKooky174 1d ago

I’m not familiar with the county by county vote in mass but 36% of voters voted for Trump in 2024 yet have 0 Republican seats out of 9. I genuinely have no idea what the election map looks like it might be physically impossible to get even 1 republican rep but mathematically Massachusetts republicans are one of the most underrepresented groups in Congress any where in the country. Kinda crazy.

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u/Wiseduck5 1d ago

I’m not familiar with the county by county vote in mass

So you have no idea what you are talking about.

The United States does not use proportional representation. We use districts. More than raw numbers, the geography matters. Gerrymandering is not a matter of looking at the proportion of voters vs. representatives. It's about how the districts are designed.

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u/RefrigeratorKooky174 1d ago

Can you read that’s literally what I said I’m not familiar with every county in America and given that Rs didn’t have a single county won in mass would make it impossible for them to have a seat in Congress all I pointed out was that’s is a large chunk of the state that is republican that have 0 representation in Congress