Donald Trump Won't Be Saved by Maps

Gerrymandering in red states is predicated on Republicans holding Trump’s support in 2024, particularly from Latinos. That could be a bad bet.

by David Dayen August 29, 2025

As Americans have physically sorted themselves along ideological lines and as Big Data has dug into voting preferences on practically a house-by-house basis, it can be compelling to suggest that cartographers hold a skeleton key to U.S. elections. That’s definitely the assumption underlying the Trump administration’s red-state redistricting tour, which has already stormed through Texas, has dates booked in Florida, Missouri, Ohio, and possibly Indiana (whose leaders still sound indifferent on moving ahead), and is lying in wait for a Supreme Court go-ahead to shred other parts of the South.

In short, Trump and his allies are trying to erect impregnable walls around their own unpopularity; you can call it an attempt to steal the midterm election. But the universe of voters changes from year to year, and even in today’s polarized political environment, individuals change their minds. Exercises in mapmaking can amount to fighting the last war, with old information not fit to the current circumstances. That’s particularly true with new maps that are largely predicated on Donald Trump’s 2024 overperformance, particularly with Latino voters.

How much of an overperformance 2024 was, or whether it sparked a new realignment in American politics, is the key question. “Democratic performance writ large is almost certainly going to improve from 2024,” said Katherine Fischer, director of Texas Majority PAC, which seeks to elect more Democrats in the state. “To what extent, anyone who tells you is guessing or lying.”

SNIP
Those districts are all heavily Latino. TX-28 (90 percent Latino) and TX-34 (77 percent), two Rio Grande Valley seats, are currently held by Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, respectively. The new TX-35 (53 percent Latino), formerly a Democratic vote sink that stretched from San Antonio to Austin, is now a San Antonio–only seat that incorporates some of the city and its suburbs, along with outlying red counties. Joe Biden won both the new TX-28 and TX-34 districts in 2020, and only lost TX-35 by 1.9 points.
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-08-29-donald-trump-wont-be-saved-by-maps/