Dems derided Trump’s midterm gamble — until he ended up winning big

One year ago this week, Texas passed a new congressional redistricting map, giving President Donald Trump his first major victory in his push to give Republicans a big boost heading into the midterm elections by drawing more right-leaning districts.   

One year later, as they fight to hold their razor-thin House majority, Republicans are the big winners, with partisan redistricting netting them at least 10 additional right-leaning congressional seats in time for the midterms.

Democrats and left-leaning pundits repeatedly railed against Trump’s efforts and charged they would “shred our country’s democracy.”

Top Democrats aimed to fight fire with fire but fell short. Their efforts to keep pace with the GOP were derailed following major court rulings by the Supreme Court and Virginia’s top court earlier this year, which were seen as major legal victories for Republicans. And the GOP scored another redistricting win earlier this month in Missouri, when a judge allowed a new map, backed by Trump and passed last year by Republican state lawmakers, to be used in November’s elections.

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Progressive pundits that cast Trump’s push for Texas to redraw its congressional map before the 2026 midterms as a threat to voting rights and democracy. Among them was former MSNBC anchor Joy Reid.

She branded the fight a “Voting Rights 911” and later titled a segment on “The Joy Reid Show” as “Texas’s War on Democracy Through Gerrymandering.”

John Oliver, host of “Last Week Tonight” on HBO, was also among a group of pundits that criticized the redistricting push as a power grab by Trump and the GOP.

Oliver said gerrymandering was the practice of manipulating maps “to get the outcome you want,” and called it “putting a heavy thumb on the scale of who gets elected.”

Fox News Digital reached out to representatives for Reid and Oliver to see if they continue to stand by their criticism, but didn’t receive responses by the time this story was published.

It wasn’t just pundits who spoke out.

Top Democrats also took action, after Trump, aiming to prevent what happened during his first term in the White House when Democrats reclaimed the House majority in the 2018 midterms, first floated the idea of rare, but not unheard of, mid-decade congressional redistricting.

After Texas led the way last summer, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin called a ruling by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court to greenlight the redistricting a victory for a “rigged map” meant to protect the GOP from midterm accountability.

“But it will backfire,” Martin predicted.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who led a successful redistricting effort in his Democrat-dominated state last year to negate the GOP gains in Texas, emphasized, “California will not sit idle as Trump and his Republican lapdogs shred our country’s democracy before our very eyes.”

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And Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, who considered but decided against redrawing congressional maps in the blue-leaning state, charged that Trump and Republicans were aiming to “erode our democracy and drag us toward authoritarianism.”

A veteran Republican strategist sees the Democrats’ arguments as hypocritical.

“The left’s overcharged political rhetoric is undermined by Governor Gavin Newsom’s willingness to spearhead a power grab in his state that eliminated at least 5 GOP congressional seats,” Colin Reed told Fox News Digital.

Reed argued that “Democratic leaders had the same goal as Republicans with mid-decade redistricting; they just weren’t as successful, but their intent makes any complaints about democracy ring hollow.”

But Democrats stand by their resistance.

“Elected leaders in every state should respond aggressively to this unAmerican attempt to rig control of congress for a generation,” John Bisognano, executive director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, told Fox News Digital.

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While Texas and California were the first major battlegrounds in the redistricting war, the fight quickly spread from coast-to-coast.

Republican-controlled Florida, Missouri, and Ohio and swing state North Carolina, where the GOP dominates the legislature, drew new maps as part of the president’s push.

But in blows to Republicans, a Utah district judge late last year rejected a congressional district map drawn by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature and instead approved an alternate that created a Democratic-leaning district ahead of the midterms.

And Republicans in Indiana’s state Senate in December defied Trump, shooting down a redistricting bill that had passed the state House.

But Democrats were dealt a major blow this spring when the Virginia Supreme Court struck down the Democrat-controlled state’s congressional redistricting ballot measure, which would have produced up to four more left-leaning House seats.

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Concurrently, a blockbuster decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that gutted key portions of the landmark Voting Rights Act – ruling that race should not dictate the redrawing of legislative districts – gave a handful of GOP-dominated Southern states the greenlight to move forward with redistricting.

The legal rulings locked in an advantage for Republicans in this year’s battle for the House. Now it’s up to voters to decide which party will control Congress.

But the redistricting fight is far from over.

Democrat-controlled New York is taking steps toward redistricting in time for the 2028 elections.

So is blue state Maryland, but a court ruling on Wednesday dealt Democrats a setback. A Maryland court blocked Democrats from adding a congressional redistricting initiative to the November ballot on Wednesday. The Democrat-backed effort would have allowed Maryland residents to vote on an amendment to the state constitution to let lawmakers redraw district maps ahead of the 2028 elections.

Meanwhile, battleground Georgia, where Republicans currently control the governor’s office and state legislature, is also mulling a move.

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“The gerrymandering crisis Trump started last year is is not over. We expect him to continue demanding new congressional maps that manipulate voting districts to protect Republicans despite what American voters want,” Bisognano told Fox News Digital.

He urged state leaders to speak out and draw “responsive maps to ensure the national congressional map reflects the make up and the will of the American people.”