War is the ultimate measurement of power.
By the end of war, there is a “neat ledger of power which has been duly audited and signed,” wrote historian Geoffrey Blainey in The Causes of War.
In politics, election results provide a similar ledger of power. In the 2024 elections, Republicans won the popular vote, the Electoral College, the U.S. House of Representatives, and successfully flipped four Democratic-held U. S. Senate seats to recapture the Senate majority. Republicans maintained the majority of the governorships across the country, too.
Now, Trump wants to press the advantage.
He is encouraging some states to engage in mid-decade redistricting—a tactic to produce a more accurate allocation of seats in the House. Though Trump himself will not be on the ballot in the 2026 midterm elections, he knows that the impact of his second term hinges on Republicans keeping control of Congress.
The Reapportionment Act of 1929 permanently set the number of House members at 435. It also created a process to reapportion seats among the states based on the results of the census every 10 years. States with declining populations can lose representatives, and states that gain population add more representatives. These changes can trigger state-level processes for drawing district maps, a high-stakes political battle called “gerrymandering.”
Gerrymandering benefits whichever party controls the state legislature and the governor’s mansion. Considerations about the new boundaries of a particular district are typically informed by an intent to ensure which districts will be won by which party. This explains why state district maps look like an array of unlikely shapes comparable to jagged clouds.
Though maps are typically drawn once every 10 years, much has changed since the last census in 2020, a year when state governments responded to Covid-19 in ways that caused many Americans to move to states with Covid policies that they found preferable, accelerating the population decline that was already underway in New York, California, and Illinois, while Florida and Texas (among other states) saw their populations surge. A recent review of the 2020 census showed that states with overcounts of the population tended to be blue states, while red states were more likely to be undercounted.
Here, Trump sees a political opportunity.
In the wake of these demographic changes, along with counting errors, Trump has ordered a new census with a more accurate count that excludes people who are living in the country illegally. “I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS.”
In particular, Trump believes that Texas Republicans are “entitled to five more seats” in the U.S. House of Representatives, prompting Governor Greg Abbott to call a special session of the legislature to vote on a newly-drawn district map. And Trump’s team is urging Republican governors in Florida, Missouri, Ohio, and Indiana, among other states, to launch their own mid-decade redistricting initiatives.
Trump’s bid poses a modicum of risk. Should blue states make good on threats to offset red state initiatives by redistricting their own states, the early forecasts indicate Republicans stand to net five or more seats due to “superior opportunities” to redraw district boundaries in red states. California’s Governor Gavin Newsom, who was quick to threaten tit-for-tat redistricting in the Golden State, appears to be negotiating against himself. Newsom wrote Trump a letter on August 11 stating that he would “happily” stand-down California’s retaliatory gerrymander if other states abandoned theirs. Days later, Newsom called for a special election to be held in November, in which he will ask voters to override California's independent redistricting commission in favor of a partisan gerrymander. But polling data show roughly two-thirds of California voters prefer the status quo. Sooner or later, blue states will awaken to an unpleasant realization: their maps already favor Democrats to the greatest possible extent.
Governor Newsom and others pontificate that Trump is “playing with fire,” and that gerrymandering is a brazen assault on democracy. But their rhetoric rings hollow. Gerrymandering may be contrary to a certain democratic spirit that many Americans still hold as a political ideal, but this hasn’t discouraged either party from exercising their redistricting power – when they have it.
More than that, gerrymandering is just one of many schemes that politicians use to stack the deck in their favor. Others include ballot harvesting, shady voter registration operations, weak identification requirements for voting, and counting illegal immigrants in the census (thereby giving states with high populations of illegal immigrants more representation in Congress – even though illegal immigrants are ineligible to vote).
We can acknowledge, then, that the potential gains are too great to pass up, especially for a president with the creativity and ambition of Donald Trump. He understands the threat posed by a Democrat-led House of Representatives. He learned this lesson the hard way during his first term. Once Democrats secured the House majority in the 2018 midterm elections, Trump was constantly dogged by phony investigations. Bureaucratic maneuvering stalled his agenda and ran out the clock on his presidency. If Democrats regain control of the House in 2026, they probably will abuse its investigative power to intimidate the cabinet, distract the public, and micro-manage Trump’s presidency.
But the abacus of power still favors the Republican party. Trump has interpreted the results of the most recent election as a mandate not to facilitate change on the margins but to move the country in a new direction and, where possible, create the constituencies to follow his lead.
Odds are President Trump will succeed.
John J. Waters is a lawyer. He served as a deputy assistant secretary of Homeland Security from 2020-21. Follow him at @JohnJWaters1 on X. Adam Ellwanger is a professor at University of Houston – Downtown, where he teaches rhetoric and writing. Follow him at @1HereticalTruth on X.
