‘Fire with fire’: The doomsday political scenarios after Texas and California launch their warheads over redistricting
Shall we play a game?
With California threatening to meet Texas in a nationwide redistricting fight, the possibility of strike-counterstrike scenarios between red and blue states is evoking Cold War vibes. No, it’s not the nuclear simulation nightmare faced by Matthew Broderick’s character in War Games (1983) — in this East-to-West escalation of tensions, the driving force is control over the U.S. Congress.
To that end, Democratic and Republican lawmakers in at least half a dozen states are openly wielding the threat of mid-Census redistricting to add politically sympathetic seats in the House of Representatives ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
It’s 2025’s nuclear option.
Behind the front lines of this war over control of the House for the last two years of Donald Trump’s presidency stand Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and California’s Gavin Newsom — aiming their partisan ballistic missiles at each other like John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.
The timing of this redistricting push — which reportedly stems directly from pressure put on Republicans in their respective states by Trump — is far from coincidental. Trump spent the first six months of his second term watching a bitterly divided House GOP caucus battle over his “Big, Beautiful Bill” and only narrowly averted a government shutdown in March thanks to their razor-thin majority.
He wants to close out his legacy in an easier fashion.
So, with the House up for grabs in 2026, Trump is increasingly desperate to stave off a Democratic takeover, in line with traditional historical patterns for mid-presidential term elections. A Democratic-controlled House could cause more headaches for Trump than it did during his first term, when he faced an impeachment push and repeated investigations into his administration. Election forecasters currently rate the chamber as a toss-up.
The House of Representatives has 435 members. Right now, Republicans hold a 219-212 margin, and four seats are vacant; three were held by Democrats, one by a Republican. The president’s party has tread a thin line for months attempting to pass legislation, with Democrats largely unwilling to cross party lines and Republicans uninterested in making overtures to their foes.
Typically, redistricting takes place after the beginning of the decade, following the completion of the U.S. Census. The constitutionally-required count of every person living in America determines how many congressional districts each state will be allocated in the lower chamber. Individual district lines are then drawn by state leaders, with population shifts and other factors sometimes leading to two incumbents fighting for one seat.
A mid-decade redistricting is rare, and typically only occurs when a court throws out the existing congressional maps for being improper in some regard. Because Texas, California and other states considering these measures do not have the backing of new Census data, they will not add (or subtract) seats from their respective totals.
And the battle seems to have done what Trump’s actions alone in his first eight months could not — activate younger Democratic members of the House and Senate despite the sluggishness of their veteran party leadership. It’s also given the term-limited governor of California a battle upon which to raise his national profile, and revamp his image, for an expected 2028 run at the presidency.
Last week, several Democrats who fled Texas to hold up a redistricting effort in the state legislature returned and were prevented from leaving again as Republicans pushed forward with their own plans. The Texas legislature on Wednesday passed the measure in an 88-52 vote along party lines. It now awaits Abbott to sign the plan into law.
Newsom, in kind, unveiled a plan to subvert his state’s independent redistricting commission as an emergency response to any redrawing of congressional maps in Texas or any other GOP-led state. His plan, which would utilize a ballot measure, would be voted on by Californians in a special election this November. California lawmakers voted mostly along party lines Thursday to approve that legislation calling for the special election and Newsom quickly signed it.
