Traditionally, the first midterm election for the new party in the White House does not go very well.
To give you an idea, during Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s first midterm elections, they lost more than 100 seats collectively.
To offset the expected losses, Trump asked GOP governors to gerrymander their congressional maps, but he has had little success in the courts on this front, until now.
New Texas maps have gotten all the press, but that is hardly the only state that redrew its maps at Trump’s request.
North Carolina also manipulated its maps, albeit without the dramatic swing that was created by the Texas scheme.
The Tar Heel state currently has 14 seats in the House, 10 of them occupied by Republicans.
The new map would remove one of the Democrat seats, all but giving the GOP a lock on 11 seats.
The maps, of course, were challenged in court, and initially, the GOP lost the case.
The matter just went before an appellate court, however, and shockingly, the ruling fell in favor of Republicans.
Most of the challenges to new maps have been premised on allegations of racial discrimination, but the panel in North Carolina did not believe that the plaintiff proved any such thing occurred.
The plaintiff also accused the GOP of rushing the maps for the purpose of discrimination, but the ruling stated that plaintiffs “have offered no reason to believe that the speed of the 2025 process indicates an intent to discriminate on the basis of race.”
The real battle is in Texas, as the state redrew its maps to take five seats away from Democrats.
We all knew that Democrats would challenge the maps, and initially, they were successful as the court blocked the maps from being put in play.
With two Republican judges ruling in the case, one of them a Trump appointee, the GOP felt good about its prospects, but it was the Trump appointee, Judge Jeffrey Brown, who sided with the liberal judge to strike the maps down. He stated, “The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics. To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”
Since then, there has been an appeal to the Supreme Court, and review was granted, so the lower court ruling has been temporarily stayed. We are now awaiting the high court’s ruling now that a response has been submitted to see if the court will dismiss the request or hear oral arguments.
