A significant milestone went unnoticed on a week that was extraordinarily eventful even by today’s standards of U.S. politics. What with the anniversary of Donald Trump’s victory, the Democratic electoral triumph, and the record-breaking government shutdown, it was difficult to remember that Monday marked the start of the one-year countdown to the next midterm elections. These votes will renew all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate. But above all, they will determine the viability of the second half of Trump’s term.
Aware of how much is at stake in these midterms, the U.S. president has already launched an assault on several fronts to — if all goes well, with the help of the Supreme Court — alter the rules of the game before the vote (by manipulating the congressional map through redistricting), during the vote (by making it more difficult for minorities to vote), or afterwards (by denying the results if they are adverse). The goal? To prevent Republicans from losing the House of Representatives and to prevent Democrats from curbing the president’s agenda, and who knows, perhaps even to initiate impeachment proceedings like the two he faced during his first term in the White House.
The rigged election hypothesis doesn’t sound so alarmist or exaggerated when one considers that in 2020, after months of spreading suspicions in advance about the electoral system, Trump clung to power after losing the election by alleging a non-existing fraud, pressured the Georgia attorney general to find him the votes he needed, challenged vote counts across the country, and, when he saw that none of this was working, incited a mob of his followers to storm the Capitol.
Although perhaps we don’t need to go back that far: in the summer of 2024, at a rally in Florida during the campaign that returned him to the White House, the candidate addressed American Christians, saying: “Get out and vote! Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore! Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore.”
The part of the plan related to the “before” began in the summer, when the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, announced that he would redraw his state’s congressional districts to take five seats away from his rivals. He did so using the tactic of gerrymandering, a sport as American as it is undemocratic. Practiced by politicians of all stripes, it consists of creating demographically artificial and geographically impossible voting districts (as impossible as a salamander, the animal from which the second part of the neologism originates) that benefit whoever is in power. The Constitution mandates this redistricting, by state, every 10 years, when, after the release of new census data, electoral maps are redrawn to reflect population changes.
What Abbott did is known as midterm gerrymandering, because it’s practiced before the midterm elections that split the presidency into two and are usually unfavorable for the incumbent. The fact that the map of Texas, a territory far more diverse than the stereotype suggests, was already heavily manipulated is demonstrated by the fact that Republicans won 67% of the seats in Washington in 2024 despite only obtaining 52% of the vote in the Senate by direct vote. With this new manipulation, they aspirate to 80% of the foot.
