Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan warned that the Supreme Court’s decision in the Texas redistricting case will lead to a “violation of the Constitution” of voter rights.
The Supreme Court issued an unsigned decision in favor of freezing the initial 2-1 U.S. federal court ruling against Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s proposed redistricting map, a stay that could help Republicans pick up five additional U.S. House seats in next year’s midterms.
“This Court’s stay ensures that many Texas citizens, for no good reason, will be placed in electoral districts because of their race,” Kagan wrote in her dissent. “And that result, as this Court has pronounced year in and year out, is a violation of the Constitution.”
Is this the same Texas map that was drawn up using voting data based on Trump’s 2024 victory?
Because if so, does it not then have the potential to water down enough districts to make them swing districts, based off of more recent demographic voting trends?
I don’t know enough about polling, statistics and probability to determine if this is a realistic outlook, or just copium.
How poetic would it be if it backfired that way though? We can dream
You pack and you crack.
You either try and pack as many opposition voters into as few districts is possible, or you crack opposition districts and spread their voters to districts you think have enough favorable demographics for you to still win.
But they did all this math based on voter data from the last presidential election, and those demographics have now swung wildly in the other direction, at least according to more recent elections.
So they created a whole bunch of GOP districts that only had a few points of advantage, but that advantage was based off Trump 2024 results.
Is this copium? Maybe, maybe not.
They really did make these decisions based off that voter data, and subsequent election results raise the possibility that they’re really fucking up here, but only time will tell if those trends hold.
In a place like Texas… More than likely.
In a state that’s closer to a swing state it’s easier to over do it with gerrymandering and spread out your support too thin. In a state where there’s a lot more support to spread out… Accidentally fucking up is a little more challenging to do.
Plus, I would find it difficult to believe that political operatives wouldn’t be able to grasp the idea that things like the Latino vote from the last election might not be as dependable this year and react accordingly.
That’s how gerrymandering always works…
You want to get every district to where you’d barely win, and jam all the extra people who would vote against you into as few districts as possible that they will definitely win.
The obvious danger is if you gerrymander too much, and a wave shows up, you could potentially lose everything because you no longer have any “safe” districts.
I’ve been saying since the beginning that we’re better off letting them do all this redistricting ASAP, that way we can start the groundwork to win enough of those close districts to take the whole state government
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