Elections, for some reason, seem to unsettle and unnerve President Donald Trump. Losing is an intolerable outcome; winning is satisfying only if it produces a landslide, whether real or imagined..
We are seeing more evidence of the president’s perpetual election neurosis in the run-up to the 2026 midterms. That is why he has pushed red states, like Texas, Missouri and Florida, to gerrymander their congressional districts in hopes of ensuring that Republicans retain their majority in the House of Representatives.
Trump’s election anxieties were on display on Tuesday during an interview with CNBC. “We should have many more seats in California. It’s all gerrymandered. We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats,” he said. Four of those seats are currently held by Black or Hispanic lawmakers. Rep. Sylvester Turner, a Black Democrat, occupied the other one until his recent death.
The president, as is his wont, did not stop at noting the opportunity to flip those seats. “We have a really good governor, and we have good people in Texas,” he said. “And I won Texas. I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know, and we are entitled to five more seats.”
A Canadian Broadcasting Company report disputes what Trump said about his 2024 margin of victory in Texas: “George W. Bush won a higher share of Texas (his home state) in both of his successful presidential campaigns (59 per cent in 2000 and 61 per cent in 2004), while Ronald Reagan won an even greater share of Texas in his 1984 landslide presidential win (nearly 64 per cent.)”
What really matters here is not the truth of Trump’s claim, but that in his view, he and his Republican allies are “entitled” to seats held by duly elected representatives the Republican-dominated Texas state legislature seems determined to deliver for its party.
What really matters here is not the truth of Trump’s claim, but that in his view, he and his Republican allies are “entitled” to seats held by duly elected representatives the Republican-dominated Texas state legislature seems determined to deliver for its party. That’s not the way elections are supposed to work — not democratic elections, at least.
In authoritarian regimes, leaders may feel entitled to electoral victories and justified in stacking the deck to deliver that result. But in democracies, no one can claim entitlement to any election result before the votes are cast.
Americans need to wake up and stop thinking that the 2026 midterm elections will be free and fair. In fact, so long as the president has anything to say about it, the era of free and fair elections in this country will be a distant memory.
The only hope we have of preserving whatever is left of our democracy depends on whether Democrats in blue states succeed in matching the Republicans, gerrymander for gerrymander. And even then, the prospects for the Democrats to retake the House of Representatives will not be great. This is because, as the Washington Post reported, “Republicans have full legislative control of 23 states compared with only 15 for the Democrats — giving them more places to squeeze out a congressional seat here and there. Should there be a call to the barricades, Ohio is expected to quickly follow Texas’s lead, and so might Missouri and Florida, for starters.”
Beyond that stark fact of political geography, the Democratic brand is seriously tarnished. Polls show that only 33% of the American public has a favorable view of the party, which the Wall Street Journal says is its lowest rating in thirty-five years. That adds to the difficulty Democrats will have in wresting control of the House from the Republicans.
And then, the Post observed, there is the fact that “there are fewer and fewer places where congressional elections are truly competitive. As recently as 1999, fully 164 of the 435 members of the U.S. House represented swing districts.” In 2024, “only 37 House races were decided by five or fewer percentage points, and only 19 districts flipped between parties.”
Looking ahead to 2026, FairVote, a nonpartisan election reform organization, projected that next year “352 of the nation’s 435 House seats will be ‘safe’ for Republicans or Democrats. An additional 45 seats lean red or blue, leaving just 38 true tossup races. This means we can confidently say which party will win the vast majority of congressional districts in 2026.”
Despite this daunting reality, the fight to stop our elections from becoming the kind of empty ritual that delivers guaranteed victories to strongmen rulers and their parties in places like Russia, Turkey and Hungary is worth waging. The president has now told us how he feels about the upcoming congressional election — and it’s up to citizens and political leaders who value democracy to take him at his word. They cannot fight with one hand tied behind their backs while the president and his MAGA allies pull out all the stops. Standing up for free and fair elections in state legislatures and in lawful, peaceful demonstrations is an urgent matter.
Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
As in other areas of our political life, we can thank the Supreme Court for making this fight more difficult than it has ever been, and for propelling the gerrymandering wars that are now raging in this country. Five years ago, long before it granted immunity from criminal prosecution to the president, the court conferred a kind of legal immunity to anyone who wanted to fiddle with the redistricting process.
At that time, the court’s five conservative justices decided, over the stringent objections of its four liberal members, that partisan gerrymandering was a “political question beyond the reach of the federal courts.” They did so even though they acknowledged that “such gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles’…”
Justice Elena Kagan, who dissented, nonetheless agreed with them that “gerrymandering is, as so many Justices have emphasized before, anti-democratic in the most profound sense. In our government, ‘all political power flows from the people.’ And that means, as Alexander Hamilton once said, ‘that the people should choose whom they please to govern them.’”
By its very nature, gerrymandering reverses that relationship, allowing politicians to monkey around with the election process to ensure they get the voters they want in the districts they represent. It feeds the very sense of entitlement to which the president gave voice.
We need your help to stay independent
Kagan got it right when she called the court’s decision “tragically wrong.” What is now happening in Texas with the president’s open encouragement will, as she then wrote, “create a world in which power does not flow from the people because they do not choose their governors.” That world is the one Trump seems intent on creating.
His intention, to paraphrase Kagan, “imperil(s) our system of government,” the foundation of which is “free and fair elections.” We have long known that the president believes that elections he wins are free and fair; elections he loses are rigged.
We also know that the president believes any election he wins, no matter how small the margin, is a landslide, conveying a mandate to enact whatever policies he chooses.
But I don’t think many Americans would have ever imagined he would believe that victory in one election creates an entitlement to a particular result in the next one. The cat is now out of the bag.
Upon leaving office, former Attorney General Eric Holder founded the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, an organization dedicated to fighting for fair election maps, which has included filing lawsuits against Republican gerrymandering efforts. “Gerrymandering poses a critical threat to our democracy,” its website reads. But recently Holder changed his tune, if reluctantly, saying Democrats should fight fire with fire. “We must [do what is necessary to] preserve our democracy now,” he said, “in order to ultimately heal it.”
