Wile E. Coyote politics?
The GOP gerrymandering schemes pioneered in North Carolina might backfire this year.
Yesterday, Virginia Democrats released a new Congressional map that gives the party a 10-1 advantage. Republicans on Twitter are in an uproar; they’ve never seen such an egregious gerrymander! As a North Carolina Democrat, I can’t stop laughing.
Donald Trump’s plan to rig the 2026 election with a national mid-decade gerrymander is blowing up in his face. After he ordered his minions in Texas to redraw their Congressional districts to squeeze out a few more seats, California responded to even the score. Now, it looks like Democrats are actually going to pick up seats in the gerrymandering wars.
North Carolina, of course, is Ground Zero for the modern gerrymandering battles. For more than three decades, the state drew and redrew districts due to lawsuits filed by one side or the other. After a redistricting in 2015, then-Representative David Lewis famously defended partisan gerrymandering by saying, “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” Well, Virginia Democrats figured out how to draw one that gives Democrats a 10-1 advantage.
In Texas, the Republicans who drew the new districts are now in a panic. In a special election for a state Senate seat last week, a Democrat defeated the Republican by 14 points in a district that Trump won by 17. The GOP map-makers based their new districts on the premise that Hispanic voters had shifted to the GOP after they voted that way in 2024. The special election results indicate those voters have shifted back toward Democrats. If they stay with Democrats, Texas Republicans may lose more seats than they gain.
Here in North Carolina, Republicans bent the knee to Trump. They redrew two districts in eastern North Carolina in an attempt to unseat Democrat Don Davis in the First Congressional District. In doing so, they shifted Republicans out of GOP Representative Greg Murphy’s Third Congressional District into Davis’s district. If 2026 becomes a big Democratic wave year, both NC-01 and NC-03 could be Democratic after the votes are counted.
Republicans, though, aren’t finished. They’re trying to nationalize voting by requiring proof of citizenship to vote through the SAVE Act. The bill restricts the type of identification voters can use and excludes standard driver’s licenses. It’s another attempt by Republicans to limit access to the ballot box for voters who don’t fit the GOP profile.
Republicans know that 2026 is going to be a tough year for them. They’re falling back on the strategies and tactics they learned in North Carolina—rigging elections through gerrymandering and voter suppression. Neither tactic can stop a large wave. The attempt at gerrymandering, though, may turn out to be a Wile E. Coyote move.
Considering Davis votes Republican as often as not, they would have probably been better off leaving well enough alone. But I’m still saying don’t sleep on NC 09, and maybe NC 11 too. Hudson invented the ‘quit doing town halls approach to campaigning, and his opponent Richard Ojeda is happily filling in the vacuum he left behind him, working the district form end to end (and it is a sizable district). Out west, Chucklefuck Edwards isn’t any more popular with his constituents because they're all wondering when they’re finally going to put their district back on the map after Helen washed it away.
So let the NCGOP hide from their constituents, and depend on the R behind their names to protect them. It probably *will* protect some of them, but we finally have a state party chair that recognizes that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. And I suspect that if the candidates she’s fielding across the whole 100 counties are as fired up as she is, Phil Berger could find himself in a whole heap of trouble.
We should never, ever leave a seat unchallenged as we have done so often. Dems have got to take the lead on educating the voting public because it’s obvious that schools have failed miserably in their Civics education. Of course we know why that is too; republicans again pushing their favorite drugs of home schooling and vouchers after Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” fiasco. Gutting education has worked for them which has added to the general apathy and views of politics as being dirty; not in any way necessary for continuing our way of life.