Donald Trump’s unprecedented attempt to rig the midterm elections through mid-decade gerrymandering, voter suppression, and weaponizing the legal system took a massive hit on Tuesday. Democrats struck back with their own redistricting efforts, defeated GOP attempts to make it harder to vote, and protected Democratic judges who have ruled against Trump’s election subversion schemes.
The biggest anti-Trump victory came in California, where voters overwhelmingly approved Prop. 50, enshrining a new congressional map through 2030 that could give Democrats five new US House seats in the next election. Beyond the significance of offsetting Texas’ Trump-inspired mid-decade gerrymander, Democrats hope the momentum from Prop. 50 inspires other Democratic states to take similar action. In his victory speech, California Gov. Gavin Newsom called on Virginia, Maryland, New York, Illinois, and Colorado to adopt new maps in response to the GOP’s gerrymandering efforts.
“I hope it’s dawning on people the sobriety of this moment, what’s at stake,” Newsom said on Tuesday night. “We can de facto end Donald Trump’s presidency as we know it.”
Other Democratic states do appear to be getting off the sidelines in the redistricting wars. Virginia Democrats are moving forward with a new redistricting plan that is similar to California’s Prop. 50 and would need to be approved by the state’s voters. That effort received a boost on Tuesday when Virginia Democrats elected Abigail Spanberger as governor and flipped 13 seats in the state’s House of Delegates. That is likely to add momentum to the redistricting push there, which could make it possible for Democrats to win up to four more seats.
Also on Tuesday, Maryland’s Democratic governor, Wes Moore, announced his own redistricting bid, though the Democratic head of the state Senate still opposes that effort. Meanwhile, Kansas Republicans announced on Tuesday night that they were dropping their plan to hold a special session to eliminate the seat of Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids. While Democrats remain behind in the overall gerrymandering arms race, these combined developments put them much closer to parity.
Voters also rejected GOP attempts to restrict access to the ballot. Maine voters overwhelmingly defeated a ballot initiative that would have required voter ID for in-person and mail-in ballots and would have added a number of new hurdles to casting a mail-in ballot. It’s only the second time, following a failed Minnesota measure in 2012, that voters have rejected a voter ID initiative at the polls.
“Once again, Maine people have affirmed their faith in our free, fair, and secure elections, in this case by rejecting a direct attempt to restrict voting rights,” Gov. Janet Mills (D) said of the result. “Maine has long had one of the highest rates of voter turnout in the nation, in good part due to safe absentee voting—and Maine people tonight have said they want to keep it that way.”
Finally, voters in Pennsylvania thwarted an attempt to oust three Democratic state Supreme Court justices, likely keeping a Democratic majority on the state’s top court through the 2028 election. The result has major significance for voting rights—the Democratic justices struck down a GOP gerrymander in 2018, rejected Trump’s attempts to overturn the election in 2020, and upheld no-excuse mail-in voting in 2022. It was also another rebuke of the GOP’s efforts to buy the courts; Republican megadonor Jeff Yass, a top Trump supporter, spent $3.5 million to oppose the three Democratic justices, but they retained their seats with at least 61 percent of the vote each.
In response to these defeats, Trump is certain to double down on his authoritarian tactics. During a speech to GOP senators on Wednesday morning, he called on Republicans to “terminate the filibuster…Then we should pass voter ID, we should pass no-mail-in voting. We should pass all the things that we want to pass to make our elections secure and safe, because California’s a disaster. Many of the states are disasters.”
As Trump and his GOP allies become more unpopular, we can expect his attempts to manipulate the electoral system in his favor to grow even more extreme.
After California Republicans passed Prop. 50, California Republicans quickly filed suit against the map in federal court on Wednesday, claiming that it was drawn “specifically to favor Hispanic voters,” even though the new map has the same number of majority-Latino districts as the one drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission after the 2020 census. Trump threatened a “very serious legal and criminal review” of the vote on Tuesday, so it’s likely the DOJ will intervene in this lawsuit or file its own.
“They’re gonna try 5x harder to sabotage the midterms after tonight,” Indivisible c0-founder Leah Greenberg wrote on Bluesky Tuesday evening, “and we’re gonna have to organize on a literally historic scale to stop them.”
