“How the New Texas Map Changes the Outlook for Control of the House”

redistricting

Nate Cohn for The Tilt:

So far this election cycle, most analysts have assumed that Democrats will win the House next November. No, it’s not a guarantee. But the party out of the White House usually does well in midterms, and Democrats need a mere three seats to retake the chamber.

Over the last few weeks, this reasonable assumption has started to get more complicated. It turns out that Democrats might need to flip more than three seats, as President Trump is pushing red states to undertake a rare mid-decade redistricting effort to shore up the slender Republican House majority.

On Wednesday, Republicans in Texas unveiled the first of these efforts: a new map that could flip as many as five seats from blue to red.

It’s still too early to say what might happen beyond Texas. Maybe other Republican states will join; maybe Democrats will retaliate. Obviously, a wider redistricting war could have far greater implications, to say nothing of whether it is healthy for the country. But on its own, while the Texas map makes the Democrats’ path to the House harder, it doesn’t necessarily make it hard. They would still be favored to win the House if the election were held today on the new map, even though they don’t hold a very large lead in the polls….

For another, recent electoral trends have positioned Democrats to win House elections more easily. The Republican advantage in the early 2010s was partly a reflection of the geographic distribution of the Obama coalition, which showed its greatest strength in urban areas where Democrats had already been winning House elections. Since then, Democrats have made big gains in highly educated suburbs, flipping many previously Republican-leaning districts. At the same time, the collapse of the Obama coalition cost Democrats many popular votes in urban and rural areas but didn’t cost them many House seats. Put it together, and today’s congressional map is arguably the most balanced map since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Perhaps the easiest way to tell: Democrats barely lost the House popular vote in the last two elections, and they barely lost the chamber. By some measures — including the so-called efficiency gap promoted by redistricting reformers — the current House district map actually leans slightly to the left. By others — including my preferred measures — the map leans slightly to the right.

Either way, the fundamentally balanced House map is the backdrop to the new Texas map. While a few more Republican seats will certainly help the G.O.P., it will take more to give Republicans a major structural advantage in the fight for the House….

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“Texas House panel advances redrawn congressional map that would add more GOP seats”

redistricting

Texas Tribune:

A Texas House panel on Saturday advanced a draft congressional map aimed at adding five new Republican districts next year over protests from Democrats that the proposal would suppress the votes of people of color.

The chamber’s redistricting committee approved the map on party lines, 12 to 6, after spending much of Friday hearing testimony from U.S. House Democrats from Texas and members of the public largely opposed to the plan. The map could be considered by the entire state House as soon as early next week.

Earlier in the hearing, GOP lawmakers said that they are redrawing the state’s congressional map to advantage Republican candidates, setting aside a legal justification offered by the U.S. Department of Justice and making their political motivations explicit for the first time.

“Different from everyone else, I’m telling you, I’m not beating around the bush,” Rep. Todd Hunter, the Corpus Christi Republican carrying the bill, said about the goal of the map. “We have five new districts, and these five new districts are based on political performance.”

Texas Republicans launched the redistricting effort after pressure from President Donald Trump’s political operatives, who demanded state leaders redraw the map to help Republicans maintain their slim House majority ahead of a potentially difficult midterm election.

The House redistricting committee released its proposed redo of the map Wednesday. It slices up districts in the Houston, Austin and the Dallas areas, yielding five additional districts that would have voted for Trump by at least 10 percentage points in 2024. In 2024, Trump won 56.2% of votes in Texas. Under the current lines, Republicans hold 66% of Texas’ 38 House seats. The new map aims to push that share to 79%….

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“Donor List Suggests Scale of Trump’s Pay-for-Access Operation”

campaign finance, campaigns, lobbying

NYT:

When the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Eric Schiermeyer heard that President Trump was holding small group dinners with major donors, he saw opportunity.

Mr. Schiermeyer reached out to a lobbyist with connections in Mr. Trump’s orbit, who arranged for him to attend a dinner with the president at his private Mar-a-Lago club on March 1 in exchange for donations to a pro-Trump PAC called MAGA Inc. totaling $1 million.

The personal and corporate donations were among dozens of seven- and eight-figure contributions to MAGA Inc. from crypto and other interests revealed in a campaign finance filing on Thursday night that hinted at the access Mr. Trump accords those willing to pay.

At the dinner, Mr. Schiermeyer, who had never given a federal political donation before, presented an idea for a cryptocurrency called “U.S.A. Token” that would be distributed to every citizen, according to interviews and a flier he distributed to attendees that sets out details of the proposal. He hoped it could be supported through a federal contract with his company.

“I don’t usually put time and attention on politics,” Mr. Schiermeyer said in a text exchange with The New York Times. But, he added, “I was able to say my piece, and the idea is clearly making the rounds, so mission accomplished from my view.”

While the Trump administration has not given Mr. Schiermeyer any indication it is pursuing the U.S.A. Token idea, the episode underscores the face time that Mr. Trump has been willing to grant to deep-pocketed interests seeking business, preferential treatment or protection from him and his administration.

It also reveals how lobbyists, political consultants and others in the influence industry have capitalized on Mr. Trump’s aggressive fund-raising while in office to deliver for clients and earn chits with a president who keeps close tabs on who is delivering cash and listens to their appeals. It is a cycle that has helped Mr. Trump fill the coffers of his political groups, defying the gravity that sometimes drags down the fund-raising of term-limited presidents….

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“The Great Political Money Gap; When it comes to attracting mega-donors, Republicans are crushing Democrats.”

campaign finance, campaigns

NYT:

There are many signs that the Democratic and Republican Parties are in different places. Here’s one: The main Republican presidential super PAC controls almost $200 million. The main Democratic presidential super PAC is still repaying millions of dollars it accepted from someone who is now a convicted felon.

Such is the state of big-dollar political fund-raising, as last night’s filings with the Federal Election Commission made clear. When it comes to attracting mega-donors, Republicans are crushing Democrats. That could mean a lot more ads for conservatives than for liberals in next year’s midterm elections.

MAGA Inc., President Trump’s super PAC, collected about $177 million in the first half of 2025, in large part from cryptocurrency interests eager to curry favor with Trump.

The corresponding group for Democrats, Future Forward, had a slightly different tie to crypto: It spent the last six months disbursing $3.4 million to what is known as the FTX Recovery Trust, repaying money it had accepted during the 2022 election cycle from crypto-exchange executives like Sam Bankman-Fried. (Last year, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison after being convicted of stealing billions of dollars from his customers.)…

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“Top Biden Aide Had $4 Million Incentive to Secure a 2024 Win”

campaigns

NYT:

Mike Donilon, the longtime strategist and confidant for former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., told congressional investigators Thursday that he would have received a $4 million bonus had Mr. Biden won re-election last year.

That shows how Mr. Donilon held a financial interest in Mr. Biden’s remaining in the presidential race, all while Mr. Donilon was part of a very small inner circle of aides who kept damaging information from Mr. Biden. Mr. Donilon had also warned him that his “biggest issue is the perception of age.”

The admission from Mr. Donilon, revealed by a person briefed on his testimony who also confirmed that Mr. Donilon said he was paid $4 million for his work on the campaign, came during testimony before a House Republican-led Oversight Committee investigation into Mr. Biden’s mental acuity during his term in office. It was earlier reported by Axios.

Mr. Donilon was among the Biden aides who resisted calls for him to end his re-election campaign even after a debate performance that prompted a swell of opposition from within the Democratic Party. As recently as March, well after Mr. Biden left office, Mr. Donilon told The Harvard Political Review that Mr. Biden should have remained in the race and could still serve as president. “I still think he’s the best person to be president today,” Mr. Donilon said then….

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Breaking: Supreme Court, in Order Asking for Additional Briefing in Louisiana Voting Case, Appears to Put the Constitutionality of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act into Question

Supreme Court, Voting Rights Act

The Supreme Court just issued this order:

Louisiana had to create that second majority-minority district in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act, as it had been found to face Section 2 VRA liability for not creating that district. What the Court seems to be asking, without directly saying it, is whether Section 2 of the VRA, at least as to how it has been applied to require the creation of majority-minority districts in some circumstances, violates a colorblind understanding of the Constitution.

The stakes here are enormous; I was worried the Court would put the VRA’s constitutionality into question when there was this great delay in the Court ordering supplemental briefing. Something big was happening behind the scenes. And now we know.

This Court is more conservative than the Court that in 2013 struck down the other main pillar of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County case. This is a big, and dangerous, step toward knocking down the second pillar.

There was a LOOOOONG delay in SCOTUS issuing the supplemental briefing order, burying it after 5 pm on a Friday in August rather than at the end of the Supreme Court term when everyone was paying attention.

UPDATE: Page 36-38 of appellees’s brief, referenced in the order above, make it clear that Section 2’s constitutionality is being put into question:

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