Texas Governor Greg Abbott didn’t hesitate to agree to President Donald Trump’s request to create five new Republican congressional seats through an uncommon, though not unheard of, mid-decade redistricting. The president’s call was reminiscent of his recorded conversation in 2020 with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger when he asked Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.” This time, the president was interested in finding five more safe Republican seats in Congress, and Abbott obliged. Democratic strongholds like California and New York are planning to initiate their own redistricting in response to offset the newly created Republican districts in Texas. Texas Democrats have fled the state to prevent the legislature from proceeding and Texas Republicans have issued warrants for their arrest.
President Trump’s appeal to Gov. Abbott is what initiated the current standoff, but if this latest failure of good governance is the president’s responsibility, it’s important to acknowledge that leaders on both sides of the aisle have a long history of playing games with congressional lines. Governor Wes Moore and Maryland’s Democratic leaders are right to be upset by what’s happening in Texas, but this may be a good time for them to reconsider the actions Democrats have taken to make Maryland one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. More than assigning blame, what matters now is finding a way out of this situation.
One way is to up the ante, and New York and California are preparing to gerrymander Republican districts out of existence. Rather than follow suit, Maryland could lead in a different direction. Instead of reshaping the 1st Congressional District, the only Republican-held district in Maryland, we could signal our willingness to redraw the lines of the 6th Congressional District, removing parts of Montgomery County that are heavily Democratic but have little in common with the rest of the district that covers Western Maryland. This would give Republicans a fair shot of winning a seat that’s less competitive because it was gerrymandered to benefit Democrats.
If other Democratic states followed Maryland’s lead and allowed a few of their most gerrymandered districts to become more competitive, it’s possible that Republicans would accept that outcome as a reasonable way out of the current standoff. This would extricate us from a situation that’s quickly becoming a crisis.
Rather than engage in a race to the bottom, changing the 6th Congressional District would allow Maryland to suggest a novel end to the current crisis. The idea of making this sort of gesture, at a time when Texas Republicans are violating the spirit of the rules, is understandably hard for Democrats to consider. But ending the crisis on terms that are generally acceptable to both sides is more important right now than pointing fingers. There’ll be plenty of time for Democrats to review what’s happened and explain it to voters.
Gerrymandering isn’t the only way to win elections. Democrats are making the case that President Trump is weakening the economy and threatening people’s healthcare. If they’re right, voters should notice, and a reconfigured 6th Congressional District should still be winnable.
President Trump promised America a golden age, but downtown Cumberland in Allegany County hasn’t experienced a Trump-induced boom. Not in the first six months of his current term or the entire four years of his first. Some of that failure is tied to state policy, but Democrats have a good case to make to rural voters that President Trump’s actions aren’t improving their lives. More of these voters might listen if Democrats created goodwill by fixing the gerrymandered lines of the 6th Congressional District.
If Democrats moderate their positions and speak to a wider audience, the five seats Texas hopes to create shouldn’t matter. In 1932, Democrats gained 90 seats in the House. In 2018, they flipped 40. Big victories are possible.
Those who say our politics are too polarized to create these kinds of margins are wrong. Americans who don’t identify with either party are now the largest group of voters in our country, a clear signal that more people are rejecting the tactics we’re seeing in Texas and the tactics that created Maryland’s 6th Congressional District. These voters are winnable by the party that differentiates itself by refusing to add to our dysfunction.
Democrats don’t help themselves when a member of Congress like Jasmine Crockett gives Governor Abbott the nickname “hot wheels” because he uses a wheelchair, and they don’t help themselves when they match Republican redistricting antics with antics of their own. There are two ways for Democrats to engage in the fight with President Trump’s Republicans: They can adopt Trump’s tactics and try to carve out five new seats of their own, or they can reject his tactics, moderate their message, talk to voters beyond the cities, offer a grand gesture like redrawing the 6th Congressional District, and with that momentum pursue a landslide victory in the 2026 midterms. If things are as bad under Trump as Democrats claim, a huge win is attainable. And if they’re as good under Trump as Republicans claim, they wouldn’t be trying to carve out five new districts in Texas.
Colin Pascal (colinjpascal@outlook.com) is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and a graduate student in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C. He lives in Annapolis.
