Five additional seats in Texas, two in Ohio, one in the Missouri: through the United States, Donald Trump puts pressure on the electoral districts and establish his majority at the Congress. And if in front of the Democrats try to retaliate, their arsenal remains limited.
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“I won Texas,” boasted the republican president on Tuesday on the CNBC channel, explaining that with this advance during the last presidential election, the Republicans had obtained the right and deserved to win “five more seats” during the mid-term elections in November 2026, capitals for the continuation of Donald Trump.
With his statements, Donald Trump illustrates an old recipe for electoral cooking in the United States, “Gerrymandering”.
This technique of cutting the constituencies, used both by the Republicans and the Democrats, aims “to dilute the relative electoral power of a particular group”, explains to AFP Daron Shaw, professor of political science at the University of Texas.
This allows in return to “maximize the number of seats that a party receives,” he adds, resulting in inequitable results on the scale of the American states.
From this learned electoral charcuting sometimes emerges from the constituencies to the ubiquitous contours, without geographic coherence or population.
It also causes a certain polarization.
According to the COOK Political Report, in 2024, only 27 seats could truly rock democrat or republican out of the 435 that the American Chamber of Representatives has.
Rural and urban
With a majority at the congress that matters on the fingers of the hand, and while the ruling party traditionally loses ground during the mid-term elections, the White House knows that the clock turns.
In recent weeks, Donald Trump has thus weighed all his weight on Texas Republican officials so that they quickly offer a more favorable division, which would allow 30 of the 38 seats at stake, against 25 currently.
Presented last week, this new map will make the constituencies “even more discriminatory on the racial level than they are currently”, denounces to AFP Dave Jones, president of the coalition of associations Fair Maps Texas, which militates against “Gerrymandering” in this state.
Living in the Metropolis of Dallas, he cites the example of his constituency, the limits of which will be extended to much more rural localities with the new map.
“The goal is to dilute the votes of people of color in urban areas,” said Dave Jones, since the African-American and Hispanic electorate has traditionally voted in the majority of democrat.
In an attempt to prevent a vote in the Texas Parliament to ratify this new division, elected democrats fled the state on Sunday, taking refuge in Chicago or New York.
In their absence, a quorum is not reached, which pushed the republican governor Greg Abbott to threaten them with arrest and forfeiture of their mandate if they did not return quickly.
“Fire by fire”
Beyond Texas, the Trump administration would also like to redraw in its favor the cards of Ohio, Missouri, or even Indiana.
In response, several Democratic governors have announced their intention to do the same, like the Californian Gavin Newsom, who said he wanted to “fight fire by fire”.
But unlike Texas, where the legal process allows this relatively easily redistribution, democratic states have for many putting legislative and even constitutional safeguards.
It will therefore be complicated for them to compensate for the seats potentially lost elsewhere.
For Daron Shaw, from the University of Texas, it should not be forgotten, however, that the practice of “gerrymandering” is far from exclusive to the republican states.
He thus quotes his recent analysis, based on the results of the 2024 presidential election, which shows a over -representation of Democrats in California of 12 seats and in the Illinois of eight seats; While the Republicans are overrepresented mainly in Florida of four seats, and in Texas of three seats.
The democratic argument that this redistribution of the Republicans is a threat to democracy is therefore “particularly swollen coming from people in California and Illinois who have a” gerrymandering “much more blatant than in Texas,” said the professor.