The Texas State Capitol building in Austin. Democrats aim to fight fire with fire over Texas redistricting. Photo / Getty Images
The words are still there on the homepage of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee: “Gerrymandering poses a critical threat to our democracy”.
But the founder of the eight-year-old reformist organisation, former United States attorney-general Eric Holder, has done a 180-degree turn - at least for now - in the face of what he is calling “an existential crisis”.
“We must preserve our democracy now in order to ultimately heal it,” Holder said in a statement.
Democratic-led states, Holder said, are justified in responding in kind if Texas legislators move ahead with a mid-decade redistricting scheme aimed at giving Republicans five new safe seats in the US House - potentially enough for the GOP to hold the chamber in the 2026 Midterm election.
Awkward? Yes. Hypocritical? You could make that argument.
At a minimum, it represents a dramatic turnaround by a party that for more than a decade has claimed to be at the vanguard of good government and reform.
But the alternative, many Democratic leaders appear to agree, is unilateral disarmament.
The Democratic governors of California and New York - blue states where the lines are drawn by commissions - have indicated they are open to end-running that system if Texas redraws its districts.
New York’s Kathy Hochul scoffed at the idea of holding herself and her state to a “purity test”.
She said: “I’m tired with fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back. With all due respect to the good government groups, politics is a political process.”
But there’s another problem for Democrats if they engage in what has the potential to become a state-by-state war across the map: They would probably come out on the losing end.
It is true that gerrymandering - the stretching and distorting of district lines to guarantee results according to the wishes of the party in power - is nearly as old as the republic.
With computer technology and the use of targeted voter data, the modern potential for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around, has grown exponentially.
Reapportionment typically happens only once every 10 years, after a census.
Texas itself was an exception to that in 2003, after Republicans won full control of the legislature for the first time in 130 years and set about redrawing congressional district lines, according to a plan by then-House Republican majority leader and Texas congressman Tom DeLay.
That year also saw a walkout by Democrats in the state legislature, but their efforts to stop the redistricting ended in failure, and the GOP advantage has endured.
Though President Donald Trump won 56% of the vote last year in Texas, Republicans hold more than 65% of the state’s seats in the US House.
What’s different this time is the potential for the battle to spread beyond the Red River.
There are practical obstacles and time constraints in states where mid-decade redistricting would require a special election, as California Governor Gavin Newsom (Democrat) is considering, or amending the state constitution, as New York might have to do.
And then there is the fact that Republicans have full legislative control of 23 states compared with only 15 for the Democrats - giving them more places to squeeze out a congressional seat here and there.
Should there be a call to the barricades, Ohio is expected to quickly follow Texas’s lead, and so might Missouri and Florida, for starters.
Past gerrymandering has left Democrats with fewer opportunities left to counter those moves.
“It’s not that Democrats haven’t been fighting this war. It’s that they are out of ammunition and targets,” says David Daley, a senior fellow at the reform organisation FairVote and author of the provocatively titled book, Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count.
Of course, both sides’ calculations are based on the idea that 2026 will be a close election in a deeply divided and polarised country.
Should there be a big wave, as there often is against a president’s party in Midterm elections, all of this manoeuvring could turn out to be inconsequential.
And then there are the long-term consequences to consider.
Polls continue to indicate there is a strong public distaste for gerrymandering.
A YouGov survey released yesterday found that almost two-thirds of respondents think there should be “public input on proposed congressional and legislative voting districts”, and well over half support requiring that redistricting be conducted by a non-partisan commission.
But even before Texas kicked off the current partisan battle, the larger cause of election reform was struggling under an assault from both political parties.
In 2024, a host of proposals - including ranked-choice voting, non-partisan primaries and redistricting commissions - were on the ballot.
And almost everywhere, with the exception of the District of Columbia and a handful of other local jurisdictions, they failed.
Alaska, which has open primaries and is the only state other than Maine that employs ranked-choice voting in its elections, came within a whisker of abandoning the system that it voted into place only four years before.
There are fewer and fewer places where congressional elections are truly competitive.
As recently as 1999, fully 164 of the 435 members of the US House represented swing districts. Last year, only 37 House races were decided by five or fewer percentage points, and only 19 districts flipped between parties, according to a Brennan Centre analysis of data compiled by the Cook Political Report.
Most of the rest are “so safe, it would take an unprecedented tsunami-sized wave election to flip them”, the Brennan Centre’s Michael Li wrote.
In other words, the results of the vast majority of congressional elections are decided in party primaries, which tend to be low-turnout affairs conducted during the spring and summer.
Only a tiny minority of highly engaged and intense partisans even bother to cast their ballots in those, often overlooked, contests, which means the representatives they send to Washington have little incentive to find common ground or compromise by reaching across the aisle.
As a minimum, what appears most likely to be a losing battle on the part of Democrats might end up achieving one thing: It is drawing attention to the internal processes that most voters overlook and ignore.
“Once this time has passed, measures at the federal and state levels must be put in place to outlaw the actions that have precipitated this crisis,” Holder vowed.
However, as Americans well know, few forces in politics ever trump self-interest.