Vance dismantles narrative on Texas gerrymandering

Democrats and the media have been raging over the new Texas congressional maps, which Governor Abbott just approved this weekend. What they are not discussing, however, is how badly many Democrat maps are gerrymandered.

Ideally, voter presence in the state is reflected in the percentage of House seats, but that is not the case in most states, and Vice President JD Vance had no problem calling the media out on this front.

The problem

If you look at most red or blue-dominated states, the maps are clearly off, but from what I have seen, the problem is far worse for Democrats.

As an example, in the last presidential election, Trump won nearly 40% of the vote in California, yet Republicans control only 23% of the congressional seats allocated to the state.

Donald Trump won nearly 45% of the vote in Connecticut, which has five seats, and all of them are Democrats.

Trump won 43.5% of the vote in the 2024 election in Illinois, yet of the 17 congressional seats, Republicans have only three, which is a mere 17.6% of the seats.

Going to get worse

This problem is only going to get worse, as Democrats are using the Texas gerrymandering to further gerrymander their maps (prior to the new maps, Texas’s maps were fairly close in voters to Democrat representation, but still leaned right).

Maryland, a state with eight congressional seats, had 35% of its voters pull the handle for Trump, but there is only one of the eight seats, or 12.5%, allocated to Republicans.

That one seat could be gone, as Democrat Governor Wes Moore is threatening to eliminate it.

He was asked, “There is one seat here that is actually Republican and it is a seat held by Rep. Andy Harris. Are you considering trying to redraw lines in Maryland?” Moore responded, “When I say all options are on the table, all options are on the table.”

Vance drops a truth bomb

I have been arguing this since Texas first announced its maps, laughing at the hypocrisy on the left, as if, because they redrew their maps after the 2020 census was filed, that it makes all of this okay.

When Kristen Welker asked Vance about the Texas gerrymandering, he finally flipped the script, telling her, “First of all, Kristen, you have to ask yourself why have Democrats gerrymandered their states aggressively in the past 10 to 20 years. If you look, for example, at the popular vote in a lot of these states, in Massachusetts, where 32% of the residents of Massachusetts voted for Republicans, zero Republican federal representatives.”

He continued, “All we’re doing frankly is trying to make the situation a little bit more fair on a national scale. The Democrats have gerrymandered their states really aggressively. We think there’s opportunities to push back against that, and that’s really all we’re doing.”

I get everyone being upset about the Texas maps, but if the media is going to be fair and honest, they have to put Democrats on the spot over their maps and not accept an answer, “Well, we did ours in 2022, so it’s okay.” Even with Texas maps being gerrymandered, they are still fairer than most of the Democrat maps, but that is not something the media wants to report.