Originally published at: Indiana Gov Announces Special Session to Act on Trump’s Gerrymandering Squeeze - TPM – Talking Points Memo
Succumbing to mounting pressure from the Trump administration and the president’s allies, Indiana Republican Gov. Mike Braun announced on Monday that a special session focused on redistricting will convene on November 3. The announcement significantly bolsters the Trump administration’s pressure campaign to strongarm Republicans in red states across the country to redraw their congressional maps as…
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I hope it bites them in the ass.
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Blatantly rigging the game, and it’s going to happen with the SCOTUS complicit in this power grab. This is the Fourth Reich, people. We need to stop thinking that’s bombast or hyperbole. Fascists will hold power for a generation with this rigging.
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I just heard a stat that shows why they’re so so desperate to get all these structural barriers to non-right-wing voting in place…
The percentages of Americans who are White CHhistians (the general source of the pro-Trump, pro-White Christian Nationalist voting/behaving) and of those who are White Conservative Evangelicals (the main and the really fervent source of White Christian Nationalist sentiments) both continue to drop significantly. The percentage of White self-identified Christians in the U.S. is now 41 percent, as I understand it, while the percent of White Conservative Evangelical Protestant – which was 25 percent of the country not very long ago-- is now down to just 13 percent.
And that fact is diluting right-wing power as far as raw numbers go, according to PRRI’s Robbie Jones, who I just heard talking about the new PRRI/Brookings American Values Survey on Michael Podhoretz’s Substack. And that’s a good thing, of course, for rational voting and a rational government.
However, he noted that, by now, between the geographic distributions of White Christians across the nation and across each state, the amount of gerrymandering and Supreme Court demolition of the Voting Rights Act and so on, plus the Federal system in general as the Constitution lays it out, the structural advantages that the White Christian vote has is not dropping along with their overall proportion of the population and in some ways may eve be getting boosted.
Jones’ view is that, therefore, this right-wing horror that we have right now isn’t actually a Democratic messaging problem, as we all keep saying, but in fact is primarily a very complicated interwoven structural advantage for the right-wing vote – i.e., for White Protestants – which Republicans are putting all their efforts into trying to bolster.
On the bright side, he also noted that the Latino shift toward Protestantism-- especially conservative Evangelicalism --seems to be dropping off fairly significantly, with Catholicism (which does tend to vote more Democratic) holiding its own, and “unaffiliated” rising substantially among Latinos while Evangelical Protestantism simultaneously drops off (after a period when it was pretty significantly rising.)
Just FYI, here’s who Michael Podhoretz is –
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“Rig elections”
–The Republican Party, 2025
Wait until they start rigging business operations, for the good of America, of course, but mostly for the good of their subscribers.
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I live in one of the 2 Dem districts – both very urban– and this is just infuriating. I think there will be protests at the statehouse. Not sure it will do any good, but if Braun thinks slavish support of Trump’s racist disenfranchising of the city he currently lives in will go over well, he should be faced with some opposition.
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The GOP is the terror cell that keeps on giving.
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They know they can’t win honestly, so they cheat. It’s the GQP way.
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Rushed hyper gerrymandering is dangerous for the Republicans.. The current gerrymandering schemes took years and lots of careful work to establish. They basically are about segregating minority voters into a few districts. The more you try to gerrymander the more you have to move minority voters into Republican districts. I think we could see some of these states losing districts if this is the wave election everybody thinks it is going to be.
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This is the smell of desperation from Republicans. If this is a shellacking like 1994, 2006, 2018 then all this gerrymandering will still make the Republicans in the house in 2027 the minority.
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Braun doing this was always going to happen. He deflected as long as he could, but he’s a weak man. There was some talk last week that the ‘votes aren’t there to do this”, but that was because some of the reps wouldn’t publicly commit to a position. I suspect the behind the scenes strong arm talks are done.