House Speaker Mike Johnson shakes hands with President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, D.C., July 4, 2025. REUTERS/Leah Millis
Republican lawmakers are desperate to pass the blame to anyone but President Donald Trump for their increasingly despised gerrymandering crusade, with The Hill reporting that they are now attempting to claim that Democrats started it.
Republican-controlled red states have been pursuing an aggressive redistricting agenda at Trump's urging, creating new House district maps that favor GOP candidates in the hopes of hanging on to their slim majority. Efforts by Democrats to fight back have, meanwhile, been stymied by court rulings.
According to a report from The Hill on Tuesday, voters are not happy about this gerrymandering push, citing polling which found that 64 percent of Republicans and independents would support a ban on redistricting that is not tied to a new census, as has traditionally been done.
In the face of yet another Trump initiative that has become toxic with voters, The Hill noted that several Republicans have begun putting the blame on Democrats, arguing that red states are merely responding to preexisting blue state maps that lack any Republican-majority districts, such as Massachusetts.
“This started because we had some of our blue states that got overly aggressive trying to displace Republican representation,” Rep. Beth Van Duyne, a Texas Republican, told the outlet. “When you look at New England, 40 percent of their voters are Republican voters, and yet they have zero representation in Congress.”
Trump himself once cited Massachusetts as a supposed example of corrupt Democratic gerrymandering, wondering how it could have no GOP representatives, despite the fact that he won, "I think, 41 percent of the vote."
The Hill's report pointed out the reason that Massachusetts's map is a poor basis for making this claim, explaining that it is a "complicated story" about state demographics versus political geography. Even if there was a will to do so, the report explained, it would be very hard to carve out a Republican-leaning district in the state.
"The difficulty in a state like Massachusetts is that, while there are plenty of conservative voters, those voters are spread out across the state in such a way that it’s virtually impossible to create a contiguous district that would send a Republican to Congress — a dynamic highlighted by Nate Cohn, the data guru at The New York Times," the report detailed.
It continued: "Indeed, the current Massachusetts map was bipartisan, signed into law in 2021 by then-Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican. A year later, a group of researchers used computer models to crank out 5,000 possible House maps for each state. In Massachusetts, only three of those maps included a district that would have sided with Trump in 2024, when in reality not a single county in the Bay State voted for the president."