Trump's Scheme To Steal the Midterms Is Backfiring, BIGLY
How Democrats Flipped the Script and Are Leaving Trump's Plot in Tatters
Donald Trump’s audacious plot to rig the 2026 midterm elections has stalled, possibly for good.
The president prodded Republican-led states all year to engage in an unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering war, attempting to draw maps that would permanently entrench a GOP House majority.
Voters, however, delivered a stunning repudiation of this power grab on November 4, 2025. Democrats achieved decisive victories across the country in a wave that was stronger than the 2017 results which preceded the 2018 midterm blowout.
Democrats won convincing gubernatorial victories in New Jersey and Virginia with candidates Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger.
The party also flipped key judicial and legislative races in Pennsylvania. Most telling, Democrats won two statewide elections in the deep-red state of Georgia for the first time in two decades.
These results demolished the White House’s spin. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) dismissed the losses, claiming “blue states and blue cities voted blue,” a statement directly contradicted by the historic victories in Georgia.
The GOP’s Flawed Latino Gamble
The 2025 election exposed the fatal flaw at the heart of the entire Republican strategy. The GOP’s Texas gerrymander was built on one “questionable assumption:” that Trump’s 2024 gains with Latino voters represented a permanent political realignment.
Last Tuesday’s results prove that assumption is false. Latino voters were among the constituencies that swung hardest back to the Democratic party.
New Jersey’s results were unambiguous. The state’s three most heavily Latino counties “moved sharply back to the left.” Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill won the Latino vote by over 30 points, flipping 18% of 2024 Latino Trump voters.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was blunt: “Any progress that they’ve made with the Hispanic community — gone.”
The “Spreading Thin” Vulnerability: An Analysis of GOP Strategic Risk
The plan’s demographic failure is matched by an equally critical structural failure.
A. Madrid’s Core Warning
Beyond the Latino demographic miscalculation, the GOP’s strategy contains a second, equally fatal flaw, identified by Mike Madrid: “The problem is they’re spreading their other districts thin as they’re getting greedy.”
This is a classic gerrymandering risk. To create new R-leaning districts (e.g., R+5), map-drawers must “crack” existing safe R districts, taking Republican voters from them.
This makes the new districts functional, but it makes the old, “safe” districts (e.g., R+15) less safe (e.g., R+8). This strategy maximizes the number of seats in a “normal” political environment but maximizes the risk of a catastrophic loss in a “wave” election.
B. The 2025 “Blue Wave” as a “Stress Test”
The November 2025 election results provide a perfect “stress test” for this fragile map, demonstrating that a “blue wave” scenario is not hypothetical. The anti-GOP swing was broad, deep, and far exceeded typical political shifts.
Virginia: Democrat Abigail Spanberger outperformed the 2021 Democratic gubernatorial candidate by a median of 13 percentage points across all counties and flipped 15 counties that her predecessor had lost.
Pennsylvania: In Erie County, a region that “narrowly favored Trump in the 2024 election,” the Democratic candidate for county executive won by a “commanding 24-point margin.”
Georgia: Democrats won their two statewide races with massive 17-point and 22-point margins (58 to 41% and 61 to 39%), respectively.
C. The “Cascade Failure” Scenario
These two factors - the “spreading thin” strategy and the “wave” environment - combine to create a “cascade failure” scenario for Republicans in 2026.
The GOP gerrymander in Texas and elsewhere creates a multitude of R+5 to R+8 districts, where R+15 districts once stood.
The 2025 election data demonstrates that a 13-point or even 24-point pro-Democratic swing is possible in this political environment.
If the 2026 midterm election mirrors the 2025 off-year environment (as 2018 mirrored 2017 ), a 10-point swing would be catastrophic for the GOP.
Such a swing would wipe out not only the newly created “R+5” districts (like those in Texas) but also the previously safe “R+8” districts that were “spread thin” to create them.
By “getting greedy,” the GOP’s “audacious” gerrymandering plan has inadvertently made their entire House majority more fragile, not less. It has exposed their caucus to a catastrophic cascade failure, where they could lose more seats than if they had done nothing.
This is the essence of Madrid’s warning: “None of this is good for Republicans. It’s all their own doing, though.”
California’s Prop 50 Counter-Punch
California’s voters delivered the most direct blow to Trump’s scheme. They overwhelmingly approved Proposition 50, a ballot measure championed by Governor Gavin Newsom as a direct “tit-for-tat” response to the GOP’s gerrymander in Texas.
The new measure temporarily scraps the state’s independent commission to enact a legislative map targeting five Republican-held seats. This single move effectively “cancels out” the five-seat gain Republicans thought they had secured in Texas.
Newsom nationalized the fight, casting Prop 50 as a necessary tool to “end Donald Trump’s presidency as we know it.”
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The National Map Crumbles
Trump’s offensive is crumbling elsewhere from internal Republican opposition. GOP legislators in Indiana, despite intense White House pressure, defied Governor Mike Braun’s call for a special session, punting the issue to December.
Kansas Republicans announced they “lacked support” for a special session to draw out the state’s lone Democrat. The GOP’s new map in Missouri, designed to add one seat, is now hostage to a citizen-led referendum that is “increasingly likely” to suspend it.
Democrats, meanwhile, are pressing their new advantage. The “blue wave” in Virginia gave them a full trifecta and their largest state House majority since 1989, “unlocking” their ability to draw two or three new Democratic seats.
The Democratic counter-offensive has fractured in other states. Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson is openly resisting a push from Jeffries to gerrymander out the state’s lone Republican, arguing Democrats “don’t need to rig the system to win.”
His stance earned a blistering public rebuke from Virginia State Senate President L. Louise Lucas: “Grow a pair and stand up to this President.”
A Mandate for Democracy
The 2025 election results provided a clear path forward for Democrats. The “blue wave” was not just a victory, but a mandate from voters who rejected Trump’s cynical plot to rig the 2026 election.
The GOP’s complex scheme, from Texas to Indiana, is now in tatters, collapsing under the weight of its own flawed assumptions and internal party opposition.
The election proved what some, like GOP strategist Mike Madrid, have argued all along: Democrats can “win elections at the ballot box without sacrificing the moral high ground.”
While Trump and his allies remain “full-steam ahead” on their failing strategy, Democrats are now the favorites to take back the House in 2026.
Minority Leader Jeffries summarized the new reality: “Republicans woke up this morning and realized that they are no longer in a 2024 electoral environment. That’s over.”
🇺🇸 Outstanding summation of the new electoral possibilities since Tuesday’s election rout.
I’m starting to hope again, which is a huge transformation for me from Monday night.
Let’s all take heart that right is winning over hate on several fronts. Join me in my newfound optimism — then join me in fighting for our country, one voter at a time. 🇺🇸
Liked yours article “Trump's Scheme To Steal the Midterms Is Backfiring, BIGLY” but i question the use of the word mandate. Yes it was a big win, but we (the Democrats) can rest on the reasoning the election in two states, even if they were landslide’s, would be a mandate. Maybe in those states but not nationwide. The only clear mandate would be to totally blow the socks off the Republican in the midterms and again in the general election in 2028.