The Many Rewards of Playing Hardball

Democrats didn't just win a few House seats in Virginia. They also showed they can be a different kind of party, and the future may be better because of it.

In the wake of the voters of Virginia blessing a mid-decade redistricting that could give Democrats four more seats in the House, a few moderate Republicans are ever-so-gently suggesting that maybe it wasn’t such a great idea for President Trump to start this mid-decade redistricting war last summer by ordering Texas Republicans to give him five more seats. “Chess players think three to four moves ahead,” said Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska. “It doesn’t appear this happened.”

Well no, it didn’t — Donald Trump is not a think-four-moves-ahead kind of guy, and he clearly didn’t anticipate that his opponents would fight back in the way they did. In fairness, that was not a crazy thing to believe, given Democrats’ long opposition to gerrymandering and their tendency to respond to procedural hardball with outraged harrumphing but not much in the way of action.

While it might be too much to say those days are over and Democrats will henceforth be a party of aggressive street fighters, it’s at least possible that this battle will wind up being a turning point for both parties. Should that happen, it will mean that the real defeat Republicans suffered wasn’t just about the number of seats that will or won’t swing their way.

More than one kind of victory

In the short term, it’s looking like the Great Gerrymandering War of 2025-2026 might be a wash. Republicans redistricted their way to five more seats in Texas, two in Ohio, and one each in North Carolina and Missouri, for a total of nine. Democrats will probably get five in California and four in Virginia; also nine. In addition, Texas Republicans might have made some seats more vulnerable, since if you try to squeeze out a few more seats you’ll have to do it by moving your voters around in ways that make some of those seats less of a sure thing.

Nevertheless, the most likely result is that all that gerrymandering and those referenda will just get us back to where we started. But it’s much more than that.

You don’t have to tell Democrats in Congress that their base is angry; they know it all too well, and you can see it in the fact that every Democrat now says they’re a “fighter” who will “fight” Trump with all the fightin’ fightingness they can muster. They’ve also started swearing a lot, which is meant to further communicate their pugilistic spirit.

This reflects a growing realization that despite the argument made by centrists that Democrats can solve all their problems if they shuffle to the center on policy issues, the real problem the party has with the public isn’t about policy. G. Elliott Morris explains:

…the Democratic brand is not predominantly woke, but weak. Respondents to our survey associated the Democrats with traits like honesty and caring about the working class, but they are seen as weak and not particularly effective. The Republican brand, by contrast, is a strong brand that a majority of the country finds extreme.

Anyone who heard about the Virginia ballot measure — which the news media did contextualize by explaining how Trump started the whole conflict in Texas — just watched Democrats give as good as they got, even to the point of being willing to temporarily cast aside a principle they had committed themselves to in order to fight back.

Playing political hardball can therefore not only get Democrats a practical victory, it can also help change the impression that they’re weak, among both their own voters and the broader electorate. And there’s a third effect, one equally important but less immediately obvious: By changing their own behavior, Democrats can change Republicans’ behavior as well.

While Republicans will bleat about what a bunch of terribly ruthless cheaters Democrats are, they know that in fact, Democrats are much more committed to established rules and procedures, and reluctant to violate longstanding norms. That has given Republicans an enormous freedom of movement, because they can do pretty much whatever they want without worrying that Democrats will respond in kind.

For example, Republicans packed the Supreme Court by refusing for nearly a year to allow Barack Obama to fill an open seat after Antonin Scalia’s death; in effect, they shrank the court, and then expanded it once Donald Trump took office and they had the power to fill the seat. Then when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, they put Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination on a rocket sled through the Senate, taking her from nomination to confirmation in just one month.

And what did Democrats do in response? Joe Biden, following up on a campaign promise, formed a commission to examine Supreme Court reform and report its findings! Nothing says “You’re going to pay for what you did” like appointing an august panel of experts to carefully produce a 294-page white paper.

The importance of deterrence

Now imagine if, when Republicans sent Merrick Garland’s nomination to purgatory in early 2016, every Democratic leader said publicly and privately, “If you don’t immediately move this nomination through the process, we make you this promise: The second we have control of Congress and the White House, we will add four seats to the Supreme Court, all of which will be filled by the Democratic president.” And imagine if the threat was credible.

They didn’t do that, but it’s not too late. The redistricting battle showed that when Democrats want to play hardball, not only are they capable of it, their constituents will back them up. And the more they do it, the more their opponents will come to realize that they can’t count on Democrats lying down and letting themselves be rolled over. That will then change the strategic calculations Republicans make, by increasing the cost of transgressing the rules. It’s straightforward deterrence.

The next step in establishing that deterrence is to deliver accountability to Republicans for their actions — good and hard. An iron-clad promise to support genuine Supreme Court reform — including adding justices and imposing 18-year term limits — should be a litmus test for any Democrat running for president in 2028, as should sweeping change to the structure of the federal government to undo the damage done under this administration and vigorous corruption prosecutions for all the grifters and scammers currently slithering their way through the executive branch.

Republicans need to live in fear that if they violate norms, rules, and laws in the ways they have been for the last couple of decades, there will be hell to pay and they’ll be the ones paying it. Only then, once they know Democrats are serious, will they be brought to heel.

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