How Dumb is That? Democrats Risk Losing the Midterms Because they Thought Rules Would Restrain a Bunch of Phenomenal Assholes

By Yiannis Damellos

May 9th, 2026

Democrats Bet the Rules Would Restrain Republicans but When Legitimacy Meets Power Politics, Guardrails Don’t Compromise 

In 2016, it was Trump who shocked the Americans when he said that he knew the system was rigged because he used it extensively. Voters thought he was going to change it so they elected him President, but instead, since that day, Trump and his right-wing colleagues used that same system to their advantage to strangle Democracy. Yet, the Democrats did not learn anything from that warning. They kept on making the same mistakes. As with redistricting, the Democrats’ mistake wasn’t that it exists, or even that politicians draw maps for advantage. That's how the system works. It was that Democrats treated the rules of political competition as something you can “lead by example” against an opponent who leads by corruption, exploitation, and greed. During the last decade, the Democrats gambled that showing restraint would persuade their opponents to reciprocate. Like, little Goebbels, Stephen Miller was going to play fairly! To the contrary, Republicans learned they could use the same system—courts, deadlines, mapmaking authority, and uneven state processes—to keep winning, and then kept escalating to rig the next cycle.

The latest episode in Virginia makes the pattern plain. Voters there approved a ballot initiative that would have created additional Democratic-leaning districts before the midterms. But the Virginia Supreme Court struck it down, and the decision instantly became a celebratory talking point for Donald Trump. The critique embedded in that response wasn’t only about the outcome; it was about hypocrisy and motive. Democrats pursued unilateral tactics in the redistricting fight because Trump had demanded redistricting in several Republican-led states. The difference is that in those places, the Republican side was already structured to act aggressively and quickly, while Democratic officials delivered responses that were more about messaging than power—like insisting that voters would have the final say, even when the map itself is what determines who can realistically win.

That is the core point of the argument: when institutions decide outcomes before voters get a chance to weigh in, “the final say” becomes theoretical. Gerrymandering doesn’t eliminate elections; it changes what elections are. It decides which voters are placed in competitive districts, which incumbents become protected, and which communities are diluted across districts so their preferences can’t translate into representation. In that context, a court decision that nullifies a voter-approved map change isn’t just a bureaucratic setback—it’s a reminder that Democrats were operating as though legitimacy could substitute for leverage.

And while Democrats were signaling disappointment and deferring to process, Republicans and Republican governments were treating redistricting as an arms race. A fight for survival. When the U.S. Supreme Court limited the practical reach of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana—essentially forcing a redraw that could nullify protections for minority voters—Republican-dominated states moved. Florida added Republican-leaning House seats. Tennessee sliced a heavily Black district associated with Memphis to create a seat with numerous Republican neighbors and no Democratic-leaning counterparts. Louisiana could face similar follow-on action, while other states were also positioned to curb Democratic influence in districts that have political weight, such as South Carolina’s 6th district connected to a long time Democratic leadership.

What makes the Democratic mishandling more than a single-case failure is the asymmetry of timing and authority. Some states have constitutional or structural barriers that slow down Democratic response. California, which is the exception, allowed voter-driven map changes. But in states like New York and Colorado, Democrats would need to amend constitutions or wait for future ballot opportunities, and those changes could take until 2028. Too late.

In New Jersey, Democratic ability to counter gerrymandering is limited by a nonpartisan commission structure. Meanwhile, Republican-led states—without the same constraints—can redraw sooner, more often, and with less need to seek voter permission. The analysis emphasizes that so far, Republican jurisdictions that gerrymandered or redrew did not ask voters for approval. That doesn’t merely reflect different political choices; it reflects different assumptions about what voters are owed. If you believe voters matter at every step, you involve them. If you believe you can win without asking, you don’t.

Yes, but are they rigging the next elections?

That difference in assumptions is where the “rig the next elections” argument lands. Democrats tried to win through the idea that guardrails would generate cooperation—nonpartisan rules, commissions, and lawful process treated as a shared commitment. But Republicans didn’t interpret those guardrails as an invitation to compromise. They interpreted them as obstacles to be removed whenever the courts allowed it or whenever the law could be bent. When the Voting Rights Act becomes the target, and when lawsuits become tools not to resolve disputes but to narrow protections, the “neutral environment” that Democrats hoped for never arrives. It becomes instead a landscape where one side keeps challenging the constraints while the other side keeps honoring them. Meaning, the Republicans outsmarted the Democrats by being the assholes that they are.

There is also a deeper strategic miscalculation: Democrats allegedly assumed that if they designed rules that restricted partisan manipulation, Republicans would respect those restrictions enough to meet halfway. The reality, as implied here, is that Republicans saw redistricting rules primarily as tactical leverage—something to be outmaneuvered, litigated, or replaced. So instead of creating incentives for reciprocity, Democratic reliance on process became a vulnerability. It gave Republicans a clearer path to escalation because the restraint Democrats demonstrated didn’t change Republican incentives; it changed Democratic deadlines and bargaining position. So the Dems shot their own legs again by playing parliamentarians while the others were just the assholes that they are. Well, for how long will the Democrats continue to treat their opponents as symbionts in a democratic procedure and not as the assholes that they are?

The end result is a bind. If you need to flip many seats to overcome structural advantages created by redraws, then losing a small number of court fights and ballot approvals can translate into a much larger electoral problem. Democrats would need dramatic gains—far beyond simple midterm volatility—to overcome likely Republican advantages from redistricting. Ultimately, it is not just that Democrats “made mistakes,” but that they made a specific kind of mistake: believing that institutional integrity could be used as a substitute for counterplay.

Of course there is room for reversal, arguing that Republican gerrymanders were built partly on assumptions about durable political realignments—assumptions that can break when public opinion shifts. The Texas example is used as the illustration: Republicans redrew districts last year partially based on expectations that demographic and political trends would permanently favor them. If those trends reverse—whether through changes in party identification, immigration backlash politics, or broader dissatisfaction—then even carefully engineered maps can become less reliable. Because electoral vulnerability isn’t determined only by district lines; it’s also determined by how quickly national approval and coalition behavior change.

But the warning remains central. Democrats can’t treat elections as if fair competition will automatically emerge from rules that the opposition is willing to shrink, litigate, or bypass. When one side is prepared to act unilaterally and to treat voter permission as optional, the other side’s restraint becomes an invitation to be outperformed. The Democrats put themselves in a bind—and the bind is, in large part, a self-inflicted result of misreading how hard their opponents would push once given the opportunity.