A significant milestone went unnoticed on a week that was extraordinarily eventful even by today’s standards of U.S. politics. What with the anniversary of Donald Trump’s victory, the Democratic electoral triumph, and the record-breaking government shutdown, it was difficult to remember that Monday marked the start of the one-year countdown to the next midterm elections. These vote will renew all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate. But above all, they will determine the viability of the second half of Trump’s term.

Aware of how much is at stake in these midterms, the U.S. president has already launched an assault on several fronts to — if all goes well, with the help of the Supreme Court — alter the rules of the game before the vote (by manipulating the congressional map through redistricting), during the vote (by making it more difficult for minorities to vote), or afterwards (by denying the results if they are adverse). The goal? To prevent Republicans from losing the House of Representatives and to prevent Democrats from curbing the president’s agenda, and who knows, perhaps even to initiate impeachment proceedings like the two he faced during his first term in the White House.

The rigged election hypothesis doesn’t sound so alarmist or exaggerated when one considers that in 2020, after months of spreading suspicions in advance about the electoral system, Trump clung to power after losing the election by alleging a non-existent fraud, pressured the Georgia attorney general to find him the votes he needed, challenged vote counts across the country, and, when he saw that none of this was working, incited a mob of his followers to storm the Capitol.

Although perhaps we don’t need to go back that far: in the summer of 2024, at a rally in Florida during the campaign that returned him to the White House, the candidate addressed American Christians, saying: “Get out and vote! Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore! Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore.”

The part of the plan related to the “before” began in the summer, when the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, announced that he would redraw his state’s congressional districts to take five seats away from his rivals. He did so using the tactic of gerrymandering, a sport as American as it is undemocratic. Practiced by politicians of all stripes, it consists of creating demographically artificial and geographically impossible voting districts (as impossible as a salamander, the animal from which the second part of the neologism originates) that benefit whoever is in power. The Constitution mandates this redistricting, by state, every 10 years, when, after the release of new census data, electoral maps are redrawn to reflect population changes.

What Abbott did is known as midterm gerrymandering, because it’s practiced before the midterm elections that split the presidency in two and are usually unfavorable for the incumbent. The fact that the map of Texas, a territory far more diverse than the stereotype suggests, was already heavily manipulated is demonstrated by the fact that Republicans won 67% of the seats in Washington in 2024 despite only obtaining 52% of the vote in the Senate by direct vote. With this new manipulation, they aspire to 80% of the pie.

Response in California

California Governor Gavin Newsom reacted to Texas’s announcement by proposing a new congressional map in his own state that guarantees Democrats five seats. Since California is one of the few states where districts are drawn by an independent commission, he had to submit his plan to a referendum, which passed with 64% of yes votes last Tuesday, a result that strengthened Newsom’s credentials as a potential 2028 presidential candidate.

“Paradoxically, Newsom had to bypass that commission, which is the ideal system,” acknowledges Ricardo Ramírez, a Los Angeles political consultant and expert on voting rights, over the phone. “At first, I thought it was problematic, but there was no other option: playing by the rules in this case would have been like trying to put out a forest fire with a glass of water.”

Tuesday was also the day of resounding Democratic victories in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia. These wins have restored the party’s faith in its ability to win after a year of identity and leadership crisis, and increase its chances of regaining the House of Representatives in the midterms (with the Senate, it will be more difficult). Trump reacted to the defeat by pressuring Congress on Truth Social to pass electoral reforms focused on his fixation with mail-in voting and proof of citizenship at the polls. (The idea that undocumented immigrants, paid by Democrats, vote en masse is one of the Republicans’ favorite conspiracy theories.)

In March, Trump issued an executive order that, in the name of election security, included those two measures and others, such as the one requiring that only mail-in ballots received before Election Day be counted, regardless of state rules. Two federal judges blocked him because, as one of them reminded him, “the Constitution does not grant the president any specific power over elections.”

Texas and California have been followed on the Republican side by Missouri (where they are guaranteed an additional representative after the redistricting), North Carolina (another), and Ohio (two more). In all cases, Trump’s party used its control of state legislatures to push through allocations in which minority representation, with its potentially Democratic vote, is concentrated in fewer districts, which they already consider lost, or diluted across other conservative-leaning districts.

North Carolina Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger said in a statement released this by his office that gerrymandering in his state was necessary. “We are doing everything we can to protect President Trump’s agenda, which means safeguarding Republican control of Congress,” and “to ensure Gavin Newsom doesn’t decide the congressional majority.”

“The gerrymandering wars are not over yet,” warns Michael Li of the Brennan Center for Justice, a leading nonpartisan organization focused on election law, in a telephone interview. Having missed the opportunity to end election manipulation in 2022 with the Free Voting Act — which failed to pass despite Democrats controlling both houses of Congress — Li lists other states that could further expand the battleground (from Republican Florida to Democratic Illinois) and clarifies that there is still time for new manipulations until shortly before the primaries. In some places, they begin as early as March and extend until the end of summer.

And in the midst of that process, the Supreme Court will rule in June on Louisiana v. Callais, one of the most important cases of the judicial year. Its nine justices, six of whom are conservatives and have handed victory after victory to Trump since his return to the White House, already looked at it last year, but decided in June to re-examine it to seize the opportunity to amend Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This is a landmark law of U.S. democracy because it outlawed discriminatory practices to guarantee voters of ethnic or linguistic minorities equal access to the polls.

That second section states that local and state authorities cannot redraw districts if such manipulation results in the denial or restriction of any citizen’s right to vote on the basis of race. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority, which in 2023 struck down affirmative action policies in universities, heard oral arguments in the case on October 15 and appeared willing to weaken that part of the law.

“In practice, Republicans could gain almost 20 seats in the House of Representatives,” explains University of Massachusetts professor Paul Collins, author of several books on the politicization of the Supreme Court. All of them are in the South. Furthermore, it would create a vicious cycle: by being excluded, minorities have no incentive to become politically involved because they don’t see themselves reflected in their representatives, so they stop voting. It has also been proven that it would encourage extremism: without competition, the need to find common ground in the center to build consensus also disappears.

“This goes far beyond a weakening maneuver,” says Lydia Ozuna, who founded an organization called Texans Against Gerrymandering in 2017. “The Voting Rights Act is on life support. The Supreme Court ruling would be like taking away its oxygen.” Ozuna speaks to EL PAÍS by phone from the greater Houston metropolitan area, which population shifts in recent years have transformed into a veritable demographic experiment divided almost equally into four groups: white, Black, Asian and Latino. Governor Abbott’s new electoral maps convert one of its districts, currently Democratic, into a Republican one.

Lines to vote

“The success of that electoral manipulation will also depend on voter turnout,” argues the activist, who suggests not losing sight of the plans Trump may put in place for next year’s elections: “Basically, obstacles to going to the polls, such as reducing the number of polling places, which could lead to longer lines.”

Those lines are never a problem in rural, predominantly Republican areas. There’s also Trump’s insistence on limiting voting to election day, contrary to the current system — often difficult to understand from a European perspective — in which polling stations can remain open for weeks. Changing this would hinder millions of citizens from voting. Unlike some other countries such as Spain that hold votes on a Sunday, elections in the U.S. always fall on a Tuesday, which is never a public holiday, so that many would-be voters have to take a day off in a country that is notoriously stingy with them.

The sum of these obstacles seeks to establish a playing field where “competition is real, but unfair.” This is what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way first defined in a 2002 scientific article as “competitive authoritarianism” to describe a system that gives a virtually predetermined outcome the appearance of a democratic choice. Levitsky is also the co-author of the influential essay How Democracies Die, which convincingly argued that contemporary autocrats love elections, as long as they can manipulate them.

Levitsky and Way’s theory is mentioned in a recent article in The Atlantic titled “Trump’s Plan to Subvert the Election Is Already Underway,” whose author, David A. Graham, begins by asking the reader to imagine what happens next. He proposes a journey into the future, to the night of November 3, 2026, at the end of the midterm elections. The scenario is as follows: Republicans have won the Senate, but control of the House “seems like it will come down to two districts in Maricopa County, Arizona.”

“ICE agents and National Guardsmen have been deployed there since that summer, ostensibly in response to criminal immigrants, though crime has been dropping for several years,” Graham writes, imagining Trump prematurely declaring victory and attacking his opponents in Truth; his loyal allies pressuring Arizona election officials; and the far-right media spreading fake news about Democrats committing fraud. Despite the presence of Marines in the streets, small but intense protests erupt in Phoenix and elsewhere, Graham adds. In this scenario, Trump uses them as a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act and declares martial law in cities governed by Democrats.

And again, it might sound overly alarmist, if it didn’t seem like an improved and expanded sequel to the 2020 election movie. Even the setting is familiar: Maricopa was five years ago ground zero for Trump’s Big Lie.

Then, credulous supporters of the still-president, many of them armed, arrived in Phoenix to challenge the results, initiating a sequence of events that culminated two months later in the storming of the Capitol. Some 1,600 insurgents were sentenced to prison for their actions on that January 6.

On his first day back in power, Trump pardoned them all. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that many of them will be willing, if the opportunity arises, to return the favor in the next election.

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