Texas governor promises to rig midterm elections even harder

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott went on Fox News Monday to defend the GOP’s ongoing efforts to gerrymander his state’s congressional map. Responding to California Gov. Gavin Newsom's warning that he would take similar actions “to offset the rigging of maps in red states,” Abbott made a grotesque promise.

"I’ll tell you this, if California thinks that they're going to move their needle to the extreme and eliminate 5 Republican members of the United States Congress there, Texas is not going to do 5—we'll add 10 more Republican seats using the same procedure they're using in California,” Abbott said. “We have more Democrat seats that can turn into Republican seats than they have Republican seats, in California, that they can turn into Democrat seats."

In response to the GOP’s gerrymandering, Texas Democratic lawmakers have left the state to protest what state Rep. Ann Johnson called a “majority [that] has really gone off the rails.” 

Governors from Illinois, California, and New York have all signaled their willingness to fight fire with fire, vowing to offset the damage being done in Texas by taking similar actions in their own states.

Meanwhile, Abbott has continued to escalate his rhetoric around degrading voting power in Texas, appearing on right-wing media to promise increasingly disproportionate GOP representation in Congress.

Fox News continues to feed a steady stream of right-wing pablum, including celebrity gossip and non-existent crime statistics, to distract its viewers from the Texas GOP’s efforts to rig midterm elections.   

Polling shows that most Americans oppose partisan gerrymandering. But under pressure from President Donald Trump, the GOP continues its pattern of ignoring the will of the people—plowing ahead to consolidate minority rule.