Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder are pushing back against the notion that Democrats’ gerrymandering efforts bear any resemblance to Republican plans to extract five new seats in Texas ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
“What [Texas Gov.] Greg Abbott is doing and what [President] Donald Trump is attempting to do is to cheat mid-decade here. They’re attempting to change the map,” Pritzker told NBC’s Kristen Welker in an interview that aired Sunday on “Meet the Press.” “They know that they’re going to lose in 2026, the Congress, and so they’re trying to steal seats. And so that is what these Texas Democrats are trying to stand up against.”
With Republicans — at the direction of President Donald Trump — pushing a rare mid-decade redraw of the Texas legislative maps, dozens of Lone Star State House Democrats fled the state for Illinois and other blue states in early August, preventing the Texas legislature from reaching a quorum. Now, the FBI is assisting in efforts to find them, though Pritzker said Texas law on quorums has no validity in Illinois. As for their own party’s coming redistricting efforts, national Democrats say the time is now to fight fire with fire.
Republicans say that’s hypocritical.
Trump won nearly 44 percent of the vote in Illinois last year, slightly more than the percentage that then-Vice President Kamala Harris won in Texas. But just three of Illinois’ 17 House seats are held by the GOP. Princeton University’s Redistricting Report Card gives the state’s map an F for partisan fairness.
“They have no capability. They’ve already gerrymandered their states in ways in which they don’t have hardly any Republican members of Congress,” Abbott said in an NBC News interview last Thursday. “It’s a joke.”
The Illinois map, Pritzker told Welker, came at the end of the decennial census. State officials held public hearings and ensured that it followed the Voting Rights Act, he said.
“That’s how it’s done in this country,” he said. “You talked about how rare it is to do what he’s doing. Yes, it is. What’s even rarer is to do it at the behest of the president of the United States, who’s clearly attempting to and says that he deserves to have five more seats.”
Holder, who led the Justice Department under former President Barack Obama, now runs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which has long pushed for fundamental changes to the map-drawing process. He told Welker that his party’s answer to Republican gerrymandering will be “responsive” and “temporary.”
And it won’t be based on the whims of the party leader.
“When Barack Obama was president, when Joe Biden was president, did either of those presidents call a governor of a state or a state legislature and tell them to gerrymander to find five seats for them? No,” Holder said. “So we’re doing something now that is responsive to what is going on with this White House.”
Holder said the president’s actions in Texas reminded him of another famous phone call, between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021.
“That call to Texas is kind of reminiscent of the call that President Trump made to the secretary of state in Georgia,” Holder told Welker. “He said, ‘Find me 11,780 votes.’ He calls Texas now and says, ‘Well, find me five seats so that we can save the House in 2026.'”
