Frantic Election Rigging

May 18, 2026

Donald Trump, who regularly charges his opponents with rigging elections, has been frantically doing his own election rigging, including by pressuring states under Republican control to redraw Congressional district maps to boost Republican chances of preserving their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. It started with Republicans in Texas last year. So, the Democrats in California hit back with their own redistricting campaign to try to stay even, or even gain a small advantage.

Of course, redrawing election maps by both parties to gain political advantage has been going on practically forever. As politicians often say, it isn’t the voters who choose the elected officials, it is the political bosses who choose the voters. What else can you expect from a corrupt and avaricious system designed to serve the interests of the capitalists, oligarchs and plutocrats?

In late April, the U.S. Supreme Court, with a 6–3 majority of justices appointed by Republican presidents, put its own thumb on the scales in favor of Trump and the Republicans. It said that courts will no longer rule on whether electoral districts are discriminatory, a longtime Republican goal. This gave the green light to Republican politicians in Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee to rush to redraw their own electoral maps in their bid to pick up a few more seats in the upcoming elections.

But not all Republican politicians have gone along with this political trickery, obviously out of fear that it could backfire against them with voters. Earlier in the year, the state government of Indiana, where the Republicans have a majority, had already refused to follow Trump’s directives and implement any new redistricting. In mid-May, the Republican politicians in South Carolina and Mississippi also resisted Trump’s pressure and threats to redraw the electoral map.

At least some Republican politicians are deciding not to attach themselves too tightly to the fading Donald Trump bandwagon, given that polls show increasing parts of the electorate blame Trump for the worsening economic crisis, the extremely costly war in Iran, and the much-hated ICE witch hunt against immigrants.

Ordinarily, Trump’s fading in the polls would benefit the Democrats in the November midterm elections. But that is not at all sure, since the Democrats themselves have been so discredited by their own policies that benefit the capitalist class, and by their own attacks on the population when they are in office. It got to the point that in the 2024 election there was a big increase in the number of Black and Latino voters who chose Trump and the Republicans, racist demagogy and all.

In fact, increasing numbers of voters, especially younger voters, are fed up with both parties. According to recent Gallup polls, there are more independent voters, who don’t belong to any party, than in the Republicans and Democrats combined!

This shows that there are more openings for revolutionaries, who want to see the working class change the society, to use elections in order to reach out and explain that another road is not only possible, but absolutely necessary.