It’s been a wild week in the Texas U.S. Senate race, but it’s a good idea to understand the Democratic options in terms of an old strategic debate, as I suggested at New York:

One of the truly ancient debates in U.S. political circles is whether candidates in highly competitive partisan elections can best win by persuading swing voters or mobilizing base voters. There’s no absolute identity between ideology and strategy, but speaking generally, right- or left-wing ideologues tend to adopt base mobilization strategies that don’t require any accommodation of the other party’s views. Republican or Democratic “moderates” generally hew to the “median voter theory” that winning over a swing voter is especially effective because it adds a vote to one’s own column while denying a vote to the opposing candidate. So they value crossover voting as much as turnout advantages.

Hardly anyone would deny that in the Trump era, Republicans have gone over almost completely to the base-mobilization strategy. To the extent MAGA candidates try to persuade swing voters, it’s mostly via vicious attacks on the opposition as extremists, encouraging a lesser-of-two-evils voting or even non-voting by moderates. But among Democrats, the base-versus-swing debate rages on, and we may be about to see a laboratory test of the two approaches in a red-hot Texas Senate contest.

Thanks to an unusually poor landscape and a current three-seat deficit, Democratic hopes of gaining control of the Senate in 2026 depend heavily on winning an upset or two in red states. And Texas looks promising thanks to an intensely cannibalistic three-way Republican primary involving two MAGA challengers to Republican incumbent John Cornyn.

Two early Democratic Senate candidates embodied (in somewhat different ways) the swing-voter strategy. There was 2024 Senate nominee and former House member Colin Allred, a bit of a classic moderate Democrat. And then there was state senator James Talarico, who gained fame for his battle against the Trump-engineered congressional gerrymander in Texas earlier this year. Talarico actually has a fairly progressive issue profile and is from the progressive hotbed of Austin. But he has gained national notoriety for being conspicuously religious (he’s actually attending a seminary aside from his political gigs) and for reaching out to Trump voters (e.g., via a successful foray onto Joe Rogan’s podcast). Last week, Allred abruptly dropped out of the Senate race, and now Talarico is facing a primary contest with the all-time-champion advocate of base mobilization, Representative Jasmine Crockett.

Crockett is far better known than any other second-term House member, mostly because she has a jeweler’s eye for viral moments and dominates them regularly. In May 2024, she became the acknowledged master of the clapback during a high-profile exchange of personal insults with the most famous third-term House member, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and has subsequently drawn the attention of Donald Trump, as Crockett reminded us in a launch video that simply recited Trump’s insults aimed at her.

Crockett’s vibes-based approach to politics has made her a fundraising magnet and a pop-culture celebrity, but the question is whether that will make her potentially competitive in a statewide race in Texas as compared to Talarico. And it’s not just a matter of issue positioning. Crockett is popular among progressives but has made combativeness rather than progressive policy commitments her signature in a brief career in legislative office. She very clearly believes all the heat she can bring to a tough general election will not just mobilize Texas’s Democratic base but expand it. She has apparently sought the counsel of Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, who pursued a base-mobilization strategy in two unsuccessful but exciting bids for governor of Georgia. And as you might expect from even a moment’s exposure, she is very sure of herself, as HuffPost reports:

“Early on in her kickoff speech, Crockett said she was running because ‘what we need is for me to have a bigger voice …’

“She reiterated her top priority would be turning out otherwise apathetic voters, a strategy even many other progressives have backed away from. ‘Our goal is to make sure that we can engage people that historically have not been talked to because there are so many people that get ignored, specifically in the state of Texas,’ she said. ‘Listen, the state of Texas is 61 percent people of color. We have a lot of good folk that we can talk to.’”

The idea that there is a “hidden majority” among non-voters that a loud-and-proud partisan can identify and turn out at the polls is a staple of base-mobilization advocates in both parties, though they rarely take into account that such tactics help the opposition mobilize its base as well. There is certainly enough ammunition in Crockett’s brief political history to energize Texas Republicans, particularly her reference to the wheelchair-bound Greg Abbott as “Governor Hot Wheels” (she subsequently claimed this was a reference to his aggressive transportation measures to get rid of migrants, not to his disability). Asked how she might reach out to Trump voters in a state that he carried by over 13 percent in 2024, Crockett offered an interesting theory in a CNN interview: “We are going to be able to get people that potentially have voted for Trump even though I, obviously, am one of his loudest opponents, because at the end of the day, they vote for who they believe is fighting for them.”

It’s hardly unusual for progressive Democrats (or for that matter, MAGA Republicans) to argue that disengaged voters prefer “fighters,” but Crockett appears to be suggesting that the content of one’s message — as opposed to its tone or vibe — doesn’t much matter at all.

You get the sense listening to Texas Democrats that Crockett is very likely to beat Talarico for the party’s Senate nomination and can mount a well-financed, much-watched general election campaign. But the idea she’s going to win that general election by turning up the volume to 11 isn’t widely accepted. She has been in exactly three general elections in her Dallas base, none of which were remotely competitive. And it’s not just about the Senate race, given Texas’s role in determining control of the House. And as the Texas Tribune reports, Republicans love the idea of facing Crockett and pinning her to House Democrats they’re hoping to unseat in the midterms.

Candidates arguing about Crockett won’t be able to focus as much on Trump’s broken promises and poor record. And Jasmine Crockett will never be the sort of politician who deflects attention. Like her or not, she’ll be the big issue in the Democratic primary.

Don’t know if this post from New York about Trump’s immaturity will get me onto the White House list of enemy media, but there’s a chance.

Veteran political journalist Jonathan Martin has a new rant at Politico Magazine with the self-explanatory headline: “The President Who Never Grew Up.” Nothing he said is the least bit revelatory; it’s all about things we know Donald Trump has done and said but lined up in a way that illustrates how very much the president resembles a child, and a not-very-well-behaved child at that. A sample:

Trump is living his best life in this second and final turn in the White House. Coming up on one year back in power, he’s turned the office into an adult fantasy camp, a Tom Hanks-in-Big, ice-cream-for-dinner escapade posing as a presidency.

The brazen corruption, near-daily vulgarity and handing out pardons like lollipops is impossible to ignore and deserves the scorn of history. Yet how the president is spending much of his time reveals his flippant attitude toward his second term. This is free-range Trump. And the country has never seen such an indulgent head of state.

Yes, he’s one-part Viktor Orbán, making a mockery of the rule of law and wielding state power to reward friends and punish foes while eroding institutions.

But he’s also a 12-year-old boy: There’s fun trips, lots of screen time, playing with toys, reliable kids’ menus and cool gifts under the tree — no socks or trapper keepers.

Martin is just scratching the surface here. He doesn’t even mention the president’s inability to admit or accept responsibility for mistakes, which is reminiscent of an excuse-making child, or his tendency to fabricate his own set of “facts” like an incessant daydreamer bored by kindergarten. Now to be clear, the essentially juvenile nature of many of Trump’s preoccupations and impulses has struck just about everybody who’s forced to watch him closely and isn’t inclined by party or ideology to jump into the sandbox with him to share the fun. But since he’s the president, it’s more seemly for critics to focus on problems deeper than immaturity. There are the many worrisome “isms” he is prone to embrace or reflect (nativism, racism, sexism, authoritarianism, jingoism, cronyism, nepotism). And there’s also his habit of surrounding himself with cartoon villains like Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, Stephen Miller, and J.D. Vance who are the stuff of grown-up nightmares.

But still, I find myself wondering regularly how Trump’s own followers process his rather blatant lack of seriousness about the most serious job on the planet. If there’s such a thing as negative gravitas, the toddler president has it in abundance. So what are the excuses MAGA folk make for him? There are five major rationalizations that come to mind:

Trolling the liberals

Whenever he says something especially outrageous or embarrassing, we are quickly told by his defenders that he’s just having an enormous joke at the expense of humorless liberals. This dates back to pro-Trump journalist Salena Zito’s famous 2016 dictum that his followers “take him seriously but not literally.” Where you draw the line between the stuff he means and the stuff he’s just kidding about can obviously be adjusted to cover any lapses in taste or honesty he might betray. The “he’s just trolling the libs” defense is a useful bit of jiujitsu as it happens. It turns the self-righteousness of his critics into foolishness while neutering any fears that whatever nasty or malicious thing Trump has said reflects his true nature and inclinations. You see this tactic a lot with Trumpworld social-media takes on mass deportation that exhibit what some have called “performative cruelty” in depicting ICE violence against immigrants, which predictably shock liberals who are then mocked for not understanding it’s all a shuck. Meanwhile, the most radical of Trump’s MAGA fans bask in the administration’s appropriation of their worst impulses.

Playing chess, not checkers

A second rationalization you hear from Trump’s defenders, particularly when he says or does something that makes no sense, is to argue that he’s operating on multiple levels that include some higher strategies his critics simply don’t have the mental bandwidth to grasp. If, for example, he insults a foreign leader, he may secretly be setting off a diplomatic chain reaction that results in foreign-policy gains somewhere else. Similarly, if he defames federal judges, Democratic elected officials, or mainstream journalists, he may simply be trying to manipulate public opinion in a sophisticated way to overcome those who thwart or undermine his substantive agenda. Trump himself set the template for the “chess not checkers” theory by telling us his most incoherent speeches and statements reflect a novel rhetorical style he calls “the weave.” You do have to admire his chutzpah in telling people they simply aren’t smart enough to follow him as he fails to complete thoughts and sentences.

He’s a man of the people, and the people are as childish as he is

An even more common excuse for Trump’s worst traits is that he is focused on communicating with the people, not the media or other snooty elites. If he’s crude or impulsive or irrational, so, too, are the people. As one liberal writer ruefully admitted of Trump circa 2016:

He liked fast food and sports and, most importantly, he shared all their gripes and complaints and articulated them in the same terms some used themselves. For all his crowing about his money and showing off, he really didn’t put on airs. He was just like them.

And he behaved just like they would if they were given a billion dollars and unlimited power. Thus his childishness and even his cruelty could be construed as efforts to meld minds with the sovereign public or, at least, key parts of it. This became most explicit in 2024 when Trump’s crudeness and fury about diversity were transformed into a shrew pitch for the support of the “manosphere” and the masses of politically volatile younger men who spend much of their lives there. It could even serve as an excuse for his destruction of the White House as we’ve known it. Gold plating of everything in sight and the construction of a huge, garish ballroom might disgust aesthetes and history buffs with postgraduate degrees and no common sense. But with the White House set to become a venue for UFC fights, why not go big and loud? Nobody elected architecture experts to run the country, did they?

Trump is an insurgent leader with an insurgent style

A parallel excuse for Trump’s uncouthness is that transgressions are central to his mission. He’s there to overturn the Establishment, not respect its silly rules of what’s appropriate for presidents. His distractors ruined the country, so who are they to complain when it requires someone unconventional to set things aright? Trump campaigned in 2016, 2020, and 2024 as a disrupter and thrilled his followers by refusing to be domesticated in office. When returned to power most recently, he hit Washington like a gale-force wind defying all precedents and expressing an exasperated public’s disgust with the status quo and the people who led it. So why would anyone expect this Robespierre to play by the rules of Versailles? That’s not who he is and not what he was elected to do.

He’s saving America, so he should be able to do any damn thing he wants

The president himself has best articulated the standard by which he judges himself and expects to be judged by his followers, and by history, in a Truth Social post this past February: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” From the MAGA point of view, the 47th president is bending history, reversing a long trend toward national decline, and raising the economic aspirations and moral values of America to heights thought to be long lost. Perhaps the most powerful rationalization for Trump’s many excesses ever written was the famous 2016 essay by Michael Anton comparing those supporting Trump’s challenge to Hillary Clinton to the desperate and self-sacrificing passengers of the hijacked September 11 flight that brought the plane down by rushing the terrorists in the cockpit:

[I]f you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

It’s Trump, warts and all, or the abyss, to many Trump fans, today as in 2016. So if he wants to have some boyish fun while he’s saving America, and perhaps civilization, who are we to deny him?

I can hardly believe the possibility mentioned in the headline, but with the 47th president, you never know, as I explained at New York:

Donald Trump’s superpower, if he has one, is to assert wildly counterfactual things over and over and somehow convince people his version of reality is gospel, or at least plausible. His 2024 presidential campaign was a master class in shameless fabrication: He invented a violent crime wave even as crime statistics were falling nearly everywhere; he invented a nationwide crisis of voting by noncitizens despite almost no evidence it was happening at all; he accused his opponents of consciously betraying the country by deliberately herding violent felons across open borders and directing them to rape, kill, and plunder a helpless population of law-abiding Americans, a narrative supported by little more than anecdotes; and he asserted that all his many legal problems, capping a career marked by vast legal problems, were in fact perversions of justice orchestrated by his enemies. Ultimately, his many lies and exaggerations combined to paint a portrait of a nation that had been on the brink of never-before-imagined glory just a few years earlier but was now on its knees and near to total destruction.

This cartoonish version of current affairs was immensely gratifying to his MAGA base of true believers, and didn’t unduly trouble swing voters who were inclined to believe all politicians make stuff up and who mostly just wanted a change of administration. But now that Trump is totally in charge of the federal government and exhibiting every single day his domination of national affairs, he wants the public to acknowledge the astonishingly bright prospects he has given them, and forget all the troubles that led them to vote for him in the first place. That’s the only sensible interpretation of his fury towards the subject of affordability.

Anyone who can read polls or follow off-year election returns is aware that concerns over the steadily rising cost of living, which contributed powerfully to Trump’s 2024 victory, have not at all gone away. There is, in fact, a growing sense of dismay, within and beyond the MAGA ranks, about Trump’s campaign promises that he wouldn’t simply slow down inflation but would actually reduce prices for the most important goods and services. Many voters give him low marks on that front, which is why addressing affordability has emerged already as the Democratic Party’s key message for the 2026 midterms. It was very successfully introduced in this year’s offyear elections, which were a fiasco for Trump and his party.

For a moment, Trump seemed to understand and accept the assignment to look less interested in ending or beginning overseas wars and more interested in “affordability.” He even got chummy with New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in claiming a shared focus on the issue during their congenial Oval Office visit on November 23. But as this November 29 Truth Social post indicated, Trump treats the “affordability” crisis as a marketing problem rather than anything he really needs to address in a substantive manner:

“Because I have invoked FAVORED NATIONS STATUS FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, DRUG PRICES ARE FALLING AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, 500%, 600%, 700%, and more. No other President has been able to do this, BUT I HAVE! This is also the answer to much less expensive, and far better, HEALTHCARE! Republicans, remember, this was done by us, and nobody else. This is a revolution in medicine, the biggest and most important event, EVER. If this story is properly told, we should win the Midterm Elections in RECORD NUMBERS. I AM THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT. TALK LOUDLY AND PROUDLY! President DJT”

Americans didn’t need Obamacare subsidies or Medicaid benefits or lower tariffs or regulations on AI to thrive; they just needed to realize how lucky they were to be alive at this time of restored American Greatness, the “story” that needed to be “properly told” to them. As with his fable-making in 2024, Trump wanted to impose his own version of the facts on everyone his voice could reach. But in this case he isn’t talking about overseas threats or large impersonal forces shaping events or elite conspiracies, but the lived experiences of people who won’t easily be convinced their troubles are a figment of their imaginations.

Politically attuned people in Trump’s inner circle must have cringed inwardly during Tuesday’s televised Cabinet meeting when the president denounced affordability concerns as a hoax, as the New York Times reported:

“President Trump on Tuesday downplayed the cost-of-living pains being felt by Americans, declaring that affordability ‘doesn’t mean anything to anybody’ as his political edge on the economy continues to dissipate….

“After ticking off what he claimed were trillions of dollars of investments and other economic accomplishments, Mr. Trump called the issue of affordability a ‘fake narrative’ and ‘con job’ created by Democrats to dupe the public….

“Mr. Trump has tried to claim he has brought down inflation, glossing over the fact that it ticked up slightly in recent months and some of his policies were contributing to high costs, like his tariffs.

“’There is still more to do,’ Mr. Trump acknowledged on Tuesday. ‘There’s always more to do, but we have it down to a very good level. It’s going to go down a little bit further. You want to have a little tiny bit of inflation. Otherwise, that’s not good either. Then you have a thing called deflation, and deflation can be worse than inflation.'”

Trump appears to be making the same mistake his predecessor Joe Biden made: talking trends and macroeconomics to people who just want prices to go back to where they were before the pandemic — conditions for which Trump himself took so much credit. Worse yet, he’s talking down to Americans, accusing them of being dupes by feeling what they’re feeling and seeing what they’re seeing. It’s not a good look for a billionaire president to become visibly impatient with his subjects and their concerns.

Perhaps his advisers will prevail on him to get on the right side of the affordability issue before the midterms. But it’s possible that after years of telling tall tales about conditions in the country, Trump is beginning to believe his own hype, and is spinning himself as well as the media and the country. If that happens, he and his party are in deep trouble.

As you may recall, the high hosannas with which Republicans greeted Trump’s 2024 win were accompanied by predictions of a new and broader GOP coalition. They aren’t looking so good now, as I noted at New York:

In June, the Pew Research Center’s analysis of validated voters in 2024 gave us the most definitive information on how Donald Trump won the presidency over Kamala Harris. And it left little doubt that the most important gains Trump made between his 2020 defeat and his 2024 win were not among young voters or Black voters or white working-class voters, but among Latino voters:

“In 2020, Joe Biden won Hispanic voters by 25 percentage points, and Hispanic voters supported Hillary Clinton by an even wider margin in 2016. But Trump drew nearly even with Kamala Harris among Hispanic voters, losing among them by only 3 points.”

This shift among Latinos voters was decisive. And since Latinos make up the most rapidly growing segment of the electorate, a lot of the “realignment” talk surrounding Trump’s return to power stemmed from a theory that Latinos were undergoing a sort of delayed ideological sorting out that meant they might keep trending Republican and become a solid part of the GOP coalition. If true, that might have been disastrous for Democrats.

But a new study from Pew, long an authority on Latino voters, suggests otherwise. Trump’s appeal to Latinos is clearly sagging and could erode even further if he doesn’t change his policies on immigration and the economy:

“70% of Latinos disapprove of the way Trump is handling his job as president.

“65% disapprove of the administration’s approach to immigration.

“61% say Trump’s economic policies have made economic conditions worse.”

Even among the Latinos who voted for him in 2024, Trump’s job-approval rating has dropped from 93 percent at the beginning of the year to 81 percent right now. Fully 34 percent of these Trump voters say his second-term policies “have been harmful” to Latinos. And 2024 Harris voters seems to loathe him universally. Overall, Latino voters view what’s happening under Trump 2.0 with great trepidation:

“Hispanics are pessimistic about their standing in America. About two-thirds (68%) say the situation of U.S. Hispanics today is worse than it was a year ago, while 9% say it’s better and 22% say it’s about the same.

“This is the first time that most Hispanics say their situation has worsened in nearly two decades of Pew Research Center Hispanic surveys. When we asked this question in 2019, late during Trump’s first administration, 39% said the situation of U.S. Hispanics had worsened and in 2021, 26% said this.

“When asked about how the Trump administration’s policies impact Hispanics overall, far more say they harm Hispanics than help them (78% vs. 10%).

“That’s a significantly darker outlook than Latinos had in 2019, shortly before they gave Joe Biden 61 percent of their votes.”

Since Latinos trended away from Biden in 2024 in no small part because of his economic policies, this finding could be especially important:

“When asked about the overall U.S. economy, Hispanics’ views are mostly negative and unchanged from 2024. Some 78% say the economy is in only fair or poor shape, while 22% say it’s in excellent or good shape. In 2024, 76% gave the economy a negative rating.”

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s mass-deportation policies are distinctly unpopular among one of ICE’s chief target populations, as it has become clear that they are not at all focused on “violent criminals”:

“52% of Latino adults say they worry a lot or some that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported. This is up from 42% in March …

“19% say they have recently changed their day-to-day activities because they think they’ll be asked to prove their legal status in the country.

“11% say they now carry a document proving their U.S. citizenship or immigration status more often than they normally would.”

Yes, concerns about Trump’s immigration policies vary among those with different countries of origin, but the overall picture remains negative:

“Across Hispanic origin groups, about two-thirds of Central Americans and Mexicans disapprove of the administration’s approach to immigration. By comparison, 63% of South Americans, 58% of Puerto Ricans and 50% of Cubans say the same.”

Puerto Ricans are by definition American citizens by birth, and Cuban Americans, long a Republican stronghold, are increasingly either American born or were naturalized some time ago. But Republican hopes for big Mexican American voting margins in states like Texas and Arizona may be in vain as long as Stephen Miller is in charge of deliberately cruel immigration policies.

Even if Trump manages to improve his current standing among Latinos, the idea that they are in the process of permanently trending Republican like the white Southerners of an earlier generation seems delusional. And if current trends persist, Latinos could contribute to a significant Democratic midterm victory in 2026.

Not that long ago it looked like Republicans might hold onto their trifecta next year by rigging U.S. House maps. Not so much any more, as I explained at New York:

At some point earlier this year, Donald Trump took a look at his shaky political standing and decided two things. First, he really wanted to hold on to the trifecta control of the federal government that made all his 2025 power grabs possible. And second, he recognized that keeping control of the U.S. House during the 2026 midterms would probably require a big thumb on the scales, which he could most easily achieve by quite literally changing the landscape. He went public in July with a national effort to get red states to remap their congressional districts immediately so that the GOP would go into the midterms with a cushion larger than the likely Democratic gains. And it all began with a blunt demand that Texas give the GOP four or five new seats in a special session that was originally supposed to focus on flood recovery.

Texas complied, and other red states followed suit, even as Democrats — most notably in California — retaliated the best they could with their own gerrymanders. But now, the original map-rigging in Texas has just been canceled (subject to U.S. Supreme Court review) thanks to the ham-handed incompetence of the Trump administration, as Democracy Docket explains:

“A federal court Tuesday delivered a devastating blow to Texas Republicans’ attempt at a mid-decade gerrymander. And the court found that a July letter sent by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) — intended to justify the GOP’s aggressive redraw — effectively handed voting rights advocates a smoking gun proving it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. …

“Unless the U.S. Supreme Court reverses it — Texas has already said it will appeal — the state must use its 2021 congressional map for the 2026 elections, killing what had been the GOP’s biggest planned redistricting gain of the decade.”

The blow to Trump’s plans came from two federal district-court judges (one of whom is a Trump appointee) who were part of a three-judge panel. Their order made it clear that DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, under the direction of Trump appointee and longtime Republican operative Harmeet Dhillon, stupidly insisted on making its instructions to Texas Republicans revolve around the racial makeup of the desired new districts, which is a big constitutional no-no:

“’It’s challenging to unpack the DOJ Letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors,’ the judges wrote. ‘Indeed, even attorneys employed by the Texas Attorney General — who professes to be a political ally of the Trump Administration — describe the DOJ Letter as ‘legally unsound,” “baseless,” “erroneous,” “ham-fisted,” and “a mess.”‘

“The judges noted that while Texas insisted the 2025 map was drawn for partisan reasons, the DOJ letter made no such claim and framed its demands entirely around race.

“That omission was pivotal.”

The grand irony is that this same DOJ Civil Rights Division subsequently sued California to invalidate that state’s voter-approved gerrymander on grounds that the legislators who drew the map had taken race into account in designing the new districts.

Trump’s whole map-rigging exercise seems to be unraveling all over the country. On the very same day as the Texas ruling, Indiana’s Republican-controlled state Senate killed a special session that Trump, J.D. Vance, U.S. senator Jim Banks, and Governor Mike Braun had all demanded in order to wipe out two Democratic U.S. House districts. Kansas Republicans have similarly balked at Trump’s orders to kill a Democratic district. Voters in Missouri seem poised to cancel that state’s recent gerrymander designed to eliminate a Democratic seat in a ballot initiative. Fearing litigation, Ohio Republicans cut a deal with Democrats to make two Democratic-controlled House districts a bit redder instead of flipping them altogether. And on November 4, voters in Virginia solidified Democratic control of that state’s legislature and elected a new Democratic governor, which greatly facilitated plans to remap that state’s congressional districts to flip as many as three GOP seats.

Republicans could still gain seats in Florida, and a U.S. Supreme Court review of the Voting Rights Act could create all sorts of chaos. But Trump’s gerrymandering crusade will soon hit the wall of 2026 candidate filing deadlines. As Punchbowl News observes, his party could actually lose ground overall: “It’s not impossible to imagine that [Democrats] end up netting more seats than the GOP in these mid-decade redraws, a stunning change of circumstances that didn’t seem possible only a few months ago.”

Trump opened a Pandora’s box in Texas, and he and his party — not to mention his bumbling and heavily politicized legal beagles — are now dealing with the consequences.