After Texas Republicans' intial success in redistricting, President Donald Trump's gerrymandering strategy is starting to backfire, writes Salon's Heather Digby Parton, and as Democrats have the last laugh, Republicans are starting to doubt their "overconfidence" in Trump's strength.

Texas Democrats fled the state on two separate occasions — once in 2021 and once in 2025 — to block Republican legislation by denying the state House a quorum.

Their protests in 2021 centered on a restrictive voting bill, while the 2025 action was to oppose a new congressional map they condemned as a partisan gerrymander.......

Digby Parton notes that "the Texas redistricting was largely based on the idea that Trump’s 2024 win marked a massive, permanent shift of Latino voters to the GOP column," which proved untrue.

"Latino voters are not a monolith; there are regional and cultural differences. But the recent elections indicated large numbers in New York, New Jersey and Virginia had returned to the Democratic camp, a swing that could very well be equally reflected in Texas and any other state with a large Latino population," she writes.

Texas Republicans were so sure of themselves, she says, that they "indulged in what the political types call 'dummymandering'— diluting some of their safe seats where Trump won by large margins to ones where he would have won by less, and leaving themselves vulnerable, in a wave election, to losing seats instead of gaining five."