They Can't Win the Votes, So They're Rewriting Who Counts

Start with the tell. In Dallas this week the Republican Party staged its first-ever midterm convention, and party figures are betting that Donald Trump's center-stage performance can lift their fortunes despite his record-low approval ratings. That is the whole strategy stated plainly: not that the program is popular, but that the showman might drag it across the line anyway. When a party concedes it cannot win on what people think of it, watch what it does to the rules instead.

The rules are exactly where the real work is happening. The administration is pushing a census overhaul for 2030 that would exclude some immigrants and remove questions on race — changes that would upend the process for allotting congressional seats and for shaping the policies that address disparities. Read that in class terms. The census decides who is counted as present in America, and therefore how much representation a community gets and how much money flows to it. Erasing immigrants from the count does not remove them from the workplaces, the fields, or the rent rolls; it removes them from the ledger that hands out power. Deleting the race questions does the same to the data used to prove discrimination exists. You cannot address a disparity the state has decided not to measure.

The maps are the second front. In Missouri, dueling and conflicting legal rulings have thrown the congressional maps into limbo with less than two months until Election Day — and even so, Republicans are not seeing as much gain as they had wanted from the redistricting fight. The census sets the size of the prize; redistricting carves it up. Both are being worked at once, and both are being worked because the ordinary route — persuading a majority — is closed to them.

You can see it is closed by how their own candidates are behaving. Orange County Republican Young Kim has removed several references to Trump from her campaign website as she tries to broaden her appeal in a race against a fellow Republican. When a sitting member of the president's party quietly scrubs his name to survive, the record-low approval is not an abstraction — it is a liability her consultants can read in the numbers. In Texas, meanwhile, Democrat James Talarico has picked up an endorsement from a former top aide to Attorney General Ken Paxton — David Maxwell, Paxton's own former law enforcement director, who reported him to the FBI over allegations of abusing his office, is among the ex-allies now turning on the GOP nominee. And Republican Rep. Pete Sessions has said flatly that Paxton must debate Talarico to win the state's Senate seat. That is a party worried on its own turf.

So the convention performs strength while the machinery is quietly retooled. The merchandise around the American Airlines Center included Trump-shaped rubber ducks, sequined jackets bearing his name, and bedazzled stiletto purses — the president's face nearly impossible to escape. And as he prepared to take that same prime-time stage, Trump accused Iran of trying to influence the elections. The spectacle and the foreign-menace line do the same job the census and the maps do: they change the subject from the fact that the votes are not there.

Pull the thread and one argument holds it together. A movement that cannot command a majority is redrawing the definition of the electorate — who is counted, whose district is safe, whose existence the state will bother to record. The cost lands where it always does. Immigrants deleted from the count still work and still pay rent, now stripped of the representation and the funding the count is supposed to secure. Communities of color lose the very data used to name the harm done to them. This is not a fair fight the right happens to be losing. It is a fight over who gets to be in the fight at all — and they mean to settle it before a single ballot is cast.