Americans worry democracy in danger amid gerrymandering fights, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds
Most Americans believe that efforts to redraw U.S. House of Representatives districts to maximize partisan gains, like those under way in Texas and California, are bad for democracy, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
More than half of respondents – 57% – said they feared that American democracy itself was in danger, a view held by eight in 10 Democrats and four in 10 in president Donald Trump’s Republican party.
The six-day survey of 4,446 US adults, which closed on Monday, showed deep unease with the growing political divisions in Washington – where Republicans control both chambers of Congress – and state capitals.
The poll found that 55% of respondents, including 71% of Democrats and 46% of Republicans, agreed that ongoing redistricting plans – such as those hatched by governors in Texas and California in a process known as gerrymandering – were “bad for democracy.”
At Trump’s urging, Republican Texas governor Greg Abbott has called a special session of the state legislature to redraw the state’s congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, aiming to help Republicans defend their 219-212 US House majority.
Key events
The president doesn’t have any public events today, according to his official schedule.
He’ll receive an intelligence briefing at 11am ET, and then will sign executive orders in the Oval Office at 3pm ET. For the moment that’s closed to the press, but we’ll update you if that changes.
California legislature poised to vote on redistricting plan in response to Texas gerrymandering
The California state legislature was poised on Thursday to vote on a plan to redraw its congressional boundaries and create five potential new Democratic House seats – an answer to the Republican redistricting push in Texas, sought by Donald Trump, aimed at tilting the map in his party’s favor ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
The nation’s two most populous – and ideologically opposed – states were racing on parallel tracks toward consequential redistricting votes, potentially within hours of each other. As Democrats in Sacramento worked to advance a legislative package that would put their “election rigging response act” before voters in a special election this fall, Republicans in Austin were nearing a final vote on their own gerrymandering pursuit.
Approval by the Texas senate, which is expected as early as Thursday, would conclude a dramatic showdown with the state’s outnumbered Democratic lawmakers whose two-week boycott captured national attention and set in motion a coast-to-coast redistricting battle.
The California plan, led by the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, is designed to flip as many as five Republican-held seats in California – the exact number of additional GOP seats Trump has said he is “entitled to” in Texas.
“This is a new Democratic party, this is a new day, this is new energy out there all across this country,” Newsom said on a call with reporters on Wednesday. “And we’re going to fight fire with fire.”
The redistricting tit-for-tat is an extraordinary deviation from the norm. Traditionally, states redraw congressional maps once a decade based on census data, with both the Texas and California maps originally intended to last through 2030.
The California state legislature, where Democrats have a supermajority, is expected to easily approve new congressional maps despite sharp Republican objections. Newsom’s signature would send the measure to the ballot in a special election this November.
The California changes would only take effect in response to a gerrymander by a Republican state – a condition that would be met when the Texas legislatures sends the maps to the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, for his promised signature.
Rachel Leingang
The government lost its bid to unseal grand jury transcripts in the sex-trafficking case against Jeffrey Epstein.
Richard Berman, a federal judge in New York, said the transcripts pale in comparison to the documents the government already has on Epstein and that disclosing them could harm victims.
The ruling comes after a different judge ruled against disclosure in a separate effort to unseal transcripts in a case against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend. Maxwell is in prison on a 20-year sentence after she was convicted of sex trafficking for aiding Epstein’s sexual abuses.
Epstein, who died by suicide in custody in 2019 while awaiting trial, sexually abused hundreds of girls and women and operated a sex-trafficking ring over decades. He was connected with some of the world’s most powerful people. Documents related to his conduct could reveal his connections, how he made his money and how he was able to evade justice for so long.
The government was seeking to unseal 70 pages of grand jury transcripts, exhibits including a PowerPoint presentation, four pages of call logs and letters from victims and their attorneys, from proceedings that took place in 2019.
The motions to unseal the documents came as the Trump administration is under intense scrutiny from its supporters over failure to release Epstein files in its possession. Trump had previously promised to release the files, a longtime goal for the Maga movement, and now has sought to tamp down fury among his Maga acolytes over the files. Trump and Epstein were once friends, and his entanglements have come under renewed examination.
Lucy Campbell
JD Vance was booed and heckled with chants of “Free DC!” during a photo op with national guard troops at Union Station in Washington on Wednesday afternoon.
Handing out burgers to troops deployed last week by Donald Trump, at the station’s Shake Shack alongside the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, Vance told soldiers “we appreciate everything you’re doing” and asserted: “We brought some law and order back.” Meanwhile, a crowd of demonstrators protested outside.
The crowd shouted slogans such as “Free DC!” and “From DC to Palestine, occupation is a crime.” Some also shouted expletives as the three men walked into Union Station and gathered at the restaurant, and continued as they tried to speak to reporters and eventually left.
Asked why the troops were at the station instead of parts of the city where crime rates were statistically higher, Vance claimed it was being overrun with “vagrants, drug addicts, the chronically homeless and the mentally ill” and that visitors didn’t feel safe. “This should be a monument to American greatness,” he said, later adding: “We do not have to live like this.”
Addressing the protests, Vance said:
It’s kind of bizarre that we have a bunch of old, primarily white people who are out there protesting the policies that keep people safe when they’ve never felt danger in their entire lives.
Callum Jones
Donald Trump has called on a Federal Reserve governor to immediately resign, renewing his extraordinary attack on the central bank’s independence as officials mull next steps on interest rates.
A close Trump ally accused Lisa Cook, an appointee of Joe Biden, of “potentially committing mortgage fraud” and urged the US Department of Justice to investigate.
The claims have not been confirmed, and this evening Cook said she had “no intention of being bullied” into stepping down.
The US president has repeatedly broken with precedent in recent months to demand the Fed cut rates and urge its chair, Jerome Powell, to quit after disregarding such calls.
On Wednesday, Trump leaped on the allegations about Cook. The governor “must resign, now!!!”, he wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform.
Cook, whose current term on the Fed’s board extends until 2038, previously served on the council of economic advisers under Barack Obama. When she took office in May 2022, she became the first Black woman to sit on the central bank’s board.
President Donald Trump said on Thursday that any California school district that did not adhere to his administration’s transgender policies would not be funded.
On Truth Social, he wrote:
Any California school district that doesn’t adhere to our Transgender policies, will not be funded. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Joseph Gedeon
Amid the Donald Trump administration’s heavy-handed review of Smithsonian museums, the Guardian has seen a document compiled by the White House that details examples of how the widely visited cultural institutions have overly negative portrayals of US history.
The document, based on public submissions shared with the administration, points to what it says are problematic exhibits at seven different museums, including a Benjamin Franklin exhibit that links his scientific achievements to his ownership of enslaved people and a film about George Floyd’s murder that it says mischaracterizes the police.
“President Trump will explore all options and avenues to get the Woke out of the Smithsonian and hold them accountable,” a White House official said. “Until we get info from the Smithsonian in response to our letter, we can’t verify the numbers of artifacts that have been removed because the Smithsonian has removed them on their own.”
Trump announced the initiative on Truth Social earlier this week, writing: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”
The seven museums that have so far been flagged for review include the National Museum of American History, National Museum of the American Latino, National Museum of Natural History, National Museum of African Art, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of Asian Art.
Uganda has entered an agreement with the United States to take in nationals from third countries who may not get asylum in the US but are reluctant to return to their countries of origin, the foreign affairs ministry said on Thursday.
President Donald Trump aims to deport millions of immigrants who entered the US illegally and his administration has sought to increase removals to third countries, including by sending convicted criminals to South Sudan and Eswatini, Reuters reported.
“This is a temporary arrangement with conditions including that individuals with criminal records and unaccompanied minors will not be accepted,” Vincent Bagiire Waiswa, the ministry’s permanent secretary, said in a statement.
Waiswa added that Uganda would prefer to receive people from African nationalities under the agreement. “The two parties are working out the detailed modalities on how the agreement shall be implemented,” he said.
On Wednesday, another Ugandan foreign affairs official had denied a US media report that the East African country had agreed to take in people deported from the United States, saying it lacked the facilities to accommodate them.
Obama calls California’s redistricting plan ‘a responsible approach’
Robert Mackey
Barack Obama waded into states’ efforts at rare mid-decade redistricting efforts, saying he agreed with California governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to counter the new Texas congressional map by launching an effort to redraw his own state’s map and create more Democratic-friendly districts, calling it “a responsible approach”.
“I believe that governor Newsom’s approach is a responsible approach. He said this is going to be responsible. We’re not going to try to completely maximize it,” Obama said at a Tuesday fundraiser on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. “We’re only going to do it if and when Texas and/or other Republican states begin to pull these maneuvers. Otherwise, this doesn’t go into effect.”
Obama also called Newsom’s strategy “measured”, as it only temporarily grants the California legislature the ability to redraw maps mid-decade.
While noting that “political gerrymandering” is not his “preference,” Obama said that, if Democrats “don’t respond effectively, then this White House and Republican-controlled state governments all across the country, they will not stop, because they do not appear to believe in this idea of an inclusive, expansive democracy”.
According to organizers, the event raised $2m for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and its affiliates, one of which has filed and supported litigation in several states over Republican-drawn districts. The former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Eric Holder, who served as Obama’s attorney general and heads up the group, also appeared.
Americans worry democracy in danger amid gerrymandering fights, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds
Most Americans believe that efforts to redraw U.S. House of Representatives districts to maximize partisan gains, like those under way in Texas and California, are bad for democracy, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
More than half of respondents – 57% – said they feared that American democracy itself was in danger, a view held by eight in 10 Democrats and four in 10 in president Donald Trump’s Republican party.
The six-day survey of 4,446 US adults, which closed on Monday, showed deep unease with the growing political divisions in Washington – where Republicans control both chambers of Congress – and state capitals.
The poll found that 55% of respondents, including 71% of Democrats and 46% of Republicans, agreed that ongoing redistricting plans – such as those hatched by governors in Texas and California in a process known as gerrymandering – were “bad for democracy.”
At Trump’s urging, Republican Texas governor Greg Abbott has called a special session of the state legislature to redraw the state’s congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, aiming to help Republicans defend their 219-212 US House majority.
When Texas Republicans redrew their congressional map this month at the urging of Donald Trump, they faced a difficult task.
They needed to find a way to pick up five seats that the president wanted ahead of the midterm elections next year without spreading their voters too thin and jeopardizing the 25 seats they already held.
Here is a visual breakdown of the redrawn congressional maps…
Texas Republicans advance map that reignited US redistricting wars
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with news that the Texas legislature’s lower chamber passed a contentious new electoral map on Wednesday that aims to help Donald Trump’s Republican party retain its razor-thin US House majority in the 2026 midterm elections, AFP reported.
The vote had been delayed by two weeks after Democratic legislators fled the southern state to halt the redistricting drive, which carves out five new Republican-friendly districts.
More than 50 Democrats walked out, stalling legislative business and generating national headlines as they sought to draw attention to the rare mid-decade redistricting push.
The Democratic lawmakers returned this week, but not before their protest had set off a national map-drawing war, with Trump pressuring his party’s state-level officials to do everything they can to protect the majority in the US House of Representatives.
The stakes are sky-high for Trump, who will be bogged down in investigations into almost every aspect of his second term if Democrats manage to flip the handful of districts nationwide needed to win back the House in next year’s midterm elections.
Trump hailed the “Big WIN for the Great State of Texas“ on Wednesday night. “Everything Passed, on our way to FIVE more Congressional seats and saving your Rights, your Freedoms, and your Country, itself,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. “Texas never lets us down.”
The president also suggested Florida, Indiana and other states were looking into pursuing similar redistricting to benefit Republicans while once again calling to “STOP MAIL-IN VOTING.”
Trump – who has long railed against postal ballots, even though they have benefited his party and he has voted by mail – said in a separate post:
END MAIL-IN VOTING, AND GO TO PAPER BALLOTS. 100 additional seats will go to Republicans!!!”
In other developments:
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The vice-president, JD Vance, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, staged a photo op with National Guard troops at Union Station in the nation’s capital. They were roundly booed and jeered on their way in and out of the station.
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A federal judge denied the justice department’s bid to unseal records from the grand jury that indicted Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. US district judge Richard Berman said the small number of documents seen by the court pale in comparison with the 100,000 records the government already has on Epstein and that disclosing them could harm victims.
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Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor Trump has called on to immediately resign over an accusation that she falsely declared a property she obtained a mortgage on was her primary residence, responded on Wednesday that she has “no intention of being bullied to step down”.
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Trump has bought at least $100m of bonds since he returned to office in January, according to a CNBC analysis of new filings from the president with the US Office of Government Ethics.
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A young American citizen who was violently arrested by federal immigration officers in Los Angeles county in June, after he objected to the arrest of an older man in a Walmart parking lot, was charged with conspiracy to impede a federal officer.
