The popularity of both major parties is in decline. The polls show it: Trump’s net approval rating sank as low as -18% last month. But he’s still more popular than his party—only 38% have a favorable opinion of the Republicans. The Democrats fare no better. The party sits at its lowest approval rating in 35 years. More than two million voters have dropped their Democratic registration in what The New York Times calls a “stampede” away from the party.

The crisis of capitalism narrows the options of the bourgeois state. Increasingly, capitalist politicians find themselves at odds with even the limited “democracy” by which they govern and maintain legitimacy. Burdened by a sluggish economy and skyrocketing debt, they’re unable to offer any real reforms to satisfy the electorate. As anxiety builds for the midterms, they’re resorting to gerrymandering—redrawing electoral districts to rig elections in their favor.

Congressional districts are typically redrawn after the census at the beginning of each decade. In Texas, the GOP pushed through a “mid-decade redistricting plan”—designed to ensure five additional seats. Republicans overcame the Democrats’ feeble theatrics and forced the plan through the state Senate. Governor Greg Abbot signed it in the middle of the night.

Under the new map, Republicans would carry more districts than their share of the statewide votes would justify. Trump won Texas with around 56% of the vote in 2024, yet thanks to the gerrymander, Republicans now expect to carry 79% of congressional districts in 2026.

Increasingly, capitalist politicians find themselves at odds with even the limited “democracy” by which they govern and maintain legitimacy. / Image: RCA

Seeing this, California’s governor played a countergambit. Gavin Newsom, the Democrats’ carefully-coiffed poster boy, is aping the coarse language and manner of right-wing reactionaries, recently declaring himself the “Joe Rogan of the liberals.” Vowing to “fight fire with fire,” he called a special-election ballot measure to temporarily suspend California’s independent redistricting commission, replacing it with maps drawn by Democrats. The new lines target five Republican seats for elimination, while strengthening a few narrowly held “toss-ups” in favor of Newsom’s party.

Newsom’s ploy is legalistic, defensive, and reactionary. In other words, exactly what we expect from the Democratic Party. The liberal press, which pretends to champion “democracy” against Trump’s excesses, continues to tout Newsom as the Democrats’ “great white hope” for the 2028 presidential election.

But working-class Texans and Californians resent these maneuvers. Polls show a clear majority in both states disapprove of gerrymandering. While liberal scaremongers continue to warn about Trump’s authoritarian jackboot, such undemocratic schemes are bipartisan, and have been part and parcel of American bourgeois “democracy” from its inception.

Republicans and Democrats have initiated similar gerrymandering efforts in Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, Maryland, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, and Kansas. Both parties are desperate to prevent pesky voters from interfering with the high business of state: vicious austerity cuts to fund imperialist wars and interest payments to bankers. Yet again, the two main parties appear as mirror images of one another.

The real issue for workers is not which party wins more seats in rigged congressional elections. We know every bourgeois election is rigged against us from the start. As both parties attack our living standards, the American working class is desperate for an alternative that has not yet emerged. While the so-called “left” and “right” play out their legal challenges over the heads of voters, communists aim to cut the legs out from under both parties of property with a class-struggle program, uniting working people to fight the billionaires and their hangers-on in the workplace, on the streets, and at the polls.