Maryland’s Democratic governor, Wes Moore, reportedly suggested on Sunday that he may attempt to redraw his state’s congressional map in a way that would erase the lone Republican voice in the state’s delegation to Washington.
Appearing on CBS News’ “Face The Nation,” Moore said he is considering plans that would directly target Rep. Andy Harris, the sole Republican among Maryland’s ten members of Congress. “I want to make sure that we have fair lines and fair seats,” Moore said, framing the effort as a matter of “fairness.”
The comments have raised concern among Republicans who see Moore’s strategy as an attempt to cement one-party dominance in a state where more than a third of voters supported President Donald Trump in 2024.
Trump lost Maryland to former Vice President Kamala Harris, who captured 63 percent of the vote, but his share underscored a sizable minority that would effectively be stripped of congressional representation under Moore’s plan.
Moore couched his redistricting push in the language of electoral integrity, arguing that his plan was necessary to counteract what he called partisan manipulations by Republicans at the national level. “We need to be able to have fair maps, and we also need to make sure that if the president of the United States is putting his finger on the scale to try to manipulate elections because he knows that his policies cannot win in a ballot box, then it behooves each and every one of us to be able to keep all options on the table to ensure that the voters’ voices can actually be heard,” Moore said.
The governor’s remarks came just days after Texas Republicans redrew their own congressional maps, creating five additional GOP-majority districts.
That plan followed encouragement from Trump, who said that “new lines should be drawn to get the GOP a handful more seats in the House.” Several other Republican-led states, including Florida and Ohio, are also weighing redistricting moves before the upcoming midterms.
Democrats, however, appear eager not only to condemn Republican-led redistricting but to pursue even more aggressive versions of their own. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has unveiled a proposal to reshape the state’s congressional map in ways that could deliver Democrats as many as five additional seats.
Newsom’s plan would require voters to temporarily strip authority from California’s independent redistricting commission — a body created by state referendum in 2010 to reduce partisan manipulation — and hand it back to the state legislature, which is dominated by Democrats.
The maneuver underscores the increasingly open embrace of gerrymandering by Democrats, who have long claimed to oppose it.
In Maryland, Moore’s pursuit of Harris’s seat would eliminate the only dissenting partisan voice in a ten-member delegation, effectively leaving Maryland Republicans without federal representation in the House.
For now, Moore has presented his plan as hypothetical. But his willingness to consider using redistricting as a weapon signals a broader trend in Democratic-controlled states, where officials are responding to GOP-led map-drawing not with reform, but with escalated partisanship of their own.
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