A view of the Texas state flag on at River Oaks Country Club on April 1, 2025 in Houston, Texas. Andrew Wevers/Getty
Should Democrats be revenge gerrymandering?
“Hell yeah,” says Texas congressional candidate, Isaiah Martin.
On Sunday evening, Texas House Democrats fled the state to try to block an effort by state Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional map and flips five districts from blue to red. Some Democrats are now looking for blue states to return the favor. I asked Isaiah Martin, candidate for Texas’s 18th congressional district, for his thoughts on how Democrats should approach this moment.
Martin, 27, has skin in the game. A Houston native, he’s spent much of his young life working in politics, including as an advisor to the late Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. Last week, Martin made headlines when he was arrested for disrupting a local redistricting hearing when he refused to yield once his time had expired. “We should be talking about the fact that we live in a state that is unaffordable for people, our economy is wrecked, people cannot find good jobs, ” Martin said, “and you choose to go and gerrymander people out of their seats.”
Martin told me that he believes that Democrats should use every single tool at their disposal to fight back, and that they should be asking themselves if they are willing to “lose the country” because they are “playing into a moral high ground dilemma.”
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