Deep in the badlands of defeat, Democrats have soul-searched about what went wrong last November, tinkered with a thousand-plus thinkpieces and desperately cast for a strategy to reboot their stalled-out party.

Amid the noise, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has recently championed an unlikely game plan: Forget the high road, fight fire with fire and embrace the very tactics that virtue-minded Democrats have long decried.

Could the dark art of political gerrymandering be the thing that saves democracy from Trump’s increasingly authoritarian impulses? That’s essentially the pitch Newsom is making to California voters with his audacious new special election campaign.

As Texas Democrats dig in to block a Republican-led redistricting push and Trump muscles to consolidate power wherever he can,

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