For a while there, you could hear serious talk about Donald Trump ’s brazen midterm-rigging national gerrymandering initiative backfiring. He’s faced Republican resistance in Indiana, Kansas and Ohio and suffered an unexpected judicial defeat in Utah. We could see voters overturn the extinction of a Democratic district in Missouri. Florida presents a legal and political obstacle course for GOP gerrymanderers. And of course California voters approved a pro-Democratic gerrymander on November 4.

But the biggest blow to Trump came from a federal district court panel in Texas that on November 19 struck down that state’s new pro-GOP map — the first in the whole series — as an impermissible race-based gerrymander. Five new Republican House seats hung in the balance, but relief for Trump

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