How JB Pritzker Is Fighting to Stop Trump From Redrawing the Map

Around the country, President Donald Trump is stepping up a pressure campaign on Republican state lawmakers to create new electoral maps meant to enshrine a GOP majority in the House—and ensure that he’s able to keep pushing through his agenda and avoid a potential impeachment ordeal at the hands of a Democratic-controlled Congress. And in Illinois, Governor JB Pritzker is offering a safe haven to Texas Democrats opposed to such efforts in their state.

In a show of Midwestern hospitality, Pritzker welcomed dozens of Democratic Texas lawmakers who had fled the state to halt a special session called by Texas governor Greg Abbott. The president had asked Abbott to have legislators draw and approve a new electoral map, designed to give five more congressional seats to the Republicans. “We are entitled to five more seats,” Trump told CNBC.

You might be wondering if that is normal. In fact, it’s highly irregular. Electoral maps are typically updated every 10 years, with the goal of reflecting the latest results of a population census. By pressuring states to create new maps at his request, the president is asking lawmakers to bend to his will.

To avoid a vote on the measure, Democratic lawmakers flew to Illinois, following in the footsteps of thousands of migrants bused and flown to Pritzker’s state by Abbott in recent years. When I checked in with the Illinois governor this week, he told me, “Even throughout all the chaos of the past year, my optimism remains—because a happy warrior is still a warrior. Illinoisans sent me to Springfield to be a fighter during the first Trump administration, and so I knew on day one this time around, we had to fight again.”

Pritzker, the billionaire hotel heir, has already handily won two terms as governor and is running for a third in 2026—all while 2028 chatter persists. A party flamethrower, Pritzker has staked out a position as one of Trump’s fiercest statehouse critics and has even taken aim at “do-nothing Democrats,” who he believes are complaining on podcasts when they should be championing their voters’ needs and values.

Fighting back, to Pritzker, has “meant standing up to the Trump administration in court, passing laws to counteract their radical agenda, and raising the alarm bell whenever necessary,” he told me. “As I said right after the election,” Pritzker added, “if you try to take away freedom and opportunity from Illinoisans—you come for my people, you come through me.”

These days, his people also include a few dozen politicians who live about 1,000 miles away, and he’s grappling with a rapidly escalating legal situation: On Tuesday, Texas senator John Cornyn (who is facing a primary challenge from Attorney General Ken Paxton) called for the FBI to help find or arrest the Democratic lawmakers.

“We have no intention of just rolling over and allowing these authoritarian wannabes to steal the United States Congress,” Texas Democratic Party chair Kendall Scudder told me. Scudder, who is among those who left the state, added, “Texas Democrats don’t work for Donald Trump; we work for the people of Texas.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s redistricting agenda has Vice President JD Vance heading this week to Indiana, where, in addition to attending a GOP fundraiser, he’s expected to urge Governor Mike Braun and the state’s Republicans to redraw the map there. While Braun has been publicly noncommittal about any redrawing, a Republican close to the White House told Politico, “I certainly think the vice president and the president and the people around both of them can be quite persuasive.” That same Republican suggested that Ohio and Missouri were in play too: “Things are just kind of percolating.”

The Texas mess has spilled into blue states, as the governors of New York and California, Kathy Hochul and Gavin Newsom, respectively, are making moves to counter this Republican redistricting. (California would have to add a ballot initiative to a special election, which Newsom is seeking to hold the first week of November.) At a briefing at the New York State Capitol on Monday, Hochul told reporters she would pursue an aggressive gerrymandering plan to create more Democratic districts: “I’m tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back. With all due respect to the good-government groups, politics is a political process.”

Anne Caprara, Pritzker’s chief of staff, told me, “When you go into these moments, these hard moments like the COVID crisis, you have these moments of moral clarity. When Trump won, we decided: We’re going to do what’s right for the country.”

Pritzker’s pugnacious response to Trump has fueled speculation that he’s eyeing a presidential run, and in Caprara’s remarks, there’s a hint of a greater ambition. “There is a right way, and there’s a wrong way. There’s not a right way and wrong way and a poll-tested way. There is just right and wrong,” she told me. “Voters do understand that and reward it in the long run. They care about character.” Caprara was one of the few who artfully articulated how Democratic voters are desperate for the cohesion of a “Team Fight” instead of a Team “Cave,” emphasizing that “Team Fight stretches across all ideological aspects.”

In the meantime, it’s not clear what the fight will look like. “We’re going to do everything we can to protect every single one of them and make sure that—’cause we know they’re doing the right thing, we know that they’re following the law,” Pritzker told reporters. Breaking a quorum is not breaking the law.