BALTIMORE — A hurricane of political rage had pummeled Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson (D), and he walked through south Baltimore to see if the same ire swirled in his district.
Ferguson knew blocking mid-cycle redistricting in Maryland would cause some fury. By refusing to allow his chamber to help redraw Maryland’s political map, he torpedoed his party’s plans to retaliate against President Donald Trump and the Republicans using redistricting to secure GOP power in Congress.
But the backlash against Ferguson had exploded: close to 5,000 phone calls in 10 days, protesters at his office, activists cornering him at events. A prominent liberal podcaster railed against him. A pressure campaign streamed from Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (New York) and other top Democrats. He drew a primary challenger.
“Can you carve a spine to help you actually fight against the GOP?” asked one person among the legions who said on social media he was “pathetic” and should stop being “a coward.”
Amid the grassroots energy fueling Democratic optimism ahead of the midterms in 2026, rank-and-file Democrats are increasingly impatient for their leaders to stop Trump’s agenda. The nationwide gerrymandering fight has some Democratic politicians asking how far they’re willing to go to thwart the president.
Many party luminaries have abandoned their old “good-government” positions against gerrymandering, arguing that Democrats must fight back by drawing districts to their own advantage, creating safe Democratic seats in Congress that will, as former attorney general Eric Holder Jr. put it, “preserve our democracy now to ultimately heal it.”
Ferguson, 42, represents the flank of the party unwilling to cede those values, arguing that will unravel the country. “There is a general existential feeling among Democratic elected officials right now,” Ferguson said. “There has been a general fear of what the world looks like moving forward.” He stands alone among the Democratic power structure in Maryland, a moral high ground on which his political career may drown.
In the month since Ferguson shared a three-page memo outlining why the Maryland Senate would not join the redistricting effort, outrage has increased, but he refuses to relent.
He’s been explaining, over and over, publicly and privately why he thinks redistricting will make things worse. “We believe that this will backfire,” Ferguson said, adding that his caucus has indicated to him that it stands behind him. “We believe it is a trap for Democrats, and we believe that this is not who Marylanders, on the whole, want us to be.”
On a recent Saturday afternoon, Ferguson walked Baltimore’s quiet Mount Winans neighborhood, a mostly Black enclave bounded by railroad tracks and a cemetery, to see whether his Democratic constituents share his conviction: What mattered most was the policies Democrats could enact to help people.
He hopped up Sharon Johnson’s porch steps and knocked on her storm door to find out whether she agreed.
‘Fight fire with fire’
Jones, a retired educator, recognized Ferguson immediately and remembered that he moved to Baltimore as a Teach For America volunteer. When she didn’t bring up redistricting, he asked about it directly.
“This is the time you have to fight fire with fire,” she told him firmly. “Nothing else has been working.”
Ferguson nodded, but pressed his case: “Does your opinion change if it could mean fewer Democratic seats?”
He had been walking this tightrope for months, balancing his party’s indignation against his own sense of pragmatism, since Texas Republicans redrew their maps in August at Trump’s urging and created five safe GOP seats. The Texas plan is under Supreme Court review, but other Republican-leaning states followed suit.
California voters threw a counterpunch this month, setting up a process to gain five Democratic seats there. Virginia began a process that could add a handful more Democratic seats.
But Ferguson said every Democratic push adds fuel to the nationwide redistricting fight and encourages Republican states to retaliate. Plus, Maryland’s effort could backfire in the courts, potentially losing some of the state’s seven Democratic seats.
Maryland’s power brokers strongly disagree and describe Ferguson as naive.
“We’d be foolish just to sit by,” said Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Maryland) dean of the Maryland Democratic Party and the former House majority leader.
“In theory, Bill is correct: The concept of turning the other cheek is a wonderful concept,” Hoyer said. “But the other team’s not playing fair.”
Hoyer says all of Maryland’s Democratic congress members support redistricting to fight Republicans, though with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
“Do we want to be them?” Hoyer asked. “The answer is an adamant no, we don’t want to be them. But we also know that there is no check and balance in the Republican Party, either in the Senate or in the House, on Donald Trump. They have left the field.”
Maryland Democrats are pushing maps that would redraw the state’s one Republican-leaning district, ousting Rep. Andy Harris, chair of the House Freedom Caucus. A special session on redistricting was tentatively planned for December, according to people familiar with the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy.
“If Donald Trump is picking and choosing which states should go through a mid-decade cycle that bucks tradition, then Maryland should do the same thing,” said Moore, who has the power to convene a special session and responded to Ferguson’s reticence by creating a redistricting commission to gather public input about it.
Moore said Democratic leaders shouldn’t pull punches when Trump’s administration and Republicans in Congress are cutting the federal workforce and Medicaid, withholding food assistance or advancing a laundry list of other policies.
“While this assault is happening on our people, the response that people want me to have is sit on our hands because of tradition?” Moore said. “Absolutely not.”
Standing at her Baltimore doorstep, Johnson was in that camp.
“The more he’s able to get away with, the further he’s going to go,” she said of Trump.
Ferguson gave her the elevator-pitch version of his memo, which outlined five lines of argument against redistricting, including that the last time Democrats had drawn a map trying to oust Harris, in 2021, a judge called it an illegal, “extreme partisan gerrymander” and threw it out. He said he worried that next time Maryland Republicans could argue they deserved more than one seat. “That’s what I’m struggling with,” he told her. “I just can’t stomach it.”
“I think I would risk it,” Johnson told him.
“You would?” Ferguson asked. “You would risk it?”
“All guardrails have just been destroyed,” she told him.
‘Bigger than Bill Ferguson’
At the core of Ferguson’s argument is an uncomfortable question for his party: Have Maryland Democrats already stretched partisan gerrymandering to its legal limit?
Democrats have held majorities in the Maryland General Assembly since 1920, retaining exclusive power to draw state legislative and congressional districts.
The 2021 ruling was the first time a judge applied state constitutional rules that govern General Assembly districts to Maryland’s eight federal congressional districts. Democrats settled the case by submitting a map that upheld the delegation’s partisan status quo, appeasing Republicans who had brought the legal challenge.
“We dotted every ‘i’, we crossed every ‘t’, we did everything by the book — and the map got thrown out,” said Ferguson, an attorney. “That was a very meaningful experience for us, knowing that you can fight the right way and still lose and go backward.”
Moore said “some of the best legal minds in the state could not disagree more.”
Former Maryland attorney general Brian E. Frosh (D) argued that the state’s courts would have ultimately upheld the 2021 map on appeal. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), a constitutional scholar and former state senator, who agrees with Frosh, is among those who have privately discussed the legal issues with Ferguson.
Judge Dan Friedman, a former counsel to the General Assembly who now serves on Maryland’s second-highest court, wrote a 53-page law review article last year about the 2021 case. Friedman concluded the case was decided incorrectly and “should also have no persuasive effect on future federal congressional redistricting in Maryland.”
House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones (D-Baltimore County) said her chamber is “ready and eager” for redistricting.
The governor remains the driving force in Maryland for getting it done.
“My goal is not to persuade Bill,” Moore said. “The Maryland General Assembly is bigger than Bill Ferguson. There are a whole collection of members in both chambers who are going to have a voice and who are going to have a say on this.”
Shortly after the redistricting fight started, Moore said he would be selecting legislative candidates to support in the 2026 election, an implicit warning that he is willing to wade into General Assembly primary races.
Ferguson had won office running to the leftof a veteran Democratic incumbent and built a reputation as a change-oriented liberal, but he now faces a primary challenge from the left by a small-business owner and social media influencer named Bobby LaPin, who said he’s running because “the system won’t change itself.”
Other Democrats have accused Ferguson of siding with Republicans.
“Bill Ferguson should stop providing aid and comfort to the extremists by irresponsibly parroting MAGA talking points,” a spokesman for Jeffries, the House Democratic Leader, said in a statement.
When Ferguson wrote on X that said the party’s victories in Virginia’s election shows “we don’t need to rig the system to win,” his counterpart in Richmond, state Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth), responded that he should “get our victory in Virginia out of your mouth while you echo MAGA talking points.”
Get our victory in Virginia out of your mouth while you echo MAGA talking points. Grow a pair and stand up to this President. This is just embarassing. https://t.co/iV2eHL6nI0
— L. Louise Lucas (@SenLouiseLucas) November 5, 2025
Lucas, who noted in a different post that former Maryland governor Larry Hogan (R) agrees with Ferguson, said in an interview that if her caucus didn’t support redistricting as Ferguson says his does not, “I would do my damnedest to convince them otherwise because I feel like it’s the right thing to do.”
She supports Virginia Democrats’ redistricting to gain four of the five Republican-held seats in her state, and says Ferguson’s reticence is an embarrassment to his party.
“I just don’t understand not fighting back, because if you sit on your hands and do nothing, you get completely steamrolled,” she said.
About three dozen protesters recently showed up at Ferguson’s Annapolis office bearing signs trying to persuade him to change course. “THESE ARE NOT NORMAL TIMES. JUST DO IT!!!!!” read one.
On his way to the protest, Amar Mukunda stopped by the Maryland Board of Elections to file a primary challenge against one of Ferguson’s top lieutenants, Senate Majority Leader Nancy J. King (D-Montgomery). “This redistricting thing was the nail in the coffin,” he said. “You don’t see any of the Senate leadership speaking out about it.”
Ferguson said the threat of primary challenges doesn’t deter him because “I learned early on you can’t govern scared.”
He said he feels validated in his argument that redistricting can backfire, given that the Texas case faces court challenges and a judge ordered GOP-controlled Utah to draw a seat likely to result in a Democrat winning. “Once you start down this path, you can end up getting the opposite result than what you intended,” he said.
“Of course there are moments of second-guessing,” Ferguson said. “But Democrats have always won by providing the better vision, not by necessarily changing the rules.”
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