Texas Democrats fled to the city in a private jet to oppose Republican gerrymandering
Three days after Texas Democrats took a private jet to Chicago in an attempt to stop their Republican counterparts from passing a new congressional map, the airport they flew to, O’Hare International, experienced a flight backlog that forced planes to park in areas of the airport they would not normally use. The city’s House districts are so infamously gerrymandered that those planes were parked in two different congressional districts.
Much of O’Hare, including its four terminals and the bulk of its eight runways, are located within Illinois’s Fifth Congressional District. Incoming planes typically taxi to those terminals. But “technical issues” impacting United Airlines on Wednesday forced the airport to hold departures, creating a backlog that prevented incoming planes from reaching their gates. As a result, a map from live flight tracker Flightradar24 shows O’Hare began parking incoming United flights on the airport’s northern end, which is located within the fifth district, as well as its western end, which is located within the neighboring third district.
The ordeal illustrates the extent to which Illinois Democrats gerrymandered their state’s House districts to send as many of their partymates to Washington, D.C., as possible. It also illustrates the unforced error Texas Democrats committed by traveling to Chicago to block Republicans from passing a new map in their own state.
Before the Democrats boarded Texas in a 76-seat private jet flown out of a “state-of-the-art” private terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, they posted photos and videos from the tarmac in which they said they were fighting a “rigged-redistricting process.” Then they flew to Illinois, home to a House map that is widely regarded as one of the most gerrymandered in the country.
Illinois suffered the second-largest population decline in the United States from 2010 to 2020, causing it to lose a congressional seat following the 2020 census. Governor J.B. Pritzker (D.) and his Democratic partymates responded by spearheading an aggressive redistricting process that packed five Republican-held districts into three. The move meant Illinois Democrats picked up a congressional seat even as their state lost representation. They now hold 82 percent of the state’s congressional seats; Kamala Harris carried just 54 percent of the Illinois vote in 2024.
The third and fifth districts are strong examples of how Illinois Democrats accomplished that feat. Both districts start at or near downtown Chicago before thinly stretching west, boundaries that allow Democrats to place as many of their urban and suburban voters as possible within separate districts. Overall, the Princeton Gerrymandering Project gave the map an “F.”
That didn’t stop Pritzker from accusing Texas Republicans of “attempting to cheat” by redrawing their state’s congressional boundaries to carve out additional districts likely to elect Republicans, comments that came during a Sunday press conference the governor held alongside the fleeing Texas Democrats. Pritzker was asked about his own state’s map but dismissed the notion that it’s an example of a Democratic gerrymander, saying, “The fact that we are very good in Illinois about delivering for the people of Illinois and then people react to that and vote for our candidate winning is very different than cheating mid-decade by rewriting the rule because their cult leader told them to do it.”
Shortly thereafter, on Tuesday, Pritzker appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Colbert confronted Pritzker with photos of Illinois’s map, which he called “crazy.”
“Look at [district] 17 here. It does that, then it comes up here, and it sneaks around there, and goes all the way up here, and then goes right over there like that,” Colbert said. “So because all states, to a certain extent, do this, why is what Texas doing particularly egregious in this case?”
“This is extraordinarily rare,” Pritzker responded. “And the way they are doing it is taking voting rights away from black and brown people.”
Former president Barack Obama piled on one day later, saying, “Republicans in Texas are trying to gerrymander district lines to unfairly win five seats in next year’s midterm elections. This is a power grab that undermines our democracy.” As a state senator in Illinois, Obama redrew his own South Side, Chicago district to extend north so it could include the city’s affluent Gold Coast neighborhood, a move that provided the future president with new wealthy and influential constituents.
Karl Salzmann and Matthew Xiao contributed to this report
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