Donald Trump has ushered in a period of political shamelessness. Things that politicians used to do very quietly or in secret are now done right out in the open. There is no longer any pretense about such moves, the politicians now brag about what they're doing. This is evident in too many ways to even list, but the most prominent example right now is the mid-decade redistricting battles being waged in the states. Led by Texas and California, this could soon spread to other states as well, as Republicans jockey to avoid losing control of the House of Representatives next year and Democrats move to counterbalance these efforts.

What the outcome will be nobody knows, at this point. America has already experienced a gradual movement towards creating as many safe seats as possible, to the point where truly competitive House districts have shrunk in number over the past few decades. The upshot of this is that even in a "wave" election neither party will win dozens and dozens of new seats in any one election, the majority now mostly shifts by single numbers. The margins have gotten thinner, in other words, because so many seats are either safely in the hands of Democrats or Republicans that the pool of swing districts has shrunk.

This is obviously going to get worse with the new redistricting. Carving out safe districts means even fewer battleground districts will even be left. And redistricting happens on the state level as well, which tends to lock one party in for long stretches of time. The state legislatures are the ones who get to redraw the U.S. House districts, but those same state legislatures are so gerrymandered themselves that voters have no real way of pushing back against such partisan shamelessness. In Congress, at least the Senate cannot be gerrymandered in any way, but at the state level they have state senate districts whose lines can indeed be redrawn. So even if a state is truly purple, balanced on the edge of choosing between a Democrat and a Republican for president, the state legislature may be overwhelmingly (with veto-proof supermajorities) locked up by one party or the other. One party may win 52 percent of the popular vote in the state legislative elections and wind up with 70 percent of the seats, to put this another way.

Currently, the Republicans control the U.S. House of Representatives, but their majority is razor-thin. Historically, the party in power (in this case, in the House, the Senate, and the White House) tends to lose seats in the midterm elections. If Democrats can flip five or more House seats, they will regain control of the chamber.

So Donald Trump decided to rig the maps to avoid this. He called for the Texas state legislature to redraw their House district maps to add another five safe GOP seats. They are now in the process of doing so, and the bill will be signed into law soon.

In response, Governor Gavin Newsom of California (who is pretty obviously already campaigning to run for president in 2028) is pushing through new maps for his state which would add five more safe Democratic seats. Newsom has a more complicated route to achieving this, because he will have to convince voters to back his plan and overturn (on a temporary basis, until Trump leaves office) the nonpartisan redistricting commissions that are currently in place.

This is a shame, since California previously joined the ranks of states that moved to end gerrymandering once and for all by taking the responsibility of drawing the maps away from the politicians in the legislature and hand it instead to an apolitical commission that would take into consideration things like geography rather than partisan leanings. Instead of divvying up the voters in one town between four districts, the town itself would become a single district -- that was the basic goal. Instead of district lines that snaked all over the place, districts would be more compact and try to keep geographic regions largely intact.

As I said, there was a movement that was pushing such nonpartisan redistricting in many states, and they had some successes in both red states and blue. But not everywhere -- there were still plenty of states that continued their political gerrymandering by the legislature. The idealistic goal was to slowly get more and more states to adopt the new way of doing things, and eventually the House would be a lot more responsive to the voters. That was the plan, at any rate, and it was at least partially a bipartisan one (California never would have voted on the redistricting commission plan without the backing of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican).

This movement seems likely to suffer some big setbacks, what with the current cutthroat redistricting battles raging. It seems inevitable, since neither party wants to take a moral stand on getting rid of gerrymandering while the other party is doing so with abandon in other states. As Newsom puts it, you have to fight fire with fire.

What will be the outcome, when all the dust has settled? Nobody really knows. Will the Republicans wind up with an advantage (since they've got more states to gerrymander than the Democrats do)? Will it guarantee their majority in the House?

Well, maybe. But then again maybe not. Technology has advanced to the point where drawing district maps isn't a matter of guesswork but rather science. But this still requires the politicians to make assumptions about voting patterns, some of which turn out not to be true. Merely looking at the last election and projecting that all those voters who voted for your party will continue to do so doesn't always work, to put it a different way. And gerrymandering usually leads to making seats that were previously safe by a wide margin into seats that are only considered safe by a much smaller margin.

A true "wave" election can upset this applecart. If the people get so disgusted by the "In" party that they vote for the "Out" party in a big way, then all those carefully-drawn maps can fail to deliver the intended results. But it's got to be a pretty big wave to achieve this.

What does appear likely is that after the states get done with their blatantly-partisan mid-decade redistricting, there will only be a handful (roughly a few dozen) House districts that will remain true swing districts. This trend had already been happening, but this round of redistricting is going to accelerate it.

Which is a shame. But then we live in a era of political shamelessness, so the politicians simply don't care. California voters -- most of whom strongly support the idea of the independent commissions -- will very likely vote to approve the gerrymandered map Newsom has come up with. As he says, sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. The alternative is to piously sit on your high horse with your principles intact while the other side rigs the game so badly that you can't win.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant