Republicans’ 11th-Hour Gerrymandering Plot Flops in Another Red State

Republicans just got some bad news ahead of the midterm elections.

After Democrats snagged a likely House seat in Salt Lake City County, Utah, in February, the GOP was furious. Republicans control all four House districts in Utah, and despite about 40 percent of residents voting Democrat in 2024, they considered losing even one unacceptable.

The new maps led to GOP lawmakers launching a petition to try to put the anti-gerrymandering law that had created the Democratic district back on the ballot, where it could be overturned.

We can now safely say the petition has flopped.

But it was close! The Republican group behind the petition spent $4.35 million on “professional signature gathering,” per Deseret News, and recruited powerful allies such as Turning Point Action, Donald Trump Jr., and the president himself.

The petition required valid signatures from 8 percent of voters across the state—141,000 at minimum. The GOP cleared this mark easily, attaining roughly 170,000.

But the petition also needed at least 8 percent of signatures in 26 out of Utah’s 29 state Senate districts, to show that voters across the state wanted the issue brought to the ballot. It was here that Republicans failed. After a nonprofit backing the new maps, Better Boundaries, convinced about 7,000 voters to remove their names from the petition, it fell just short of the 26-district threshold.

The redistricting wars were kicked off by President Trump’s call last June for state leaders to gerrymander their maps to benefit Republicans. It’s crucial that Democrats battle back through their own gerrymandering if they are to regain the House and Senate in the midterms. Since 2025, Republicans have redistricted in an attempt to add seats in Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri. Dems have countered through redistricting in California and now, officially, in Utah.

Trump may add an extra layer of complication to the midterms by suppressing the vote before them and attempting to overturn the results if his party loses. We can only hope the public’s general lack of support for the Trump administration will be strong enough that Democrats can pull through.

White House Celebrates Pressuring Olympics Into Banning Trans Women

The Trump administration is proud about bullying the IOC into changing its policy on transgender athletes.

The White House is not only celebrating but taking credit for the International Olympic Committee’s decision to ban trans women from competing in the 2028 Olympic Games.

The IOC announced Thursday that eligibility for female category Olympic events will be “limited to biological females,” determined by genetic testing. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately took to X to celebrate the news. 

“You cannot change your sex,” she wrote. “President Trump’s Executive Order protecting women’s sports made this happen!”

In February 2025, Trump passed the executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which banned trans women from competing in women’s sports at all levels, and vowed to rescind  funds from any programs that refused to do so in the name of “safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.” The order also pressured professional sports associations to adopt similar bans. 

Though it’s an issue that affects very few Americans, trans women’s participation in sports has become a fixation for Republicans who claim to support women’s rights, all the while passing abortion bans and limiting access to health care.

In reality, trans people make up about 1 percent to 2 percent of the U.S. population, and just 0.0002 percent of college athletes. Just 0.001 percent of Olympic athletes identify as trans. The political preoccupation with trans athletes is nothing but a scapegoat to distract from the many real inequities women and LGBTQ people face on a daily basis. 

Amid volatile debate, the IOC’s stance was highly anticipated. IOC President and former Olympic swimmer Kristy Coventry said the decision is “based on science and has been led by medical experts.” Trans women with reduced testosterone levels were previously allowed to compete. 

“At the Olympic Games, even the smallest margins can be the difference between victory and defeat,” Coventry said in a statement. “It would not be fair for biological males to compete in the female category.”

In the 20 years that trans women have been allowed to compete at the Olympics, there has been only one trans woman Olympian (New Zealand weightlifter Laura Hubbard in 2021), and she did not win a medal.

Trump’s America Refuses to Recognize Slavery as Crime Against Humanity

The U.S. was one of only three “no” votes at the U.N.

On Wednesday, the U.S., Israel, and Argentina were the only countries to reject the formal recognition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade—which saw millions of Africans kidnapped, trafficked, brutalized, and dehumanized for centuries—as the “gravest crime against humanity.” The United Nations resolution also called for reparations, and was adopted with 123 votes in favor and 52 abstentions, in addition to the three “no” votes.

“The trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans [was] the gravest crime against humanity by reason of the definitive break in world history, scale, duration, systemic nature, brutality and enduring consequences that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialized regimes of labour, property and capital,” the Ghana-backed resolution read.

The UN General Assembly has adopted a Ghana-led resolution recognising transatlantic slavery as the “gravest crime against humanity,” passing despite opposition from the US, Israel, Argentina, and European........

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