KANSAS CITY, Mo. (TNS) — The left-leaning press is ringing the alarm bells: “Trump’s Texas Gerrymander Is Supercharging a New War on Democracy,” says Mother Jones. “This Is the Biggest Threat to Our Democracy That Nobody’s Talking About,” says the Nation while everybody, and I mean everybody, is talking about Texas Republican politicos’ plan to rig, I mean redistrict, so Republicans gain seats in the 2026 House election.

To listen to Democrats, it is a five-alarm fire. “Republicans are trying to steal five seats in Texas,” said Mike Smith, the president of the Democrats’ House Majority PAC, which is raising $20 million to fight Republicans. Politicians in heavily gerrymandered states of California and Maryland promise to retaliate and disenfranchise Republicans there if Texas Republicans succeed.

Texas Democratic legislators are talking about fleeing to New Mexico despite $500 a day fines for leaving the legislature without a quorum. And that’s chump change compared to what the two parties spent on vying for control of state legislatures and 111 lawsuits after the 2020 Census set up the data for new congressional maps first used in the 2022 election.

Do you know what that last quarter-billion dollars bought the two parties? Despite rigging maps all over the country from Oregon to Pennsylvania, Democrats nationally got 48% of votes for members of the House of Representatives and 49% of the seats. Republicans, who used the system to cheat by selecting voters in their fair share of elections from Texas to North Carolina, got 51% of the House vote and 51% of the seats.

Wait, what? Democracy might be taking a beating at the local level, but nationally all the sleazy money and shady political consultants and arcane mapping software and legal shenanigans got the two parties exactly the Congress voters voted for. The national results were much like there was no gerrymandering at all.

While gerrymandering is at a high watermark in terms of ferocity, spending and technological prowess, its national effects are at low ebb. Back in 1990, when Democrats were nearing the end of a four-decade run of controlling the House of Representatives largely on the basis of gerrymandering that did get very little national attention, they got 52% of the vote, but their partisans sat in 61% of House seats.

Now that was a war on democracy.

Back then, Republicans were much less of a factor at the state legislative level and Democrats enjoyed free rein to gerrymander away where they ruled. That changed with the rise of Newt Gingrich and a new effort to take control at the state level in the late 1980s. That, and the unpopularity of Bill Clinton’s tax increases, shut the door on Democratic control of Congress in the 1994 election.

I live in a purple district represented by an anti-Trump Republican. I really like the fact that here my vote matters. So I understand why regular people — the real victims of gerrymandering — feel like they are being robbed of their vote. One place that could happen is in Missouri’s 5th District where Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s Democratic voters could be split up to let Republicans eke out another Republican district in the state.

But on the big issues, it really doesn’t matter that much whether your interests are represented by a congressman from where you live or one two states over. A pro-life lady in Illinois is just as happy when Congress defunds Planned Parenthood even if her local gerrymandered member of Congress is against it. A pro-union Texas dude has his labor rights just as protected by votes that come from Maryland or Washington state as they would be if his local Representative were a Democrat.

It is reassuring that as much as our two political parties are led by unprincipled hacks who would do anything for power, at the end of all their scheming, our Democracy still works as it was intended. You know, the guys who set up our country might have known what they were doing.

So enjoy the show as Texas Trump Republicans take their crack at hijacking Democracy as you wait for the woke Democrats in New York and California to hijack it back … and on and on. Political consultants and geodata mavens will get rich in the chaos, but don’t listen to the end times predictions, we’ll be fine.

(David Mastio is a national opinion writer for McClatchy and the Kansas City Star.)