WATCH: Dems’ Gerrymandering Narrative Completely Collapses On Live TV

Democrats have spent years blasting Republican-led states for drawing gerrymandered congressional districts—but that narrative took a major hit Monday night, when Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker was pressed on national television about his own party’s district map. What followed was an awkward dodge, a half-hearted joke, and a deflection straight to Donald Trump.

Pritzker, a Democrat, appeared on CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where the host began by displaying a map of Illinois’s congressional districts.

Colbert zeroed in on some of the more bizarre lines, saying, “Take a look at this. Look at 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. And look at this one, kind of goes whoop up there. It’s like the stinger on a scorpion down here.”

The liberal audience laughed, but the joke turned serious when Colbert asked, “Is this common for all states to do?”

Pritzker responded with a joke of his own, “We hand it over to a kindergarten class and let them decide.”

When Colbert pressed further—“Okay, and that’s the nonpartisan group that does this for you guys?” Pritzker then doubled down.

WATCH:

But few believe Illinois’s congressional map was drawn by anyone other than Democratic operatives looking to maintain their grip on power in the state. And even fewer would describe it as “independent.”

Rather than address the concerns honestly, Pritzker pivoted to Texas—ignoring his own party’s long history of partisan redistricting.

“Well here, every 10 years we do a census in this country and right after the census we redraw districts in every state. But what the Republicans are trying to do—and the Texas Republicans, frankly at the behest of Donald Trump—are doing it mid-decade. That is extraordinarily rare.”

In July, Texas Republicans indeed launched a special legislative session aimed at redrawing congressional boundaries. The move sparked outrage from state Democrats, who fled Texas in an attempt to deny quorum and block the vote. Governor Greg Abbott (R-TX) threatened expulsion for the fleeing lawmakers, while Trump publicly urged them to return and accused them of dereliction of duty.

That led Senate Democrats to call for investigations into potential executive pressure on state-level redistricting efforts, even citing the Hatch Act—a move critics say reeks of selective outrage.

What Pritzker failed to mention in his appearance was that Illinois Democrats executed a sweeping gerrymander in 2021 that significantly padded their congressional control, slicing conservative areas and tacking them onto Democrat-leaning urban districts. In fact, national election watchdogs and nonpartisan analysts have long flagged Illinois as one of the most extreme examples of redistricting abuse.

Yet when called out directly, the best defense Pritzker could muster was sarcasm and finger-pointing. While Democrats accuse Republicans of “undermining democracy,” their own redistricting maps often look like something out of an abstract art gallery.