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It’s fairly unlikely that Democrats win exactly 217 U.S. House seats in November, falling a single seat short and thereby leaving the House in the hands of a Republican majority that is content to let President Trump ignore the Constitution and govern as a dictator. But if Democrats do end up just one seat short, everyone should point their fingers at Ferguson and the other 33 Maryland Senate Democrats (there are 13 Republicans). And even if that nightmare scenario doesn’t come to pass, Maryland’s lawmakers exemplify a problem that dogs the Democratic Party and therefore the country 10 years into the Trump era: Many Democratic politicians still refuse to acknowledge and act on the reality that they are in a civil war against the Republicans and that winning this war will require breaking with traditional norms and niceties and even some generally solid democratic practices.

Let me be clear: I absolutely hate gerrymandering. It results in elections where the results are predetermined. While both parties have gerrymandered in the past, over the last two decades Republicans have gone way overboard, rigging district maps to ensure huge GOP state legislative majorities in places like North Carolina where the two parties are roughly at parity.

Right now, though, Democrats have to gerrymander. Have to. With Trump’s poll numbers plunging and the GOP on a clear path to lose the House, Trump last summer demanded that Republican-controlled states start redrawing their districts to ensure a continued GOP majority. Redrawing district lines to avoid democratic accountability is literally in the authoritarian playbook: such a common tactic that scholars Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt explicitly discussed it in their 2018 book, How Democracies Die. Texas quickly followed the president’s edict, and eventually so did Missouri, Ohio, and North Carolina. Republicans, who currently have a four-seat House majority, would have gained around nine seats if they gerrymandered and Democrats didn’t respond.