‘It's really theft': the Republican plan to redraw Texas maps – and grab more power

The Guardian

6 days ago

A plan for Texas to redraw its congressional districts and gain five additional Republican seats barrels through flimsy legal arguments and political norms like a rough-stock rodeo bronco through a broken chute.
But the fiddly process of drawing the maps to Republicans' advantage for 2026 may require more finesse than cowboy politics can produce.
'It is more than redistricting. It's really theft,' said Democratic representative Al Green, whose Houston-area congressional district is likely to be one targeted by Republicans in a redrawn map. 'It's the kind of election theft that you use when you realize that you can't win playing with the hand that you've been dealt. So, you decide that you'll just rearrange the cards so that they favor you.'
The attempted power grab comes at a time when the state legislature is meant to be focused on the floods that killed more than 130 people just two weeks ago.
Texas has 38 congressional districts, and Republicans hold 25 of those districts today. All but one of those districts has a white voting majority. And every one of those districts was won by double digits.
While Republicans hold two-thirds of the seats, they only won about 58% of congressional voters last year. In 2018, the midterm of Donald Trump's first term in office and a Democratic wave election year, Texas Republicans barely cleared 50% statewide, and lost two of those seats. In 2022, after a harsh gerrymander that voting rights groups challenged in court, Republicans reclaimed those seats.
Texas is the only state that explicitly permits more than one redistricting in between decennial censuses. But even accounting for that, the strategy exploits the end of pre-clearance requirements for new maps under the Voting Rights Act that the US supreme court eliminated in the Shelby county v Holder decision in 2013.
'They are willing to enact, frankly, illegal, racially discriminatory maps, even while their current maps are in court,' said Sam Gostomski, executive director of the Texas Democratic party. 'They know if they just cheat, they can break the law … They can just do this every couple of years and kick the ball down the road, because every time they draw new districts, those cases have to be litigated, and that takes time, right?'
The party opposing the president historically gains seats in Congress in off-year elections. Facing a likely repeat of 2018, the White House is looking for options in Texas to limit the damage.
'I think we get five,' Trump said of Texas earlier this week. 'And there could be some other states. We're going to get another three or four or five in addition. Texas would be the biggest one. And that'll be five … Just a very simple redrawing. We pick up five seats, but we have a couple of other states where we'll pick up seats also.'
Texas governor Greg Abbott shoehorned mid-cycle redistricting into a special session of the Texas legislature that begins Monday, ostensibly to address disaster relief after deadly flooding near Austin. It's not at all clear if a proposed map will be presented even by the time of the first public hearing on redistricting on 24 July, said state representative Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, a Democrat from San Antonio and a member of the Texas house's redistricting committee.
'No maps have been seen,' she said. 'No doubt, we believe those maps have been drawn already, but we haven't seen them.'
The redistricting is not politics born of Texas, Gostomski said. Republicans there are not eager to campaign in more competitive districts. They're less keen to resist a Trump demand.
'The Republican congressional delegation and Governor Abbott bent the knee before they even saw the maps,' Gostomski said. 'They don't know what these maps are going to be and have already agreed to redraw whatever lines the White House wants them to.'
Democrats in Texas are livid. Gostomski said he had spent some days after the flooding near Austin with people from church and former classmates digging out cars and doing whatever could be done to help.
'On a very personal level, I felt it in the pit in my stomach when all of a sudden, 24 hours later, I come back to my job, and 24 hours after that, now the governor has made it political,' he said. 'And that should not be the conversation right now.'
A redistricting fight hijacks a session which should be devoted to disaster recovery, Gervin-Hawkins said. 'We should be focusing on those families, how we can support them, how we can help them, how we can recover from the bodies that are missing. Yet, we're trying to redistrict a map, cut out people's rights to vote … I think it's just an atrocity, and I think our leadership should be ashamed of what they've done.'
A gerrymandered, off-year Texas redistricting that increases Republicans' congressional delegation to 79% in a year when their share of the vote is likely to decrease? It would require redrawing maps for a state that already has an F rating on the Princeton redistricting report card to one of the most unfair maps in American history.
'In order to get the five seats that Donald Trump is telling the media and telling the Republican congressional delegation that they want, they're going to have to take risks,' Gostomski said. 'They're going to make some of these Republican seats a lot less safe, especially in what we expect to be a big swing year in the midterms.'
Houston and its surrounding area is one of the fastest-growing municipalities in the country and at about eight million people it is the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States. Harris County at the center has about 4.8 million residents, about three quarters of whom are nonwhite, with a Hispanic plurality.
Eleven members of Congress represent voters in the metro Houston area. Seven are Republicans.
For seats around Houston, Republican mapmakers would carve the city up like a pie, splitting up a core thick with Democratic voters with long, thin wedges, radiating outward into the Republican suburbs and rural counties surrounding them. Green's south Houston ninth district is vulnerable to this strategy, as is Lizzie Fletcher's seventh district, Sylvia Garcia's 29th district and Sylvester Turner's 18th district. All are in safe Democratic seats.
Other districts near Dallas and along the southern Texas border may also see changes. Democrats Vincente Gonzales and Henry Cuellar are both in districts that are close to evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Between them is Republican Monica De La Cruz, whose 15th district is rated as a +7 Republican lean by the Cook Partisan Voting Index. In most states, that would be a lock. In Texas, facing a wave election year, it presents a challenge for mapmakers angling to catch Democratic lawmakers nearby.
Shaving Republican districts of conservative voters to capture Democratic districts makes presumptions that may not hold about how suburban voters and Latino swing voters might behave in future elections, said Mike Doyle, chairman of the Harris county Democratic party in Houston.
'It also makes assumptions about turnout,' he said. 'They work incredibly hard to make it difficult to vote here in the state, and so our voting is some of the lowest in the nation.' But in a wave election year, Democratic anger at Trump and the reaction of rural voters to the economy and suburban swing voters to partisan excesses may change the electoral math.
'There are certainly some districts where you know, with the right candidate, right resources, we could easily turn some of these quote 'red' seats into Democrats,' he said.
There's little Democrats can do legislatively; Republicans control both chambers of the Texas state legislature. But they might succeed … fugitively.
They can run for it, and deny Republicans a quorum.
At least two-thirds of the 150-member Texas house and 31-member senate must be present to conduct legislative business. Sixty-two Texas house members are Democrats, as are 11 state senators. One state senate seat is vacant.
Texas Democrats last fled the state four years ago when attempting to derail legislation that attacked voting rights. While within Texas, a fugitive lawmaker during a session is subject to arrest by Texas rangers and being hauled back to the capitol in Austin. But if they make it across the border to a friendly state, Texas cannot compel them to return. The attorney general can prevail upon the federal government to issue an arrest warrant, however, and they are subject to $500 daily fines.
Opponents of redistricting launched a website, StopTheTexasSteal.com, which accuses the Republican majority of using the flooding for partisan gain and is raising money. 'We're preparing our members to use every tool available – including breaking quorum if necessary – to force Abbott to focus on flood relief instead of Trump's power grab,' the site states.
And legislators are definitely thinking about it.
'I think we need to leave all tools on the table,' Gervin-Hawkins said. 'But I think anybody knows that it's very difficult to do a quorum break when you talk about families, jobs and everything like that. That's difficult. But we're leaving everything on the table to really just see what works best. Our goal is, no doubt, to save democracy. Our goal is to make sure our people are protected.'