Trump wants Texas to redraw its congressional map. Here's what to know.

Yahoo

6 hours ago

Washington — The Texas Legislature is set to convene Monday for a special session where it will attempt to redraw the state's congressional map to boost President Trump and his allies' efforts to maintain the GOP's grip on the U.S. House in next year's midterm elections.
The state's decision to recraft the boundaries of House districts comes midway through the decade and several years after its GOP-controlled Legislature adopted a redistricting plan in the wake of the 2020 Census.
Under that plan, Republicans hold 25 of the state's 38 congressional seats, while Democrats control 12. (The death of Rep. Sylvester Turner, a Democrat, has left one seat open.)
But with Republicans holding a razor-thin majority in the House, and the risk the GOP could lose control of the chamber in the 2026 midterms, a reshaping of the congressional districts could give Mr. Trump's party an edge heading into next year's elections.
Mr. Trump's political team had been pushing Texas GOP leaders to look into redrawing the state's congressional map, the New York Times reported last month. Gov. Greg Abbott confirmed the Legislature would undertake the effort, among 17 other agenda items, when it meets.
"I don't think this has anything to do with Texas — this has to do with Trump," said Joshua Blank, the research director of the Texas Politics Project. "This has nothing to do with the internal dynamics of the state, the political trajectory of the state. This is purely about this election cycle and one person's benefit."
How did we get here?
States undergo the redistricting process after every 10-year census, when voting lines are redrawn to account for population changes. After the 2020 Census, Texas crafted a new congressional map to include two new districts, bringing its total number of House seats to 38.
The maps drawn by the GOP-led Texas Legislature aimed to protect Republican seats in Congress and the statehouse. Democrats flipped two congressional districts and 12 state House seats in the 2018 midterms.
"In 2021, they spent a lot of time and effort making sure they had the best maps possible with the primary goal to ensure that the Republican majority was rock solid," said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University. "And they created 24 of 38 districts where there is no way, shape or form that a Republican is losing those districts, absent some type of murder indictment or a serial adulterer, etc."
But the final version of the congressional map was met with criticism, and it has been challenged in court. Among the issues raised by voting rights groups is that 95% of Texas' growth has been driven by non-White voters, but the map crafted in 2021 created more majority-White districts.
A three-judge panel in El Paso is currently considering a consolidated challenge to the map brought by voting rights groups, Latino voters and lawmakers. The plaintiffs argue that the new lines violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. A trial ended in June.
Texas has a part-time Legislature, which meets for 140 days every two years. The governor has the power to call special sessions to cover specific topics, and the special sessions constitutionally cannot last longer than 30 days. The governor can, however, call as many special sessions as he deems necessary. After the 88th legislative session in 2023, Abbott called four special sessions that stretched into December.
Redistricting is one of 18 topics that Abbott has asked the Legislature to address. Four of those topics include disaster relief for the Central Texas floods and improving the state's warning system.
"I'm not convinced that the goal is to pass everything, but ultimately, Abbott gets the credit for trying, and the Legislature will get the credit for what it can accomplish, but it'll also get the blame for what it fails to do," Blank said.
Although the Democrats could leave the state to deny Republicans a quorum, like they did in 2021 to protest a voting bill, it's unlikely they would do so if it meant holding up flood relief.
Where does Trump and his administration come into play?
Texas has conducted two congressional elections under the 2021 map. But earlier this month, the Justice Department sent Abbott a letter alleging that some of the districts were racial gerrymanders that violate the Constitution's 14th Amendment.
Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, specifically pinpointed four districts — the 9th,18th, 29th and 33rd — that she said constitute "coalition districts" that should be redrawn. All three are currently represented by Democrats, and Turner, who died in March, represented the fourth.
Coalition districts are those that bring two or more racial minorities together to make up a majority of the population, and where voters from these groups vote together to elect their preferred candidate.
In her letter, Dhillon wrote that the state had to "immediately" rectify the alleged racial gerrymanders, and if it chose not to, it was at risk of legal action by the attorney general.
"The congressional districts at issue are nothing more than vestiges of an unconstitutional racially based gerrymandering past, which must be abandoned, and must now be corrected by Texas," she wrote.
Mr. Trump appears to be on board with the recrafting of Texas' voting boundaries. Before leaving the White House on Tuesday, the president said he is looking for a "simple redrawing" where Republicans pick up five seats.
"Texas would be the biggest one," he said.
But during the trial in the case involving the congressional map, state officials repeatedly said they were motivated not by race when they drew the district lines, but instead driven by politics. State Sen. Joan Huffman, a Republican who led the 2021 Senate Redistricting Committee, testified that the congressional map was "drawn blind to race" and "racial data was not considered at all during the drawing of the maps," according to court records.
"There is no legal justification for doing this. It sort of walks and talks and quacks like a political move," said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. "The problem is that it's really difficult to get more seats in Texas without heavily undermining the political power of communities of color."
In claims of racial gerrymandering, those challenging a map have to show that race predominated for how the lines were drawn.
"This can't be a racial gerrymander if they didn't consider race," Li said. "This is a textbook, easy it's-not-a-racial-gerrymander. … If you didn't consider race, it can't be a racial gerrymander."
Has Texas drawn new maps in the middle of the decade before?
A divided Texas Legislature drew up a congressional map in 2001, but two years later, in a plan engineered by then-U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick, Republicans wanted to redraw the lines to make the most of the growing GOP majority in the state.
Fifty-one Democrats in the state House fled to Oklahoma for four days, denying the Republicans the quorum they needed to bring the redistricting plan to the floor and letting the clock run out on the regular session. Then-Gov. Rick Perry called the Legislature back for a special session, but state Senate Democrats left the state to deny a quorum.
Although the Democrats remained out of state for more than a month, they couldn't stop the maps from eventually passing, and Republicans ultimately picked up five seats. The Supreme Court upheld the congressional districts in 2018.
But former Democratic Rep. Mark Strama, who ran for office after that round of redistricting, warned the effort did have some downsides for Republicans. The drama was covered nationally, and Strama himself flipped a Central Texas district in 2005.
"Voters were mad at both sides," Strama said. "They hate all these political shenanigans. But there's no question voters hate this."
While Texas has redrawn the lines of congressional districts in the middle of a decade before, Li said the current situation is far from normal.
"Outside of litigation, it is extremely rare," he said. "And it's exceptionally rare — in fact, I can't think of another circumstance, where a party drew the map, and then that same party redrew the map. Where there are mid-decade redistrictings, it's usually because political control changes hands."
Could this plan backfire?
While Democrats have not won statewide office in Texas since 1994, the best year Democrats have had at the ballot in the past two decades was in 2018. In that midterm election, former Democratic Rep. Beto O'Rourke came within three points of GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, and Democrats flipped two congressional seats and 12 state House seats.
Republicans have managed to quell those gains and, as Jones noted, the 2024 election was a high point for the party. But the dynamics of the 2026 election could mirror those in 2018, when Democrats ran aggressive campaigns targeting Mr. Trump and retook the House. Any changes to the congressional map might not be enough to stem Democratic gains this time around.
"If Republicans do engage, do go all out and try with the goal of flipping, say three, four, even five seats as President Trump says – it's far more likely Republicans see a net loss than a net gain," Jones said.
Plus, any map adopted by the GOP-led Legislature and approved by Abbott is likely to be swiftly met with lawsuits. If a federal court blocks its use, the new district lines may not even be in place for the 2026 midterms.
"President Trump is talking about five more seats out of Texas, and the only way you get five more seats out of Texas is if you seriously undermine the political power and the political voice of communities of color," Li said. "And that is a Texas-sized lawsuit with potentially huge ramifications."
Li said the redrawing of political bounds to give Republicans a leg up in the 2026 midterm elections is not only a legally risky move, but could be politically perilous too.
"The essence of trying to get more seats is that you have to spread your voters out more if you're a Republican," he said. "So you have a bunch more districts that you're not winning by 65 or 70%. You're going to have a bunch of districts that you're winning by 52, 53% and in a state that is changing as fast as Texas, that's growing as fast as Texas, that's changing demographically as fast as Texas. By 2030, these districts could look and perform very differently."
The 2020 Census showed that people of color accounted for 95% of Texas' population growth over the prior decade. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau released last year also showed that the number of Asian Americans in Texas grew by nearly 92,000 people, while there were more than 91,000 new Black residents in the state.
"When you gerrymander, you're making a bet that you know what the politics of the future will look like," Li said. "There are many places where you can safely bet on what the politics of the future will look like in the country. Texas is not one of those places. It's just changing too fast."
Republicans have made big gains in South Texas' Rio Grande Valley, once considered a Democratic stronghold. But even with those GOP gains — and running on the maps drawn in 2021 — two of the three seats remained Democratic in 2024.
"People talk about the Rio Grande Valley as if it's somehow indicative of Texas," said Blank of the Texas Politics Project. "It's less than 3.5% of the total statewide vote, and it's incredibly economically depressed and it's overwhelmingly Hispanic. It's not really indicative of any part of the state, it's indicative of its region of the country that happens to share a border with Mexico."
What can Democrats do?
Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the states have lambasted Republicans for pushing to redraw congressional district lines to hold onto power in the House.
"Elected officials should earn the support of voters they hope to represent," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters Tuesday. "Republicans want a country where politicians choose their voters, not the other way around. It reeks of desperation, and we're going to do everything that we can in Texas and beyond to respond."
Jeffries said the reason for the special session in Texas is to "try to steal the midterm elections by rigging" the state's congressional map.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, meanwhile, has suggested that Democrats mount their own partisan gerrymander. California has 52 congressional districts, and Democrats represent 43 of them.
"There are *currently* 9 Republicans in the California Congressional Delegation. Just thought folks might like to know that fun fact," he wrote on X on Tuesday.
During an appearance on the podcast "Pod Save America," Newsom accused Republicans of trying to "rig the game" because they're concerned about maintaining control of the House next year.
California voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2010 that handed over the task of crafting congressional and state legislative districts to an independent commission. But Newsom suggested there are still two paths that could lead to a new congressional map: calling a special session of the California Legislature to put a measure on the ballot for a special election that would clear the way for new House district lines; or having the state Legislature create a new map under the idea that it's coming mid-decade and not after the census.
"It ups the stakes of the redistricting war, with the acknowledgment that Democrats have a limited hand to play," Li said of Texas' decision to draw new congressional lines.
Just 15 states have Democratic trifectas, where they control the state legislature and the governorship. Two of those states, Colorado and Michigan, leave the drawing of political voting lines to independent commissions like California does. Republicans are in full control in 23 states.
Plus, in other states where Democrats control the legislature and governor's mansions, the congressional delegations already heavily skew Democratic. In Illinois, for example, Democrats hold 14 of its 17 House seats. Maryland's eight-member congressional delegation contains just one Republican.
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