Trump’s Texas Gerrymander Is
Supercharging a New War on Democracy
Texas Republicans just unveiled a
shocking plan to give their party five new House seats.
National Voting Rights Correspondent
Donald Trump’s plan to rig the 2026
midterms became crystal clear on Wednesday, as Texas
Republicans introduced a new congressional redistricting map that would give
their party five new seats in
the US House, making it much more difficult for Democrats to retake the chamber
next November.
The map is designed to give
Republicans control of nearly 80 percent of
the state’s House delegation, though Trump only won 56 percent of the vote
there in 2024. The plan creates 30 districts that Trump would have carried by
10 points or more, up from 25 seats in the current map.
Republicans accomplished this feat by
drawing more Republicans into the seats of two vulnerable Democrats in South
Texas, Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzales Jr., and eliminating
Democratic-held seats in Austin, Houston, and Dallas-Fort Worth. No Republican-held
seats became significantly more competitive as a result.
“This
map is racist, it’s illegal, and it’s part of a long, ugly tradition of trying
to keep Black and Brown Texas from having a voice,” said Democratic Rep. Marc
Veasey.
New districts are typically redrawn
following the decennial census, and it’s highly unusual to redraw them
mid-decade, absent a court order. Texas did it once before in 2003, under the
orders of then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, but the legislature at that
time redrew districts that had been drawn by a court. This time, the
GOP-controlled legislature is redrawing maps that were drawn by that very
legislature, which is virtually unprecedented.
“The maps are already bad,” said Emily
Eby French, policy director at Common Cause Texas. “Now they’re getting worse.”
Texas State Sen. Phil King, chair of
the senate’s special committee on redistricting, said the new map was drawn by
GOP redistricting operative Adam Kincaid,
who authored the 2021 Texas redistricting maps that civil rights groups are
challenging as racially
discriminatory and is executive director of the National
Republican Redistricting Trust, which was founded after the 2020 census to
“coordinate the GOP’s 50-state redistricting effort.”
The brazenly partisan nature of the
re-gerrymandering of the state undercuts the stated rationale for the special
session provided by the Justice Department, which claimed earlier this month in
a letter to Texas that four congressional districts, all represented by Black
or Hispanic Democrats, constituted “unconstitutional
racial gerrymanders.”
Voting rights experts, Democrats, and
even Texas Republicans have since debunked that argument. Justin Levitt, a
high-ranking official in the Obama Justice Department, called the letter “a fig
leaf, if you think one is necessary, to give the governor an excuse to
redistrict.”
The DOJ letter claimed that coalition
districts, in which different minority groups form a combined majority of the
voting population, violate the Voting Rights Act, citing a 2023 opinion by
the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most conservative appellate court in
the country. But the Fifth Circuit’s decision, while holding that states like
Texas are not required to draw coalition districts under the Voting Rights Act,
did not say that existing coalition districts must be dismantled, as the
DOJ letter claims. Nor has the Supreme Court weighed in yet on that decision.
Nina Perales, vice president of
litigation at Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, testified
before the Texas Senate that the Justice Department’s argument was “factually
wrong” and “littered with errors.”
And Texas Republicans have repeatedly
asserted that they drew the current redistricting maps “race-blind,”
contradicting the DOJ’s claims. “I’ve certainly never seen any indication that
any map that has been passed out of this legislature, anytime I’ve been in the
legislature, would violate in any way the Voting Rights Act,” said State Rep.
Cody Visut, the Republican chair of the House special redistricting committee.
Democrats in the Texas legislature
have sought to subpoena the
head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, Harmeet Dhillon, a
close Trump ally who authored the DOJ letter, to compel her to testify.
If anything, the 2021 maps give too little
representation to communities of color, argue civil rights
groups who are challenging it in court. Ninety-five percent of the state’s
population growth over the past decade came from people of color, but the state
drew two new seats in areas with white majorities instead.
Trump’s new plan makes that problem
worse, by targeting districts held by minority representatives, including
Representatives Al Green in Houston and Greg Cesar in Austin.
“This map is racist, it’s illegal, and
it’s part of a long, ugly tradition of trying to keep Black and Brown Texas
from having a voice,” said Democratic Rep. Marc Veasey.
Blue states could retaliate in
response to Texas’ new map but their options are more limited.
California and New York, where Democrats could pick up the greatest number of
new seats, have independent redistricting commissions and prohibitions on
partisan gerrymandering that make any mid-decade redistricting effort more
complex. And Democrats have already come close to maximizing the number of
representatives in other blue states, such as Illinois, Massachusetts, and
Maryland.
Meanwhile, Republicans are pushing
forward with mid-decade
redistricting in Ohio and floating similar schemes in states
including Florida, Indiana, and Missouri.
Trump, with the help of the conservative
majority on the Supreme Court, is supercharging a new race to
the bottom, using re-redistricting as the latest tool in his ever-growing war
on democracy. As his popularity sinks and
a majority of the public disapproves of his handling of every major issue, the
president seems to believe that the only way his party can win is if election
outcomes are predetermined in their favor.
“The president and his party are
afraid of the voters,” former Attorney General Eric Holder testified before
Senate Democrats on Wednesday, “and they’re trying to manipulate the maps in
Texas so that they can rig the elections in 2026.”
