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The Republican-led Texas House on Wednesday was set to advance a new congressional map crafted to hand five additional U.S. House seats to the GOP over fierce opposition from Democrats, who cast the plan as an attempt by President Donald Trump to stack the deck in next year’s midterm election.
Republican lawmakers are pursuing the unusual mid-decade redistricting plan, which has set off a national map-drawing war, amid pressure from Trump to protect the GOP’s slim majority in Congress. The effort comes just four years after the Legislature last overhauled the state’s congressional map following the 2020 Census.
Democrats in the Texas House staged a two-week walkout over the plan in a bid to stall the map’s passage and rally a national response among blue states, where lawmakers could launch their own retaliatory redistricting efforts. The roughly two dozen Texas Democrats who returned to Austin on Monday said they were starting the next phase of their fight: putting the screws on their Republican colleagues and establishing a record that could be used in a legal challenge to the map.
Republicans have said the new districts were drawn purely to maximize their partisan advantage, arguing that the GOP’s margins of victory in 2024 supported new lines that entrenched their hold on power. They have also framed the effort as a response to Democratic gerrymandering elsewhere.
“In the context of balancing what Democratic states have already done, what Texas is doing is eminently fair,” Rep. Cody Vasut, R-Angleton and chair of the House’s redistricting committee, said this month. “This is about making sure that when we go into the congressional election in [2026], Republicans are on a level playing field to be able to compete with Democrats.”
To create up to five Republican pickup opportunities, the map dismantles Democratic strongholds around Austin, Dallas and Houston and makes Democrat-held seats in South Texas redder — all without seriously jeopardizing any of the 25 districts Republicans already control.
“I’m not beating around the bush,” Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi and the map’s bill sponsor, said during an Aug. 1 committee hearing. “We have five new districts, and these five new districts are based on political performance.”
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that states can draw electoral maps on partisan grounds. But under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the map cannot diminish the voting power of people of color.
Democrats have condemned the plan, arguing it widens Republicans’ partisan edge by unconstitutionally packing people of color — who are driving almost all of Texas’ population growth — into some districts while spreading them throughout others to reduce their ability to elect their preferred candidates.
“These illegal maps are based on already racist and unconstitutional maps that were litigated just barely a month ago,” Rep. Gene Wu of Houston, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said Monday, referring to an ongoing legal challenge to Texas’ current map. “It can only get worse from there. This is probably — from the experts that we’ve talked to — the worst racial discrimination in redistricting since the Jim Crow era.”
The proposed map also would push a handful of Democratic members of Congress into seats already represented by other Democrats, setting up possible primary battles between long-serving members of the Texas delegation and younger newcomers.
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