Texas Republicans Unveil Gerrymandered House Map, Trying to Please Trump

The proposed map would give Republicans a chance to gain five U.S. House seats, including in Houston, Dallas and along the U.S.-Mexican border.

The Republican-dominated Legislature in Texas on Wednesday unveiled an aggressively redrawn map for the state’s U.S. House districts, proposing to carve up five Democratic seats so that Republicans would now be likely to win them in 2026.

The redrawn map was condemned by Democrats as a baldly partisan attempt at a rare mid-decade redistricting that has been pushed for months by President Trump and accepted by Gov. Greg Abbott and the Republican leaders of Texas.

It fulfilled the president’s central demand: five additional Republican seats in Congress that could help the party keep control of the U.S. House after the midterm elections next year. Mr. Trump is pressing Republican legislatures in Missouri, Indiana and elsewhere to follow Texas’ lead.

Beyond possible litigation, Texas Democrats may be powerless to stop the Republicans from moving ahead with redrawing districts to flip Democratic seats in deeply blue Dallas, Houston and Austin, and to win control of two highly competitive areas of the Rio Grande Valley along the U.S.-Mexican border.

And the map did not appear to seriously weaken Republican incumbents, which Democrats had hoped could be an inadvertent result of any aggressive effort to grab more seats in the state.

“When they know they can’t win, they cheat!” declared Representative Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat who narrowly won re-election last year in a border district that is redrawn in the proposed map to favor Republicans.

He called the map “outrageously gerrymandered” to create a “Trump rigged district.”

The new map would push Democrats together into one seat around Austin, forcing a veteran liberal Democrat, Representative Lloyd Doggett, to face off against a rising star on the party’s progressive left, Representative Greg Casar, over the remaining district in the heavily blue state capital.

“Merging the 35th and the 37th districts is illegal voter suppression of Black and Latino Central Texans,” Mr. Casar said in a statement, warning that if the map is allowed to stand, Mr. Trump’s efforts to push redistricting “will spread like wildfire across the country.”

Mr. Abbott has defended the redistricting effort, citing a letter from the Justice Department this month that argued that several districts needed to be redrawn in light of a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Petteway v. Galveston County.

“We will maximize the ability of Texans to be able to vote for the candidate of their choice,” Mr. Abbott said in a television interview last week. He did not comment on the proposed map on Wednesday.

The appellate court found that the federal Voting Rights Act does not protect so-called “coalition districts,” where minority groups together constitute a majority. Constitutional law experts have said the decision did not mean that such districts, which are common throughout the country, must be redrawn.

In all, the new map, proposed by the State House in consultation with the National Republican Redistricting Trust, a Washington-based group, could well give Republicans control of 30 of the state’s 38 House seats, putting nearly 80 percent of the delegation in Republican control. In the 2024 election, Mr. Trump carried the state with 56 percent of the vote.

It must still be approved by a legislative committee, and then by the full House. The Texas Senate may propose its own map, or it may choose to pass the one introduced by the House.

A public hearing on the proposed map was set for Friday in the State House, and a final vote by the Legislature could come as early as next week.

Mr. Abbott, who made redistricting part of the recently scheduled 30-day special legislative session after prodding from the White House, can then sign or veto the map.

If it is adopted, Democrats and voting right groups are likely to challenge the new congressional map in court, arguing that it is a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

“Texas Republicans appear to have made what is already one of the country’s most racially discriminatory maps even worse,” said Julie Merz, the executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the House Democrats’ official campaign arm. “We anticipate Texas will get sued and the map will get struck down.”

But the new districts appeared to be drawn in such a way that Republicans hope it will survive a challenge: Four of the five redrawn seats are majority Hispanic.

The approach suggested that Republicans are banking on holding onto the Hispanic voters that they have gained, particularly in Texas, in recent elections.

But Democrats say that is not guaranteed, especially in midterm elections that almost always favor the party not in power in the White House. In that sense, the Republicans may be gambling that the huge Hispanic shift — especially among men — is a true realignment behind the their party; Democrats hope it was driven more by Mr. Trump personally, and by economic concerns in 2024 that have not been allayed.

The unveiling of the map came less than a day after public hearings concluded before committees of the Texas Legislature. Nearly all the testimony from Texans at the hearings was strongly opposed to the effort. Democratic lawmakers also spoke loudly against the redistricting, while Republicans on the committees remained mostly silent.

Some Republican members of Congress in Texas had been wary of the redistricting effort, concerned that redrawn lines would make their own seats less safe. Few have spoken publicly about it, though Representative Nathaniel Moran said in an interview this month that the redistricting “is a concern.”

But each of the incumbent Republicans who were in seats that Trump carried with at least 60 percent of the vote still are in districts that Trump carried by about 60 percent of the vote or more, according to a Times analysis of the newly drawn maps.

The districts that have been redrawn to flip from Democratic control to Republican in the new map are three urban districts: Houston’s ninth, held by Representative Al Green; the 32nd, held by Representative Julie Johnson, in the Dallas area; and the 35th, held by Mr. Casar, which stretches from Austin to San Antonio. In the proposed map, the 35th would not include parts of Austin at all.

There are also two seats in the Rio Grande Valley: the 34th, held by Mr. Gonzalez, and 28th, held by Representative Henry Cuellar, who survived a re-election challenge last year despite being under federal indictment in a bribery case.

Other Republican-led states are facing pressure from the White House to follow Texas. In Missouri, where two of the state’s eight seats are Democratic, White House officials have been reaching out to individual members of the legislature, pressuring them to draw new maps that would flip the Kansas City district to Republican control.

In order to draw new districts, Gov. Mike Kehoe of Missouri, a Republican, would have to call members into a special session. On Wednesday evening, after Texas’ move, Mr. Kehoe broke his silence.

“Governor Kehoe and his team are aware of the redistricting efforts in Texas, and discussions are always being held to ensure that conservative Missouri values are represented in Washington,” his spokeswoman, Gabby Piccard, said. “Governor Kehoe will always consider options that provide congressional districts that best represent Missourians.”

Republicans are also looking to Ohio, which was already planning to redraw its U.S. House maps when the current ones expire in 2026, to draft a more aggressive gerrymander.

Democrats in the Texas Legislature have been trying to fight back against the redistricting effort. They have traveled to meet with the Democratic governors of California and Illinois, who have suggested they could respond to Texas’ partisan redistricting with one of their own. New York Democrats are considering their own response.

Even Democrats who had once been critical of partisan gerrymandering are changing their positions in the face of Republican boldness.

“We must preserve our democracy now in order to ultimately heal it,” Eric Holder, a former U.S. Attorney General who heads the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said Wednesday, after fighting partisan gerrymanders for years. “It is for this reason that we do not oppose — on a temporary basis — responsible responsive actions to ensure that the foundations of our democracy are not permanently eroded.”

Texas Democrats have also been mulling a walkout that could stop the maps from going forward in the Legislature by denying a quorum. They did so during Republican-led redistricting in 2003 and in 2021. (The 2021 maps are being challenged in federal court in El Paso, where a panel of judges has yet to issue its ruling.)

Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, was expected to travel to Austin on Wednesday to meet with state representatives.

Gene Wu, a state representative who leads Democrats in the Texas House, said the unveiling of the map — before lawmakers have passed any bills addressing devastating flooding in the Texas Hill Country — showed that the special session “was always about a corrupt political bargain for Donald Trump at the expense of Texans.”

But both approaches — changing other states’ districts and walking out — face hurdles. California’s maps are drawn by an independent commission and changing the system could require a referendum. Illinois already has maps that heavily favor Democrats. And New York’s Legislature would have to change state law that links redistricting to the decennial census before lawmakers could consider new maps.

In Austin, previous walkouts at the Texas Legislature have delayed but not denied Republicans from ultimately adopting new maps.

Irineo Cabreros contributed reporting.

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