Texas is moving forward with its radical redistricting plan

Texas is on its way to gerrymandering its own gerrymander. On Saturday, Republicans on the state house of representatives’ redistricting committee approved a new plan to add five Republican seats—part of a radical mid-decade scheme to help Republicans keep control of the US House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections. The plan could go to a full vote in the chamber early next week, after which it will move on to the Republican-controlled state senate.

It might also set off a chain reaction. In response to Texas Republicans’ threats (and now action), some Democratic governors have called for a proportionate response—changing the rules in states such as Illinois, California, and New York to maximize the party’s advantage. And in Texas itself, Democratic legislators are mulling whether to flee the state to deny a legislative quorum.

This is the second time this millennium Texas Republicans have done a mid-decade gerrymander, and it’s easily the most extreme. In 2003, after Republicans finally took control of the legislature for the first time since Reconstruction, they also set about redrawing the maps, looking to flip five Democrat-held seats. That was a big deal, of course, but the justification was a bit more plausible. Texas, by that point, was operating under an extremely outdated map from the early 1990s that preserved a Democratic congressional majority in a now-comfortably Republican state. Democratic legislators twice fled the state, to Oklahoma and New Mexico, but the gambit ultimately failed.

This time, though, the maps that Texas Republicans are trying to redraw were drawn by Texas Republicans just four years ago. And while the current map was not quite the maximalist gerrymander it could have been, it’s still advantageous to Republicans. Democrats won 13 seats out of 38 in 2024. If the party continues to lose support in its former stronghold of South Texas, that number could easily have fallen to 11 all on its own. The argument that has been rolled out by Gov. Greg Abbott to justify this emergency redistricting is that the map he previously approved is actually an illegal racial gerrymander. Therefore, urgent action must be taken, four years later, to redraw the maps that, again, Republicans themselves enacted.

As my colleague Ari Berman explained in a recent piece, the contradictory arguments for why Texas is moving ahead with this add up to a big, bad-faith mess. The actual explanation for why this is happening, though, is less convoluted: President Donald Trump asked them to do this, and Texas Republicans would sooner denounce germ theory and their own families than tell the president no.

The new map is, of course, a disaster for Democrats. To take one glaring example, 16-term Rep. Lloyd Doggett and Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Greg Casar would likely be forced to compete for the same Austin-based turf. But the cynicism of the ploy goes behind the gaming of the 2026 elections. As the New York Times wrote about the Democrats’ quorum quandary:

[D]oing so comes with political and practical risks: Republican leaders in the Texas House fast-tracked the redistricting legislation before introducing any bills responding to the deadly floods in the Texas Hill Country —putting Democrats in the position of potentially walking out on legislation that addresses needs caused by the flooding.

I think it’s a bit unfair to say that Democrats would be culpable for blocking flood relief when Republicans have made the very deliberate choice to condition flood relief on first arranging for the defeat of five Democratic representatives. Why, exactly, is defeating Rep. Vicente Gonzalez in 2026 more important than responding to a natural disaster? But that is the sort of calculus Republicans have created, not just in Texas, but everywhere. With Trump, everything is a hostage negotiation. And this time, he couldn’t have made his demands clearer.