Summary
- Texas House approves new GOP-favored map.
- Map grants five extra House seats to Republicans.
- Democrats oppose the plan, citing racial discrimination.
- Trump was accused of stacking the midterm election deck.
By a vote of 88 to 52, the House approved the map along party lines. Later this week, the entire Senate was supposed to deliver the updated lines to Governor Greg Abbott's desk after a Senate panel advanced the plan Thursday morning.
Under pressure from Trump to preserve the GOP's narrow majority in Congress, Republican lawmakers are pursuing the unique mid-decade redistricting plan, which has sparked a national map-drawing conflict.
Only four years have passed since the Legislature last revised the state's congressional map in the wake of the 2020 Census.
In an attempt to delay the adoption of the map and create a nationwide backlash among blue states, where lawmakers could begin their own retaliatory redistricting attempts, Democrats in the Texas House organized a two-week boycott over the proposal.
Republicans have claimed that the new districts were created solely to increase their partisan advantage, claiming that the GOP's 2024 victory margins validated new boundaries that strengthened their control of the party.
Additionally, they have presented the initiative as a reaction to Democratic gerrymandering in other places.
In outlining House Bill 4, the map's proponent, Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, stressed that Republicans were legally allowed to undertake redistricting in the middle of the decade in order to maximize political benefit.
“Redistricting can be done at any point in time,”
he said.
“The underlying goal of this plan is straightforward: improve Republican political performance.”
Without substantially endangering any of the 25 districts that Republicans currently control, the plan reddens Democratic-held seats in South Texas and destroys Democratic strongholds in the Austin, Dallas, and Houston areas to generate up to five Republican pickup possibilities.
Additionally, a few Democratic members of Congress would be forced into seats currently occupied by other Democrats under the proposed map, perhaps resulting in primary conflicts between younger, up-and-coming candidates and more seasoned members of the Texas delegation.
In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that states have the right to create electoral maps based on political affiliation. However, the Voting Rights Act's Section 2 states that the map cannot reduce persons of color's ability to vote.
How might the new congressional map impact future Texas elections?
The map is designed to add five additional U.S. House seats favoring Republicans, increasing their chances to flip Democratic-held districts and expand their representation. This boosts GOP electoral strength in Texas and helps protect their narrow majority in the U.S. House.
By "packing" Democratic voters into fewer districts and "cracking" others by splitting up Democratic strongholds and merging them into larger, more rural, Republican-leaning districts, the map reduces the overall impact of Democratic voters. This strategic redrawing weakens the Democrats' ability to compete genome-wide.
The map deliberately skews district boundaries to maximize Republican success, potentially leading to less competitive races and solidifying GOP control in many districts.