Trump’s Texas gerrymander Is supercharging a new war on democracy

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.

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.”