Texas districts already look like someone closed their eyes and drew random lines, and currently, the GOP in Texas is attempting to make it even more irrational and gerrymandered. Texas has been undergoing a lot of very controversial actions recently. A lot of it is because the GOP passed a new congressional map that some claim is going to be extremely gerrymandered in favor of the Republicans. They did this after being ordered by President Trump to obtain five more congressional seats. This means that a state that is already heavily gerrymandered will become even more out of touch with what voters actually want.
What is Gerrymandering?
Gerrymandering is a term used when a region is split up into districts that heavily favor one political party. They often have oddly drawn boundaries that attempt to confine all of one party to a single area. It’s like stacking the deck in a game of poker so you always win. It makes it impossible for anyone else to win, regardless of what they do. This is to ensure that the favored party has minimal difficulty. This is legal because in 2019, in the case of Rucho vs Common Cause. It was ruled that federal courts can no longer review politically gerrymandered districts. One of the main features of this new map is that cities like Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, and Fort Worth were split and placed in new districts with a high concentration of Republican voters. This is likely done to make it so these Democrat heavy cities have little effect on voting.
What is Happening in Texas
This has been causing controversy because Texas is already one of the most gerrymandered states. Princeton made the map shown, and the F grade is based on many factors, including partisan fairness, compactness, competitiveness, and county splits. Texas is in F territory for all but one of those factors, competitiveness, where they are teetering on F territory. This is a problem because it shows that voters aren’t being adequately represented. You can see that they aren’t being properly represented because in Texas, there are more registered democrats than republicans, while unaffiliated voters do exist. It is unlikely that it makes up for the 1.5 million-person difference.
Why is This Important?
They are doing this redistricting ahead of the 2026 midterm election. This is because President Trump reportedly ordered Governor Greg Abbott to redistrict and create at least five more Republican seats in the election. This situation is even more unusual because it is a very odd time to redistrict the state. Typically, redistricting occurs every 10 years to coincide with the census. This is extremely important because the president’s political party typically loses twenty-eight House seats and four Senate seats in the midterms. It seems that President Trump is trying to avoid this by any means necessary. If this happened, Republicans would lose the majority in both the Senate and the House. Because they don’t have the majority, republicans would face more resistance when trying to take action.
This occurred in July, and the vote was scheduled for August, but Democrats protested against it by breaking the quorum. This means that they fled from Texas to make it impossible to vote on the map. This is possible because they need ⅔ of the house to be there. They were fined nearly 20k dollars a day combined between them, and they eventually had to return and take a vote on the map. The new map was adopted following an 18-11 vote.
Retaliation
On August 29th, a map that takes heavy democratic cities and puts them in the same districts as “Republican strongholds” (Miller) ended up being signed into law by Governor Abbott. This means that five seats will likely flip from Democrat to Republican. Other states, like California, are attempting to combat this and are threatening to redistrict themselves as a form of protest against the actions of GOP Texans. California citizens will vote on new districts that could potentially take away half of the GOP seats in the state; this could potentially offset the redistricting in Texas. This could possibly lead to a chain reaction of many states’ redistricting.
