More than a dozen Texas Democrats led delegations on Friday to visit Governor Gavin Newsom in California and Governor JB Pritzker in Illinois as the state’s Senate committee held a hearing in Austin on redistricting. Democrats nationwide and their supporters have been in a tizzy for the last week over the mid-decade effort to redraw the congressional boundaries in the Lone Star State. With midterms nearly a year away and the small Republican majority in the House, the Democratic Party has been scrambling to figure out how to push back against this redistricting effort, even looking at states where they can gerrymander to pick up a few seats themselves. It’s doubtful the left will take action until it knows for sure what Texas will do – why plan when you can react? Either way, retaliating will only take them so far.
Texas Gerrymandering – A Bipartisan Tradition
Texas has a long history of gerrymandering – on both sides of the aisle. One notable occasion happened in 1991, when “the Democrats redrew the state’s congressional map to create what the Almanac of American Politics called ‘the shrewdest gerrymander of the 1990s . . . with incredibly convoluted lines . . . pack(ing) heavily Republican suburban areas into just a few districts,’” explains the Brennan Center for Justice. “The resulting firestorm of litigation ended when a federal court voided primary elections in 13 districts and imposed a court-drawn map.”
Republicans had their turn to gerrymander in 2003, an effort that led Texas Democrats to break quorum and flee to a Holiday Inn in Oklahoma. The Texas GOP still ended up gaining a majority of the state’s federal House seats, a first since Reconstruction. Three suits were later filed to challenge the map, but the Supreme Court upheld the redistricting as constitutional in 2006.
Congressional maps have continued to be a hot issue in the Lone Star State, and both parties have made plenty of missteps when redistricting. Yet today’s elected Democrats and their most ferocious supporters are behaving as if the GOP’s effort in Texas is unprecedented and, of course, a threat to democracy. “They are trying to stop Black and brown voters,” said protesters outside the Capitol in Austin on Thursday. Activists claimed Republican Governor Greg Abbot “is letting Trump take over Texas with this redistricting scheme. … They know they are in trouble and the only way to keep the power and control is to cheat.”
For the record, “[i]n the 2024 election, Trump made history by winning the largest percentage of Black and Hispanic votes in Texas history,” said The Center Square. “He also won nearly all border counties, which are nearly all Hispanic.” Not to mention, he won the state by 14 percentage points.
Though the president has urged Governor Abbot to redraw the congressional districts, what actually set the wheels in motion was a letter to the governor on July 7 from the Justice Department, which said four districts are racially gerrymandered and violate the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. But all the left seems to notice are snippets of the president urging Governor Abbot to redraw the map. “Trump said he’s going to steal five Congressional seats in Texas and gerrymander his way into a 2026 win,” said Newsom via X on July 15. “Well, two can play that game. … Special sessions. Special elections. Ballot initiatives. New laws. It’s all on the table when democracy is on the line.”
A Prelude to 2026 Midterms
Republicans currently have a narrow 219-212 majority in the House, with four seats vacant heading into 2026, and they could grab three to five more by redrawing in Texas. It also holds solid majorities in both chambers of the Texas legislature, leaving Democrats few options to block the GOP from redistricting. They could go nuclear, as former Democratic congressman Beto O’Rourke has suggested. But denying Republicans the minimum number of lawmakers needed to pass a redistricting bill would require at least 51 of the 62 Democrats in the Texas House to break quorum – not an easy feat. Texas Democrats are still considering it, though, as its national leaders continue to press them for a walkout if the time comes. In fact, many governors have now tossed their hats into the redistricting ring and are considering their states’ options.
Kathy Hochul of New York and Phil Murphy of New Jersey aren’t ruling out the possibility of redrawing congressional boundaries. Maryland House Majority Leader David Moon said on X that he is “introducing legislation to redraw Maryland congressional districts if any other state cheats & draws new maps outside of the census period.”
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker met with Texas lawmakers on Friday to discuss options for retaliation. “So as far as I’m concerned,” he told reporters after the meeting, “everything’s on the table. … But I’d like them to understand that if they’re going to take this drastic action, then we also might take drastic action to respond.”
The funny thing about Pritzker is that he, like many Democrats, is no stranger to gerrymandering. “There is no bigger hypocrite on the topic of gerrymandering than Gov. JB Pritzker,” said Illinois Rep. Ryan Spain, a Republican, speaking to ABC7 Chicago. “He ran on the promise of delivering fair maps to the people of Illinois. He made me a personal promise that he would work on this topic, and he signed the most blatantly partisan gerrymandered maps in the entire country.”
It’s a bipartisan issue nationwide. To pretend otherwise and to act as if the GOP is doing something unheard of is seemingly irrational or performative – probably both, in some cases. Surely, it must speak volumes that so many elected Democrats didn’t bat an eyelash when it came to discussing redrawing maps in blue states.
“This is not a bluff,” said Newsom after meeting with Democrats from the Texas House on Friday. “This is real, and trust me, it’s more real after listening to these leaders today, how existential this is.”
Again, it’s difficult to tell if the left is intentionally being dramatic about the whole thing or just letting its Trump-deranged emotions make all the decisions. Regardless, gerrymandering mid-decade is far from uncommon, and both sides have participated in it for decades. Most blue states, however, even those where Democrats control every level of government, cannot redraw their maps in the same partisan manner as Texas and other GOP-led states. So they face tougher challenges, such as California’s independent commission. Perhaps its biggest challenge, though, a key factor many Democrats seem to be forgetting, is that even if their states redraw congressional maps to favor their party, they still need to win over voters in each district. Between the infighting, scandals, and record-low approval ratings, gerrymandering might be the least of their worries.
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Liberty Vault: The Constitution of the United States
