First there was this.
The Tarrant County Commissioners Court could get a bigger conservative majority next year under a new map passed Tuesday.
Republican Commissioners Manny Ramirez, Matt Krause and County Judge Tim O’Hare voted to adopt the map. Democratic Commissioners Alisa Simmons and Roderick Miles Jr. voted against it.
The map reshapes the two Democrat-controlled precincts and makes Precinct 2 more friendly to Republicans, according to past election data shared by the county.
This could make it harder for Simmons to be reelected to Precinct 2 in 2026.
“This appears to be a calculated attempt to strip representation from the very communities that we were elected to represent,” Simmons said at Tuesday’s meeting.
State Rep. Tony Tinderholt, R-Arlington, announced his candidacy for Precinct 2 almost immediately after the vote — the day after he announced his retirement from the Texas House.
“Throughout my career, I’ve fought to protect our values, ensure responsible government, and serve the people of Texas with integrity and commitment,” he said in a statement posted to X. “I’m running to bring that same leadership and experience to Tarrant County, and I humbly ask for your trust and your vote as we work together to strengthen our community and build a more prosperous Tarrant County.”
Simmons plans to run for reelection, she confirmed to KERA News in a text message.
The county released five potential redistricting maps at the beginning of May that were discussed at four public hearings throughout the county. On Friday, the county posted two more maps online, options six and seven. Krause moved to adopt option seven, and that’s the map that was approved.
“For the most part, I thought it maximized the partisan advantage to about as much as it could,” Krause told reporters after the meeting.
This is a long story and a long process that got us here, so read the rest and I’ll point to some other stories in a bit. Maximizing partisan advantage – or at least trying to – is a thing that redistricters do, and legally speaking they can do that. Normally this is done following the Census, but Tarrant County decided in 2021 that they didn’t need to redraw their Commissioner precincts, not even to rebalance population. Seems weird to me given that Tarrant is a growing county, but whatever. Doing it outside of the year following a Census is not the norm, but as far as I know there’s no clear law or precedent barring it. So here we are.
There are of course other possible ways in which this may be illegal, and so the next day we got this.
A group of Tarrant County residents have filed a federal lawsuit over the county’s new commissioners court precinct map, accusing the county of disenfranchising Black and Latino voters.
Commissioners voted 3-2 along party lines to adopt the new map Tuesday. It largely reshapes precincts 1 and 2, which are represented by Democrats. The court’s Republican majority has openly said the goal was to create another Republican precinct, and the new map does just that — redrawing Precinct 2 with more Republican voters.
Throughout the redistricting process, opponents have accused Republicans of racial gerrymandering. They said the new map — called Map 7 in the lawsuit — takes voters of color out of Precinct 2 and packs them into Precinct 1.
The Lone Star Project, a Democratic political action committee, shared the lawsuit in an emailed news release. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas confirmed the lawsuit had been filed.
“Map 7 surgically moves minority voters from District 2 to District 1 while just as carefully moving Anglo voters from District 1 to District 2,” the lawsuit states. “The resulting map —in a county in which the majority of residents are non-Anglo — has three Anglo-majority precincts and one majority-minority precinct.”
Republican commissioners have denied redistricting has anything to do with race. People who dislike the way maps are drawn use race as a tool to try to get them thrown out, Commissioner Matt Krause said at a public hearing in Hurst in May.
“The Supreme Court’s not gonna step in if it’s a partisan gerrymander,” he said. “That’s why you have to allege that racial component, because that’s the only way you can ever get into court to find relief, whether there’s any basis to it at all.”
The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division. Tarrant County, the commissioners court and County Judge Tim O’Hare are listed as defendants.
I mean, this is the turf over which Congressional and legislative redistricting have been fought in Texas for decades. SCOTUS, as we well know, has made that fight much harder to wage, much less win. That said, it is still possible to win such a suit. It’s just that it may take several years, and unless the new maps are enjoined in the meantime the redistricters will get to enjoy the spoils of their scheme, however it ends up. I strongly suspect that’s what will happen here.
In the meantime, the best case scenario for the Dems would be to win some countywide elections in Tarrant, and perhaps also the redrawn Precinct 2 seat. Tarrant had been trending blue – Beto famously carried the county in 2018, and Biden did as well in 2020 – but downballot Dems didn’t do as well those years, and the progress didn’t continue in 2022 and 2024. That said, Colin Allred carried Tarrant County in 2024, a fact I had not realized until I looked it up for this post. Trump won Tarrant by five and Tarrant’s controversial Sheriff won it by seven. In 2022, Greg Abbott won Tarrant by four points, Dan Patrick won it by two, and Tim O’Hare won it by six. Commissioner Simmons won her original precinct by three points. If 2026 is a good year, then knocking off O’Hare is in play. I don’t know enough about the new Precinct 2 to say, but it should at least be a goal.
So there you have it. There are links to earlier stories in this saga in that Fort Worth Report story, so check those out as well. It will not shock me if there’s a temporary restraining order put on the new map by a federal district court judge, which is then lifted by the Fifth Circuit. That’s a movie we’ve seen plenty of times before. I will keep an eye on it.
While done after redistricting, Harris County did the same, which is why they are down to one MAGA.