Votebeat addresses a few questions.
How do Texans in Congress feel about the proposal?
On Capitol Hill, members of the Texas GOP delegation huddled Monday night to discuss the prospect of reshaping their districts. Most of the 25-member group expressed reluctance about the idea, citing concerns about jeopardizing their districts in next year’s midterms if the new maps overextended the GOP’s advantage, according to the two GOP aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private deliberations.
Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Lubbock, was skeptical of the idea.
“We just recently worked on the new maps,” Arrington told The Texas Tribune. To reopen the process, he said, “there’d have to be a significant benefit to our state.”
The delegation has yet to be presented with mockups of new maps, two aides said.
[…]
If Texas redraws its maps, what would it mean for the ongoing lawsuit over the existing maps?
A trial is underway in El Paso in a long-running challenge to the state legislative and congressional district maps Texas drew after the 2020 U.S. Census.
If Texas redraws its congressional maps, state officials would then ask the court to toss the claims challenging those districts “that no longer exist,” Levitt said. The portion of the case over the state legislative district maps would continue.
If the judge agrees, then both parties would have to file new legal claims for the updated maps.
[…]
Why does Trump’s political team view Texas as a prime target to pick up seats for House Republicans via redistricting?
When Republicans in charge of the Legislature redrew the district lines after the 2020 census, they focused on reinforcing their political support in districts already controlled by the GOP. This redistricting proposal would likely take a different approach.
As things stand, Republicans hold 25 of the state’s 38 congressional seats. Democrats hold 12 seats and are expected to regain control of Texas’ one vacant seat in a special election this fall.
Most of Texas’ GOP-controlled districts lean heavily Republican: In last year’s election, 24 of those 25 seats were carried by a Republican victor who received at least 60% of the vote or ran unopposed. The exception was U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-Edinburg, who captured 57% of the vote and won by a comfortable 14-point margin.
With little competition to speak of, The Times reported, Trump’s political advisers believe at least some of those districts could bear the loss of GOP voters who would be reshuffled into neighboring, Democratic-held districts — giving Republican hopefuls a better chance to flip those seats from blue to red.
The party in control of the White House frequently loses seats during midterm cycles, and Trump’s team is likely looking to offset potential GOP losses in other states and improve the odds of holding on to a narrow House majority. Incumbent Republicans, though, don’t love the idea of sacrificing a comfortable race in a safe district for the possibility of picking up a few seats, according to GOP aides.
[…]
What comes next?
Texas Republicans are planning to reconvene Thursday to continue discussing the plan, according to Rep. Beth Van Duyne, R-Irving, and Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Houston, who said they will attend the meeting. Members of Trump’s political team are also expected to attend, according to Hunt and two GOP congressional aides familiar with the matter.
See here for the background. The problem with the logic in the second item is that, as I showed, outside of the two South Texas seats that would be obvious targets, the rest of the Dem-held districts were also won with over 60% of the vote. It would take some significant changes to move the needle, and that’s before we engage with the idea that 2026 will be a good year for Dems, certainly a better one than 2024 was. I won’t be surprised if maps that make a decent effort at it can be drawn, but it’s interesting that Team Trump hasn’t presented any examples yet. You’d think they might lead with that.
Christopher Hooks at Texas Monthly has some thoughts as well.
In a certain light, the big plan here makes sense. The U.S. House has been closely divided since the last election, with a less than ten-vote Republican majority. It’s conceivable that if Texas can wring another two to three seats for the party, those gains might matter in the next Congress. But the cost to the Legislature for undertaking this scheme is great, and there are risks to the president’s party.
A major difference between 2003 and now is that DeLay’s gang could at least plausibly assert that it was ungerrymandering Texas—that it was illegitimate for a state that collectively voted for Republicans by about ten-point margins to have a congressional delegation in which a slim majority were Democrats. That popular-vote margin can be a little wider today—the GOP won congressional races by around 18 percentage points in 2024, though it was just 3 points in 2018—while the congressional delegation right now consists of 25 Republicans and 12 Democrats, with 1 seat currently empty.
The state is already heavily gerrymandered, in other words, and reopening the district map to try to get even more wins could backfire. “This has ‘dummymander’ written all over it,” said Texas redistricting expert Michael Li, of the Brennan Center, a legal advocacy group.
What is a dummymander? When lawmakers draw districts, they do so imagining a certain set of future political conditions. But if something unexpected happens politically—say, prosperous suburban voters in rapidly growing neighborhoods across Texas defect from the Republican Party en masse, as happened in 2018—the lines you drew for one set of conditions may end up screwing you. If the GOP pushes its advantage too far by spreading solidly Republican voters too thinly across too many districts, it creates the risk that a high blue tide washes candidates that should have been safe out of office.
The Texans in Congress, unlike Trump’s team, will be keenly aware that this came close to happening at the end of the previous decade. Texas had grown and changed so fast that the lines Republicans drew in 2011 started to look less favorable for them in 2018 and 2020, when traditionally right-of-center voters were revolting against Trump. When it came time to draw new lines in 2021, they created safer districts for themselves, trying to shore up the seats they had rather than press their advantage further. In 2024, only two Congressional seats were won with a margin of less than ten percentage points.
This reflects a nuance in how gerrymandering actually takes place. The desire to boost the ruling party’s numbers is sometimes in tension with the desires of incumbents in both parties to protect themselves. Members of the Texas congressional delegation—Republicans and Democrats alike—would prefer to stay in Congress. But the Trump administration now wants incumbent Republicans to accept riskier seats in order to benefit him and the national party. This may work out fine. But if the economy is in the toilet when early voting starts next year, all bets are off. While others are keeping mum about the Trump redistricting push, Congressman Pete Sessions is telling the media about it. He lost a once safe seat in 2018 and had to move to a different part of Texas to win a safer one in 2020, and you can bet that he would prefer not to do that again.
Again, I will note that this gambit could succeed, especially if the target is two or three seats and not the five suggested in the original story. Make CDs 28 and 34 a little redder, shift a bunch of West Texas voters into CD16 without screwing over Tony Gonzales in CD23, and hope for the best. Getting beyond that feels awfully greedy to me, but then it would.
Hooks also notes that blue states like California and New York could retaliate, and Texas Dems could attempt to delay matters to past the point of the 2026 filing deadline by fleeing the state a la the Killer Ds of 2003; the Texas Standard also notes the latter possibility. Both of those are a bit more complicated than that. California has a non-partisan commission that draws its maps, and New York’s top court threw out an aggressively gerrymandered map in 2021 on the grounds that it violated state law. Both the Texas House and Senate have passed rules to punish members who break quorum, and a special session to pass a new map could also mandate a later primary in 2026, as we had in 2012. I’m not saying these aren’t considerations, especially for the queasier and more risk-averse among the Republicans, but they may not be as risky as they first appear.
If there’s a meeting today, we’ll probably know more about what they plan to do soon. I have no idea what to expect.