Texas GOP Pushes Race-Centric Redistricting Amid Political Backlash

Texas Republicans are planning a White House-driven redrawing of the state's congressional map this summer, saying the districts they crafted just four years ago are constitutionally flawed.

The effort could be critical for the GOP maintaining control of Congress next year. But it may also leave incumbent GOP members more vulnerable to Democratic challenges in 2026 and the next presidential election cycle, in 2028. The party’s rationale for the move also appears to contradict its own arguments for how it drew the existing maps.

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State Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, testified in a federal lawsuit challenging the 2021 maps that they were drawn “race-blind.”

But when Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the new redistricting effort in a special legislative session that opens July 21, he leaned into a letter from the Trump administration’s Justice Department saying that race was illegally used as a factor in deciding the makeup of at least four majority-minority districts represented by Democrats, almost all of them in the Houston area.

"It is the position of this Justice Department that several Texas Congressional Districts constitute unconstitutional racial gerrymanders," the DOJ letter sent this week to Abbott and Texas Attorney General Paxton states.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs challenging the 2021 maps used the DOJ letter to ask the court to reopen testimony in light of the Justice Department’s assertions. Attorney Chad Dunn, who is representing a group of plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said the dichotomy is evidence of political opportunism.

"The state has consistently argued that it was not drawing districts on the basis of race," Dunn said. "And now the governor is taking the position that, ‘Oh no, the map drawers were using race.’"

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The court on Monday rejected the request but left open the possibility of revisiting it if the Legislature ends up redrawing the map.

Even before Abbott formally added redistricting to the special session lineup, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said he was on board with such an effort.

"I'll just say that if we can pick up Republican seats in Texas to make Congress stronger, after what the Democrats did to our country in the last four years," Patrick told reporters at a June 23 news conference, "I want more Republican congressmen."

And on Friday, Patrick, the Senate’s presiding officer, joined his House counterpart, Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, in a statement saying they “aligned in their focus” to redraw the congressional map to satisfy Trump’s DOJ.

Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice whose work focuses on redistricting, said the state’s justification for redoing the political maps “doesn’t make any sense” and is based on a misinterpretation of a recent Fifth Circuit of Appeals decision that came out after Texas redistricted last in 2021.

The court found in that case that map drawers can’t be forced to pack minority groups into single districts, known as coalition districts. But it did not find that coalition districts were themselves unconstitutional, Li said.

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“You may not have an obligation to create a coalition district, but if you dismantle one, you’re inviting a challenge that this is intentionally discriminatory, especially when you’re doing it without any clear reason for it,” he said. “That will almost certainly be a suit that is waiting in the wings for its turn to appear if the state truly does target these districts.”

John Colyandro, a former senior adviser to Abbott and the former executive director of the Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute, argued that the Fifth Circuit had in fact found coalition districts to be unconstitutional.

“Given the Fifth Circuit decision, there is a legitimate basis for taking a second look at the maps, and taking a second look at the maps does not constitute a ploy,” Colyandro said, referring to how civil rights groups have accused Republicans of pursuing redistricting for political reasons. “This is a significant change in jurisprudence that needs to be considered.”

Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said Republicans’ quest to add to their already lopsided majority is not without peril. Since the populations of each district must be relatively equal, finding Republican voters to make Democratic districts more competitive might not be as easy as it sounds.

“There's a risk that Republicans will fly too close to the sun,” Rottinghaus said. “They've been pretty successful in maxing out the Republican support in these districts. “You can't make new Republican districts out of whole cloth. And that means Republicans will have to rob Peter to pay Paul to produce districts they think might be more competitive.”

Colyandro said Republicans will have to be wary of overreach. Five new districts “may be really difficult to do,” he said, but three might be more plausible.

“I say ‘difficult to do’ if you're looking ahead to 2028 and beyond, right?” Colyandro said. “You may be able to draw them in such a way today that you get through the ‘26 cycle, but it's in the near-term, future election cycles where you really can run into trouble if you're not prudent.”

He added that lawmakers will need to be careful about not putting too much stock in 2024 election data — and include previous recent election years’ in their analysis — because it’s difficult to parse out whether voters were strong Trump supporters or voted red mostly because they disliked Vice President Kamala Harris.

Matt Angle, a longtime Texas Democratic operative and veteran of congressional redistricting battles dating back to 1991, called the redistricting effort "an open assault" on Texas voters by forces in Washington who have little or no ties to the state.

Texas, like other states, has used the redistricting process to pack minorities into districts that are already represented by minority members, which ultimately weakens their voting power more broadly.

"Anglos make up less than 40% of the Texas population yet they are trying to draw a map where Anglo voters get to decide 28 to 30 of our 38 seats in Congress," Angle said. "It's craven, and it's cowardice."

Redrawing congressional districts in the middle of a decade is not unprecedented in Texas. In 2003 when Democrats still had a majority of the state’s seats in Congress even though Republicans controlled the Legislature and all statewide offices, then-U.S. House GOP Leader Tom DeLay of Sugar Land pressured state lawmakers to scrap the districts drawn in 2001 and replace them with ones sure to deliver a Republican majority.

Texas Democrats tried using parliamentary stall tactics, including breaking quorums in both legislative chambers to no avail. It took several special sessions, but DeLay ultimately got his way, and Republicans have kept their majority ever since.

Rottinghaus also said that Democrats, outnumbered by wide margins in both legislative chambers, will be hard-pressed to stop redistricting, pointing out that their efforts in the past served only to stall the inevitable.

“Democrats are definitely painted into a corner when it comes to redistricting,” he said.

Angle, meanwhile, said past Republican redistricting efforts are almost benign when compared to what’s likely to come in the special session.

"This is much worse," Angle said. "DeLay was replacing maps that were drawn by the courts (because the Legislature was unable to reach a consensus on congressional redistricting). This time, they are redrawing the map drawn by Republicans in the Legislature to screw over Democrats and minorities."