As Texas Republicans prepare for mid-decade redistricting, cautionary tales loom from the past

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As Texas Republicans prepare to redraw the state's congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, cautionary tales loom from past redistricting efforts that saw the state’s rapid demographic change collide with far-reaching partisan gerrymandering.

The move to carve out more GOP seats in Texas was unveiled Wednesday by Gov. Greg Abbott, who included redistricting in a sweeping 18-item agenda for the Legislature's upcoming special session. The announcement ended weeks of speculation over whether Texas Republicans would follow through on demands from President Donald Trump's political advisers, who have been pushing for the rare mid-decade redistricting gambit to improve the GOP's chances of retaining its slim majority in Congress.

Some Republicans, including members of Texas' congressional delegation, oppose the idea over concerns about jeopardizing their own seats if they miscalculate with the new districts.

A recent test case unfolded after the 2010 U.S. Census, when Republicans who controlled the Texas Legislature looked to maximize their party’s seats across the map by drawing reliable GOP voters into nearby Democratic districts and turning them red.

But by 2018, a Trump midterm election year, that aggressive approach came back to bite them. With a favorable national climate and explosive population growth driven almost entirely by people of color, Texas Democrats picked up 12 seats in the state House, ousted two longtime GOP members of Congress and narrowed their losing margins in statewide races.

“What looked like a solid gerrymander by the end of the decade had become almost a dummymander,” Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said. “The lesson from 2010 is that you can stretch yourself too thin, that you can be too smart for your own good. And when the politics change, you get bitten in the you-know-where.”

The Texas Legislature last redrew the state’s maps in 2021, this time with an emphasis on shoring up Republican support in already red districts. Each state’s political maps must be redrawn once a decade after the U.S. census to account for population changes and to ensure each congressional and legislative district encompasses roughly the same number of people.

But with a minuscule margin in the U.S. House and anticipated midterm backlash against the party in power next year, Trump’s political team wants to buttress the Republican majority against losses across the country by creating up to five new GOP seats in Texas — a proposal that critics say would almost certainly dilute the voting power of communities of color, and that Republican skeptics worry could stretch GOP voters too thin.

That was what happened several years ago in Dallas County, where Republicans in 2011 opted to extend the number of GOP seats instead of creating a Black and Hispanic majority district and reinforcing their support in red districts. GOP lawmakers may look to avoid similar overreach when they redraw Texas’ maps this year, but they will have to do so with outdated and less reliable data than the fresh census figures they typically use at the start of each decade, further complicating their efforts.

“History gives a lot of flashing red light signals about how this might not be wise,” Li said. “It’s not wise both for political reasons but also for legal ones.”

Under the current maps, Republicans hold 25 of Texas' 38 congressional seats, most of which lean heavily to the right. The 2021 state legislative and congressional maps are still on trial in El Paso in a long-running challenge arguing that the maps intentionally discriminate against some Black and Latino voters.

Some Texas Republicans are nervous about trying to squeeze more red seats out of the map by moving their voters to now-Democratic districts. Instead of flipping Democratic seats, those members fear the new lines could create an opening for Democrats and threaten Republican incumbents by taking away too many GOP voters — as played out in 2018.

“I don’t know how you create five districts out of that,” said one Texas Republican member of Congress, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the Trump advisers' redistricting push.

“I think it’s a bad idea myself, personally,” state Rep. Drew Darby, a San Angelo Republican and former chair of the House Redistricting Committee, said at an event last month hosted by The Texas Tribune. “We did it according to the law, and I think we need to live with it and the effects until we have the next census.”

Still, responding to follow–up questions this week, Darby acknowledged he could see some merits in the idea, noting that redistricting could reflect recent gains Republicans have made statewide and correct any legal issues with the existing maps.

“The main takeaway is that redistricting is always a political fight — contentious, personal, and hard to get done,” he said in response to written questions. “This year will be no different.”

The 2011 cycle, for some, offered lessons that mapmakers should heed this year.

“You can’t cut the districts so thin that it gets you through 2026 but puts those seats in jeopardy for the future,” said John Colyandro, a former senior adviser to Abbott and the former executive director of the Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute, a public policy think tank. He called 2011 “the cautionary tale.”

Still, he argued that there were a few Republican seats to be gained in a mid-decade redistricting effort.

“The important thing is to be prudent about it,” he said. “Texas can certainly have a bit of a firewall against losses elsewhere.”

Experts said that maximizing a certain party’s seats over several election cycles becomes more challenging in the middle of the decade, when lawmakers will have to rely on likely outdated and less reliable data, and in a fast-changing state like Texas.

The 2020 U.S. Census remains the most precise data set that mapmakers can use, experts said, with more recent numbers from the 2024 election outcomes and the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey offering less durable and less specific insights.

“When you gerrymander, you’re making a bet on what the politics of the future look like,” Li said. “Predicting the politics of the future is really hard in a state like Texas. … You hope that those margins that you’ve left yourself with are big enough, but they may not be.”

Redistricting this year will likely home in on South Texas, where Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar of Laredo and Vicente Gonzalez of McAllen won reelection in 2024 by narrow margins. Both represent districts centered on the border and made up of Hispanic-majority populations that swung to the right in 2024 — gains that the GOP hopes are enduring, but that Democrats are desperately trying to claw back.

A more aggressive redistricting approach would almost guarantee legal backlash and spark concerns that communities of color, which are driving population growth in Texas, would see their voting power diminished.

“It’s very hard to maximize seats without undermining the political power of communities of color,” Li said. “That is especially hard now that Texas is that much more diverse.”

Overhauling the state’s maps this year is unusual for another reason, too: Republicans were the ones who crafted the existing districts. Some insist they already maximized their advantage when they drew the maps five years ago, having exhausted avenues to add any GOP seats beyond the current 25.

“If we could have done it in 2020, we would have,” former state Sen. Kel Seliger, an Amarillo Republican who chaired the Senate Redistricting Committee in 2011 and left office in 2023, said. He noted that some may now see an opportunity to push more aggressive maps past the courts, whose benches have been reshaped by Trump.

The last time Texas redrew its maps later in the decade was 2003, when the state’s politics were shifting in favor of Republicans and then-U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Sugar Land Republican, launched a multistate redistricting plan to amass GOP seats.

The bold move to consolidate GOP power came two years after the Texas Legislature — then split between a Democratic-controlled House and Republican-majority Senate — left it up to the courts to draw new lines following the 2000 census. When Republicans won a majority in the lower chamber in 2002, giving them full control of the Legislature, DeLay moved to scrap the court map in favor of one that would cement the Texas delegation’s GOP majority.

Democrats fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum, and decried the effort as a partisan power grab. A Democratic senator later defected, arguing that the caucus did not have an “exit strategy.” The Legislature eventually passed new maps favoring Republicans.

“We felt we had no alternative to just hold it up so that people could get a better look at what’s going on,” former state Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos, an Austin Democrat who decamped to New Mexico at the time, said. “We were using the rules. And underneath the rules is representing the people who elected you.”

Democrats have denounced the Trump administration’s redistricting push this year, with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, Democrats’ national arm to contest state GOP mapmaking, calling the proposal “yet another example of Trump trying to suppress votes in order to hold onto power.” California Democrats are weighing a retaliatory redrawing of their maps if Texas goes through with the effort.

It was unclear if there was appetite among state Democrats to break quorum this year, especially with flood infrastructure and recovery on the agenda after the devastating flash floods that killed over 100 people in the Hill Country this month.

Some Democrats pointed to a potential upside if Republican mapmakers spread their voters too thin and created swing seat opportunities for Democrats.

“The way in which the Texas map has been drawn is already an extreme partisan gerrymander,” U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader from New York, said last month. “There are several Democrats who have looked at it who perhaps may welcome changes.”

He added: “Be careful what you wish for.”

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