Lawmakers are debating GOP congressional maps. What does redistricting mean for Texans?

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Texas’ mid-decade redistricting effort has sparked a national fight between Republicans and Democrats over congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. But what does redistricting mean for Texas beyond political calculations?

Some experts said that by prioritizing partisan advantages, Texas Republicans’ proposed map — which could secure them around five more GOP seats — threatens the representation of Texans across the state by lumping together communities with different populations and geographies.

And Texas is extremely diverse. Texans in cities have different needs than those living in the state’s rural areas; Gulf residents and people living more inland have different priorities; Texans in El Paso and those living near the wildfire-prone pine forests of Bastrop may want different things from their leaders.

When a representative’s district covers multiple communities with wide-ranging needs, it’s difficult for elected officials to focus on the issues that matter the most to each one of them, said Álvaro Corral, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

“All of a sudden, you … don’t really have a recognizable community,” Corral said. “I think that’s … the keyword — this … recognizability of a coherent, cogent community that has shared interests … starts to wither away.”

That can make it harder for voters in Texas cities, suburbs, rural regions and different geographic areas to have their voices heard, experts said.

“If you've got a constituency that's too wide and too different, then it makes it nearly impossible for that member to truly reflect those interests,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.

What is gerrymandering?

Gerrymandering happens when the boundaries of a district for an elected representative are manipulated to favor a particular party or group. It’s typically done by “packing” a group of voters into as few districts as possible, or by “cracking” a group by spreading voters thinly across several districts to limit their ability to elect representatives of their choice.

States are in charge of redrawing district boundaries for their representatives in Congress and their state lawmakers, but there are some federal guidelines set by the U.S. Constitution, federal courts and the Voting Rights Act meant to ensure equal representation.

Congressional districts must generally have similar populations. In Texas, each of the state’s 38 congressional districts has to include about 767,000 people.

The Voting Rights Act in some cases has protected the creation of “minority-majority districts” — districts where most residents belong to a racial group that has been historically underrepresented, such as Black or Latino voters — to avoid diluting their vote. However, the U.S. Supreme Court has recently indicated it plans to review the constitutionality of some minority-majority districts created under the Voting Rights Act, leaving the future of these protections in question.

Texas’ maps, including the existing congressional maps drawn in 2021, have faced lawsuits over Voting Rights Act violations, and Texas Democrats have argued the new proposed maps would further hurt Black and Latino voters in regions such as Houston and the Rio Grande Valley.

For example, under the proposed maps, the 34th Congressional District, a Latino and Rio Grande Valley district currently held by U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat, would be reshaped to take part of the 27th Congressional District, a whiter and coastal district represented by U.S. Rep. Michael Cloud, a Republican.

State Rep. Matt Shaheen of Plano, has argued online that the proposed maps would give Latinos, who have become less decisively Democratic in parts of Texas like the Rio Grande Valley, more power to shape elections.

But experts said scrambling to redraw congressional districts ahead of midterm elections could hurt voters by undercutting their voice, causing confusion or creating distrust in the political system.

“If you give voters a reason to think that the political system is rigged and that it works against them, and that it's political elites that are essentially crafting the outcome before votes are cast, well, then, you know, guess what? You get really low voter turnout,” he said. “And Texas has some of the lowest voter turnout of all 50 states.”

Urban and rural differences

In the past, congressional districts could often be clearly recognized as either rural or urban districts with different needs, Corral said. These days, however, some Texas congressional districts stretch hundreds of miles and can include cities, suburbs and rural regions, he said.

For example, the 9th Congressional District includes a slice of Houston’s urban core and fans out to Harris County’s rural eastern edge. The district is currently represented by U.S. Rep. Al Green and voted 27.2% for President Donald Trump last year. Under the Texas House’s proposed map, support for Trump would increase to almost 60%, according to an analysis by The Texas Tribune.

Under the new maps proposed by Republicans, some districts that once primarily represented cities and suburbs that often swing Democratic would be broken up and stitched to large rural areas, effectively handing rural GOP primary voters more control over who represents some of the state’s largest cities. Democrats and community groups argue that the mid-decade redistricting would also rob constituents of representatives with experience navigating Congress to improve their parts of the state.

Lumping together different types of communities can also complicate a lawmaker’s ability to address local needs, Rottinghaus said. For example, schools and health care providers face different challenges in urban environments and rural areas. While people in cities may have more access to resources and demand for them, residents in rural areas may have to travel longer distances for specialized services.

Meanwhile, suburbs have to grapple with meeting the needs of growing development and diversifying communities.

Respecting existing community markers such as city lines can help produce more neutral maps, even in populous cities that may require more than one district, said Jonathan Cervas, an assistant teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon who was appointed by a New York state court to redraw New York’s congressional map after it was found to be partisan.

“If you're drawing a neutral map, you might try to keep large parts of Austin into a single district, with the idea that Austin has its own distinct features, its own communities and that by keeping them together, you enhance representation,” he said.

Instead, Texas’ maps tend to jam together portions of different cities, Cervas said. For example, in the proposed maps the 10th Congressional District stretches more than 200 miles, encompassing more than a dozen mostly rural counties, including Trinity and San Jacinto, while cutting through a slice of Austin’s downtown area. Other portions of Travis County would be attached to the 11th District, which stretches all the way to Ector County near the Texas-New Mexico border, a span of more than 330 miles.

Coastal and inland differences

Differing natural environments can also pose challenges for representatives, who may have to respond to natural disasters or environmental concerns within their districts.

While the Texas Coast faces the threat of flooding and property damage from hurricanes and storm surges, more inland parts of Texas, like pine-forested Bastrop, often need more water amid droughts and wildfires. And yet, the two regions are currently paired together in the 27th Congressional District, represented by U.S. Rep. Michael Cloud.

Communities face specific local challenges even along the Texas Coast, from concerns about environmental damage amid SpaceX operations near Brownsville to fishermen’s worries about increasingly closed oyster harvest areas concentrated near Corpus Christi and Houston.

“The practical policy needs are very different all across Texas,” Rottinghaus said. “The wide swath of geography and diversity of people means that you've got so many different, often competing interests that make it hard for members to have to take a clear stand.”

Border differences

Texans along the U.S.-Mexico border also face unique issues, including concerns about the impact of tariffs on international trade and local jobs, the Trump administration’s stance on immigration, and border wall construction near homes and wildlife centers.

Daniel Diaz, a member of the Rio Grande Valley grassroots organization La Unión del Pueblo Entero, said this is why it’s concerning that Texas’ maps have stuck border communities into districts that include areas that don’t share their experiences or priorities.

Mayors along the border in predominantly Latino cities like McAllen have pushed back against federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, Diaz said. In contrast, local officials in Goliad County — which is closer to San Antonio than it is to the border and would shift from the 27th District to the border-anchored 15th District under the redrawn map — have been keen on cooperating with ICE, Diaz said.

“So it's very different,” he said. “It's such a weird combination of folks being put into this district.”

Adding drainage infrastructure to unincorporated border communities, or colonias, to prevent flooding on roads and homes is also a key concern that Rio Grande Valley residents like Edith Cuevas worry will get lost amid redistricting.

“For those concerns to be shown through people's vote is a really big difference in our everyday lives,” said Cuevas, a co-founder of the Building Leaders and Organizing Our Movement (BLOOM) RGV, which focuses on youth civic engagement and voter registration.

What does fair redistricting look like?

With so many different communities across Texas — and so many possible ways to draw boundaries between them — Cervas said there’s no one way to perfectly draw the state’s 38 congressional districts. Even attempting to draw more uniform districts could be flawed because “communities don't always line up perfectly in squares and grids,” he said.

But partisan gerrymandering hurts representation, Cervas argued, while striving to create politically neutral districts built around a community’s needs and composition tends to create more electoral competition. The latter gives voters more of a say over who represents them and their concerns, he said.

“Democracy relies on people having the ability to make choices about who represents them,” he said. “And when we gerrymander, we lose that ability, and it doesn't matter whether it's Democrats or Republicans or African Americans or Hispanics or even if it's white voters, it doesn't matter who is the one on the losing end. It's bad for democracy.”

Princeton University’s Gerrymandering Project rates states’ political maps based on the degree of partisan gerrymandering in each one of them. Samuel Wang, director of the Gerrymandering Project, said his team reviews past voting patterns and runs computer simulations of what fairer maps could look like, allowing them to gauge “when a map has favored party beyond any other consideration.”

Wang’s team concluded that Texas’ current congressional maps were unfairly drawn and rated them with an F. Wang said the proposed maps appeared to be even worse.

Several states that have been found to have less partisan gerrymandering, such as Colorado and Michigan, redrew their maps through citizen commissions that had extensive public input and discussion, Wang said. In other cases, there was more bipartisan governance, such as in Minnesota, or state courts intervened to address partisan gerrymandering.

Unlike many of the states where citizen initiatives created independent redistricting commissions, Texas does not allow citizens to vote directly on redistricting reforms. That means any new maps or redistricting policies would have to come from the Republican-controlled Legislature, which also leaves the minority party with little leverage to influence how the districts are drawn.

So in states like Texas, Wang said redistricting can be “a weak point that can be exploited” and that “gives us the appearance of democracy without having actual democracy.”

Disclosure: University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley has been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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