How Texas could help ensure a GOP House majority in 2026
They were two of the closest congressional races in the country this past November.
In Texas’s 34th District, between Brownsville and Corpus Christi, Democrat Vicente Gonzalez won by just more than 5,100 votes. Just to the west, in the 28th District, which runs between San Antonio and the Mexican border, voters reelected Henry Cuellar by less than five percentage points.
Democratic dreams of recapturing the U.S. House begin with retaining seats such as these. But next fall, those districts might look different. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has added mid-decade redistricting to a special legislative session scheduled to begin next week.
If Texas Republicans gerrymander themselves additional advantages on a congressional map they already control 25-12 (with one solid blue vacancy), the stakes will reverberate beyond South Texas. A map that turns blue seats red before anyone casts a midterm ballot could put the House beyond reach for Democrats in 2026.
President Donald Trump is pushing for the extra cushion. And if it happens, this will be one more gift delivered to the GOP by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the Supreme Court.
Sure, Texas Republicans cravenly seek to boost their side’s national prospects at the expense of their own state’s voters. But to be surprised by one more shattered norm - Hey, gerrymandering is supposed to happen once each decade, not twice - is to be shocked when your pet rattlesnake bites you.
These are politicians, Texas politicians no less, and they’re doing what Democrats and Republicans have done since our country’s founding, albeit armed with more sophisticated mapping software and precise voter data than those rascals Patrick Henry or Tom DeLay.
The real responsibility sits with the Supreme Court, which had the opportunity to police this antidemocratic scourge in 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause. Instead, it made things worse. The 5-4 ruling, along partisan lines, closed federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims and ended the best chance to enforce a national solution to a national problem.
Perhaps most bitterly, Roberts decreed that this was a political issue beyond the courts at the precise moment when federal judges appointed by both parties demonstrated they had all the statistical tools needed to rein in the most egregious gerrymanders, whether by Republicans in North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, or Democrats in Maryland.
The chief justice’s decision pretended that the court wasn’t abandoning voters to predatory gerrymanders. No, Roberts insisted, Congress retained the ability to pass legislation that could end this. But to pretend they would do so is akin to prison guards walking away and suggesting inmates police themselves. It’s a classic Roberts feint - blame Congress, not the courts - while downplaying how his decision locked in maps that benefit his side.
The decision predictably ensured bad behavior coast to coast. Democrats found seats wherever they could: Illinois, Maryland, Oregon, New Mexico and New York. Republicans, who started from a stronger position after dominating the 2010 cycle, went to work in Florida, Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah and Texas. They also flouted state courts in Ohio. They picked up three more seats in North Carolina after the GOP-controlled state Supreme Court overturned a year-old decision that had led to a balanced map.
There was so much gerrymandering that some national pundits were fooled into thinking both sides had rigged up something that looked like a stalemate. Yet it did not create fairness - or end the wars. While Democrats maxed out their gains in November, the GOP began Election Day with the added potential to win as many as 16 seats, which would have cemented its control of the House, according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center.
Which brings us to last week’s announcement. Republicans, assured of two-thirds of the Texas delegation, originally chose to protect incumbents rather than all-out smash-and-grab. Until now. The Texas GOP reportedly has two possible mid-decade plans in mind: One tweaks around the edges and leads to an additional seat or two; the more aggressive option might net as many as four or five.
The goal of this, of course, is to make the Democrats’ already perilous path to the majority that much harder. Democrats must gain three seats to take the House (assuming they hold three safe blue seats currently vacant). But just 37 of 435 races were decided by five points in 2024 - and Democrats already hold 22 of them. Only three Republicans represent districts carried by Kamala Harris in 2024.
Some observers suggest that the GOP effort could backfire, spread Republican voters too thin, and create a “dummymander,” Yet the modern era of high-tech gerrymanders has rendered dummymanders a thing of the past. Not one congressional or state legislative map drawn since 2010 has backfired on its creators.
And if Adam Foltz remains involved, there’s even less chance of a dummymander. In 2021, Texas Republicans hired Foltz, one of the architects of the Wisconsin gerrymander that has endured since 2012. Such a skilled mapmaker would find plenty to work with now: In 2024, only one Texas Republican won their seat with less than 60 percent of the vote. Safe, reliable 59-41 districts could easily be drawn. Multiple plans likely exist in an Austin desk drawer.
More dominoes will soon fall. Two Democratic seats could disappear in a mid-decade redraw in Ohio. The Supreme Court is sending signals that it might eliminate protections given minority-majority seats, which could push new seats won by Black Democrats in Louisiana and Alabama into the GOP column.
Without a national, court-enforced solution - which Roberts took off the table - the race to the bottom continues. Voters lose, everywhere. There’s no longer any incentive for any party in control anywhere not to maximize its gains, let alone to enact reform.
There are clear solutions - national legislation that prohibits drawing lines that benefit any party, computer science that sees through tilted maps and identifies extreme gerrymanders, even a move to a more proportional House. But all of this would have to find a way through an unrepresentative Congress and an uncaring Supreme Court.
And now, the same courts and state legislatures which tilted the maps so dramatically are executing the next phase of a long strategy that ends with entrenched lawmakers and one-party rule.
- - -
David Daley is the author of “Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count” and “Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections.”
- - -
Graphic: https://washingtonpost.com/documents/cb9eba44-a128-4cae-97ec-f9d6d5824181.pdf