We should all be pissed.
At President Trump’s behest, the Texas GOP released new proposed congressional maps Wednesday, and on the surface, they’re exactly what Republicans seemed to be hoping for: an aggressive gerrymander that, if passed, would more than likely deliver five additional seats to Republicans in Congress.
To oversimplify a complicated process, Republicans’ proposed maps would accomplish this by stripping nearly a quarter million Black voters out of Congressional District 9 in Houston and packing them into two neighboring districts. Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio liberals would be stuffed into as few districts as possible, while Fort Worth would be split into bits small enough to be offset by large swaths of rural Republicans. The so-called “Fajita Strip” districts of South Texas would get a makeover, too, cutting the still-progressive city of McAllen in half and leaving South Texas Democrats without a favorable seat.
But any Republicans gleefully spiking the football should be careful what they wish for.
Success for the GOP depends on a few important variables. Namely, the U.S. Supreme Court’s willingness to abide by the disenfranchisement of Black voters, and Republicans’ ability to hold onto gains with Latino voters.
To the first point, the justices’ stomach for disenfranchisement seems high. During a 2006 challenge to a different Texas gerrymandering spree, Chief Justice John Roberts characterized the Voting Rights Act’s protections of minority voters as a “sordid business.” And in 2013, the Supreme Court effectively gutted the voting protections of the VRA, opening the floodgates to… well, what we’re seeing this week.
However, continued Republican popularity among Latino voters in Texas is — to put it mildly — not a sure thing.
It’s no secret that President Donald Trump performed well with Latino voters in Texas in 2024. This was largely driven by his promises to combat the rising cost of living and to deal with illegal immigration, both issues Latino voters care deeply about. Yet, Trump’s approval rating on immigration, once his bread-and-butter issue, is now underwater (for reasons that should be obvious). And if tariffs shoot the cost of living through the roof, it won’t be a surprise if Latino voters start swinging the other way.
More immediately, Republicans will have to survive a few knock-on effects of an obvious power grab. Namely, voting Texans of all political affiliations who are sick of this shit.
Texans ought to be pissed. Hell, even non-Texans.
There is no honest reason Republicans are gerrymandering Texas other than pure power politics.
The Texas Legislature recently completed a radically conservative legislative session, gutting public schools and passing private school vouchers, forcing teachers to display the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, and (of course) picking on trans kids.
But even in this Ayn-Rand-wet-dream of a legislative session, the Texas GOP didn’t consider redrawing congressional districts — something that has historically only followed a decennial census. That is, until Trump called Gov. Greg Abbott, the Texas Tribune reported. Then, Abbott and Texas Republicans were more than happy to follow Trump’s demand for five more Republican seats in the U.S. House, and set out to carve up Texas’ congressional districts like a Christmas ham.
It doesn’t take a PhD in political science to figure out why Trump is so desperate to hold onto control of Congress.
Trump needs to hold a Republican majority in the House to enact an agenda which, it turns out, is bipartisanly unpopular with voters. His “big, beautiful bill” narrowly passed — by four votes in the House and a tie-breaking vote by Vice President JD Vance in the Senate. A majority of Americans (70%) see the tax cuts in the law as a boon for rich people, according to a Wall Street Journal poll, and more than half think it’ll hurt poor and working class people.
Then there are the Epstein files. Trump has angered his fan base for teasing, then not delivering on, the release of investigative files into the former financier and accused sex trafficker who died in prison. Trump’s abrupt change in tune has fueled speculation that his name is in the files — so much so that House Democrats have attempted repeatedly to force their release — something they ought to be able to accomplish should they win a majority in 2026.
There are myriad reasons why redrawing congressional districts at the whim of the president is a terrible idea. But at its core, this hurried usurpation of the will of the voters is an affront to the most basic tenets of democracy and an insult to the intelligence of every voter in Texas — regardless of partisan stripes.
The beauty of democracy is that it grants us — the voters — with the ultimate ability to wield power as we see fit. If a political party does something wildly unpopular (like, hypothetically, kicking 17 million people off of health insurance to pay for a tax cut for the richest people in the country), we get to rake those politicians over the coals when the next election rolls around.
Once politicians are able to choose who their voters are for any given election, they no longer have any incentive to serve you. They will have carte blanche to abuse their power, cater to the elites they pal around with, and screw you over while doing it. And if you don’t like it, they’ll redraw their district to find enough new voters who do. We the voters will no longer have the ability to choose our politicians if our politicians can, on a whim, choose their voters.
Then there’s the gerrymandering arms race that’s likely to ensue.
Should Texas Republicans follow through with their plan to redraw congressional maps, Democrats in California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey have threatened to gerrymander their districts in retaliation. The most important of those states — California — drew their current congressional maps via an independent redistricting commission. Meaning that, should California create new districts that are drawn to favor Democrats, the Democratic seats picked up in California alone could offset and even outweigh Republican gains made in Texas.
This more than likely explains why Abbott and Texas Republicans were hesitant to take up redistricting — that is, until Trump gave them a directive.
The redistricting process has gotten off to a rocky start for the Texas GOP. The Republican-led House Redistricting Committee spent five hours getting chewed out by pissed off Houstonians who showed up to testify, despite there not being any maps available for the public to view. Thousands showed up to an anti-gerrymandering rally in East Austin.
A new poll from the Texas Politics Project, a project out of the University of Texas at Austin, showed that the most important issue for Texas voters right now is political corruption. It’s hard to think of anything more overtly corrupt than a mid-decade power grab at the behest of the president. Democrats, smelling blood in the water, have already launched a massive effort to call Republican voters who are rightfully pissed off.
And the elephant in the room in this whole conversation is that Texas isn’t as conservative as it used to be. Yes, it’s true that Democrats haven’t won a statewide election since 1994. However, in 2018, Sen. Ted Cruz received only 50.9% of the vote statewide. In 2020, Donald Trump got 52.1%. And just last year, Cruz got 53.1% of the vote in an election cycle that was widely viewed as a massive success for Republicans.
In a state where they receive between 51-53% of the vote, Republicans are seeking to control 79% of the congressional districts.
In other words, Republicans are spreading themselves thin.
And they’re doing so right before a midterm election in which their president is historically unpopular — so it might just come back and bite them in the ass.