By Associated Press’s Joey Cappelletti, John Hanna, and Nada Lathan
Texas’s Austin (AP)As they prepare for a difficult midterm election, Texas Republicans on Wednesday revealed a new congressional map that adds five more GOP-leaning districts, increasing their prospects of holding onto power.
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President Donald Trump is urging Texas Republicans to reconfigure districts in the party’s advantage, and the new plan coincides with a special legislative session scheduled by Republican Governor Greg Abbott.
With similar initiatives currently in progress in Missouri, Trump officials have hinted that their efforts may extend beyond Texas, where Republicans hope the new Texas map would improve their chances of holding the U.S. House in 2026. However, it has also prompted Democrats in California and New York to think about redrawing their districts in an attempt to thwart the GOP’s initiatives.
Regarding the new maps, Republican state representative Cody Vasut, who chairs the Texas House’s redistricting committee, stated that everything hinges on performance. According to what I understand, a Republican may win five more of those seats in the future.
The new map increases the number of seats that Republicans might win in Texas to 30, up from the existing 25 of the state’s 38 seats. Trump won all 30 of those seats in November by a margin of at least 10 percentage points, giving conservatives hope that they can hold onto them despite what is expected to be a challenging midterm environment for the GOP.
In order to prevent redistricting from happening, some Democratic members have discussed leaving the special session. With varying degrees of success, lawmakers in Texas and other states—including Minnesota this year—have employed the strategy in an attempt to block the opposing party.
Although they were unable to stop a GOP redistricting proposal in 2003, House Democrats fled to Oklahoma and senators eventually went to New Mexico. However, a conspiracy to move the date of the state’s GOP presidential primary to favor former Governor John Connally was thwarted in 1979 when a dozen liberal Democratic senators, known as the Killer Bees, hid in a staffer’s garage and avoided the Texas Rangers for four days.
Citing the combination of his district with another Democratic-held seat, U.S. Representative Greg Casar, who was drawn into a liberal district spanning Austin and San Antonio alongside fellow Democratic incumbent Lloyd Doggett, referred to the proposed changes as unconstitutional voter suppression.
In a statement, Casar emphasized that everyone who values our democracy must band together to oppose this unlawful plan.
The additional seats result from the collapse of Casar and Doggett’s seats, the conversion of two Democratic-held seats in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area into GOP-majority seats, and the mild Republicanization of two recently narrowly won Democratic seats in the Rio Grande Valley.
