A political minute ago, Texas was starting a nationwide range war by redrawing its congressional maps to tilt results in next year’s elections for Republicans to keep majorities for Donald Trump. Texas officials made the gerrymandering goal explicit.
In response, California voters turned out in droves to “fight fire with fire” by redrawing districts for Democrats, and other states were panting hard about what to do.
The politicos now are wondering if it was all a bad dream, or whether this gerrymandering to help Republicans keep the upper hand in Washington in fact will help Democrats.
On Tuesday, three federal court judges in El Paso threw over the redrawing tables, deciding 2-1 that the new maps violated prohibitions on redistricting along racial lines. The new maps had taken mixed-race districts and sought to resort them using voting precincts by race, according to a Justice Department analysis used as evidence.
Under time constraints, Texas officials said immediately that they will file emergency appeals to the Supreme Court – a body that specifically has ruled for political partisanship in redistricting but not race.
“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a Trump appointee, said in the majority opinion, joined by U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama, an Obama appointee. Judge Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee, dissented in an attack on the rush to issue a decision and the other judges. The 160-page opinion said that “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map” and thus was unconstitutional. Judge Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee, dissented in an attack on the rush to issue a decision and the other judges
In the meantime, Texas must use existing maps without the bias of extra Republican votes, all with practical deadlines that 2026 lines must be in place early next month.
The decision only affects Texas, but the other states considering redrawn maps are listening.
Gauging Political Impact
Clearly, the mid-terms have politicians of all stripes unnerved. This month’s elections in several states showed positive results for Democrats and spell trouble for tight majorities in both houses of Congress. Democratic majorities will prove problematic for Trump’s broad policy changes and his aggregation of power.
Trump shows dropping popularity in the face of tariffs and rising prices, health care insurance rate woes, the antagonism to the military aggressiveness of the migrant mass deportation campaign and the Epstein case fallout.
So, Texas acted in August to redraw district lines in expectation that states with yet more registered Republicans might pick up five GOP congressional seats. Missouri, Ohio and North Carolina threatened more pro-Republican districts redraws, Virginia said it may follow with tit-for-tat Democratic districts. Indiana Republicans said the redistricting question was beneath them and defied Donald Trump and JD Vance.
In a show of irony, Trump’s Justice Department has challenged the California redistricting maps in court on similar grounds but with opposite political impact (Three other challenges have been rejected by courts). But redistricting was not ordered by state politicos; it was a ballot measure by voters. In Virginia, proposed changes would be a change in state constitution, not a drawing whim of a partisan legislature.
Democracy Docket, which aligns with Democrats and whose founder represented the successful litigants in Texas, has a useful map and explanations about redistricting. The various moving parts make it difficult to know whether any of the perceived party gains are realistic. Plus, redrawing “safe” districts to create new would-be majority districts necessarily requires diluting the safety margin in the original districts.
But numerically, the Republican push to redistricting for electoral gain in 2026 actually could end up helping Democrats.
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