The thoroughness of Texas’ gerrymander during the last round of redistricting in 2021 leaves no room for Republicans to grow their 25-member majority among the state’s 38 seats in the House of Representatives. Any alteration of the map will only hurt the GOP’s sitting incumbents and comes with a risk of backfiring, experts said.
It is a gamble Abbott is willing to make after he placed redistricting on a lengthy agenda for a special legislative session that begins July 21. Democrats across Texas have criticized it as a cynical move of political gamesmanship that comes when politicians should be solely focused on the response and recovery to the deadly floods in the Hill Country.
“While partisan activists focus solely on political issues, Governor Abbott is dedicated to delivering results on issues important to Texans, such as flood relief, property tax cuts, and the elimination of the STAAR test,” Abbott spokesman Andrew Mahaleris said in a text message.
While some Democrats have publicly denounced redistricting, Rice University political scientist Mark P. Jones said those comments might be “crocodile tears.”
“Texas Democrats want Republicans to engage in this redistricting, because they’ll be able to, from a PR perspective, use it to criticize Republicans for trying to stack the deck and change the rules and manipulate the districts for political gain,” Jones said. “But at the same time, those Democrats know that those new districts will actually be more favorable for Texas Democrats than the current districts.”
Abbott’s redistricting effort was prompted by a letter this week from the Department of Justice, which raised concerns over the legality of four districts in Houston and the Dallas area that have non-white majority populations. All four districts strongly lean sharply to the left, and voters in each district elected Democrats by margins greater than 30 points.
They include the district represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey , which snakes its way through Tarrant and Dallas counties, capturing numerous enclaves of non-white voters. The district is 86.8 percent non-white, with 57.6 percent of its voters Hispanic and 20.3 percent Black.
Veasey said the Justice Department’s focus on his district was a pretext for statewide redistricting. He called the effort “disgusting.”
“This is just an excuse that they’re using to open up a door to rewrite, to redraw the entire map,” Veasey said in an interview Thursday.
The real aim is South Texas , University of Houston political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus said.
“It’s a sneaky way to reconfigure the politics of South Texas,” Rottinghaus said.
Republicans could pick up two seats in that region. U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat, won reelection in 2024 by 5.6 percentage points over his Republican challenger. And U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez beat his GOP challenger by 2.6 points.
There’s little for Republicans to gain in Houston and Dallas, the experts said. The Justice Department memo states the four districts might be illegal because they created non-white voter coalitions, which a federal appeals court has ruled are not protected under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Those districts were drawn to concentrate Democratic voters into single districts, creating more easily attainable Republican majorities elsewhere. They tend to be centered around the state’s urban centers.
Dismantling them would only make their neighboring Republican-held districts more winnable for Democrats.
Redistricting expert Michael Li with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University said by redrawing those districts, Texas Republicans run the risk of creating a “dummymander” – an attempt to grow their power in Congress that backfires.
That happened in Arkansas in 2013 after that state’s Democratic-led legislature redrew congressional districts to elect a second Democrat to Washington . Instead, Republicans won all four of the state’s seats and have held them since.
“When you gerrymander, you’re making a bet that you know what the politics of the future look like,” Li said. “That’s a very hard thing to predict in Texas, because the state is changing so fast.”
Li said breaking those districts apart also raises the likelihood of legal challenges. The 2021 maps were challenged in federal courts by numerous individuals and activist groups, including the League of United Latin American Citizens and the Texas NAACP.
A civil trial was recently held regarding the 2021 maps before a panel of federal judges in El Paso. No judgment has been issued.
The effort to redraw the challenged maps was led by state Republican Sen. Joan Huffman. Huffman said during hearings and in court depositions that she drew the district lines without regard to race.
It was unclear if Huffman would lead redistricting during the special session. Huffman and her staff did not return messages seeking comment.
State Rep. Cory Vasut, a Republican, is chairing the House’s redistricting committee. His office did not return a message seeking comment.
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