When Texas Republicans redrew the state’s congressional map in 2021, their goal was not so much to pick up more seats but to prevent Democrats from gaining any ground. They went into redistricting that year with a 23-13 advantage in the state’s delegation to the U.S. House and now have a 25-12 edge. This was part of a national GOP strategy to lock in gains and take vulnerable seats off the table. “We want 10-year maps, not maps that are going to flip back and forth,” Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, told me in 2022.
That was then. Under pressure from President Donald Trump, Texas Republicans are in the process of redrawing the state’s congressional map in hopes of squeezing five more seats out of it. You’ve heard all about that, as well as Democrats talking about how they might reciprocate in states they control, such as California and Illinois.
We’ve been here before. Back in 2003, Texas Republicans, prodded by Tom DeLay, then the House majority leader, redrew their map. Then, as now, this was considered an outrageous betrayal of the norm preventing unnecessary mid-decade redistricting. Then, as now, Texas Democratic legislators fled the state, at least temporarily depriving the GOP majority of a quorum to do business and pass the map. But the map passed after a while anyway and Republicans in fact did gain five seats as a result.
Although such actions are now considered rare, they once were common. Following the Civil War, competition was fierce between the parties and they each deployed aggressive — and frequent — gerrymanders in pursuit of House power. “Between 1840 and 1900, there were only two years in which at least one state did not redistrict,” political scientist Erik J. Engstrom wrote a dozen years ago in his book Partisan Gerrymandering and the Construction of American Democracy.
Back then, a single state's gerrymander sometimes was enough to sway control of the U.S. House. In 1888, for example, Pennsylvania Republicans created a map that gave them 21 of the commonwealth's 28 seats, despite winning only 53 percent of the statewide vote — just enough to give the GOP the House majority.
Such manufactured majorities were often fleeting, with overstretched, marginal districts switching back to the other party in the next election. The 19th century set records for numbers of seats changing hands in a single election: Democrats lost 114 seats in 1894, when the chamber had only 357 members.
Partisan greed led politicians of that era to draw what are now known as dummymanders — maps that attempt to stretch partisan advantage beyond the breaking point, unintentionally making more seats marginal, so that the other party ends up being the winner in future, more favorable years.
That’s the pertinent question now in Texas: Have Republicans drawn a dummymander? Their 2021 map was practically impregnable. Trump won 11 of the 23 GOP-held districts in the state by 15 percentage points or more in 2020 but that number nearly doubled to 21 under the map drawn in 2021. The Texas GOP won’t enjoy the same kind of near-universal advantage under the new map lawmakers will soon pass.
That’s ultimately the impediment against constant redistricting. The process becomes a zero-sum game. If you try too hard to squeeze out gains, you can end up with losses. Some incumbent sitting in a district that practically guarantees he’ll win 60 percent of the vote won’t want support drained away. He’d rather be certain of winning than have a seat where he’s only fairly certain to win with 53 percent of the vote, even if that means his party has a better chance of making gains elsewhere. So he gets his way.
When it comes to redistricting, all politicians are selfish. It’s a delicate dance every 10 years, even under one-party control.
This is why mid-decade re-redistricting didn’t become common practice after the Texas GOP’s success in 2003. Despite all the bold yet contradictory talk we’re hearing now from Democrats — that Republicans are cheating and unleashing chaos, and we’d better do the same thing — it’s unlikely that many states will redraw their maps, absent court orders, between now and 2031.
