Texas has sparked a nationwide rush to redraw district maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. To understand why this domino effect was triggered, it’s important to start at the beginning, when Gov. Abbott was forced to choose between keeping the existing map, already under legal challenge from both sides of the political aisle or drawing new lines.
Abbott called a special session to redraw Texas’s district map in October of 2021. After it was signed into law and used in the 2022 primaries, the map was challenged by the League of United Latin American Citizens. They argued that it violated the 14th and 15th Amendments as well as Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting Latino voting power and marginalizing minority communities. The case was consolidated with others, including United States v. Texas (filed by the Biden administration), streamlining multiple legal challenges into a single high-stakes proceeding. But it didn’t stop there.
In a separate case, Biden’s U.S. Department of Justice filed Petteway v. Galveston County, Texas, alleging that Galveston County’s 2021 redistricting plan for its Commissioners Court violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Though the U.S. District Court ruled the plan illegal, the Fifth Circuit delivered a landmark reversal on appeal and overturned more than three decades of precedent. The court held that the Voting Rights Act did not protect “coalition districts,” which are intentionally drawn to unite multiple minority groups into a majority. Instead, the Fifth Circuit interpreted such districts as political alliances rather than protected entities under the law.
This summer, under President Trump, the DOJ sent an official letter to Governor Abbott and the Texas Attorney General declaring that districts 33, 9, 18, and 29 were “unconstitutional ‘coalition districts’” and ordered Texas to redraw the 2021 map.
The DOJ letter was blunt: “Although the State’s interest… was to comply with Fifth Circuit precedent prior to the 2024 Petteway decision, that interest no longer exists.”
The districts in question, DOJ argued, were “nothing more than vestiges of an unconstitutional racially biased gerrymandering past, which must be abandoned and must now be corrected by Texas.”
In short, Texas was caught between a rock and a hard place – the 2021 map was now under fire from both sides. Faced with that reality, Abbott called a special session in July, earlier this year, to confront the problem head-on.
What followed was pure political theater: Democrats fled the state to block a quorum, Abbott threatened arrests, and courts in Illinois refused to enforce Texas warrants. California’s Governor Gavin Newsom even jumped in with his own counter-redistricting plan.
Eventually, enough Texas legislators returned – some under escort by the Department of Public Safety – and the House and Senate passed the new congressional map. By August of 2025, Abbott signed what he dubbed “The One Big Beautiful Map” into law, cementing Texas’ role at the center of America’s redistricting wars.
But the redistricting rage is reaching far beyond the borders of the Rio Grande. Voters in California are considering Proposition 50 to abandon the Citizens Redistricting Commission’s map and adopt a new congressional district map for 2026–2030. Other states, including Missouri, Ohio, and Utah, are in the midst of map fights as well. These battles may look different in every state, but with control of Congress at stake, redistricting has become a national priority.
State leaders should embrace the vision of our founders, who embedded redistricting in our system of government. As Americans, we should insist that our districts are not carved along racial, socioeconomic, or ethnic lines. Instead, they should be drawn to strengthen communities and reflect the values and priorities we want our representatives to carry, both to the state house and to Congress. After all, the stakes are too high for anything less than a fair deal.
Katie Thompson is director of the Process and Procedures Task Force at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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