Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the Republican-controlled state legislature are moving forward with an aggressive mid-decade redistricting plan at the behest of President Donald Trump. Though redistricting traditionally occurs once a decade, following the release of the U.S. census, Republicans in the Lone Star State are taking steps in an effort to keep control of the House of Representatives in the 2026 elections and prevent the losses that the party of the president historically suffers during midterms—other than a few exceptions, such as 1934 and 2002.
In response, Democratic lawmakers fled the state so that the Republicans couldn’t obtain a quorum for this special session. But at some point, the Democrats, who are being fined $500 for each day of absence, will need to come home. The governor is even threatening to expel them from the legislature if they are not back soon. Texas Senator John Cornyn said the FBI will assist in locating them. Trump, who is never shy about saying when he wants something and why he wants it, acknowledged to reporters that Texas could give the Republican Party five additional seats. Meanwhile, party leaders are reportedly eyeing other states, such as Missouri and Florida.
Outside of Texas, Democrats are outraged. Even though redistricting has been abused by both parties seeking to carve out as many safe seats as possible, this power grab shifts the battleground into a new realm. If a national party needs more seats to solidify its power, then Texas will create a precedent for just drawing those seats into a new map. A process meant to ensure that voters obtain fair representation on Capitol Hill will become one more cudgel used in the hyperpartisan battles of Washington.
And Democrats have no reason to hold back. Regardless of what one thinks is best for the democracy, Democrats would be foolhardy to allow their opponents to win the midterms on this basis. This is why several large Democratic-controlled states, including Illinois, New York, and California, are exploring ways to respond by doing some redistricting of their own, even if that means temporarily overturning laws that had made the process less partisan. Longtime proponents of redistricting reform, such as former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, have thrown up their hands and urged Democrats to start playing hardball. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is moving forward with a plan, though he has offered to drop those plans if all other states do the same. “You are playing with fire,” the governor warned, “risking the destabilization of our democracy….”
Yet in the long run, this is all a terrible development. After several states have finally been making progress since the early 2010s in establishing bipartisan and nonpartisan commissions to draw district lines along a more competitive basis, Trump and Texas Republicans are going to trigger a fierce political arms war that set the nation back dramatically.
Congressional redistricting has always been contentious, but this latest battle threatens the reforms and guardrail, built up over time, that have kept the impulse in check.
Under Article 1, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, states were granted the authority to carve out legislative districts: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of Chusing Senators.” From the minute that the two-party system took shape, which was right away, leaders have fought over the structure of congressional maps.
On March 26, 1812, the bizarre salamander-looking shape of a congressional district in Massachusetts, which had been given the imprimatur of Gov. Elbridge Gerry (who signed the bill though expressed his opposition), led the Boston Gazette to publish a cartoon, “The Gerry-Mander.” The term, which was meant to mock the brazen Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party that had been responsible for drawing the district, stuck. Gerrymandering has remained the nomenclature through which critics convey how state parties manipulate the democratic process to serve their own objectives.
Through the Apportionment Act of 1842, Congress required states to have single-member districts, and this legislation created the foundation for the modern system.
Within the states, political parties continued to fight over the drawing of district lines, understanding that this exercise in cartography helped to determine who controlled public policy and patronage. The fights became especially intense between 1878 and 1896, when partisan polarization reached high levels, and there was sizable voting turnout during most elections.
Other debates over the process emerged as well. One of the most divisive issues was that states rarely updated district maps, even as populations shifted. Since Congress passed the Reapportionment Act of 1929, the size of the House has remained set at 435 members. Many states did not adjust as the size of urban centers swelled. Statis was intentional. The result was that through the mid-20th century, in many places, small groups of voters living in sparsely populated rural areas had the same amount of representation as larger groups of voters residing in densely populated urban areas.
Given that rural areas tended to be more conservative and less socially diverse, the effects were significant. In the South, disproportionate representation allowed the conservative white electorate to overpower liberal white and Black voters in the cities. The same was true in states such as Illinois, where rural voters counted on malapportionment to protect their interests against booming metropolises such as Chicago.
The Supreme Court brought this era to an end with a series of historic decisions—Baker v. Carr (1962), Gray v. Sanders (1963), Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), and Reynolds v. Sims (1964)—which instituted the one-man, one-vote principle whereby elected officials had to draw state and federal district lines so that every vote counted equally.
“While it may not be possible to draw congressional districts with mathematical precision,” the majority opinion stated in Wesberry, “that is no excuse for ignoring our Constitution’s plain objective of making equal representation for equal numbers of people the fundamental goal for the House of Representatives.”
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, required states with histories of racial discrimination to receive federal “preclearance” before changing district lines and would prohibit any voting practices that discriminated on the basis of race. A 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act and the Supreme Court’s Thornburg v. Gingles decision in 1986 shifted the focus from ensuring that minority voters were given equal access in elections to dismantling voting practices that diluted those votes, either intentionally or by effect.
At the same time that the Civil Rights Movement was battling over race and redistricting, the parties kept ramping up their efforts to perfect control over the creation of constituencies every 10 years. Following the 1980 census, California Rep. Phillip Burton orchestrated a bold redistricting plan in his home state—criticized by Republicans and good government organizations such as Common Cause—which increased Democratic representation by two seats. “Oh, it’s gorgeous,” Burton boasted in response to attacks from the Republican Party about his artwork.
Burton’s actions paled in comparison to what happened in Texas in 2003. After Republicans took control of both chambers of the state legislature in the 2002 midterms, House Majority Whip Tom “The Hammer” DeLay pushed for an off-year redistricting plan in his state to solidify national Republican power on Capitol Hill.
This was the first time since 1964, according to Congressional Quarterly, that a state engaged in this process outside of responding to census data or court orders. DeLay’s two political action committees had funded 22 Republican candidates in the midterms. The winners were all indebted to him. The coordination between the national and state parties was not much of a secret.
When reporters spotted DeLay in the state capitol in Austin, he responded to a question about his role in the deliberations by saying: “I’m a Texan trying to get things done.” Fellow Republicans called the move political payback for what Democrats had done to them with redistricting in 1991.
Although more than 50 Democratic legislators protested in 2003 by fleeing the state to Oklahoma, and 11 state senators did the same, decamping to New Mexico so that the Republicans could not obtain a quorum, the plan finally passed in October 2003 under the strong-armed guidance of Republican Gov. Rick Perry. The redistricting helped Republicans gain seats in 2004 in the U.S. House. In 2006, in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, the Supreme Court upheld most of the new map except one district, the 23rd, because it violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Although the tradition of redistricting once a decade, after the census, survived DeLay’s guardrail-shattering precedent, increasingly sophisticated geographic information system-based computer technology offered politicians even more effective ways to maximize the number of colleagues who would rarely have to worry about general election challenges.
Using the kind of software that Amazon and other online companies deployed to master consumer markets, in 2011, state Republicans jumped ahead of their opponents by using data about specific streets and even homes to draw maps after Republicans scored massive gains in state elections during the 2010 midterms. (This was referred to as Operation Redistricting Majority Project, otherwise known as Operation REDMAP.) Gradually, Democrats caught up, and the nation has seen the number of purple districts continue to shrink.
The backlash toward the dysfunction on Capitol Hill has led more states to adopt reforms that removed power over redistricting from the hands of the state parties and gave it to nonpartisan or bipartisan bodies that could make decisions with an eye toward what is fair, logical, and efficient. States such as Arizona, California, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and Washington put into place a variety of processes that tied the hands of politicians in influencing these debates. The main goal was to maximize the number of competitive House districts to create greater incentive for representatives to listen to a broader range of voters.
Six years ago, in 2019, the Supreme Court struck a blow to reform efforts in Rucho v. Common Cause. The 5-4 majority, which included Chief Justice John Roberts, declared that the judges would not tackle extreme partisan gerrymandering even if there were claims that the lines violated the First and 14th Amendments. Roberts argued that the court did not have the authority to make decisions on these kinds of political questions.
“Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law,” the dissenting justices warned, “this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.”
The door through which Trump and the Texas Republicans have now walked was left wide open by this Supreme Court decision.
While Texas will not undercut the reform efforts of the past decade—even Governor Newsom is talking about a one-time fix to allow his state to redistrict without a commission before 2026—in the long term, these developments will make it much more challenging to move forward with reforms in the coming years. The nation is on the cusp of an arms war. And Texas Republicans, with Trump, are responsible.
For the United States as a democracy, this development is highly damaging, further eroding the sanctity of the vote and weaponizing the election system. To be sure, redistricting has always reflected the political interests of the two-party system, as both parties have maneuvered to craft a playing field that benefits them.
But when one party decides to throw aside all restraint, the entire structure comes undone. This is the ongoing story of the times and the damage wreaked by the asymmetric polarization that has defined modern politics. The number of competitive seats has shrunk to historic lows. Texas’s actions mark not just another round in a long battle that has been taking place since the start of the republic, but also a moment when the fight over co-opting the redistricting process may finally overwhelm the very concept of fair play in elections.
Unless both parties recommit to some forms of restraint and support efforts to take the process out of their hands through legislative reform, the redistricting process will be one more way that the national parties fight tooth and nail to assert their control in an era of narrow and shifting congressional majorities.
What’s unfolding in Texas isn’t just a state-level political maneuver. It portends a new stage in the deterioration of our democratic institutions.