Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.
As Texas Republicans prepare to redraw the state's congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, cautionary tales loom from past redistricting efforts that saw the state’s rapid demographic change collide with far-reaching partisan gerrymandering.
The move to carve out more GOP seats in Texas was unveiled Wednesday by Gov. Greg Abbott, who included redistricting in a sweeping 18-item agenda for the Legislature's upcoming special session. The announcement ended weeks of speculation over whether Texas Republicans would follow through on demands from President Donald Trump's political advisers, who have been pushing for the rare mid-decade redistricting gambit to improve the GOP's chances of retaining its slim majority in Congress.
Some Republicans, including members of Texas' congressional delegation, oppose the idea over concerns about jeopardizing their own seats if they miscalculate with the new districts.
A recent test case unfolded after the 2010 U.S. Census, when Republicans who controlled the Texas Legislature looked to maximize their party’s seats across the map by drawing reliable GOP voters into nearby Democratic districts and turning them red.
But by 2018, a Trump midterm election year, that aggressive approach came back to bite them. With a favorable national climate and explosive population growth driven almost entirely by people of color, Texas Democrats picked up 12 seats in the state House, ousted two longtime GOP members of Congress and narrowed their losing margins in statewide races.
“What looked like a solid gerrymander by the end of the decade had become almost a dummymander,” Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said. “The lesson from 2010 is that you can stretch yourself too thin, that you can be too smart for your own good. And when the politics change, you get bitten in the you-know-where.”
