What's up in Texas? Trump's gerrymandering push, explained
With president's backing, Texas governor aims to redraw boundaries to boost Republicans in 2026 midterms
U.S. President Donald Trump isn't hiding that the push to redraw electoral boundaries in Texas is all about helping his Republican Party make gains in Congress in the 2026 midterms.
Trump is backing a move by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and his Republican allies in the state legislature to change the election map in a manner that could flip as many as five seats in the U.S. House of Representatives away from the Democrats next year.
"We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats," Trump said Tuesday in a phone interview on CNBC.
"We are entitled to five more seats."
To try to stall the push, Democrat state representatives have left Texas, preventing the Republicans from voting in the legislature to make the new boundaries official.
They face fines, arrests and possibly removal from office for the tactic.
Here's what you need to know:
Why does the Texas redistricting matter?
The boundaries of U.S. congressional districts can have a big influence on which party controls the House of Representatives.
Currently, the Republicans hold a slim majority in the House, but historically, the sitting president's party almost always loses seats in midterm elections.
If the Democrats take control of the House in 2026, not only does Trump lose a clear path for his legislative and spending agenda, he could even face the prospect of impeachment.
Redrawing the Texas map to shift a few blue seats to red could help keep the House in Republican hands.
Why do states control district maps?
Unlike in Canada — where non-partisan commissions in each province redraw the federal riding boundaries once every decade — it's the highly partisan state legislatures that control the maps of U.S. Congressional districts.
This has led to a long history of whichever party is in power in a state drawing boundaries to maximize their seat count, a process known as gerrymandering, a term coined in 1812 in a derisive reference to the then-governor of Massachusetts.
A handful of states have in recent years assigned the job of redistricting to independent commissions.
How would new boundaries in Texas change things?
In the 2024 elections, Republicans won 25 House races in Texas, while Democrats took the other 13.
The move to change the electoral map could — according to analysts looking at recent voting patterns — shift as many as five of those Democrat-held seats to the Republicans.
The proposed changes include taking solidly blue portions of adjoining Democrat-held districts in the urban areas of Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin and combining them in such a way that pairs of Democrat incumbents would be forced either to face off against each other in primaries or risk running in a district where the Republicans have the advantage.
Meanwhile in south Texas, changes to the boundaries of two Democrat-held districts along the Mexican border could tip both to the Republicans.
Why can the Republicans be so blatant about it?
While it's the U.S. Constitution that empowers states to control election boundaries, it's the U.S. legal system that has allowed states to exercise that control in a blatantly political way.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 in a case involving claims of both Democrat and Republican partisan gerrymandering that the issue amounted to "political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts."
That means "it is absolutely permissible to draw maps based on maximizing partisan advantage," said Texas state representative Brian Harrison, a Republican.
"All the other Democrat states are doing it. The state of Texas should as well," Harrison told CNN on Tuesday.
Why did Democrat legislators leave the state?
Abbott, the governor, called a special session of the state legislature in late July with an eye to making the new boundaries law. To stop that from happening, Democrat representatives in the Republican-dominated Texas House left the state so there wouldn't be quorum, the minimum number of lawmakers required for business to proceed.
Most went to Illinois, others to New York, deliberately choosing Democrat-run states to face no risk that the long arm of Texas law enforcement would find local co-operation to bring them back.
Wait, what? Politicians can be arrested for not showing up to vote?
On Monday, the Speaker of the House in Texas signed warrants authorizing the sergeant-at-arms to compel the Democrat representatives to attend the legislative session. Abbott then ordered state troopers to arrest them.
The warrants only apply within state lines.
While each legislator faces a $500 fine for each day of absence, they do not face criminal charges. However, Abbott is threatening bribery charges if the legislators use donations to pay the fines and some Republicans are seeking ways to have the Democrats removed from office.
What is Trump's view of gerrymandering?
The president is offering two justifications for why the Republicans are "entitled" to five more seats in Texas. He claims that the Republicans deserve more seats from Texas, and that the Democrats gerrymander their states too.
"Democrats are complaining and they're complaining from states where they've done it, like in Illinois, like in Massachusetts," Trump told reporters in Washington on Tuesday afternoon. "The Democrats have done it long before we started. They've done it all over the place."
Trump argued that the Republicans should hold a bigger share of House districts in Texas given the election results in 2024. Yet that's not borne out by the math. Trump took 56 per cent of the presidential election vote in Texas, while the election delivered Republicans 63 per cent of its House seats.
Trump also claimed twice Tuesday that in 2024 he got "the highest vote in the history of Texas." That's simply not true.
George W. Bush won a higher share of Texas (his home state) in both of his successful presidential campaigns (59 per cent in 2000 and 61 per cent in 2004), while Ronald Reagan won an even greater share of Texas in his 1984 landslide presidential win (nearly 64 per cent).
Where does it all go from here?
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is warning that if the Texas Republicans follow through on their gerrymandering, he'll seek to redraw his state's electoral districts as a counter measure. There are similar noises from the blue states of New York, Illinois and Maryland.
If the Texas Republicans eventually get the new map confirmed, it could face a legal battle, but an uphill one, given that 2019 Supreme Court ruling allowing partisan gerrymandering.
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