Texas Republicans answered President Donald Trump’s call to redraw the state’s congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterms by releasing a new map that eliminates five House seats held by Democrats and creates five new seats that voted for Trump in 2024.
The new map would yield 30 Republican-leaning seats and just eight Democratic-leaning seats. It would do so by splitting five seats currently held by Democrats in and around the cities of Houston, Dallas and Austin and in the heavily Latino Rio Grande Valley. The goal is to help Republicans hold their razor-thin four-seat margin in the House in the 2026 elections to prevent any meaningful oversight of the Trump administration from a Democratic-controlled body.
The elimination of five Democratic seats and creation of five Republican seats would cause a 10-vote swing in the GOP’s favor, giving them a more comfortable cushion in the event they lose seats in other states, as the party of the incumbent president almost always does in the midterm elections. But it comes with a host of risks.
Democrats and some redistricting experts had raised the possibility that the new gerrymander may turn out to be what’s called a “dummymander.” That’s when a gerrymander makes the seats of the party, redrawing the lines, more vulnerable to maximize the total number of seats they could win. If, however, there is a strong anti-incumbent wave powered by an unpopular president, those seats could suddenly come into play for Democrats.
