Trump tells Texas Republicans to redraw the state congressional map to
help keep House majority
[July 16, 2025]
By JOEY CAPPELLETTI and NICHOLAS RICCARDI
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he is pushing
Texas Republicans to redraw the state's congressional maps to create
more House seats favorable to his party, part of a broader effort to
help the GOP retain control of the chamber in next year’s midterm
elections.
The president’s directive signals part of the strategy Trump is likely
to take to avoid a repeat of his first term, when Democrats flipped the
House just two years into his presidency. It comes shortly before the
GOP-controlled Texas Legislature is scheduled to begin a special session
next week during which it will consider new congressional maps to
further marginalize Democrats in the state.
Asked as he departed the White House for Pittsburgh about the
possibility of adding GOP-friendly districts around the country, Trump
responded, “Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five.”
Trump had a call earlier Tuesday with members of Texas' Republican
congressional delegation and told them the state Legislature would
pursue five new winnable seats through redistricting, according to a
person familiar the call who was not authorized to discuss it. The call
was first reported by Punchbowl News.
Some Texas Republicans have been hesitant about redrawing the maps
because there's only so many new seats a party can grab before its
incumbents are put at risk. Republicans gain new seats by relocating
Democratic voters out of competitive areas and into other GOP-leaning
ones, which may then turn competitive with the influx.
“There comes the point where you slice the baloney too thin and it
backfires,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of
California, Los Angeles.
Democrats will have a hard time retaliating
Congressional maps drawn after the 2020 census were expected to remain
in place through the end of the decade. If Texas redraws them at the
behest of Trump, that could lead other states to do the same, including
those controlled by Democrats. In response to the Texas plan, California
Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on social media: “Two can play this game.”
Still, Democrats may have their hands at least partly tied. Many of the
states the party controls have their state legislative and congressional
maps drawn by independent commissions that are not supposed to favor
either party. That's the case in California, where Newsom has no role in
the redistricting game after voters approved the commission system with
a 2008 ballot initiative.
Newsom on Tuesday afternoon floated the notion of California's
Democratic-controlled Legislature doing a mid-decade redistricting and
arguing it wouldn't be expressly forbidden by the 2008 ballot
initiative. Democrats already hold 43 of the state's 52 House seats. He
also proposed squeezing in a special election to repeal the popular
commission system before the 2026 elections get underway, but either
would be an extraordinary long shot.
“There isn't a whole lot Democrats can do right now,” said Michael Li of
the Brennan Center for Justice. “In terms of doing tit-for-tat, they've
got a weaker hand.”
Li noted that Democrats are backing lawsuits to overturn some GOP-drawn
maps, and there's a chance some of those could be successful before the
midterm elections. That includes in Wisconsin, where the new liberal
majority on the state supreme court declined to immediately overturn the
state's GOP-drawn congressional maps earlier this year. Democrats and
their allies have filed suit in a lower court hoping to beat the clock
and get new maps in place by next year.
Democrats also have litigation in Utah and Florida.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering a case out of Louisiana
that seeks to unravel one majority Black district mandated by the Voting
Rights Act. The case could lead to sweeping changes in longstanding
rules requiring mapmakers to ensure that racial minorities get a chance
to be an electoral majority or plurality in some areas.
The high court is expected to rule in that case by next summer.
Re-opening maps undermines ‘free and fair elections’
Redistricting is a constitutionally mandated process for redrawing
political districts after the once-a-decade census to ensure they have
equal populations. But there is no prohibition against rejiggering maps
between censuses, and sometimes court rulings have made that mandatory.
The wave of voluntary mid-decade redistricting that Trump is
encouraging, however, is unusual.
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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks as President Donald Trump listens
during a roundtable discussion with first responders and local
officials at Hill Country Youth Event Center in Kerrville, Texas,
during a tour to observe flood damage, Friday, July 11, 2025. (AP
Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
It's also left some Democrats fuming that their party has ceded much
its mapmaking power to independent commissions in states it
controls, including Colorado, Michigan and Washington.
“Reformers often do not understand the importance of political
power,” said Rick Ridder, a Democratic strategist in Denver.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries wouldn't comment on whether
nonpartisan systems should be rolled back, instead saying Trump's
push will “undermine free and fair elections.”
“Public servants should earn the votes of the people that they hope
to represent. What Republicans are trying to do in Texas is to have
politicians choose their voters,” Jeffries told reporters.
Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett, whose district includes part of
Austin, also criticized Texas Republicans for focusing on
redistricting after floods killed at least 132 people, and with more
still missing.
“Redistricting, this scheme, is an act of desperation,” he said.
Texas lawmakers will consider a new map during special session
The special Texas legislative session scheduled to start Monday is
intended to focus primarily on the aftermath of the deadly floods.
An agenda for the session set by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott put
forth plans to take up “legislation that provides a revised
congressional redistricting plan in light of constitutional concerns
raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”
Republicans in Ohio also are poised to redraw their maps after years
of political and court battles over the state's redistricting
process. The GOP-controlled Legislature is considering expanding the
party's lead in the congressional delegation to as much as 13-2. It
currently has a 10-5 advantage.
Still, there are practical limits as to how many new seats any party
can squeeze from a map. That's why some Texas Republicans have been
hesitant about another redraw. In 2011, the party's legislators drew
an aggressive map to expand their majority, only to find seats they
thought were safe washed away in the 2018 Democratic wave election
during Trump's first term.
In response, the map in 2021 was drawn more cautiously, mainly
preserving the GOP's current outsized majority in its congressional
delegation. There are 25 Republican House members from the state
compared to 12 Democrats and one Democratic vacancy that is
scheduled to be filled by a special election. A five-seat shift into
the GOP column would mean the party holds 30 of Texas' 38 seats
after winning 56% of the vote in last year's presidential election.
Both parties see potential advantages
In Austin, Republican lawmakers said they embrace the opportunity to
redraw maps.
State Rep. Brian Harrison, who served in the first Trump
administration, said lawmakers can do it in a way that's “thoughtful
and constructive.”
“This is something that we can do, and something that we should do,”
GOP Texas Sen. John Cornyn said he expects a new map will lead to
“significant gains," in part because Latino voters have been
trending toward Republicans in recent elections.
But Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee, said Tuesday that there was no way to redraw the
boundaries without exposing more GOP incumbents to a possible
Democratic wave. When a party wins the White House, it usually loses
seats in the midterms.
“Any new map that Texas Republicans draw will almost inevitably
create more competitive districts,” DelBene told reporters. “This
scheme to rig the maps is hardly going to shore up their majority.
It is going to expand the battleground in the race for the
majority.”
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