Pritzker calls Texas GOP’s remap effort ‘cheating,’ doesn’t rule out
Illinois response
[July 24, 2025]
By Ben Szalinski
Gov. JB Pritzker is leaving the door open to changing Illinois’
congressional maps to “counterbalance” an attempt by Texas politicians
to add more Republican seats to the U.S. House.
The Texas legislature is meeting in special session this week with 18
items on their agenda, including redrawing the state’s congressional
maps after President Donald Trump urged the state to redraw district
boundaries ahead of the 2026 midterm election in hopes of adding five
more Republicans to Texas’ congressional delegation and insulating his
party against any seats they might lose elsewhere in the country.
Pritzker blasted the move at an unrelated event in Chicago on Tuesday.
“I think we ought to play by the rules – everybody – and I think we
ought to have an election in 2026,” Pritzker told reporters. “We’ll see
who comes out ahead in the Congress. But I think cheating the way the
president wants to is improper.”
Redrawing legislative maps typically happens once a decade after the
national census, though sometimes states have been ordered by courts if
their legislative maps violated voting rights laws. Texas Republicans
also redrew the state’s congressional maps in the mid-2000s to add more
Republican-leaning districts.
Pritzker didn’t rule out the thought of Illinois Democrats redrawing
congressional districts to add more Democrat-leaning districts in
response to Texas.
“We’re all going to have to band together to try to address that; at
least to try to stop them by letting them know that if we were doing
what they were doing, in fact we would counterbalance and indeed take
control of the Congress,” Pritzker said.
The process, however, would have to go through Illinois’ legislature.
“That’s not something we’re pursuing,” a spokesperson for Senate
President Don Harmon, D-Oak Park, said.
Illinois Republicans blast comments
Pritzker’s comments accusing Texas Republicans of “cheating” left
Illinois Republicans furious. The party pushed through maps in 2021 with
only Democratic support in a largely opaque remap process.
Illinois’ map divides the state’s 17-member congressional delegation
into 14 Democrat-leaning districts and three Republican-leaning
districts. The three districts currently held by Republicans are mostly
large, meandering rural areas Democrats didn’t draw into districts they
wanted.
“It’s rich that the Governor now claims to support playing by the rules
— after he enthusiastically signed into law the most gerrymandered maps
in the nation,” House Republican Leader Tony McCombie, R-Savanna, said
in a statement. “When it was convenient, he promised to reject partisan
maps in favor of fair representation.”
Rep. Ryan Spain, R-Peoria, also condemned gerrymander in other states.
“I disagree with efforts in other states to double down on further
partisan gerrymandering, but I can make that statement because I voted
against partisan gerrymandering in Illinois and have been dedicated to
its elimination for many years,” Spain said in a statement.
[to top of second column]
|
Illinois delegate Susan Sweeney dances with a member from the Texas
delegation, which was notable for its coordinated hats, at the
Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July 2024. (Capitol
News Illinois photo by Andrew Adams)
Illinois’ current congressional map earned an F grade from the
independent Princeton Gerrymandering Project, finding the map fails in
every category on political fairness and competition and geographic
compactness.
The 16th District represented by Rep. Darin LaHood runs from south of
Bloomington to Galena and includes areas outside urban populations in
Bloomington-Normal, Peoria and Rockford. The 15th District represented
by Rep. Mary Miller includes much of central Illinois but is split in
half by a Democrat-leaning district that runs right through the middle
of it to include Champaign, Decatur, Springfield and the St. Louis
suburbs.
The 12th District represented by Rep. Mike Bost includes a large swath
of southern Illinois.
Whether Illinois Democrats could expand the map to create 15
Democrat-leaning districts remains to be seen, as even maps drawn for
partisan gain must meet legal requirements, including for compactness,
as outlined in state and federal voting rights laws.
The map was signed in 2021 by Pritzker after the House Democrats’ lead
mapmaker, Rep. Lisa Hernandez, D-Cicero, admitted during debate over the
maps that “partisan advantage” was considered.
Candidate Pritzker’s position
As a candidate for governor in 2018, Pritzker said he opposed
gerrymandered maps and supported an independent mapmaking commission.
“I 100% oppose gerrymandering,” Pritzker said in a 2018 social media
post two months before he would go on to win the Democratic nomination
for governor. “Legislative districts should adhere to both the Federal
and Illinois Voting Rights Acts, and I support redistricting reform that
advances fairness and removes politics from the process.”
Republicans have filed legislation to create an independent
redistricting commission and take the power away from lawmakers, but it
has never been considered by the General Assembly under Democrat
control.
Republicans have filed multiple lawsuits to try to force an independent
commission to redraw the maps, but they have failed early in the court
process.
Capitol News Illinois is
a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government
coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily
by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
 |
