08/01/2025

Texas Republicans Unveil Redistricting Map to Expand GOP Foothold by 5 Seats, Including 1 in Houston

Houston Chronicle | James Osborne, Taylor Goldenstein, John C. Moritz, Jeremy Wallace, Matt Zdun| July 30, 2025

Texas Republicans Unveil Redistricting Map to Expand GOP Foothold by 5 Seats, Including 1 in Houston

The Texas Legislature released a new congressional map Wednesday morning detailing Republicans’ plans to dramatically expand their foothold in the state at the urging of President Donald Trump.

The new maps aim to help Republicans pick up five additional seats in next year’s midterm elections, putting Texas at the center of a Republican campaign to retain control of the U.S. House in 2026, according to a Hearst Newspapers analysis.

The biggest proposed changes are in Houston, the Dallas-area, Austin and South Texas, where several districts currently held by Democrats are remade to be more favorable to Republican candidates or combined together. Under the proposal, millions of Texas voters would end up with new congressional representation. 

In one of the most notable shifts, Austin-area Democratic U.S. Reps. Greg Casar and Lloyd Doggett would effectively be merged into the same congressional district.

Casar, a rising star in the Democratic party who heads the congressional progressive caucus, called the move “illegal voter suppression of Black and Latino Central Texans.”

In Harris County, Republicans would be in a position to pick up at least one additional seat under the proposals. The redrawing shifts the 9th Congressional District held by Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, to the far eastern edges of the county, turning it into a GOP-leaning, majority Hispanic district that President Donald Trump would have won by 15 percentage points in 2024.

Much of Green’s former district would be blended into the now-vacant 18th Congressional District where more than two dozen candidates are running to replace the late Rep. Sylvester Turner in a special election in November. That could leave Green running against whoever wins that race. A spokesperson for Green said he’s still analyzing the map and couldn’t yet comment.

Thousands of voters in Houston’s East End would be largely moved out of the 29th Congressional District held by U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston. Garcia’s district would shift more to be North Houston district where Latino populations have been growing. 

In North Texas, the map draws 12-term Democrat Marc Veasey out of his Fort Worth-centered District 33, long seen as an opportunity to elect a Black Congress member in the western rim of Dallas-Fort Worth. The district would be contained wholly within Dallas County. 

The suburban district north of Dallas currently held by U.S. Rep. Julie Johnson, a newly elected Democrat, was made significantly more Republican, likely forcing her to run against Veasey in his newly drawn district.

And in South Texas districts held by Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, both Democrats, were redrawn to favor GOP challengers next year.

Right now, Republicans hold 25 of the state’s 38 congressional districts and under the proposed maps, that number could grow to 30. 

But Republicans did not go as far as they could have in making Democrat-held districts more conservative, leaving incumbent Republicans relatively safe, said David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report.

“This is a design geared towards generating 30 seats for Republicans but it’s not quite as brutally aggressive as it could have been,” he said. “This is a map that did not demand much sacrifice from Republican incumbents. There were so many Republican incumbents with large majority they had votes to give.”

The proposed map, put forward by state Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, will come up for a public hearing Friday at 10 a.m. Lawmakers have until the special session's ending date of Aug. 19 to agree on a map and send to Gov. Greg Abbott to be signed into law.

Hunter declined to answer questions about the proposal Wednesday. "I'm not going to talk (about the map) until I present it to the members," he said.

Abbott’s decision to include redistricting in a special session this summer has roiled Democrats nationwide, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-NY, attacking the “aggressive and egregious gerrymander” as rigging the election "to disenfranchise millions of people" in Texas.

“Trump and Abbott are scheming to rig next year's Congressional elections in Texas through a convoluted and shameless mid-decade redistricting plan. Let's call this what it is: a brazen, racist, power grab,” Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, said earlier this month.

Only four years after the Legislature last redrew its congressional districts, following the 2020 census, the move to create new maps before the next census is unusual but not unprecedented - Republicans also did it in 2003. But it does not come without risk.

Already, national Democrats are looking to go on offense in Texas. Democrats’ House Majority PAC is planning to raise as much as $20 million to target GOP incumbents in Texas, the group announced this week. And the activist group Unrig our Economy has begun running online spots attacking U.S. Reps. Dan Crenshaw, Lance Gooden, Beth Van Duyne and Monica De La Cruz for Medicaid cuts under Trump’s sprawling budget reconciliation bill.