By JOEY CAPPELLETTI
WASHINGTON — 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.
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.”
Associated Press Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro in Washington and writers Nadia Lathan in Austin, Texas, and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.
