Texas Redistricting Shot Down, Weakening Path to GOP Gains (2)

A federal court shot down Texas’ bid to redraw its congressional districts, delivering a loss to President Donald Trump and closing a path for Republicans to gain five House seats in next year’s midterm elections.

The plans that Texas initiated through a rare mid-decade redistricting were likely racially gerrymandered, a split panel of federal judges ruled in granting a preliminary injunction. The bid by Texas Republicans kicked off a redistricting arms race among states ahead of what is expected to be a grueling midterm election next year.

Texas will appeal to the Supreme Court, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said in statements. The state will ask the high court to allow the new maps to be used while the case plays out.

Tuesday’s decision follows a trial in October. The plaintiffs — a coalition of minority and voter rights groups — said the maps unlawfully dismantle four minority opportunity districts. Texas said the map is strictly for political gain and that it was drawn blind to race.

“To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map. But it was much more than just politics,” the opinion said. “Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”

The court ordered next year’s congressional elections to proceed under the map the state passed in 2021.

Judge Jeffrey Brown, whom Trump appointed to the Southern District of Texas in his first term, authored the majority ruling, joined by Judge David Guaderrama, an Obama appointee on the Western District of Texas. Judge Jerry E. Smith, whom Ronald Reagan put on the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, will file a dissenting opinion, the majority noted.

‘Conspicuously Absent’

The Texas ruling was handed down about a month after the US Supreme Court’s conservatives suggested they will restrict the creation of majority-Black or Hispanic voting districts during oral arguments over Louisiana’s congressional map. Justice Brett Kavanaugh and other conservative justices voiced support for GOP-led efforts to narrow the 1965 Voting Rights Act to do away with the intentional creation of heavily minority districts, which tend to vote Democratic.

The ruling doesn’t involve claims brought under the Voting Rights Act.

Texas lawmakers moved to redraw the map following a July letter from the Justice Department citing racial gerrymandering in the map the state passed in 2021. At trial, Texas disagreed with the DOJ’s analysis, instead taking the position that it redrew the maps strictly for partisan gain—which legal experts said is likely unconstitutional but, paradoxically, predicted would prevail in court.

“Any claim that these maps are discriminatory is absurd and unsupported by the testimony offered during ten days of hearings,” Abbott said in a statement.

Paxton, whose lawyers defended the redistricting plan in court, said the maps are “entirely legal and passed for partisan purposes to better represent the political affiliations of Texas.”

But the judges in the majority note that the DOJ letter targeted only majority-non-White districts.

“Any mention of majority White Democrat districts—which DOJ presumably would have also targeted if its aims were partisan rather than racial—was conspicuously absent,” the opinion said.

Texas’ redraw ignited a tit-for-tat with California and other Democratic-leaning states that took steps to add additional blue districts to their maps. Earlier this month, California voters overwhelmingly approved new Congressional lines that could net Democrats up to five more seats in next year’s House elections.

In light of the decision, Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D) confirmed he will run for re-election now that the old maps are back in play. Doggett had announced he’d step down and clear the way for another Congressman, Rep. Greg Casar (D), to take over the Austin-area district after the proposed map added a significant number of likely Republican voters to Casar’s district.

“To borrow from Mark Twain, the reports of my death, politically, are greatly exaggerated,” Doggett said in a statement.

Likewise, Rep. Julie Johnson (D) said she’ll seek re-election after Republicans had tried to seize her Dallas-area district.

“Keeping our existing districts means our communities stay intact — families, neighborhoods, and schools that share real ties, not lines engineered to protect political power,” Johnson said in a statement.

The plaintiffs are represented by Brazil & Dunn, Mark P. Gaber PLLC, Jesse Gaines of Fort Worth, Molly Danahy of Helena, MT., Sonni Waknin of the UCLA Voting Rights Project, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Elias Law Group LLP, Max Renea Hicks of Austin, Dechert LLP, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Law Office of Robert Notzon, the Bledsoe Law Firm PLLC, the NAACP office of the general counsel, and Sommerman, McCaffity, Quesada & Geisler LLP.

The case is LULAC v. Abbott, W.D. Tex., No. 3:21-cv-00259, 11/18/25.