Friends:
What’s unfolding in Texas, as reported by Nicholas Riccardi and Nadia Lathan (2025) for AP News, is yet another brazen power grab—this time through mid-decade redistricting at the urging of Donald Trump as contained in a directive from the Department of Justice that then showed up in Governor Abbott's special called legislative session (Abbott, 2025).
With a special legislative session underway for a short total of 30 days, Texas Republicans are preparing to redraw congressional maps in a high-stakes maneuver to secure five additional GOP seats. Districts like that of Rep. Vicente Gonzalez in the Rio Grande Valley are in the crosshairs. But let’s be clear: this is not about fair representation—it’s about gerrymandering political lines to entrench power.
The risks, as Riccardi and Lathan highlight, are both political and legal. In seeking to scatter Democratic voters and weaken the voting strength of communities of color, Texas Republicans are not only courting so-called “dummymanders,” but also opening themselves to renewed legal challenges under the Voting Rights Act. We’ve seen these tactics before—pack, crack, divide, and conquer. But history reminds us that such strategies, while harmful, can also ignite grassroots resistance—an ever-present source of hope, no doubt.
That said, based on a long record of gerrymandering in our state, the greatest risk will be borne by our Black and Brown communities who pay taxes like everybody else, but who have not and will not be able to elect the candidate of their choice. After all, redistricting is about incumbents picking their voters rather than voters picking their candidates for office. This was expressed throughout the entire hearing on redistricting that I participated in last Thursday (Valenzuela, 2025).
I testified before this politically motivated redistricting committee, calling out the entire process as a weapon of mass distraction and that their focus should be on the ecological and infrastructure crises before us, "exclusively," I said.
I do like what I'm seeing, including a well-attended, last-minute rally yesterday evening at the Delco Center where an excited audience, myself included, got to hear powerful presentations by Rep. Gina Hinojosa, Rep. James Talarico, Congressman Gregory Casar, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, Congressman Joaquin Castro, and Beto O'Rourke. We are not lacking in very talented Democratic Party leadership in Texas. Quite the opposite.
What we do need is folks to educate themselves quickly on what redistricting consists of and how the outcome is so vital to our democracy. What will ultimately resolve all of this is for folks to get out and vote these officials out of office. It's crazy to see the lengths they'll go to please Donald Trump—like lemmings going over a cliff. I'll continue posting on this as much as I can. You can view the total hearing at Valenzuela (2025).
Texas Democrats, once again, are contemplating a walkout—echoing the defiant stand they took in 2021. The stakes could not be higher—not just for the 2026 midterms, but for the very integrity of democracy both in Texas and the nation. The future of this state cannot, and must not, be redrawn in secret, behind closed doors.
–Angela Valenzuela
References
Abbott, G. (2025, July 9). Governor Abbott announces special session agenda [Press release]. Office of the Governor of Texas. https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-announces-special-session-agenda-Riccardi, N., & Lathan, N. (2025, July 21). Texas Republicans aim to redraw House districts at Trump’s urging, but there’s a risk. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/texas-redistricting-trump-gonzalez-democrats-walkout-2025
Valenzuela, A. (2025, July). Our line in the sand: A Texas rebellion against sin vergüenza politics [Blog post]. Texas Ed Equity. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2025/07/our-line-in-sand-texas-rebellion.html
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat who represents a slice of the Rio Grande Valley along the border with Mexico, won his last congressional election by just over 5,000 votes.
That makes him a tempting target for Republicans, who are poised to redraw the state’s congressional maps this coming week and devise five new winnable seats for the GOP that would help the party avoid losing House control in the 2026 elections. Adjusting the lines of Gonzalez’s district to bring in a few thousand more Republican voters, while shifting some Democratic ones out, could flip his seat.
Gonzalez said he is not worried. Those Democratic voters will have to end up in one of the Republican districts that flank Gonzalez’s current one, making those districts more competitive — possibly enough so it could flip the seats to Democrats.
“Get ready for some pickup opportunities,” Gonzalez said, adding that his party is already recruiting challengers to Republicans whose districts they expect to be destabilized by the process. “We’re talking to some veterans, we’re talking to some former law enforcement.”
Texas has 38 seats in the House. Republicans now hold 25 and Democrats 12, with one seat vacant after Democrat Sylvester Turner, a former Houston mayor, died in March.
Gonzalez’s district — and what happens to the neighboring GOP-held ones — is at the crux of President Donald Trump’s high-risk, high-reward push to get Texas Republicans to redraw their political map. Trump is seeking to avoid the traditional midterm letdown that most incumbent presidents endure and hold onto the House, which the GOP narrowly controls.
Trump’s push comes as there are numerous political danger signs for his presidency, both in the recent turmoil over his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case and in new polling. Surveys from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research show most U.S. adults think his policies have not helped them and that his tax cut and spending bill will help the wealthy.
Republicans risk putting their own seats in jeopardy
The fear of accidentally creating unsafe seats is one reason Texas Republicans drew their lines cautiously in 2021, when the constitutionally mandated redistricting process kicked off in all 50 states. Mapmakers — in most states, it’s the party that controls the legislature — must adjust congressional and state legislative lines after every 10-year census to ensure that districts have about the same number of residents.
That is a golden opportunity for one party to rig the map against the other, a tactic known as gerrymandering. But there is a term, too, for so aggressively redrawing a map that it puts that party’s own seats at risk: a “dummymander.”
The Texas GOP knows the risk. In the 2010s, the Republican-controlled Legislature drew political lines that helped pad the GOP’s House majority. That lasted until 2018, when a backlash against Trump in his first term led Democrats to flip two seats in Texas that Republicans had thought safe.
In 2021, with Republicans still comfortably in charge of the Texas Statehouse, the party was cautious, opting for a map that mainly shored up their incumbents rather than targeted Democrats.
Still, plenty of Republicans believe their Texas counterparts can safely go on offense.
“Smart map-drawing can yield pickup opportunities while not putting our incumbents in jeopardy,” said Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, which helps coordinate mapmaking for the party nationally..
Democrats contemplate a walkout
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session of the Legislature, which starts Monday, to comply with Trump’s request to redraw the congressional maps and to address the flooding in Texas Hill Country that killed at least 135 people this month.
Democratic state lawmakers are talking about staying away from the Capitol to deny the Legislature the minimum number needed to convene. Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton posted that any Democrats who did that should be arrested.
Lawmakers can be fined up to $500 a day for breaking a quorum after the House changed its rules when Democrats initiated a walkout in 2021. Despite the new penalties, state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, who led the walkout in 2021, left open the possibility of another.
“I don’t think anybody should underestimate the will of Texas Democrats,” he said.
Texas is not the only Republican state engaged in mid-decade redistricting. After staving off a ballot measure to expand the power of a mapmaking commission last election, Ohio Republicans hope to redraw their congressional map from a 10-5 one favoring the GOP to one as lopsided as 13-2, in a state Trump won last year with 55% of the vote.
GOP sees momentum after 2024 presidential election
Some Democratic leaders have suggested that states where their party is in control should counter the expected redraw in Texas. “We have to be absolutely ruthless about getting back in power,” former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke said Sunday on CNN.
But Democrats have fewer options. More of the states the party controls do not allow elected partisans to draw maps and entrust independent commissions to draw fair lines.
Among them is California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom has floated the long shot idea of working around the state’s commission.
The few Democratic-controlled states that do allow elected officials to draw the lines, such as Illinois, have already seen Democrats max out their advantages.
Trump and his allies have been rallying Texas Republicans to ignore whatever fears they may have and to go big.
On Tuesday, the president posted on his social media site a reminder of his record in the state last November: “Won by one and a half million Votes, and almost 14%. Also, won all of the Border Counties along Mexico, something which has never happened before. I keep hearing about Texas ‘going Blue,’ but it is just another Democrat LIE.”
Texas has long been eyed as a state trending Democratic because of its growing nonwhite population. But those communities swung right last year and helped Trump expand his margin to 14 percentage points, a significant improvement on his 6-point win in 2020.
Michael Li, a Texas native and longtime watcher of the state at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, said there’s no way to know whether that trend will continue in next year’s elections or whether the state will return to its blue-trending ways.
“Anyone who can tell you what the politics of Texas looks like for the balance of the decade has a better crystal ball than I do,” Li said.
Aggressive redistricting also carries legal risks
One region of the state where Republican gains have been steady is the Rio Grande Valley, which runs from the Gulf of Mexico along much of the state’s southern border. The heavily Hispanic region, where many Border Patrol officers live, has rallied around Trump’s tough-on-immigration, populist message.
As a result, Gonzalez and the area’s other Democratic congressman, Henry Cuellar, have seen their reelection campaigns get steadily tighter. They are widely speculated to be the two top targets of the new map.
The GOP is expected to look to the state’s three biggest cities to find its other Democratic targets. If mapmakers scatter Democratic voters from districts in the Houston, Dallas and Austin areas, they could get to five additional seats.
But in doing so, Republicans face a legal risk on top of their electoral one: that they break up districts required by the Voting Rights Act to have a critical amount of certain minority groups. The goal of the federal law is to enable those communities to elect representatives of their choosing.
The Texas GOP already is facing a lawsuit from civil rights groups alleging its initial 2021 map did this. If this year’s redistricting is too aggressive, it could trigger a second complaint.
“It’s politically and legally risky,” Li said of the redistricting strategy. “It’s throwing caution to the winds.”
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Riccardi reported from Denver.
