Back in August, state Representative Mitch Little, Republican of Lewisville, had an admirably masculine sound bite for CNN\u2019s Brianna Keilar. The TV anchor had asked Little why Texas Republicans were trying to redraw the state\u2019s congressional map in the middle of the decade to deliver the president more seats in the upcoming midterm. \u201cBecause we can,\u201d Little said. \u201cWe have the votes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Little<\/a>, to his credit, and unlike many of his colleagues, didn\u2019t hide the ball. He explained to Keilar that his party wanted a handful of congressional districts it currently couldn\u2019t win. This had a whiff of Thucydides about it\u2014\u201cthe strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must\u201d\u2014and apart from the general preference Panera Bread\u2013frequenting state lawmakers have for a little classical grandeur from time to time, it had the added benefit of making the Texas Legislature look like the tough-guy mover in the equation. This bluster obscured what had actually happened. Texas Republicans had received, and submissively obeyed, marching orders<\/a> from the political arm of the White House to find five more Republican congressional seats, even though at least some of them knew mid-decade redistricting in this political environment was a bad idea for them.<\/p>\n It was hard not to remember the Republican legislative braggadocio of last summer when President Trump spoke to a Virginia radio station on Monday before that state\u2019s redistricting referendum. (Citizens got to vote on it\u2014isn\u2019t that cute?) Virginia was about to approve maps that are designed to give Democrats four seats currently held by Republicans, and Trump offered mewling and uncharacteristically beta complaints about our wonderful Norms and the integrity of the Process. \u201cI don\u2019t know if you know what gerrymandering is, but it\u2019s not good,\u201d he told the host. Not good, he says. Won\u2019t Mitch Little have egg on his face?<\/p>\n When it comes to taking a whole pile of busywork hypothetically aimed at making things better and then producing no substantive forward motion, the Texas Legislature is God\u2019s own machine, perfect and sublime. Not infrequently, months of effort put into making something better will end up making it worse. This is the gang, you may remember, that accidentally legalized dirty, lab-prepared THC products<\/a> while keeping the real thing, God\u2019s green herb, illegal.<\/p>\n The White House probably did not know about the deeply ingrained hopelessness that pervades the Texas Legislature, or it probably would not have ordered state leaders to spearhead the gerrymander charge. It was hoping to encourage red states across the country to follow in Texas\u2019s wake. It was hoping Texans would start a prairie fire, and it asked the state to move first and early\u2014which is significant in part because the president\u2019s approval rating was much healthier-looking than it would be six months down the road.<\/p>\n Texas made sense as the first state to move, because it had famously done power-grab mid-decade redistricting before, in 2003, at the behest of Sugar Land Republican Tom DeLay. That redistricting was deeply shocking to many Americans at the time for its cynicism, and it led Texas Democrats in both the House and Senate to leave the state for a while to try to block it. When Dems returned to the Capitol and the new map passed, the whole thing succeeded in weakening the Democratic Party in Texas, but when it came to affecting the balance of power in the U.S. House, the move was mostly futile. Between 2004 and the end of the decade, the new Texas districts never made the difference in the control of Congress.<\/p>\n This round of mid-decade redistricting, which Texas House Democrats also left the state in response to, appears to be something worse than futile: It is shaping up to have been a top-to-bottom omnishambles for the GOP. Texas did set off a redistricting wave, as intended: Six other states have now redrawn their maps. But the nationwide struggle Texas incited, it turns out, was one that Democrats were much more eager to contest than Republicans.<\/p>\n The five Republican seats that were hypothetically won in Texas were quickly neutered by five Democratic districts carved off in California. A bungled process in Utah actually led to Democrats gaining a district there. Missouri, Ohio, and North Carolina could give Republicans one new seat each. Virginia gave Democrats four. If every gerrymandered seat is won by the party it was designed for, the fight Texas started will result in Trump losing a few seats. Even worse for the GOP, the president\u2019s cratering popularity could mean that the party doesn\u2019t win all or even most of the districts it drew for itself.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s approval rating is currently hovering near Jimmy Carter\u2019s and Richard Nixon\u2019s at their worst. The president\u2019s sinking political fortunes\u2014exacerbated by Epstein and the Strait of Hormuz crisis and worsening economic indicators\u2014were bad when Texas leaders decided to redistrict last June, but they have become more obvious with each passing month. In Texas, the Texas Politics Project has it, Trump went from a plus-fourteen-point net approval rating in February 2025 to minus seven in December. That has encouraged Republican lawmakers like those in Indiana (also furious about Trump\u2019s treatment of Mike Pence) to shy away from their own rounds of follow-up gerrymandering, while Democratic legislatures, able to justify it by pointing to Texas, have leaned in.<\/p>\n The five Texas seats the Legislature was supposed to secure for the president include one each in Houston and Dallas that likely will go to Republicans. The other three, though, are in South Texas. They were drawn with the belief that Trump\u2019s success with the region\u2019s Hispanic voters in 2024 was part of a lasting realignment. There are growing reasons to doubt<\/a>, though, that there was indeed a realignment, and the president\u2019s actions now look a little desperate. Trump pardoned the Democrat incumbent in one district, Henry Cuellar, only to slam him when he failed to switch parties and run as a Republican. It seems increasingly likely that Trump may only pull two or three seats out of the five he asked Governor Abbott to give him.<\/p>\n