AUSTIN, Texas (AP) \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
That makes him a tempting target for Republicans, who are poised to redraw<\/a> the state\u2019s congressional maps this coming week and devise five new winnable seats for the GOP that would help the party avoid losing House control<\/a> in the 2026 elections. Adjusting the lines of Gonzalez\u2019s district to bring in a few thousand more Republican voters, while shifting some Democratic ones out, could flip his seat.<\/p>\n Gonzalez said he is not worried. Those Democratic voters will have to end up in one of the Republican districts that flank Gonzalez\u2019s current one, making those districts more competitive \u2014 possibly enough so it could flip the seats to Democrats.<\/p>\n \u201cGet ready for some pickup opportunities,\u201d Gonzalez said, adding that his party is already recruiting challengers to Republicans whose districts they expect to be destabilized by the process. \u201cWe\u2019re talking to some veterans, we\u2019re talking to some former law enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Gonzalez\u2019s district \u2014 and what happens to the neighboring GOP-held ones \u2014 is at the crux of President Donald Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s push comes as there are numerous political danger signs for his presidency, both in the recent turmoil over his administration\u2019s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein<\/a> case and in new polling. Surveys from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research<\/a> show most U.S. adults think his policies have not helped them<\/a> and that his tax cut and spending bill will help the wealthy<\/a>.<\/p>\n Republicans risk putting their own seats in jeopardy<\/p>\n The fear of accidentally creating unsafe seats is one reason Texas Republicans drew their lines cautiously in 2021, when the constitutionally mandated redistricting process<\/a> kicked off in all 50 states. Mapmakers \u2014 in most states, it\u2019s the party that controls the legislature \u2014 must adjust congressional and state legislative lines after every 10-year census to ensure that districts have about the same number of residents.<\/p>\n That is a golden opportunity for one party to rig the map against the other, a tactic known as gerrymandering<\/a>. But there is a term, too, for so aggressively redrawing a map that it puts that party\u2019s own seats at risk: a \u201cdummymander.\u201d<\/p>\n The Texas GOP knows the risk. In the 2010s, the Republican-controlled Legislature drew political lines that helped pad the GOP\u2019s House majority. That lasted until 2018, when a backlash against Trump<\/a> in his first term led Democrats to flip two seats in Texas that Republicans had thought safe.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Still, plenty of Republicans believe their Texas counterparts can safely go on offense.<\/p>\n \u201cSmart map-drawing can yield pickup opportunities while not putting our incumbents in jeopardy,\u201d said Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, which helps coordinate mapmaking for the party nationally..<\/p>\n Democrats contemplate a walkout<\/p>\n Republican Gov. Greg Abbott<\/a> called a special session of the Legislature, which starts Monday, to comply with Trump\u2019s request to redraw the congressional maps and to address the flooding in Texas Hill Country<\/a> that killed at least 135 people this month.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> posted that any Democrats who did that should be arrested.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. Despite the new penalties, state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, who led the walkout in 2021, left open the possibility of another.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think anybody should underestimate the will of Texas Democrats,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Texas is not the only Republican state engaged in mid-decade redistricting. After staving off a ballot measure<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n GOP sees momentum after 2024 presidential election<\/p>\n Democrats have fewer options. More of the states the party controls do not allow elected partisans<\/a> to draw maps and entrust independent commissions to draw fair lines.<\/p>\n Some party leaders, such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom, are maneuvering to try to find ways around their commissions<\/a> to counter Texas, but they have few options.<\/p>\n The few Democrat-controlled states that do allow elected officials to draw the lines, such as Illinois<\/a>, have already seen Democrats max out their advantages.<\/p>\n Trump and his allies have been rallying Texas Republicans to ignore whatever fears they may and to go big.<\/p>\n On Tuesday, the president posted on his social media site a reminder of his record in the state last November: \u201cWon 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 \u2018going Blue,\u2019 but it is just another Democrat LIE.\u201d<\/p>\n Texas has long been eyed<\/a> as a state trending Democratic because of its growing nonwhite population. But those communities swung right<\/a> last year and helped Trump expand his margin to 14 percentage points, a significant improvement on his 6-point win in 2020.<\/p>\n Michael Li, a Texas native and longtime watcher of the state at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, said there\u2019s no way to know whether that trend will continue in next year\u2019s elections or whether the state will return to its blue-trending ways.<\/p>\n \u201cAnyone 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,\u201d Li said.<\/p>\n Aggressive redistricting also carries legal risks<\/p>\n 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\u2019s southern border. The heavily Hispanic region, where many Border Patrol officers live, has rallied around<\/a> Trump\u2019s tough-on-immigration, populist message.<\/p>\n As a result, Gonzalez and the area\u2019s other Democratic congressman, Henry Cuellar<\/a>, have seen their reelection campaigns get steadily tighter. They are widely speculated to be the two top targets of the new map.<\/p>\n The GOP is expected to look to the state\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n