Mapping out wins

Back in 2013, Virginia Republicans almost pulled off the feat Texas lawmakers are attempting now: Eliminating Democratic congressional seats by redrawing district lines years ahead of schedule.

State Sen. Dave Marsden, D-Va., remembered how former President Barack Obama’s January inauguration opened a one-day window of opportunity for the Virginia GOP. With a single Democrat out of town for the event, Senate Republicans pushed map changes through the chamber in a 20-19 vote. Republicans looked poised to pick up a handful of extra seats in the state, but those plans fell apart when the Republican speaker of the House refused to take up his party’s designs.

“[Speaker] Bill Howell at the time was under great pressure to agree to what the Senate had done,” Marsden remembered. “He decided he wasn’t going to go down that road.”

Today, that plan—and other efforts to redistrict the state’s congressional lines for political purposes—would be nearly impossible. Marsden and other Virginia lawmakers helped pass reforms in 2020 that have implemented new guardrails against gerrymandering in Virginia. But for much of the country, state constitutions remain silent on what’s allowed and what’s not when it comes to redistricting.

To President Donald Trump, that’s a competitive advantage.

Amid a contentious road to the 2026 midterms, Trump has called on Republican-controlled legislatures to draw lines through as many Democratic districts as they can.

“I won Texas. I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, and we are entitled to five more seats,” Trump told CNBC on Tuesday.

Normally, state legislatures redraw their congressional lines once every 10 years, adjusting their representation as needed from the results of the decennial census.

But in Texas, where no restrictions exist against redistricting more often, the legislature has proposed a map nearly five years ahead of schedule that would award Republicans an additional five seats while preserving the state’s current total of 38 districts.

Even just one more seat in Congress could meaningfully change the balance of power in the House of Representatives, where Republicans hold a three-seat majority. Texas Democrats have no legal recourse to stop the process but have fled the state to rob the legislature of a quorum. It’s unclear whether Republicans can use the FBI or other law enforcement agencies to force Democrats to return to the state.

Paul Herrnson, a professor of political science at the University of Connecticut who studies campaigns and elections, said the Texas conflict carries the same element all gerrymandering efforts have in common.

“Partisan advantage,” Herrnson said.

Gerrymandering is as old as the country itself. But prior to the 1960s, the practice was used more for segregation. Southern states in particular used gerrymandering to weaken the black vote.

“The two major practices were called ‘cracking,’ where you took a black community and divided it across so many congressional districts it wasn’t going to get any representation—or ‘packing’ where you put all of the black voters into one district,” Herrnson explained.

The Supreme Court would eventually rule in its 1993 Shaw v. Reno decision that gerrymandering along racial lines violated the equal protection clause. But gerrymandering for other political reasons continued—and, legally speaking, grew stronger.

Alex Keena, associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, believes a turning point came in 2004 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Vieth v. Jubelirer.

“The court said, ‘Well, maybe gerrymandering isn’t something that the court can tackle,’” Keena explained.

In that case, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion argued that the courts could not act as a backstop against gerrymandering because the Constitution provided no enforceable limit on the political considerations states can make when drawing their congressional maps.

“As Chief Justice Marshall proclaimed two centuries ago, ‘It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.’ Sometimes, however, the law is that the judicial department has no business entertaining the claim of unlawfulness,” Scalia wrote.

In Texas, the legislature is only required to spread the state’s population roughly evenly between the districts.

“A lot of state constitutions don’t really set clear boundaries for gerrymandering because they simply say there shall be free and fair elections or something like that,” Keena said. “[Gerrymandering ] has just become a new normal part of how politics is played.”

But Herrnson, the professor from the University of Connecticut, believes Texas’ decision to redistrict in the middle of the 10-year cycle is new. If successful, it could invite more efforts like it.

“There will be a lot of apologists who will say, ‘Oh no, this is just politics as usual. But that’s not true,” Herrnson said.

The absence of more detailed federal restrictions on gerrymandering could mean the founders didn’t anticipate the practice to be as powerful as it is today. Marsden, the Virginia lawmaker, pointed out that the framers clearly gave the states wide-ranging powers to decide their own elections. The Constitution says only that elections are left up to the states and sets timetables for when they have to take place.

Keena, the professor from Virginia Commonwealth University, believes the ongoing redistricting effort in Texas could be a double-edged sword. By spreading Republican support a little too thin, he said, the GOP could open itself up to narrower margins in elections and potentially a pendulum swing in the balance of power.

“At a certain level, Republicans who understand how this works are actually really nervous to do this,” Keena said. “It’s a very delicate balancing act of trying to rig each district to have a perfect level of Republicans and Democrats so that Republicans win nearly all the seats. All it takes is a few points in the other direction and Democrats [can] end up raking in huge victories.”

For now, Texas remains unable to continue with its plan until it can recover a quorum.

It’s unclear whether Trump’s pressure to find more Republican seats will be limited to Texas. Missouri, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida are reportedly also exploring similar plans.