AUSTIN (Nexstar) — Texas House lawmakers will discuss a new proposed congressional map that aims to give Republicans an advantage to pick up five seats in the 2026 midterms.
The map was proposed by State Rep. Todd Hunter, R – Corpus Christi, who will lay out the bill in the committee hearing Friday morning at 10 am. The meeting agenda says the first 90 minutes of the hearing will be reserved for the bill layout, an opportunity for lawmakers to ask questions about the proposed map.
Following the bill layout, the committee will hear public testimony that will be capped at a maximum of ten hours. People can only testify in person at the Capitol and will only have two minutes to speak.
How we got here
Rumors about redistricting started in June when reports came out that the White House wanted the Lone Star state to redraw its congressional maps to help Republicans pick up more seats ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Gov. Greg Abbott placed redistricting on the special session call “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.” A letter from the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division claimed four of Texas’s congressional districts were racially gerrymandered.
However, President Donald Trump told reporters in early July that the redistricting effort was to pick up five seats.
The House select committee on redistricting held three public hearings in July to allow people to testify on what they think about redrawing the congressional maps. Those meetings were held in Austin, Houston, and Arlington. A majority of the testimony in those meetings was critical of the redistricting effort.
Hunter filed his proposed map early this week under House Bill 4. You can zoom in on the map below to see which district you would fall under the proposed plan:
The proposal moves some Democratic incumbents out of their current districts and places them in another district, either in competition with a Republican member or in competition with someone in their own party. However, the U.S. Constitution said that a candidate for Congress must live in that state, but not necessarily in the district they are running for.
The proposed map appears to target congressional members in the state’s largest cities. Brian Smith, a political professor at St. Edward’s University, explains the map makers are “taking democratic districts that are already safe and making them even safer, which then may make the neighboring Republican districts more Republican.”
The map below shows you how the districts have been changed in some of the biggest cities in Texas:
What are they saying?
National and Texas Democrats have been outspoken in their frustration with a mid-decade redistricting. This process is usually done at the beginning of each decade when new Census data is available. Based on population trends, states can either gain or lose seats in Congress.
“I think Trump has taken a hatchet to Austin and to really the entire state, in order to preserve his one-man rule,” U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D – Austin, said of the proposed map. In the proposal, his district was combined with parts of Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Casar’s district. Doggett said he plans to run again in 2026.
Texas House Democrats have been traveling to different Democratic states — Illinois, California, and New Mexico — to speak with their governors about the process and to “continue the Caucus’ national effort to build a firewall against the corrupt, racially-motivated redistricting scheme being forced on Texans by Donald Trump via Greg Abbott,” according to a press release.
Texas House Republicans have remained mostly silent on the whole process. State Rep. Nate Schatzline, R – Fort Worth, did post on his X account Wednesday a picture of the proposed map with the caption, “Looks like 5 seats flipped RED! Let’s GET IT DONE!”
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