Texas Democrats on Monday prevented — for now — the chamber from continuing with a congressional map that would aggressively favor the Republican Party in the 2026 midterm elections.
Dozens of lawmakers fled to Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts on Sunday, in the hopes that their absence would block the proposed map by denying the Republican-controlled chamber the quorum it needs to conduct business.
Texas Republicans approved a motion on Monday granting authority for civil warrants to be issued for the lawmakers who left the state. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also has threatened these lawmakers, telling them in a Sunday letter that “this truancy ends now.”
Advocates have criticized the new map, unveiled just days before the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, for potentially chipping away at the political power of Texans of color.
For instance, in Democratic U.S. Rep. Al Green’s current district, which includes a portion of the Greater Houston area, the Black voting-age population would drop from 39% to 11%. Similarly, the Black voting-age population of Democratic U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey’s district, based in Forth Worth, would drop from 25%.
Here’s more information about the latest developments in the Lone Star State — and beyond. This story will be updated as developments unfold.
Why did Texas Democrats flee the state?
For months, President Donald Trump has been pushing his allies in Texas to redraw district lines. Doing so could give the Republican Party five additional seats in the U.S. House in next year’s midterm elections.
Historically, midterm elections haven’t been kind to the party of the sitting president. Trump is trying to build on Republicans’ 219-212 majority in the House, where four seats are vacant. It wasn’t until after Trump called Abbott this summer that the Texas governor put redistricting on the agenda for a special legislative session, according to The Texas Tribune.
The 30-day session began on July 21. Its agenda includes 18 items, from national disaster preparation and property taxes to redistricting.
Texas Democrats have slammed Abbott for putting items related to this summer’s deadly flooding on an agenda that they say is filled with partisan priorities. The lawmakers hope to run out the clock on the session by leaving the state, though additional sessions could be called.
Yet the battle over map-drawing is expected to have ramifications across the U.S. And some say that it could possibly trigger a redistricting arms race.
Democratic leaders in a number of other states — including California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York — have vowed to retaliate in kind if Texas Republicans continue with the unusual move to redistrict in the middle of the decade instead of after the next census in 2030.
And according to some legal scholars, the U.S. Supreme Court likely won’t provide a way out of the crisis.
“The court determined in 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering presented a non-justiciable political question, so federal courts couldn’t intervene and hear those cases,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University, told Capital B. “The only avenues for relief would be state courts or redistricting commissions.”
What are politicians saying about the Texas map?
U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas, a vocal Democratic critic of the Trump administration, blasted state Republicans on Sunday, but said that the issue is “bigger than Texas.”
“This isn’t just about the five seats in Texas,” Crockett told MSNBC. “This is about a power grab. It’s about basically setting the tone for what Donald Trump will try to do throughout the country so that he can suppress the voices of Black and brown folk just so that he can stay in power.”
Texas state Rep. Ron Reynolds, one of the Democrats who left the state, echoed some of these thoughts, saying that he and his colleagues won’t “relent to an authoritarian president that wants to steal and racially gerrymander our Black and Brown districts.”
Trump has also pressured state Republican lawmakers in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Ohio to redraw their maps. Some Democratic leaders have vowed to use every tactic at their disposal to prevent any mid-cycle redistricting.
“Everything is on the table,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who has met with the Texas Democrats, said on July 30. “We’ve got to preserve democracy.”
Maryland House Majority Leader David Moon, also a Democrat, went even further.
He told The Associated Press on Aug. 1 that he would introduce a bill permitting mid-cycle redistricting if Texas continues down its current path because “we can’t have one state, especially a very large state, constantly trying to one-up and alter the course of congressional control while the other states sit idly by.”
Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who runs the Democratic Party’s redistricting efforts and has traditionally pushed for a nonpartisan approach, seemed to give the green light — at least for now — to Democrats exploring map-drawing outside the census period.
“We have to understand that the nature of the threat that has been put upon the country through what they’re trying to do in Texas has really increased the danger to our democracy,” he told ABC News on Sunday. “As a result of that, we’ve got to do things that, perhaps in the past, I would not have supported.”
“I think that responsible Democrats in other states have to take into account the threat to our democracy, the need to preserve our democracy, so that we can ultimately try to heal it,” he added. “And I would hope that they will take steps that are, again, as I said, temporary but responsible.”
What does the departure of Texas Democrats reveal?
To many advocates, the redistricting battle illustrates the precarious state of voting rights.
In a recent statement, Texas state Rep. Gene Wu, who’s the chair of the House Democratic Caucus, condemned the proposed map as being “intentionally racist” because it would “steal the voices of millions of Black and Latino Texans, all to execute a corrupt political deal.”
This latest controversy arrives on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, which some legal scholars say is standing on its last leg.
Over the past decade, the Voting Rights Act has been scaled back through various legal challenges. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted a section of the act that required jurisdictions with histories of discrimination against Black voters to secure federal approval before changing its election laws.
“If we don’t know our history, we don’t know nothing,” Khadidah Stone, who was a plaintiff in a major 2023 Supreme Court case, recently told Capital B. “Especially if you aren’t a white man, you need to be putting yourself on the line fighting for voting rights just as much as anybody else.”
What’s the next move for Democrats?
Though many Democratic leaders are exploring retaliatory measures, not all of them can move as quickly as Texas Republicans.
That’s because different states have different procedures for redrawing maps.
In Texas and a number of other Republican-controlled states, state legislatures handle redistricting. This means that in these states the task of redrawing maps is simpler and faster and that the party in power can almost guarantee that its lawmakers will be reelected.
Meanwhile, in many Democratic-controlled states, including California and New York, redistricting is done through an independent commission. This is meant to minimize partisan influence and maximize competitiveness, though reliance on this model also slows down the speed with which maps can be redrawn.
It remains to be seen how Democratic leaders’ countermoves will play out.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has indicated that, if Texas Republicans’ redraw their map mid-cycle, she’s prepared to do the same.
“All’s fair in love and war,” she said at a recent event. “We are following the rules. We do redistricting every 10 years. But if there are other states that are violating the rules and trying to give themselves an advantage, all I say is I’m going to look at it closely with [U.S. House Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries.”
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