For months, Democrats have been urging their party to play more hardball in fighting back against President Donald Trump’s power grabs.
Texas Democrats have now taken that cue in a big way. Dozens of their state legislators have left the state to try and prevent Republicans from enacting a brazen new gerrymander of the state’s congressional map. The GOP’s attempted mid-decade redistricting, which is historically rare, could help it flip five seats in the 2026 midterms and make it harder for Democrats to win the House.
The walkout sets up a potentially protracted showdown and comes amid growing signs of a gerrymandering arms race.
So how might this walkout tactic play?
On a practical level, walkouts like this, which we’ve seen before in states like Oregon, Minnesota, Indiana and, yes, Texas, have a mixed record.
The idea is that the minority deprives the chamber of a “quorum” (i.e. a required number of members present) to conduct business.
But walkouts can be difficult to sustain, both because they can involve remaining outside the state for weeks or months, and because there are sometimes tools to compel lawmakers to return. (Texas Republicans are currently making a series of threats of various levels of seriousness, including potential arrests of the members who walked out, although that would require the cooperation of local authorities in the blue states the Democrats have fled to.)
Sometimes these walkouts have fizzled as members quickly returned. Sometimes these efforts have made a symbolic statement even as they ultimately failed, as was the case with a 2003 Texas Democratic walkout over another GOP mid-decade redistricting effort. Sometimes they’ve gotten modest concessions, as with a 2021 Texas Democratic walkout over voting rights restrictions. And sometimes they’ve nabbed pretty significant concessions, as in recent walkouts in Minnesota and Oregon.
For Texas Democrats today, the aim is apparently to prevent the GOP from passing the new map by the early December deadline required to use it in the 2026 midterms.
But that’s a long time to hold strong. Ballotpedia’s summary of historical state legislative walkouts includes just one that lasted more than 43 days – a six-month walkout in Rhode Island in 1924.
Whether Democrats can hold strong for that long – or win any concessions – will depend a lot on how this plays on a political level.
In other words: Will voters view this as lawmakers abdicating their jobs? Or will they view this as a righteous effort to stop a pretty evident political power grab?
It’s very difficult to say. But history and the little polling that exists of past walkouts provide some clues.
Polls of Oregon Republicans’ many recent walkouts suggest that voters taken a pretty dim view of them.
Also, those Oregon GOP walkouts became so common that Democrats in 2022 pushed for a constitutional amendment to disqualify any lawmaker with 10 unexcused absences from reelection – a referendum of sorts on the walkouts. More than two-thirds of Oregonians voted for the amendment.
So would that dim view translate to Texas Democrats’ walkout?
It’s understandable that a blue state like Oregon would dislike Republicans walking out, just like it would be understandable for a red state like Texas to dislike Democrats walking out.
But the subject matter also matters. The Oregon walkouts have been more frequent than in any other state, and they stemmed from issues like the GOP’s opposition to Covid-19 restrictions (2021) and abortion rights (2023) – things that weren’t exactly hugely unpopular at the time. In the case of abortion rights, the GOP was very much on the wrong side of public opinion.
Gerrymandering is another story. It’s something that Americans of all stripes seem to regard as being a very bad thing. You could make a strong argument that voters are probably on Democrats’ side — against a more political gerrymander in Texas and doing so in the middle of the decade — at least when it comes to the underlying policy at stake.
A 2023 AP-NORC poll showed 65% of Americans said states drawing legislative districts to favor one party was a “major problem” – including 78% of Democrats and 56% of Republicans.
An SSRS poll the same year showed 67% of Americans said gerrymandering was a “very serious” problem. Again, Democrats were much more likely to say that (82%), but Republicans (47%) were also quite concerned.
Given those numbers, it might seem that a walkout could focus people’s attention on Texas Republicans’ gambit in a way that might make them look pretty bad.
Yes, both parties gerrymander, but Republicans right now are doing it in a way that makes it much more politically transparent. They don’t need to redraw the lines in the middle of the decade, and it’s very rare for states to do that unless they’re forced to by the courts. But Texas Republicans are doing it anyway, with the express purpose of getting rid of Democrats and helping Trump keep the House.
At the same time, there’s a real question about just how much people truly care about this.
They might dislike gerrymandering in principle, but think it’s just what politicians do. Perhaps brutally gerrymandered districts that Democrats have drawn in other states will convince people that all’s fair. And if redrawn maps help the side voters like – in Texas’s case, that’s mostly the Republican/Trump side – that’s not a difficult conclusion to draw.
There’s some evidence that’s how this could shake out.
Pew Research Center data in 2022, for example, showed relatively few Americans had tuned into their own states’ redistricting efforts. But among those who did offer views, voters were much more likely to say they were “satisfied” when it was their side doing the drawing.
Republican-leaning voters, especially, were prone to thinking it was okay when their side did it. GOP-leaning voters who lived in states that were controlled by Democrats disliked the redistricting process by 16 points. But those who lived in Republican-controlled states approved of it by 12 points (this despite most of those states being obviously gerrymandered).
Ultimately, it’s on Democrats to not just walk out, but to press their case on why this Texas GOP effort is so extraordinary. Getting voters to internalize that could prove difficult. And if they can’t, perhaps you’ll start to see lawmakers filter back into town.
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