Democrats Are Struggling to Block Trump’s Texas Power Grab 

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Voting Wrongs

Texas Democrats are fighting an uphill battle to block the latest Republican-led effort to gerrymander the Lone Star state for electoral advantage, and Black and Latino voters are once again most likely to be impacted. This time around, President Donald Trump is publicly pressuring lawmakers in Texas and beyond to preemptively meddle in the midterm elections to preserve the GOP majority in the House of Representatives, saving him from becoming a lame duck as his approval ratings sink and Democrats attempt to ride in on a wave of voter backlash.

Both major parties are guilty of drawing congressional districts that prioritize political wins over fair representation, but democracy experts say the redistricting proposal unveiled in Texas this week is a dangerous escalation. A Republican majority is rushing to slice up congressional districts that were already redrawn in 2021 to maximize GOP power — creating a gerrymander of a gerrymander. Democrats are fighting back, but the battle may ultimately be decided by the courts and frustrated voters.

Civil rights groups in Texas are busy challenging current electoral maps in court for diluting the electoral power of Black and Brown voters. Roman Palomares, the national president of LULAC, a nonpartisan Latino rights group fighting intense voter suppression in Texas, said the latest redistricting push is “a hijacking of democracy in plain sight.”

“It entrenches Republican power by rewriting the rules of the game midstream,” Palomares said in a statement this week. “When you can’t win fairly, you cheat, and that is exactly what this is.”

Trump has demanded Texas Republicans draw a new congressional map. “Just a very simple redrawing, we pick up five seats,” the president told reporters in July. Gov. Greg Abbott recently called lawmakers back to Austin for a special legislative session to make it happen. A response to the deadly floods that rocked Texas Hill Country last month is also on the agenda, but Democrats say the GOP is focused instead on buoying Trump with the redistricting plan. Lawmakers released the proposed electoral map on July 30, five years earlier than districts would normally be redrawn with fresh census data.

Labor unions and nonpartisan civil rights groups quickly condemned the map as a blatantly partisan attack on Latino-majority districts. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat whose heavily Latino district in San Antonio would be carved up to make the district more favorable to Republicans, called the map an “illegal power grab” rooted in racism.

“Black and Brown communities will suffer the most; they’re getting torn up across the state,” Cuellar told reporters on Thursday. “In the last few decades, the overwhelming majority of growth in Texas has come from Latino and African American communities, and yet the number of seats that have been drawn to serve those communities has stayed flat or shrunk.”

Republicans claim the new map creates more Latino-majority districts, but the proposed map offers only the illusion of better representation, according to LULAC. The group said a close examination reveals that the new map dilutes voter power or potential turnout by carving up Latino communities where voters share common needs and political interests, or packing voters into districts that already lean heavily toward one party or the other. In Central Texas, the proposed map would eliminate the congressional district held by Rep. Greg Casar, a move LULAC said is targeting a “champion of civil rights.”

“The people of Texas, especially its Latino voters, deserve better than to be carved up and cast aside to serve the president’s agenda,” Palomares said. Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett also spoke out, saying that the new lines would mean she lived outside the district she currently represents.

Democratic state lawmakers are considering leaving the state in order to prevent the legislature from reaching a quorum and passing the proposed map, a tactic they used to delay approval of a congressional map during a dramatic redistricting fight in 2003. Democrats would have to camp out in another state to avoid being arrested and dragged back by state police while racking up a daily $500 fine. Republicans put the fees in place after another Democratic decampment from the state in 2021.

Texas voters are no strangers to redistricting fights, which have escalated over the decades since Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in an attempt to curb the Jim Crow-era suppression of Black voters. Republicans are now diving deep into legally dubious arguments in the latest showdown in hopes of securing a favorable map for Trump ahead of the midterms.

Dan Vicuña, director of redistricting and representation at Common Cause, a nonpartisan group supporting citizen-led initiatives against gerrymandering, spoke out against the “sloppy and transparent” July 7 letter that Trump’s Justice Department sent to GOP leadership in Texas. The letter alleges that the current congressional map was drawn with “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders,” which contradicts court testimony from Republicans who said the map is “blind to race.”

That letter kicked off the redistricting push to redraw the state’s “gerrymandered congressional map and somehow gerrymander it even more for Republicans, because Trump is afraid of how the midterms will go for his party,” Vicuña stated. Citing a controversial federal court ruling against a coalition of Black and Latino voters in Galveston, the letter gave Abbott a shallow pretext to put redistricting next to disaster relief on the special agenda, Vicuña said.

“Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Justice Department, sent the governor and attorney general of Texas a letter making the legally dubious argument claiming that a congressional map deemed by civil racial rights experts to be racially discriminatory was in fact too friendly to people of color,” Vicuña told reporters this week.

Next week will mark the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 becoming law, a major achievement of the civil rights movement. Kathleen Thompson, executive director of the Progress Texas Institute, said Republicans in Texas have fought to overturn the landmark civil rights law ever since it was implemented.

“Now, instead of working on emergency items like flash flood mitigation and warning systems, Texas Republicans are focused on stealing your voting power,” Thompson said in a statement this week. “Sixty years later, white guys are still calling each other and saying how Brown and Black citizens can vote.”