There has been an update to this story. It is posted here.
Gabby Birenbaum, The Texas Tribune
In August, when the Texas Legislature passed a new congressional map intended to yield five additional seats for the GOP, a mass of Republicans stepped forward to run in the newly gerrymandered districts. Meanwhile, several Democratic incumbents were pushed into nearby districts already occupied by another Democrat, forcing them to contemplate primaries or retirement.
Less than three months later, in the wake of a federal injunction striking down the map, it’s gleeful Democrats who are now declaring for office, while Republican candidates have to hope the U.S. Supreme Court takes their side and reverses the order.
“Oohwee, Trump’s about to be so mad,” said a giddy Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas, in a video posted to X.
The ruling has set off a domino effect for politicians, with Democrats who had previously announced retirement now planning to run for their current districts under the lines set in 2021. Republican candidates — especially those in districts that were completely redrawn — are now at the mercy of the Supreme Court, after Attorney General Ken Paxton said he would appeal Tuesday’s decision.
Many GOP candidates have already filed for election, raised money and begun campaigning under the new lines, but those districts, under the ruling, would now revert to ones that favor Democrats.
Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth, said the situation reminded him of his entry into Congress in the 2012 election cycle, when a panel of federal judges similarly rejected the Texas Legislature’s map drawn in 2011. Veasey had intentionally refused to comment on the prospect of being forced into a primary with one of his Democratic colleagues, or otherwise commit to a plan under the new maps, and he encouraged his colleagues to do the same.
“I always thought that their plans to redraw this map were so over the top, so racist, so discriminatory, that I’m really not surprised,” Veasey said. “I’ve been telling everyone in the delegation, ‘Hey guys, stay calm. This feels exactly like 2011 to me.’”
Veasey said his attorneys “told us that they felt we had a really good case, and they were right.”
Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican from Austin who is retiring, said he was involved in negotiating the 2021 map — which remains under litigation — and believed that that version would prevail in the courts. He did not predict what might happen to the 2025 map, which was pursued by Trump and his political team and whose midterm fortunes may rely on the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“It's all going to come down to the Voting Rights Act, and whether the White House redrawing of the districts violates the Voting Rights Act,” he said. “Beyond that, I really don't want to speculate.”
Houston-area districts
The court ruling, if upheld, will restore the four seats Democrats currently hold in Harris County, rather than reducing them to three, which would be a significant relief to whoever wins the special election runoff for Texas’ 18th Congressional District.
Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee and former Houston City Council member Amanda Edwards are competing in a Jan. 31 runoff to decide who will serve out the final months of Rep. Sylvester Turner’s term, after the Houston Democrat died in office earlier this year. The winner would have faced the unenviable prospect of running against longtime Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, in a primary. Green, whose district was fully dismantled, has already filed to run in the new 18th Congressional District, which overlapped with much of his current seat — the 9th Congressional District — and included his home residence.
In an interview, Green said the federal panel made the right decision, and that he hoped the Supreme Court would as well. He said he planned to run in 2026 wherever his house is — District 9 if the ruling is upheld, District 18 if it is struck down.
“I will run from the place where my home is,” Green said. “I've always held that position.”
Texas legislators redrew the 9th Congressional District “so radically” that less than three percent of the district’s previous voters remain, U.S. Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote in the court’s ruling. The new map accomplished two goals, Brown said: eliminating a coalition district, as the Department of Justice had ordered, and adding Hispanic-majority districts, as Abbott had directed, in creating a district that is 50.3% Hispanic.
To do so, the map-drawers took some of the Black residents previously in the 9th Congressional District and moved them into the 18th District, which became 50.5% Black. These “bare majority” districts stood out as a red flag to the court, a sign that lawmakers were overly attuned to race in drawing these new districts.
“Our interpretation — that DOJ commanded Texas to meet a 50% racial target — is consistent with the map the Legislature ultimately passed,” Brown wrote.
The Legislature also redrew the 29th Congressional District, which was flagged as a coalition district in a DOJ letter that formed the initial basis of Texas’ decision to redistrict. But as Brown noted, it wasn’t actually a coalition district, but rather a majority Hispanic district, “as DOJ realizes halfway through the letter.” Still, the Legislature turned it into a coalition district — where Black and Hispanic voters combine to form a majority — by “radically reconfiguring” the district’s boundaries to remove Latino voters.
The restoration of the 2021 map would be a boon to Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston. Under the 2025 map, she faced a primary challenge from former state Rep. Jarvis Johnson, who is Black, in a district where Black voters were likely to outnumber Latino voters in a Democratic primary.
In an interview with Houston Public Media, Garcia said she was “elated” about the ruling and “hopeful” that the Supreme Court would agree with the lower court.
"I think that if there is an appeal, hopefully the Supreme Court won't take it,” she said. “But if they do, they must act on it fairly quick. Courts, generally speaking, don't like holding up elections.”
The ruling leaves Republican candidates without a viable path for District 9, which had been redrawn to include conservative Liberty County and moved from a district that voted for Kamala Harris by 44 percentage points to one that would have supported Trump by 20 points.
State Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park, a top candidate for the redrawn District 9, said in a statement that his campaign was moving “full steam ahead.”
“We are running under the lines lawfully passed by the Big Beautiful map and the courts will not thwart the will of Texas voters and their representatives,” Cain said in a statement. “We are confident this temporary court obstruction will be swiftly overcome.”
Dallas-Fort Worth districts
North Texas’ three Democratic representatives — Crockett, Veasey and Rep. Julie Johnson — have been careful to publicly avoid committing to running in any one district or primarying one another until a ruling on the map came out.
Veasey said that strategy was predicated on his belief the courts would rule against the map. He said he feels optimistic that the Supreme Court will uphold Tuesday’s ruling by declining to take the case or allowing the lower court’s decision to move forward.
If the injunction is upheld, Veasey said he plans to run for reelection to the 33rd Congressional District. Johnson said in an interview that she plans to run in Congressional District 32, her current district, which was overhauled by Republicans to be unwinnable for a Democrat, with new lines that stretched into East Texas.
A smiling Johnson said she too felt positively about Democrats’ odds at the Supreme Court given recent map rulings in other states, along with the reality of the electoral timeline.
“We're anticipating that this ruling will hold,” Johnson said. “Our filing deadline ends Dec. 8. They did not adjust that. We have just a few more days. So I think that this ruling will stand for this election cycle.”
Crockett, meanwhile, has been publicly contemplating a Senate bid. In her video on social media, without explicitly discussing the Senate, she said her thinking had been influenced by redistricting.
“Serving my current District 30 is where I love to be, to be perfectly honest,” Crockett said. “And other discussions came up as soon as it looked like they were going to decimate District 30. I still have some evaluations to make.”
Central Texas districts
Austin Reps. Greg Casar and Lloyd Doggett engaged in a messy shadow primary over the summer when their two heavily Democratic districts were consolidated into one. Doggett publicly called for Casar to run in a redrawn, majority-Hispanic San Antonio-area district that favored Republicans; Casar allies reminded Doggett, 79, that he had been the first Democrat to call for octogenarian President Joe Biden to not run for reelection in 2024, and urged him to follow his own advice and step aside for Casar.
As pressure mounted in August, Doggett announced he would retire if the new maps were upheld, while maintaining that Casar, an Austinite, should have run for the new Bexar County seat.
The longtime Austin Democrat took a victory lap Tuesday in a video posted to X.
“To borrow from Mark Twain, I can happily say that the reports of my death, politically, are greatly exaggerated,” Doggett said, adding that he planned to run in Congressional District 37, his current district, if the ruling is upheld.
Casar, meanwhile, praised the ruling in a statement and said he would run in his current Congressional District 35, which stretches from East Austin to San Antonio, if Texas moves forward with the 2021 map.
“The Trump Abbott maps are clearly illegal, and I’m glad these judges have blocked them,” Casar said. “If this decision stands, I look forward to running for reelection in my current district.”
The ruling hangs out to dry the bevy of Texas Republicans running for the redrawn 35th Congressional District. The crowded primary field includes entrepreneur Josh Cortez; Carlos De La Cruz, the brother of GOP Rep. Monica De La Cruz; and state Rep. John Lujan, a San Antonio Republican whose state House district overlapped with the gerrymandered 35th District.
In a statement, Cortez said it was the 2021 map — not the 2025 map — that was gerrymandered, and that he planned to continue running in District 35.
“This ruling is wrong on the law and wrong for the people of District 35,” Cortez said. “The current 35th Congressional District map is lawful, constitutional, and reflects real communities with real shared interests. I am running in this district because Texans — not judges — should decide who represents them.”
South Texas districts
Republicans also redrew two South Texas districts represented by Democrats but that Trump carried in 2024, crafting new boundaries that made the Democratic incumbents’ path to reelection more difficult.
Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, added voters in Hidalgo County and lost voters in the San Antonio area to his 28th Congressional District, turning the seat into one that would have voted for Trump by 10 percentage points rather than the 7-point margin he had carried it by under the current map. And in the 34th Congressional District, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, lost voters in Hidalgo County and picked up conservative territory in and around Corpus Christi, boosting Trump’s margin of victory from 4.5 points to 10 points.
While both still face competitive reelections, their paths are easier with the 2021 map restored.
“I think [the judges] did what was appropriate under the law,” Gonzalez said in an interview. “We just hope that, if that gets appealed, that it gets affirmed. We’re cautiously optimistic.”
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This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.