2026 House Strategy: Redistricting Roulette | July 12, 2025 Podcast & Article Analysis

Earl & Kate Deep Dive

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2026 House Strategy: Redistricting Roulette | July 12, 2025 Podcast & Article Analysis

Texas's Redistricting Gamble: A High-Stakes Political Chess Match

Earl Cotten

and

Katherine Mayfield

Jul 12, 2025

Transcript

The Calculating and the Calculated: Texas Redistricts Its Ghosts

By Earl Cotten for The Earl Angle Newsletter

In the capitol, under the indifferent gaze of statues commemorating older, perhaps less intricate, betrayals, the machinery grinds. Governor Greg Abbott has summoned the legislature back. Ostensibly, they convene to address the floods, the drowned homes, the ruptured earth. But the true agenda, appended like a codicil to a will nobody wanted to read, is redistricting. Again. Mid-decade. A recalibration of power lines using instruments known to be faulty, guided by a map already fading from relevance. One watches, not with surprise – surprise is for the innocent, and innocence is a luxury long since pawned in Texas politics – but with a certain cold recognition. This is how it happens. Not with a bang, but with a spreadsheet. Not in a wave of passion, but in a calculated, almost elegant, act of self-immolation disguised as strategy.

The proposition, laid bare, possesses a stark, Texan audacity. Possessing already 25 of the state’s 38 congressional seats – a dominance secured by maps drawn barely three years prior, maps currently under legal siege for precisely the manipulations they now seek to amplify – the Republican apparatus aims for more. Three more. Perhaps five. The national calculus is simple, brutal: the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives is tissue-paper thin. Donald Trump, sensing vulnerability, wants a bulwark. Ohio is being similarly wrangled, promising another two or three seats. Texas, vast and booming and ostensibly crimson, is to be the linchpin. The insurance policy against the predictable ebb tide of a midterm election. So, the maps must be redrawn. Now. While the floodwaters offer a distraction, however ghoulish. While the legal challenges to the last gerrymander are still wending their way through the courts. Hakeem Jeffries names it correctly: a mid-decade power grab disguised as legislative necessity. But the naming changes nothing. The machinery is in motion.

The method is familiar, a dark art refined over decades: surgical incisions into the body politic. To wrest five seats from territory currently yielding Democratic victories requires a delicate, perilous operation. Conservative voters, clustered safely in districts running 70%, 80% Republican, must be siphoned off. Dripped, like scarce water, into districts currently blue. The aim is to turn those districts pink, then red. But the consequence, the unspoken counterpoint vibrating beneath the confident projections, is the inevitable thinning of the Republican lifeblood elsewhere. Districts once considered impregnable fortresses become mere stockades. Margins shrink from twenty points to ten, to five. Safe seats become competitive. Competitive seats become, overnight, vulnerable. You dilute your own strength to poison the well of the opposition. Julie Johnson, a Democrat possessing the weary clarity of those who have witnessed these cycles before, calls it roulette. It is perhaps more akin to playing Jenga with the foundations of your own house during a tremor. The goal is to add height; the risk is catastrophic collapse.

II.

Every act requires its justification, its fig leaf of legality. Abbott’s arrives courtesy of the Department of Justice, a letter dated July 7th. Its argument, delivered with bureaucratic crispness, lands like a punchline in a joke nobody finds funny. Four congressional districts – districts around Houston and Dallas where coalitions of Black, Latino, and Asian voters have formed effective majorities and elected candidates of their choice – are declared, suddenly, “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” The DOJ, acting on a controversial and legally shaky ruling from the Fifth Circuit (Petteway v. Galveston County), asserts these coalition districts aren’t protected by the Voting Rights Act. Therefore, Texas must dismantle them.

The dissonance is breathtaking. It hangs in the air, thick as the humidity. For years, throughout the ongoing litigation challenging the current maps (LULAC v. Abbott, among others), Texas Republicans and their hired mapmakers have testified under oath, repeatedly, emphatically, that race played no role in drawing these very districts. They were drawn, they insisted, purely on partisan grounds – a distinction they believed immunized them from Voting Rights Act challenges. The maps were colorblind, they swore. Race was irrelevant. Now, with convenient timing, the DOJ hand-delivers a rationale demanding their dismantling because of race. Because, suddenly, race was determinative, and unacceptably so. It is a legal pirouette so blatant it borders on farce. Justin Levitt, who navigated these shoals in the Obama DOJ, dismisses it as a "fig leaf." It is less a leaf than a hastily grabbed napkin, transparent and inadequate. The targets are not accidental: all four districts elected minority Democrats. The effect of "remedying" this alleged constitutional violation will be the further dilution of minority voting strength – the precise harm the pending lawsuits allege the current maps already inflict. The state’s position is not merely contradictory; it is schizophrenic. Yesterday, race didn’t matter. Today, it matters so much these districts are illegal. Tomorrow? Tomorrow depends on who needs which votes carved where. Principle is the first casualty, replaced by a chilling, transactional cynicism.

III.

History in Texas is not a distant country; it is the very soil, layered and unstable, upon which they build. The ghosts of redistricting past hover over this special session, whispering warnings in the dry, conditioned air. They remember 2003. Tom DeLay, the Hammer, orchestrating a mid-decade redraw with naked aggression. The Democrats, cornered, fled. To Oklahoma, then New Mexico. A quorum break born of desperation. It bought time, generated outrage, but ultimately failed. The GOP gained seats. It also sowed seeds of resentment, fertilizing the ground for future losses. Power, grasped too tightly, can crush the hand that holds it.

They remember 2011. Another aggressive gerrymander, stretching Republican voters across the burgeoning Dallas suburbs like butter scraped over too much bread. Safe districts were engineered, margins deemed comfortable. Then came 2018. A wave, yes, fueled by a national recoil, but it found fertile ground in those overextended districts. Demographic shifts – the steady, relentless influx, primarily Latino – met political energy. Twelve state House seats flipped. Two congressional districts turned blue. Michael Li of the Brennan Center named it the "dummymander": the self-inflicted wound born of overreach. The maps, designed for perpetual dominance, cracked under the weight of their own ambition and the changing tide they ignored. The architects, confident in their calculus, had failed to factor in the human variable – the slow drift of population, the spark of political engagement, the unpredictable current of collective will.

The parallels now are almost too on the nose. Mid-decade? Check. Targeting minority coalition districts? Check. Driven by national GOP imperatives? Check. Using power gained through previous gerrymanders to entrench it further? Check. John Cornyn’s public admission of uncertainty – “I’m as interested as you are in how that’s going to turn out” – is less reassurance and more an unwitting epitaph for strategies blind to their own potential for backfire. The lesson seems clear: in the restless geography of Texas, carving districts too fine, stretching margins too thin, invites the wave that washes them away. But the lesson, it seems, must be learned anew. The arrogance of the present moment dismisses the ghosts as irrelevant, anomalies. This time, they assure themselves, the calculations are sharper. This time, the margins will hold. History suggests otherwise. History suggests they are building on sand.

IV.

The focus sharpens southward, towards the Rio Grande Valley. Here, the political earth is shifting, or so the Republican narrative insists. Trump made inroads with certain segments of the Latino electorate; close calls in 2020 and 2022 for Democrats like Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar are interpreted as harbingers of realignment. The Valley, therefore, becomes the primary battlefield for the new gerrymander. Carve Laredo. Split McAllen. Inject rural, conservative voters into these districts like a serum meant to turn the patient red. Dismantle the coalition districts identified by the DOJ – Sylvia Garcia’s in Houston, Marc Veasey’s in Fort Worth – ostensibly to comply with the law, practically to eliminate Democratic strongholds.

But South Texas resists easy categorization. It is not a monolith. The notion of a permanent realignment remains fiercely contested; Democrats see 2024’s close shaves as anomalies, the product of unique candidates and national headwinds, not a fundamental rupture. Thomas Saenz of MALDEF sees the DOJ's sudden intervention for what it is: collusion between the state and a partisan Department of Justice to "diminish minority voting strength" under a flimsy legal pretext. And Marc Veasey, whose district is on the chopping block, voices the cold, strategic truth the GOP gamblers seem determined to ignore: “If they redraw to target us, they’ll absolutely put more Republicans at risk.” To weaken a Democratic district anchored in Fort Worth requires pulling voters out of surrounding Republican districts. The math is inexorable. You cannot create new Republican seats ex nihilo; you must cannibalize your own margins to do it. The surgical strike risks bleeding the patient to death.

Beneath the political maneuvering lies a more fundamental, almost existential, absurdity: the maps will be drawn using the 2020 Census data. This data is not merely old; it is known to be flawed. It was collected during the peak of the COVID pandemic, a period of dislocation and obscured visibility. It significantly undercounted minority populations, the very populations driving Texas’s explosive growth. Since 2020, nearly two million more people have made Texas home, the overwhelming majority people of color. Yet, the Census Bureau’s subsequent annual updates, while acknowledging growth, lack the granular, precinct-level detail required for precise redistricting. The mapmakers are forced to navigate the present, and project the future, using a manifestly inaccurate picture of the past. They are charting a course through Houston’s ever-expanding suburbs with a five-year-old GPS, its maps missing entire subdivisions, its traffic data hopelessly obsolete.

Kareem Crayton of the Brennan Center identifies the peril: “Cutting margins close when you don’t know what the population looks like—let alone what they’ll feel in 2026.” The Republican strategy hinges on creating districts with margins precise enough to flip from blue to red, but not so thin as to be vulnerable to a Democratic surge. But how do you calculate a margin when you don't know the true denominator? How do you gauge the political temperature of voters who weren't even counted, or who have arrived since the count? The Latino population, accounting for 95% of the state's growth since 2010, is systematically packed into supermajority districts or cracked across multiple districts to dilute their influence in the GOP’s favor. Using the 2020 data to attempt this yet again, while the demographic tide continues to rise, is like building a levee with sand against a hurricane already visible on the horizon. The maps they draw in July 2025 may be obsolete by November 2026, not through political miscalculation, but through sheer demographic reality. They are building castles on quicksand, using blueprints for land that no longer exists.

VI.

The response unfolds along predictable, almost ritualistic, lines. The National Democratic Redistricting Committee promises lawsuits, branding Abbott’s move “an attack on democracy.” Within the Texas legislature, whispers of a quorum break circulate – a replay of 2003 and 2021. But the flood relief session complicates the optics; fleeing the state while constituents drown presents a public relations abyss. The more potent threat lies beyond Texas borders. Julie Johnson voices a raw, pragmatic anger: “If red states run amok, we need to do the same.” The tit-for-tat impulse is strong. New York, restrained by its courts from maximizing Democratic gains in 2022, possesses both the trifecta control and the technical capability to erase several Republican seats in retaliation for Texas’s power grab. Michaelle Solages in New York expresses the ethical unease: reopening maps “sets a bad precedent.” California, bound by its independent commission, seems a less likely actor. But the pressure will mount. If Texas adds three, four, five GOP seats through raw political muscle, the temptation for New York to respond in kind becomes almost irresistible. The House majority could be decided not by voters in November 2026, but by mapmakers in Albany and Austin in the summer of 2025. The nationalization of redistricting, the descent into permanent, mid-decade cartographic warfare, becomes the new normal. The precedent Abbott sets is not merely legal or political; it is existential for the already fragile notion of representative boundaries drawn with even a semblance of fairness.

VII.

Texas is not operating in a vacuum. Ohio’s Republican legislature, bound by a state-level mandate to redraw after four years, is simultaneously engaged in its own aggressive remapping, aiming to convert 10 GOP seats into 12 or 13. Meanwhile, the federal courts hold wild cards that could reshape the entire 2026 landscape. Key cases loom:

Milligan (Alabama): Already decided at the Supreme Court, mandating a second Black-majority district, but implementation battles rage.
Callais v. Landry (Louisiana): Headed to the Supreme Court, its decision on Louisiana’s Black-majority district could reverberate nationally.
Alexander (South Carolina): Challenging partisan gerrymandering, a decision here could undermine GOP gains.
Litigation simmers in Georgia, Florida, and beyond. A single ruling in any of these cases could shift multiple seats, potentially nullifying the gains sought in Texas or Ohio before a single new map is finalized. The Republican gambit in Austin assumes a static legal and political environment. It assumes the 2020 data is adequate. It assumes demographic shifts can be frozen in gerrymandered amber. It assumes no national wave will crest in 2026. It assumes the courts will play along. It assumes history won’t repeat its lesson on the perils of overreach. It is a bet hedged with borrowed time and flawed instruments.

VIII.

What endgame do they envision? The optimists, the true believers in the reddest of red maps, see a net gain of five Texas seats, coupled with Ohio’s two or three, creating a buffer sufficient to withstand any conceivable midterm loss. But even within the GOP ranks, doubt whispers. “I don’t know how you create five districts out of that,” one anonymous congressman admits, voicing the unspoken logistical nightmare. Realism suggests a net gain of two, perhaps three seats in Texas, combined with Ohio’s similar haul, yielding a four-to-six seat cushion. Enough, perhaps, for a cycle. But should 2026 generate even a modest Democratic wave – fueled by backlash to this very power grab, or to a resurgent Trump, or to forces yet unforeseen – those newly "safe" Republican districts, their margins shaved to the bone by the redistricting scalpel, become the front lines of collapse. The dummymander of 2018 would be eclipsed. The buffer could become the breach.

Beyond the immediate electoral arithmetic lies the deeper erosion. Thomas Saenz’s warning resonates: the Abbott-DOJ collusion “should alarm everyone who believes in democratic processes.” It is the brazenness, the contempt for consistency, the weaponization of legal process for pure partisan gain, conducted while flood victims wait for aid. It exposes the scaffolding, revealing power not as a trust, but as a possession to be defended by any means necessary. When maps are redrawn mid-decade, not to reflect population change, but to pre-empt political change, the fundamental contract between representation and the represented frays. Voters become pawns, communities become lines on a screen, elections become ratifications of predetermined outcomes. Trust, already a scarce commodity, drains away. The maps they draw this summer will be lines on paper, subject to legal challenge and demographic obsolescence. But the precedent set, the signal sent, the further normalization of raw power exercised without principle – these are ghosts that will linger long after the floodwaters are forgotten and the next election is called. They are mapping not just districts, but the contours of a democracy growing ever more spectral. The air in Austin is thick with calculation, and with the faint, acrid smell of something burning. Perhaps it’s the maps. Perhaps it’s the idea itself.