Supreme Court Lets Texas Use GOP-Drawn Voting Map for 2026 (2)

A divided US Supreme Court cleared Texas to use a new Republican-drawn congressional map for next year’s election, bolstering GOP hopes of picking up as many as five new House seats in the state.

Over three dissents, the justices on Thursday lifted a lower court ruling that had blocked the map, which was drawn at President Donald Trump’s behest to help Republicans try to keep their House majority in the midterm election.

“The district court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections,” the conservative-dominated court said in an unsigned opinion.

Liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, saying the majority should have respected the lower court’s 2-1 decision that the map was probably an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

“Today’s order disserves the millions of Texans whom the district court found were assigned to their new districts based on their race,” Kagan wrote for the dissenters.

Although the order formally applies only until the justices resolve the state’s appeal, the court suggested it ultimately would rule in Texas’s favor. The majority faulted the lower court for failing to presume that the legislature was acting in good faith.

The high court also said the challengers failed one of the requirements for pressing a racial gerrymandering case by not producing an alternative map that would accomplish the state’s political goals without relying so heavily on race.

The unusual Texas mid-decade redistricting set off a partisan fight across the nation, prompting about a dozen states to either redraw their maps or consider doing so.

It’s not clear whether Republicans will ultimately benefit from the frenzy. Californians voted in November to redraw that state’s districts, potentially flipping five House seats to the Democratic side. The new California map is being challenged in another case likely to reach the Supreme Court.

Using Race

And Republican candidates might not win all five of the new Texas districts. Democrats have been buoyed by polls and off-year elections that show Latino voters who supported Trump turning against Republicans when the president isn’t on the ballot. A Democratic state Senate candidate in northern Texas outperformed expectations in a November special election and is headed to a runoff.

“They won’t pick up five seats,” said Matt Angle, founder of Lone Star Project, which supports Democratic candidates in Texas. Democrats have “an excellent chance to win at least two of them,” he said, pointing to the new border districts that rely on continued Latino support for Trump.

But Vinny Minchillo, a Republican consultant at Glass House Strategy, said he’s expects Republicans to win all five of the redrawn seats, although he acknowledges that the border district currently held by Democratic Representative Vicente Gonzalez will be the toughest.

“That’s always going to be a battle,” Minchillo said. “That’s one that I don’t think we ever count on.”

Republican Governor Greg Abbott called for the redistricting two days after the Justice Department urged the state to eliminate so-called coalition districts — those in which two or more minority races combine to constitute more than 50% of the voting population.

“The governor explicitly directed the legislature to redistrict based on race,” US District Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote in the majority opinion for the lower court. The map is being challenged by a coalition of voting-rights and minority groups.

Texas contends it revised the map for political reasons, not racial ones. The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that federal judges can’t throw out maps for being too partisan.

“From the start, everyone recognized that the purpose of Texas’s redistricting effort was Republican political advantage,” the state argued.

Alito Hint

The Supreme Court decision came after conservative Justice Samuel Alito on Nov. 21 put the lower court ruling on temporary hold in a hint that the Supreme Court was inclined to reinstate the Republican-drawn map.

The state’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, called the ruling a massive win, saying the map reflects the political climate of the state. “Texas is paving the way as we take our country back, district by district, state by state,” he said in a statement.

Gene Wu, the Democratic leader in the Texas House of Representatives, said the Supreme Court “failed American democracy.” Pointing to the California redistricting, he said Republicans won’t realize the political advantage they sought.

“A nationwide movement is being built that says if Republicans want to play this game, Democrats will play it better,” Wu said in a statement.

The Supreme Court mentioned the California map in Thursday’s decision, suggesting that it likewise was drawn for political reasons in an effort to counteract the Texas lines.

Election Timing

The Supreme Court also said the lower court decision came too late in the election cycle. In a series of decisions in recent years, the Supreme Court has said federal judges shouldn’t disrupt an election by changing state voting rules at a late date. The principle has come to be known as the Purcell doctrine because of a 2006 decision with that name.

Brown wrote that Purcell wasn’t applicable given that the Texas legislature redrew its map only weeks before the candidate-filing period opened.

“Any disruption that would happen here is attributable to the legislature, not the court,” Brown wrote. “The legislature — not the court — set the timetable for this injunction.”

The Supreme Court rejected that reasoning Thursday in a ruling that came just days before the Dec. 8 candidate-filing deadline.

“This court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election,” the court said, repeating a line from a 2020 decision. “The district court violated that rule here.”

The Supreme Court is separately deliberating over a Louisiana case that could sharply limit the use of the Voting Rights Act to create predominantly Black or Hispanic election districts. A ruling for Louisiana’s Republican leaders would eliminate one of the state’s majority-Black – and heavily Democratic – congressional districts and raise questions about similar seats in other states.

The Texas case is Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens, 25A608.

(Updates with reaction. An earlier version corrected the spelling of a congressman’s name.)

--With assistance from Joe Lovinger, Julie Fine and Anna Edgerton.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net

Steve Stroth, Elizabeth Wasserman

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