Texas Gov. Abbott signs redrawn congressional map favoring Republicans into law after Trump push
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said on Friday that he has signed the bill redrawing Texas’ congressional map into law, a milestone for the Republican-driven mid-decade redistricting in the Lone Star state that comes as other states also prepare to consider redrawing their congressional map.
Abbott, who signed the bill around a week after the state Senate passed it, shared a video on social media Friday showing the Republican putting his signature on the legislation.
He added right afterwards, “Texas is now more red in the United States Congress.”
States usually draw their congressional map once a decade, after the census, but President Donald Trump and the White House had pushed the state to redraw its map in order to help Republicans bolster their slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2026’s midterm elections.
Experts have said the new congressional map could allow Republicans to flip up to five seats; Republicans have said the new district borders were drawn based on political performance and other considerations allowed by law.
Democrats have said the maps unfairly target and marginalize voters of color.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — Dr. Kevin O’Connor, former President Joe Biden’s physician, appeared before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday for a closed-door, transcribed interview.
O’Connor was subpoenaed by Committee Chairman James Comer as part of a Republican-led investigation into Biden’s mental fitness and use of a presidential autopen while in office.
O’Connor didn’t take any questions from reporters when he arrived and left the Rayburn House Office Building on Wednesday morning.
Ahead of the meeting, Comer said the committee has “a lot of questions” for the doctor.
“Dr. O’Connor’s reports were glowing with how healthy the president was. I think the president — the state of the president’s health is the transparency that we all expect. The president of the United States is the most powerful person in the world. The American people have a right to know the health condition of the president, both fiscal and mental,” Comer said.
The House Oversight Committee has requested interviews with several of Biden’s former White House aides in light of a reports questioning his mental fitness in his final year in office and alleged efforts by those around him to cover it up.
Neera Tanden, who served as the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under Biden, sat for testimony in late June. When asked after by reporters if there was an effort to disguise Biden’s condition, Tanden replied: “Absolutely not.”
The committee intended to get answers from O’Connor about his medical assessments of Biden.
“The Committee continues to investigate the circumstances surrounding your assessment in February 2024 that former President Biden was ‘a healthy, active, robust 81-year-old male, who remains fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency,'” Comer wrote in his letter to O’Connor in May.
The White House waived executive privilege for O’Connor ahead of his appearance. The House Oversight Committee previously requested O’Connor and aides sit for interviews while Biden was president, but Biden blocked the request.
Biden rejected reports of cognitive decline during an appearance on ABC’s “The View” in early May, before his office announced his cancer diagnosis.
“They are wrong. There’s nothing to sustain that,” Biden said at the time.
Former first lady Jill Biden, in the same interview, pushed back forcefully to accusations she shielded Biden from allies and the public.
“I did not create a cocoon around him. I mean, you saw him in the Oval Office. You saw him making speeches. He wasn’t hiding somewhere,” she said.
Since then, former president Biden has spoken at some events, including at the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference in San Diego last week, where he reflected on his leadership and career.
(AUSTIN, Texas) — Texas Democrats on Friday traveled to California and Illinois for meetings with Democratic governors who have criticized Republicans’ plans to redraw the Texas congressional map to protect the GOP House majority.
The day of meetings with Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois comes as Texas Democrats are weighing a walkout from the ongoing special legislative session where redistricting could be considered in Austin – in a bid to obstruct and delay the efforts.
“They’re changing the rules in the middle of the game… this is cheating,” Pritzker said on Friday of the GOP-led effort in Texas. “Everything is on the table.”
Texas state Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, chair of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus, told ABC News she was hoping to receive guidance on how to navigate the redistricting situation from Newsom, who has frequently sparred with the Trump administration.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, proclaiming a special legislative session that focused largely on flood relief, included redistricting on the agenda “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”
In a letter earlier this month, the Trump Justice Department told Texas that four majority minority districts represented by Democrats needed to be redrawn, citing a recent federal court decision and arguing they were now “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.”
President Donald Trump has rubber-stamped the Texas effort, saying he wants his party to pick up five seats if Texas redraws its congressional maps. (States redo their maps every decade with new Census data, and rarely attempt to do so absent a court order mid-decade.)
Taken with Republican-led redistricting efforts in Ohio and other GOP-controlled states, the changes to Texas’ map could help Republicans insulate their fragile House majority from the historic midterm backlash presidents traditionally face from voters.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday suggested his state could revisit its map, which Republicans remade after the 2020 Census, because, in part, of “the way the population has shifted around Florida just since the census was done in 2020 — I think the state is malapportioned.”
In response, Democratic leaders in states like California, Illinois and New Jersey have raised the possibility of revisiting their maps if Texas moves forward, though some states face more legal and constitutional restrictions than Texas to do so.
While there has been speculation that Texas Democrats could interrupt the special session by walking out or breaking quorum, the travels on Friday do not break quorum and members are not framing it as a walkout.
In the state House, Democrats would need 51 members to agree to break quorum, and they’d all risk fines for doing so. The effort, which Democrats have attempted in the past, would be unlikely to do more than delay Republicans’ efforts to redraw the maps.
“I am more than willing to participate in a quorum break,” State Rep. Gina Hinojosa told ABC News on Friday while cautioning that discussion of one is premature.
Some Democrats, who for years have advocated for nonpartisan redistricting, say the party should respond in kind to GOP efforts.
“I think one of the things we can say while maintaining a reform principle is that we believe in an independent commission and independent redistricting, but that should only kick in when Texas agrees to it, or when Florida agrees to it,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.
The chair of the Texas redistricting committee, Republican state Rep. Cody Vasut, said during a Thursday hearing that “it is prudent and proper” for the committee to deal with items the governor put on the agenda, and that “we have no plans to change any particular district.”
Others are waiting to see if Texas actually moves forward with changes to its map.
“We have to think about what should our response be, and how do we make sure that we have a response that’s actually meeting voters with what they’re hoping for, instead of actually making a system worse for voters,” Gov. Wes Moore, D-Md., told ABC News.
Experts have told ABC News that either party could risk backlash from voters or in court, depending on how they redraw their state maps. And efforts to make Democrat-held districts in Texas more friendly to GOP pickup could weaken Republicans’ hold on neighboring red districts.
(NEW YORK) — The redistricting battle gripping Texas has put a spotlight on the ongoing debate over gerrymandering and its long-term effects on the electorate.
Sam Wang, the founding director of the Electoral Innovation Lab and the creator of the Gerrymandering Project , a research lab focused on creating the most fair district maps, told ABC News that state leaders from both sides of the aisle have changed election boundaries to make it stacked with constituents who vote in their favor.
In the last 20 years, with access to advanced computer algorithms, those gerrymandering attempts have become more egregious as whole counties have been divided up with pinpoint precision, resulting in districts with areas with outlandish shapes, he said.
“Gerrymander is partisanship maximized above all of the other things,” Wang said.
The practice was first identified and coined in 1812 when Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry signed a bill that redrew the state’s congressional maps to benefit the Democratic-Republican party. Maps are typically redrawn at the beginning of each decade to reflect changes in the population from the latest census.
Kareem Crayton, the vice president of the Washington D.C. office of the Brennan Center for Justice, who has spent years researching redistricting, told ABC News the redistricting campaigns since the 2000s have led to a systemic cycle of gerrymandering, especially in the South.
“States like Florida and Texas have the worst examples of gerrymandering,” he said.
But Crayton also pointed out that states with Democratic majorities, like Illinois, have responded with their own maps that also skew districts in their favor, leading to an endless cycle.
“All of these states are looking around at each other like ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ thinking who’s going to fire first,” he said, referring to the Western film. “There is no sheriff in town saying this is not helping everyone.”
While Republican and Democratic leaders in those states have contended they are redrawing their maps to adequately reflect their communities, Wang said the math and geography aren’t backing their arguments.
Wang’s lab created a mathematical algorithm that creates district maps using key demographic factors. Racial demographics from the Census, environmental and geographic information from local data and other public sources are used to create district maps that remove political bias. Those maps are then compared to the district maps currently in place.
“That tells us what someone who didn’t care about political parties would do,” he explained. “We have harnessed the power of computer simulation to see what would be neutral.”
Texas is one of the 15 states in the map that earned an F grade based on the Gerrymander Project’s formula.
Although the state legislature and congressional delegation are led by a Republican majority, Texas’s current districting map is divided in a way that gives the GOP an advantage, according to the project. The analysis shows that the redistricting negates a challenging vote.
Travis County, for example, includes the city of Austin, which has leaned Democratic, but the county includes five congressional districts around it. By not including Austin in the suburban areas, the congressional district will lean Republican, according to the analysis.
The Gerrymander Project’s analysis found that the county splits in Texas, which is the number of districts within a single county, are higher than the average split per state, based on its analysis.
For example, more dense Dallas County is home to five congressional districts, and two of the districts’ boundaries extend into the next county.
Such division leads to confusion among voters as to what their district is, according to Crayton.
Crayton said that such county splits have led to more examples of elected officials running unopposed.
“If you’re a candidate from an opposing party, you’re going to have an uphill battle trying to run in a district where the majority of the voters are registered to the majority,” he said.
“We’ve seen it happen all of the time where a Democrat or Republican simply won’t put the time and effort to run because the gerrymandered district puts the odds against them,” Crayton said.
Although the majority of the states that got the project’s F grade are in the South and show more of a Republican advantage, the experts warned that blue states in other parts of the country have used gerrymandering as well.
Illinois, which is one of the Midwest states with an F grade, is the prime example, they said.
Its current map, which was adopted in 2021, contains non-compact districts, which leads to unequal voter density per area, and more county splits than the average, according to the Gerrymander Project.
One egregious example is the state’s 13th congressional district, which covers a nearly 2,300 square mile boundary that extends from its southern point near the border with Missouri to Springfield, right in the center of the state, and then east to the city of Champaign.
The boundaries keep a huge concentration of Democratic leaning voters, according to the Gerrymander Project.
Wang noted that the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision that ruled gerrymandering for party advantage cannot be challenged in federal court has removed key guardrails for preventing states from taking part in severe party redistricting.
The case involved gerrymandering allegations in North Carolina, and while the court’s majority ruled that the practice may be “incompatible with democratic principles,” federal courts had no jurisdiction in reviewing those cases.
Wang said that most states have taken gerrymandering to their limit and made it extremely hard for state legislatures to revert their boundaries to more fair areas.
“The lemon has been squeezed dry,” he said.
However, Wang noted that gerrymandering cases have prompted the public to speak out and take action to turn the tide and rein in gerrymandering in some key states.
Virginia, for example, used a special master in 2022 to draw up its current maps following a court case brought by the state’s constituents and some local elected officials.
The court ordered the special master to create district maps to adhere to federal requirements of population equality, the Voting Rights Act mandates, state constitution and statutes in its districting process.
As a result of its changes, the state, which has a slight Democratic majority in its state legislature, has no partisan competitiveness in its congressional districts, according to the Gerrymander Project, which awarded Virigina an A rating.
The district’s geography is “Fairly compact” and has the national average number of county splits, according to the project’s analysis.
Wang said ballot initiatives that removed the legislature from the districting process have risen in popularity in many states and have made a huge difference.
Arizona, which also has an A rating by the project, has been using an independent redistricting commission after voters passed a ballot initiative in 2000 that changed state regulations.
The state, which has a Republican majority in its state legislature, does not have a partisan advantage in its state districts, according to the Gerrymandering Project. Its districts are seen as “fairly compact” and are the average number of county splits, according to the analysis.
Crayton and Wang said the state-run solutions to redistricting are a good step forward, but ultimately, it is going to take Congressional legislation to end partisan influence in these maps.
Wang said that public opinion has consistently shown that constituents seek fair maps regardless of their political affiliations.
“If Congress were to really pursue it, it could be bipartisan and get a lot of support,” he said of legislation that prohibited gerrymandering tactics. “And we’ve seen it work.”
