2025 Texas redistricting
In June 2025, lawmakers in the U.S. state of Texas began considering a process of mid-decade legislative redistricting plan to give members of the Republican Party in the state an advantage by gerrymandering the state's congressional districts ahead of the 2026 United States House of Representatives elections. The House seats for Texas currently stand at 25-13 with Republicans holding the majority, but with the redrawn map, it would potentially give Republicans up to 30 seats.
On August 20, 2025, the Texas State House passed congressional maps that would target five Democratic-held seats, all of them being Coalition Districts consisting of majorly minority populations. The vote was 88–52, a party-line vote. The Congressional map targets Marc Veasey, Greg Casar, Lloyd Doggett, Julie Johnson, and Al Green. On August 23, 2025, the Texas State Senate passed the map with a vote 18–8. It then headed to governor Greg Abbott, who officially signed the new congressional map into law on August 29, 2025.
| LULAC v. Abbott | |
|---|---|
| Court | Western District of Texas |
| Docket nos. | 3:21-cv-00259 (W.D. Tex.) 25A608 (SCOTUS) |
| Case history | |
| Prior action | map preliminarily enjoined by Western District of Texas. |
| Subsequent action | district ruling stayed by supreme court via shadow docket |
| Outcome | |
| Ongoing | |
On November 18, 2025, a federal court in El Paso, Texas ruled that the redistricting constituted a racial gerrymander, a ruling which would have barred the map from being used for the 2026 midterms. However, on November 21, the U.S. Supreme Court approved a request filed by Texas to temporarily block the lower court ruling.
On December 4, the Supreme Court stayed the District Court ruling in a 6–3 decision that allows Texas to use the map in 2026, concluding that the District Court had "failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith by construing ambiguous direct and circumstantial evidence against the legislature" in finding that the map was racially gerrymandered, and had "improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign" because it issued its ruling after the candidate filing period had begun. The dissenting opinion, written by Elena Kagan and joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, argued that the majority was not following the appropriate standard of review for questions of fact, stating, "We are a higher court than the District Court, but we are not a better one when it comes to making such a fact-based decision."