The NPR Politics Podcast - Texas GOP Hopes to Redraw Congressional Map And Keep Control Of U.S. House
Episode Date: July 21, 2025New congressional districts are on the agenda for the special session that began in Texas on Monday. We discuss why Texas is redrawing its congressional map now and what it and similar efforts in othe...r states could mean for party control of Congress.This episode: political correspondent Sarah McCammon, correspondent Hansi Lo Wang, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This podcast was produced by Bria Suggs and edited by Rachel Baye. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege, but a right.
Learn more at RWJF.org.
Hi, this is Emily from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I'm currently sitting in standstill rush hour traffic.
You're listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.
This podcast was recorded at 1.41 p.m. Eastern Time
on Monday, July 21st, 2025.
Things may have changed by the time you hear this,
but I'll probably still be sitting in traffic
because everybody knows that in Minnesota
there are only two seasons,
construction season and winter.
Enjoy the show.
There's definitely winner.
I feel her pain, man. I cannot stand sitting in traffic. It's terrible. But at least we are there for you.
It's a fact of life everywhere, isn't it? Even in the Midwest.
Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.
I'm Hansi LeWong. I cover redistricting.
And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
Today on the show, several states could get new congressional districts before next year's
midterm elections, and that could end up determining which party controls the U.S. House going
forward. Hansi, we're going to start with Texas, where state lawmakers are meeting for
a special session there. The agenda includes redistricting. Why does
the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, want lawmakers to redraw their state's
congressional map? The short answer is Republicans in Texas are playing pure
hard politics. They control the governor's office, they control the state
legislature, so they control map drawing. And that is usually a once a decade
process that happens right after census results come out. but this month you have the Republican Party of Texas
putting out a statement that says doing another round of redistricting now five
years before the next census is quote an essential step to preserving GOP control
in Congress and going back to your question the longer answer here is that
Governor Abbott says he received a letter this month from the Trump appointee of the Justice Department making claims about
four of Texas's 38 districts that Republican lawmakers drew back in 2021.
So wait, he's openly saying that there's a partisan objective here?
You had the Republican Party of Texas saying that.
So Abbott says there are these four districts where there's an issue.
What is the concern here, Hansi? You know, this is from, again, concerns raised by
this letter that a lot of legal experts are skeptical of. They claim that these
four districts violate the Constitution because they are allegedly racially
gerrymandered. Really, this letter is echoing arguments that Republicans in
other states have been trying to make at the Supreme Court to get key remaining parts of the Voting Rights Act struck down.
I'm talking about protections against racial discrimination and redistricting, protections against maps drawn in ways that would weaken the collective power of minority voters in areas where voting is racially polarized and would prevent minority voters from electing their preferred candidate.
But putting all that aside, the bottom line here is that Texas Republicans do not need
a legal justification to redistrict for Congress right now in the middle of the decade. They've
done it before after the 2000 census. And now you have President Trump also saying he wants
a new map for Texas that he thinks he can get Republicans five
for house seats.
You know, the Constitution gives state legislatures the right to be able to redraw districts throughout
the country.
And the Supreme Court has said that partisan gerrymandering done exclusively based on,
you know, whether or not a district's too democratic or too Republican or not enough
one way or the other, that is perfectly legal. What is not legal is racial gerrymandering. When you say I'm going to
put African Americans in this one district and I'm going to take this other ethnic group and
put them here, that is not the way they're supposed to look at it. Of course, it's a very fine line
when you start digging deeply into the fact that some
racial groups, like black voters, overwhelmingly lean democratic. So you can certainly racially
gerrymander in practice while saying that it's something that you're doing for partisan
purposes.
And it can be hard to determine where is that line? Is this a racial gerrymander? Is this
a partisan gerrymander or some combination of the two? I mean, Hansi, we've said Texas isn't the only state that could get new districts
in the coming months. There are lawsuits in a handful of other states that could lead to new
maps as well. You mentioned that this is something that happens after every census redistricting,
but why are we seeing all these efforts now? You know, it's not unusual for some congressional maps to get caught up in lawsuits that drag on for
years. And this decade, there are different types of legal issues involved in the various lawsuits.
I'm tracking five cases over congressional maps in the South, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North
and South Carolina. And there are cases in Utah and Wisconsin. And depending on what courts decide
in their timing, those states may or may not have to draw new maps
before the midterm election next year.
I should note also Ohio has to draw a new map
because of a state law.
But what is notable this decade
is that this is the first redistricting cycle
since the Supreme Court struck down key protections
under the Voting Rights Act back in 2013
that would have required
certain states with a history of racial discrimination to get their maps approved by the Justice
Department or federal court.
That's a pre-clearance program that has effectively been dismantled by the Supreme Court's conservative
majority and that has unleashed some state lawmakers to try to draw and redraw maps in
ways that courts in the past may not have allowed.
And let's be real here. I mean, this is about trying to get control of the House. I mean,
there is such a narrow margin right now that one seat here or there can really make a big
difference, which is why this is so important and why we're starting to see Democrats say
that they need to be doing this in their states.
How are Democrats fighting back?
What happened was back in 2006,
Republicans wound up getting crushed
in those midterm elections because of the Iraq War,
because of some ethics issues,
and they were able to win a ton of state legislative seats
and then win over unified control of a lot of legislatures. Meanwhile, on
the other side, you had this movement among a lot of Democrats to come up with
independent commissions to try to draw states more evenly. But given that that
had happened, Republicans were able to win over a whole lot more seats than
Democrats were able to do. And now we have a sort of going back to a little bit
of a ground zero where now you have Democrats saying in many states that they want to be able to
more gerrymander in their districts to try to win back the house. I mean, place like California,
California Governor Gavin Newsom said that he's potentially thinking about doing that,
which would go around a commission that they had to do this in a nonpartisan way.
Yeah. So a bit of a shift there for Democrats. I want to talk more about that in a moment,
but first we're going to take a quick break. We'll be back.
Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege,
but a right.
Learn more at RWJF.org.
And we're back.
Domenico, you were talking about what feels like kind of a shift for Democrats who seem
to be kind of trying to play the same game with gerrymandering that Republicans have
played for a long time.
Why?
I think that there's a split in the Democratic Party
and it's not between progressives and moderates.
It's between moderation and fighting.
You know, moderation and pugilism, if you will.
Because in this era of Trump,
I think there's a lot of Democrats,
especially younger Democrats,
who feel like the older generation has gotten steamrolled
by trying to operate within the quote unquote norms.
And they kind of roll their eyes at this idea that oh it would be hypocritical to try
to do this or it'd be the wrong thing a lot of you know younger operatives or
even people who are just looking at the situation with Trump and all of the
things that Trump's allies are willing to do that they feel like they'd be
fighting with their hands tied behind their back and they're not interested in
doing that anymore and to be able to win with their hands tied behind their back, and they're not interested in doing that anymore.
And to be able to win, they want to be able to utilize any and all of the levers at their
disposal to be able to try to compete.
So last week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, somebody who, of course, has a lot
of stake in Democrats picking up seats in the House, had this warning for Republicans
about Texas's redistricting effort. Donald Trump has ordered Texas Republicans to try to produce five additional seats.
In doing so, they will jeopardize their own electoral careers.
He says they'll jeopardize their own careers.
I mean, what's the argument there?
There is a risk here of Republicans in Texas overreaching because map makers in
this special session may be making some out of date assumptions about where voters are
in Texas and how they vote.
This new map is going to be based on census data from five years ago.
And that is a long time for a state that's changing demographically as much as Texas
is.
Yeah.
I mean, imagine a district that you draw to protect an incumbent, and it's like 58% conservative,
42% Democratic, and then now, in order to get
another couple of seats potentially,
you make it a district that's maybe 53-47 or 52-48.
Well, in a wave year, all of those seats
could potentially drop the other direction,
and that would be a big
problem and really backfire on Republicans if that were to happen. And as Hansi says,
Texas is one of those states that continues to grow, especially in the Dallas, Fort Worth area,
where you're seeing just a tremendous growth in population and frankly, a lot more Democrats
that are there in the suburbs. You know, Hansi, lawsuits seem to be a common response to new
maps. Is it likely that the redrawn Texas map will also end
up in litigation?
Yes, it's something I'm watching for. There are questions
about whether this new map that Republicans in Texas want to
pass would potentially violate the Voting Rights Act. And at
the Supreme Court, you have conservative justices signaling
they're open to revisiting past court rulings
on the Voting Rights Act,
potentially further weakening that landmark law
by striking down longstanding redistricting requirements.
So that is the legal environment
this map making is going into.
And it's really critical for the fact that we are,
you know, a year and a half away
from the next midterm elections.
Any of those legal cases
are going to make their way through the courts and are going to take some time. And we're
going to see those fights probably come down to the wire in some respects in some places.
And I wonder if it's going to stiffen some Democrats' spines where in states like Illinois
or New York, California, New Jersey, Minnesota, Washington state, for example, if there are
going to be concerted efforts to try to do this in reverse.
And Hansi, you cover voting as you're covering these redistricting fights.
What are you going to be watching for?
Sarah, you know, I think redistricting can get very technical and complicated very quickly
and easy to turn out.
And when you're talking about re-redistricting, like we have been, I mean, what a mess of a word and a concept. But it's hard to even say.
It is hard to even say re-redistricting. But the takeaway here, I think, for voters is that this
is the process that before you even get your hands on a ballot that can determine the power of your
vote. And the reality of US democracy today is that some states, like
Domenico said, allow voting districts to be drawn in ways that make elections less competitive
and essentially ensure a win for a political party. There are efforts for more state laws
that ban favoring a political party in map drawing. There's also a bill introduced this
month in Congress by Democratic Representative Mark Vesey of Texas that will limit congressional redistricting to once a decade unless the court finds a
map to be illegal.
But right now it's a Patrick of policies.
And if you're in a state where one party is tweaking the districts multiple times in a
decade, it becomes that much harder for you the voter to hold elected officials accountable
because you may not be able to vote them out.
Lots of things to watch there.
We'll leave it there for today.
I'm Sarah McCammon.
I cover politics.
I'm Hansi Luong.
I cover redistricting.
And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
And thank you for listening to the NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege,
but a right.
Learn more at rwjf.org.