Texas Redrew Its Congressional Map for Washington and Left Its Own Maps Alone

In the summer of 2025, the Texas Legislature redrew the state’s congressional districts at the urging of President Donald Trump, who wanted to protect his party’s narrow majority in the U.S. House. On Tuesday, that map elected 24 Republicans to Texas’s 38 seats in Congress, one fewer than the old map elected in 2024 and six short of the 30 it was drawn to produce. The maps for the Texas House and Texas Senate stayed as they were, and on Tuesday Democratic candidates won 83 of the 150 seats in the Texas House in unofficial returns.

Trump began pressing Texas lawmakers to redraw the congressional map in the summer of 2025, the Texas Tribune reported. Despite initial resistance from Gov. Greg Abbott and the state’s congressional delegation, Abbott added it to the agenda for a special session that opened July 21. Republicans unveiled a map designed to create five new Republican districts and a 30 to 8 split in the delegation. House Democrats left the state to deny the chamber a quorum, and when they returned, the map passed both chambers on party-line votes in a second special session. Abbott signed it on August 29, 2025. A three-judge federal panel blocked the map in November 2025, and the U.S. Supreme Court let Texas use it for 2026 and reversed the panel on April 27, 2026.

The case for redrawing mid-decade rested on arguments that applied to more than Congress, Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM) President Daniel Miller said at the time. He pointed out that the Legislature drew the Texas House and Senate maps with the same methods as the congressional map. “If it’s going to be this way, then let’s just redistrict, you know, not just Congress, let’s do the Texas House, let’s do the Texas Senate,” Miller said on his Late Night Coffee Talk livestream in August 2025.

In December, he asked the question again. “Why didn’t they redistrict all three?” Miller said. “If that is really at the heart of their problem, then why didn’t they do all three? Because that’s exactly what they should have done.” He called the choice to redraw only the congressional map “all about political convenience.”

The new map did not deliver. Republican candidates carried 24 congressional districts and Democratic candidates carried 14, according to unofficial returns from the Secretary of State. Republicans flipped one of the five districts they had targeted and lost two they already held, the Texas Tribune reported. Rep. Monica De La Cruz lost District 15, and Republicans held five other districts by four points or fewer. In Austin, Democrats took the Texas House and won every statewide office on the ballot.

The Legislature held two special sessions that summer and spent its redistricting work on the one set of maps Washington asked for. Its own districts were never on the call. The House majority that passed Washington’s map is the one Texans replaced on Tuesday.