Supreme Court lets Texas use GOP-drawn voting map for 2026

WASHINGTON - The 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 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 Supreme Court order applies only until the justices resolve the state’s appeal, and the decision doesn’t dictate whether the map can be used beyond 2026.

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.

In Texas, a federal district court panel ruled 2-1 that the GOP-drawn map was probably an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. 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. 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.

Even with the GOP-drawn maps in place for the midterms, Republican candidates might not win all five of the new 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.

The Supreme Court decision comes after conservative Justice Samuel Alito on Nov. 21 put the lower court ruling on temporary hold in a hint that the conservative-controlled Supreme Court was inclined to reinstate the Republican-drawn map for the 2026 election.

Texas had asked the Supreme Court to rule by Dec. 1, a week before the Dec. 8 candidate-filing deadline.

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. (Source: Bloomberg)