Texas Republicans have been dealt a major setback after a federal court blocked the state from using its newly redrawn congressional maps, ruling that the lines were “racially gerrymandered” and cannot be used in the 2026 midterm elections.
The 2–1 decision, delivered Tuesday, November 18, 2025, forces Texas to revert to the 2021 congressional map, undoing a mid-decade redistricting push that Republicans had hoped would secure them five additional GOP-leaning seats.
The ruling lands squarely in the middle of a national political arms race: red state and blue state legislatures have been aggressively redrawing maps ahead of 2026, each trying to carve out more favorable districts while legal challenges pile up across the country.
Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote that while politics clearly influenced the 2025 map, “it was much more than just politics.” The evidence, he said, showed Texas lawmakers intentionally used race to engineer the new districts — crossing a constitutional line.
Democrats in Texas called the decision a crucial win for voting rights. State House Democratic leader Gene Wu praised the ruling as a rare judicial intervention that “stopped one of the most brazen attempts to steal our democracy that Texas has ever seen.”
He added that Governor Greg Abbott and GOP lawmakers “tried to silence Texans’ voices to placate Donald Trump, but now have delivered him absolutely nothing.”
Abbott, however, blasted the ruling as “clearly erroneous” and vowed a swift appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. He argued that the new map merely reflected Texas’ “conservative voting preferences,” calling discrimination claims “absurd.”
The political stakes are enormous. Texas remains one of the fastest-growing and most diverse states in the country, with Latino, Black, and Asian American communities driving much of that growth. Civil rights groups have long warned that Republican-led redistricting efforts routinely dilute minority voting strength — a pattern mirrored in the court’s findings.
Texas is far from alone in the legal crossfire. California recently redrew its own maps, creating five new Democrat-leaning districts, while a Utah judge earlier this month ordered lawmakers to adopt a map that adds a Democratic-leaning seat there.
The Texas ruling could reverberate nationwide as courts weigh similar challenges in other states. For now, the decision means that the map intended to lock in new Republican advantages will never see an election — unless the Supreme Court intervenes.
What’s clear is that the fight over who gets to choose the voters — and who gets chosen by them — is far from over in Texas.
