It aims to allow Republicans to win five more seats in the House of Representatives in midterm elections within a year. A US federal court suspended the new Texas election map on Tuesday, November 18. It was seized by African-American and Latino voters who considered the redistricting of these electoral districts to be inappropriate. “discriminatory” against minorities, the court found“there is significant evidence that Texas is drawing racial lines by 2025”.
As a result, the court ordered Texas authorities to use the same maps for the midterm elections in November 2026 as for the 2022 and 2024 elections.
Texas’ new electoral map was definitively adopted in August by the conservative, sprawling southern state’s Parliament. President Donald Trump has publicly pressured Republican Party officials to expand the region. It aims to maintain a slim Republican majority in Congress after the next legislative elections.
The predominantly Latino or African American sectors that Democratic candidate Kamala Harris won in the 2024 presidential election are fragmented and attached to swing-win districts to dilute Democratic votes and allow Republicans to gain up to five additional seats.
State authority “redrawing our election maps to better reflect the preferences of conservative voters in Texas, and for no other reason”reacted in a press release by the Republican Governor of Texas. Greg Abbott estimates “Any suggestion that these cards are discriminatory is absurd”adding that Texas State will do so “immediately appeal to the United States Supreme Court” with a conservative majority.
In response, Democrats had a bill approved by referendum in November intended to give them five additional seats in California, the nation’s most populous state, which they largely dominate. The California Republican Party, backed by the Justice Department during the Trump administration, is challenging the new divide in court.
At the heart of the debate is the partisan division of elections, known as “gerrymandering,” which consists of shifting electoral district boundaries according to the interests of the ruling party in each state. The Supreme Court concluded in 2019 that the massacre did not fall within the jurisdiction of federal courts. However, this is still prohibited if done on the basis of race and no longer based on political affiliation, while ethnic minorities usually prefer the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.
