How many seats will Texas redistricting cost Democrats?

It all depends on whether the GOP can hold onto their gains among Hispanic voters.

Texas last redrew its congressional map (along with the rest of the country) in 2022 after the 2020 decennial census. The redistricting approach the Republican-controlled state legislature took that year was a small-“c” conservative one. Was the map they passed an exemplar of partisan fairness? Nope, it wasn’t. But it also didn’t squeeze out as many Republican seats as possible. Instead, the Texas GOP played it safe and focused on protecting incumbent House members. That’s an understandable enough strategy: suburban counties in Texas had been drifting left for the past few cycles, and discussions of “Blexas” were omnipresent (at least among Democrats).

The safe approach worked well enough. In 2024, Donald Trump won every Republican-held House district in Texas by double digits. But it left Republicans wanting more. Most of the state shifted right in 2024, and Republicans made huge gains among Hispanic voters. The old worry that the Texas suburbs would keep getting bluer and bluer — eventually taking Republican House seats with them — receded. That’s probably why in June — combined with Trump’s general willingness to push any norm or boundary for political gain — the White House asked Texas Republicans to start a relatively rare mid-decade redistricting process¹ and draw a new map that turns some currently Democratic seats red. (This won’t be the last you hear from us on redistricting — there may or may not be a Nate Take coming — but for today, we’re just going to focus on the numbers in Texas and not the fairness or lack thereof of all of this.)

Under Texas’ current congressional map, shown below using data from Dave’s Redistricting App, Republicans won 25 House seats in 2024 and Democrats won 13.² What exactly will the new map do? Here’s how Trump is thinking about it: “I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know. And we are entitled to five more seats.” And that’s the headline you’ve probably seen everywhere: the new Texas map will create five new House seats for Texas Republicans, shifting the map from 25-13 to 30-8.

Texas Democrats would probably describe the map differently than I just did. They’d say that Republicans are trying to steal five seats. But no matter how you frame it, this new map has set off a gerrymandering war from California to Indiana that Republicans are probably favored to win in the long run. But it’s worth drilling down on that initial claim. The “steal” semantics mostly come down to how you feel about partisan gerrymandering. But the “five seats” part is easier to evaluate. Will the proposed Texas map actually result in Republicans winning five House seats in 2026 (and beyond?) that they wouldn’t have won without another round of redistricting?

Before that question becomes relevant, the new map needs to pass the Texas State Legislature. That would ordinarily be a simple proposition, but Texas House Democrats left the state weeks ago to prevent the state legislature from voting on the map during a special legislative session. They’re now returning home after that initial special session ended on Friday. But because Texas Governor Greg Abbott can just keep calling special sessions (the second session started two hours after the first one ended), the map will probably pass eventually. Theoretically, the new map needs to be in place by Texas’s December 8th candidate filing deadline, but Abbott has said Republicans could keep working on redistricting beyond that point if Democrats remain out of state.³ For the sake of this article, I’m going to assume that the new map will end up being implemented before the 2026 midterms.

But even in that scenario, the headlines can conceal uncertainty in how Texas Democrats’ fortunes will change under Plan C2331.⁴ Here’s what the proposed map looks like. We’re interested in five districts: the 9th, 28th, 32nd, 34th, and 35th. All five are currently held by Democrats but have been redrawn to favor Republicans — substantially in some cases. Under this new map, Trump would have won each of these districts by more than 10 points in the 2024 election. So they should be easy Republican pickups in 2026, right?

Well, not necessarily. Initially, even Texas Republicans were hesitant to redraw the state’s map. They worried that their voters would be spread too thin and the gerrymander would backfire. Luckily for the GOP, that hasn’t happened. None of the U.S. House seats currently held by Texas Republicans are really going to be in a more tenuous position after the redraw. But it’s hard to draw a perfect map. However, a few of the newly redrawn districts are far from a guaranteed win.

Not all districts are created equal

It’s helpful to think about the five Texas districts that are supposed to flip from blue to red thanks to the new map as two separate groups.⁵ First, the 9th, 32nd, and 35th Congressional Districts. Kamala Harris won all three districts in 2024 under the old congressional map. Back then, they were located in the heart of major Texas cities: Houston, Dallas, and Austin, respectively. Under the new map, parts of each district would be moved into more suburban areas that voted for Trump in 2024. The result? Trump would have won the new 9th, 32nd, and 35th Districts by an average of 14 points in 2024 and he would have won all three districts in 2020.

In these three districts, GOP plans change the composition of these districts pretty dramatically. Not only have they shifted right, but they’ve gone from mostly urban to largely suburban. For example, Democrat Julie Johnson won the old TX-32 by more than 20 points in 2024. With the new map, Trump would have won that district by nearly 18 points. Nor will incumbency be much help to Democrats. Our research suggests the importance of incumbency is declining anyway, but mostly that’s because incumbents will probably abandon ship. Al Green’s best bet is to cut his losses in TX-9 and run for the vacant TX-18 seat. And the new map will force Greg Casar (formerly of TX-35) to compete with Lloyd Doggett over TX-20, the remaining Democratic House seat in San Antonio.

But the other two districts (the 28th and 34th) are less of a straightforward win for Republicans. TX-28 and TX-34 are located in South Texas on the border with Mexico and are both majority Hispanic. About 87 percent of the citizen voting age population (CVAP) in the new TX-28 is Hispanic. And the new TX-34 is 72 percent Hispanic. Both of these districts also already voted for Trump in 2024 even under the old map. The new map makes them redder: R+7.3 → R+10.4 for TX-28 and R+4.5 → R+10.1 for TX-34. But even under those lines, Joe Biden would have carried these districts in 2020 by 9.6 and 2.9 points, respectively.

These differences matter when thinking about how the 28th and 34th will fare in the midterms and beyond in 2028. On one hand, Republicans might have been able to flip these seats without gerrymandering. Maybe not in 2026 given what will probably be a less-than-ideal national environment. But it could have happened in 2028 if Hispanic voters kept trending right. On the other hand, even with the new map, flipping TX-28 and TX-34 in 2026 might be easier said than done.

Both districts have incumbents who will likely be sticking around and have track records of winning in districts that Trump has carried. Henry Cuellar’s average wins above replacement (WAR) from Split Ticket since 2016 is D+10.6.⁶ That means he’s performed about 10 points better than the fundamentals suggest he “should.”⁷ Vicente Gonzalez’s average WAR since he started representing TX-34 is lower, although slightly positive at D+0.9. Are their districts even redder now? Yes. But geographically, they haven’t moved very much. Cuellar and Gonzalez will be competing in mostly familiar territory. And a favorable midterm environment for Democrats would further boost their chances of keeping their seats.

Both districts are also full of traditionally Democratic Hispanic voters. TX-28 and TX-34 being reliably Republican going forward depends on the GOP maintaining the gains among Hispanic voters they saw in 2024. Whether that will happen in the long run is harder to say, but Trump isn’t exactly popular among Hispanic voters at the moment. His approval among Hispanics (net -28 in a recent Equis Research poll) is substantially lower than his overall approval rating. And in that same Equis poll, only 67 percent of Hispanics who voted for Trump in 2024 said they plan to vote for a Republican in 2026; 8 percent said they’ll vote for a Democrat and 20 percent are undecided.

Is that enough evidence to say the multi-year trend of Hispanic voters moving toward Republicans is over? Not even close (especially given that pollsters have had trouble pinning down the Hispanic vote, along with much of the rest of the electorate). But a reversion toward Democrats in 2026 is certainly possible. Historically, Hispanic voters are actually “swingier” than white voters, at least in Texas. From 2016 to 2024, Republicans won between 66 percent and 69 percent of white voters statewide based on the exit polls. In that same period, they won anywhere from 34 percent to 55 percent of Hispanic voters.

Using Trump’s 2024 performance in each redrawn House district as a baseline, the national environment would need to shift left by 10 points (from about R+2 to D+8) in 2026 to keep the new TX-28 and TX-34 blue. In an underwhelming “blue ripple” scenario for Democrats — say, a D+2 national environment — these seats would only end up around R+6. But what if Hispanic voters move further left than the national environment, on average?

There isn’t data on exactly how Hispanic voters broke within each of these districts in 2024, but we do have statewide numbers from the exit polls: 55 percent of Texas Hispanics voted for Trump and 45 percent for Harris. To generate some crude estimates of how Hispanics voted within each district, I combined exit poll results with 2024 turnout data, the demographic composition of each House district, and Trump’s district-level performance in 2024. I then estimated how shifts toward Democrats among Hispanic voters would alter the results in each district.⁸

If Texas Democrats win Hispanics 51-49 in 2026 in addition to a blue-ripple-type shift among other demographic groups, they’d eke out a win in TX-28 and only narrowly lose TX-34. And if Hispanics shift a couple of points further left (think 53-47 in favor of Democrats), TX-34 would also remain in Gonzalez’s hands.

I just can’t say it enough: that Hispanic shift really is key here. Even a moderate blue wave where the national environment moves from R+2 to D+6 wouldn’t be enough on its own to keep TX-28 or TX-34 blue. But again, if a wave of that size happens and Texas Democrats win Hispanics 51-49, they’ll narrowly carry TX-28 (D+0.8) and TX-34 (D+0.4). Because these districts are so heavily Hispanic, relatively minor shifts among that group translate to major electoral gains for Democrats.

You shouldn’t take this (very) simple model as gospel, but if anything it might underrate Democrats’ chances in these districts. Remember, Cuellar and Gonzalez outran Harris in their old districts by 12.6 and 7.6 points, respectively, which the table above doesn’t account for. If they can similarly overperform in 2026, it would take a much smaller national Democratic wave and/or reversion toward Democrats among Hispanic voters for them to retain their seats.

To be clear, none of this is good news for Democrats. It would take some much bigger shifts in the environment for the “gerrymander” to turn into a “dummymander”. (We’ve definitely seen some wishful thinking about this from the left.) And if it did, well, Republicans could just redistrict again — provided they held onto control of the state legislature.

Still, you can only gerrymander so far without hitting some hard limits. That’s also why Abbott’s claim that Republicans could expand beyond the five seats — up to 10! — is not exactly realistic. Any map like that would either put incumbent Republican House members in danger or just end up replacing Democratic districts with seats that lean somewhat Republican but are nowhere near safe in a midterm environment with an unpopular president.

1. Although less rare in Texas.

2. Trump actually won 27 of Texas’ 35 House districts in 2024 because two districts with Democratic House members (the 28th and 34th) voted for Trump.

3. Lawsuits are also a near-certainty if the map passes. But getting into those would double the length of this article.

4. This is a new map for the second special session, but it’s almost identical to the original Plan C2308.

5. Like Nate Cohn did in his excellent article about how the new Texas map would change Democrats’ chances of winning the House in 2026.

6. This isn’t an indication that Silver Bulletin has entered the WAR wars. But there’s also a reason we’re citing the Split Ticket numbers rather than some of the alternatives.

7. For this article, I’m assuming that Cuellar won’t be in jail before the 2026 midterms. If his legal troubles do prevent him from running, keeping TX-34 becomes harder for Democrats.

8. First, I estimated the percentage of 2024 voters in each district who were white, Hispanic, Black, Asian, or another race by reweighting the citizen voting age population (CVAP) demographic estimates in those districts using the statewide difference between the racial composition of 2024 Texas voters and the Texas CVAP. I then used Texas exit polls to estimate how those demographic groups voted within each district and aggregated those estimates to generate district-level two-party vote share estimates, which I calibrated to match the actual 2024 presidential election results in each district. From there, I applied uniform swings toward Democrats (or bigger swings among Hispanic voters) to generate the scenarios in the table below.