Governor Greg Abbott and Texas Republicans, with the full backing of Trump, are leading a redistricting effort to secure the GOP five more seats in the state and maintain their narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms. More than 50 Texas Democrats have left the state in an attempt to delay the redistricting vote – prompting right wing politicians to go so far as asking the FBI to arrest them.
What’s really behind these redistricting plans?
Background
The Trump administration and Governor Abbott have claimed that the 9th, 18th, 29th, and 33rd districts are “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders” because they are majority Black and Latino districts. But Black and Latino residents have made up the majority of the state for years, and the Texas government has a long history of suppressing these voters. This redistricting proposal is just another step in this cynical campaign to consolidate power in the hands of far-right politicians who want to shred the rights of working class Texans.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 – one of the most important achievements of the Civil Rights Movement – used to block Texas and other former Jim Crow states from carrying out this type of racist redistricting. But a Supreme Court decision in 2013 gutted the law and cleared the path for politicians like Abbott to attempt to deny Black and Latino residents fair representation.
In response, dozens of Democrats in the state legislature left Texas to “break quorum” – if enough of them are absent for the proposal’s vote, the vote cannot happen. In light of this, Abbott has asked the Texas Supreme Court to remove them from office. It is unclear if such an order would even be possible, but the move is even more evidence of the total lack of regard Texas government officials have for democracy.
Winning genuine democracy in Texas will take a people’s movement
Throughout Texas history, a mass people’s movement fought back against voting discrimination, ended all-white primaries and helped overthrow the whole system of Jim Crow dictatorship. The same kind of massive mobilization is what is required to defeat Trump’s present-day power grab. The officials who left the state have delayed the redistricting, but without pressure from huge numbers of ordinary Texans this can only last so long. In 2021, Texas Democrats also broke quorum but it proved useless after enough members came back to Texas for the legislative session to proceed.
The right to vote in fair elections is under attack – and so are countless other basic rights that have been targeted by Trump and the far right. Millions of Texans could be left without Medicaid, immigrants are subjected to a brutal campaign of mass deportations, trans Texans are being persecuted, and the devastation of tens of thousands of families across Central Texas remains unaddressed over a month after the floods. The fight for democracy and the fight for economic and social equality need to be connected if either is to succeed.
Feature image: Texas governor Greg Abbott meets with President Donald Trump at the White House in 2020. Credit: Flickr/whitehouse45 (public domain)
