Can Texas Hold ‘Em? Katie Thompson in Daily Caller
These battles may look different in every state, but with control of Congress at stake, redistricting has become a national priority.
The Daily Caller recently published an op-ed by Process and Procedures Task Force Director Katie Thompson, examining how the redistricting process that started in Texas continues to influence electoral boundaries across the country before the 2026 midterms.
Texas has sparked a nationwide rush to redraw district maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. To understand why this domino effect was triggered, it’s important to start at the beginning, when Gov. Abbott was forced to choose between keeping the existing map, already under legal challenge from both sides of the political aisle or drawing new lines.
Abbott called a special session to redraw Texas’s district map in October of 2021. After it was signed into law and used in the 2022 primaries, the map was challenged by the League of United Latin American Citizens. They argued that it violated the 14th and 15th Amendments as well as Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting Latino voting power and marginalizing minority communities. The case was consolidated with others, including United States v. Texas (filed by the Biden administration), streamlining multiple legal challenges into a single high-stakes proceeding. But it didn’t stop there.
In a separate case, Biden’s U.S. Department of Justice filed Petteway v. Galveston County, Texas, alleging that Galveston County’s 2021 redistricting plan for its Commissioners Court violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Though the U.S. District Court ruled the plan illegal, the Fifth Circuit delivered a landmark reversal on appeal and overturned more than three decades of precedent. The court held that the Voting Rights Act did not protect “coalition districts,” which are intentionally drawn to unite multiple minority groups into a majority. Instead, the Fifth Circuit interpreted such districts as political alliances rather than protected entities under the law.