Supreme Court hands Trump victory in fight over Texas congressional map
The Supreme Court on Thursday handed President Donald Trump and Republicans a major political victory by clearing the way for a Texas congressional map that was drawn in the hope of flipping up to five House seats to the GOP.
“The District Court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections,” the court said in an unsigned order that put a lower court decision on hold.
Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch wrote a separate concurrence.
The court’s three liberal justices objected. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the liberals, wrote that Thursday’s order “disserves the millions of Texans whom the District Court found were assigned to their new districts based on their race.”
The order marks the latest development in a high-stakes battle between Republican and Democratic states that are seeking partisan advantage ahead of the 2026 midterms. The states are taking the unusual step of redistricting congressional seats at the halfway point between the U.S. Census Bureau’s nationwide surveys of the population, which occur every 10 years.
Trump sparked the fight when he pushed Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional boundaries as part of a bid to help the GOP maintain its narrow, five-seat advantage in the U.S. House during the contests next year.
Candidates have until Dec. 8 to file to run in next year’s races in Texas. The legal fight has upended planning about which districts candidates in both parties plan to compete in.
A divided panel of federal judges found last month that the new map improperly discriminated against Black and Latino residents. It ordered the state to revert to a map drawn in 2021 that is more favorable to Democrats. Republican officials in Texas asked the Supreme Court to overturn that ruling.
Alito, who is the high court’s representative responsible for addressing emergency cases from the region, placed a temporary pause on the lower-court order last week to give the justices more time to weigh Texas’s appeal.
In his concurrence Thursday, Alito wrote that the Texas map was not necessarily a case of racial discrimination. Instead, he wrote, it was “indisputable … that the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”
Alito’s reference to the California law also being an example of partisanship could be a good omen for Democrats in that state. Although the law puts strict limits on racial gerrymandering, the high court has ruled that states have wide latitude to craft partisan maps. California voters in November approved a new plan that will probably yield several additional Democratic seats. That map has been challenged by Republicans.
In her dissent, Kagan said that a lower court found clear evidence of racial gerrymandering after it heard a wealth of evidence.
“Texas largely divided its citizens along racial lines to create its new pro-Republican House map, in violation of the Constitution’s Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments,” she wrote.
Republicans were exultant with the outcome.
“Texas is paving the way as we take our country back, district by district, state by state,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), who petitioned the high court, said in a statement Thursday night.
“Texas is officially—and legally—more red,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) added in a statement.
Democrats decried the ruling but said they would nonetheless win control of the House in next year’s elections.
“Once again, the Supreme Court gave Trump exactly what he wanted: a rigged map to help Republicans avoid accountability in the midterms for turning their backs on the American people,” Ken Martin, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement. “But it will backfire.”
Richard Hasen, a UCLA law professor and director of the university’s Safeguarding Democracy Project, wrote in an online post that the decision clears the way for more states to redraw their maps for partisan gain ahead of the midterm elections.
“This is a green light for there to be even more re-redistricting, and a strong message to lower courts” to stay out of the fight, he wrote.
Texas’s recent congressional map battle began during the summer after the Trump administration’s Justice Department sent a letter to the state threatening to sue. It said a handful of congressional districts that paired groups of Black and Latino voters to form a voting majority were unconstitutional.
Citing the letter, Abbott called a special session to draw fresh maps, which prompted Democrats to leave the state in a high-profile protest that delayed the proceeding. Eventually, they returned, and the legislature eliminated some multiracial majority districts, replacing them with single-race majority districts.
Civil rights groups and others sued, arguing that the state had improperly diluted the voting power of Black and Latino voters in drawing the new maps, in violation of the Voting Rights Act. A three-judge panel in El Paso voted 2-1 to back the plaintiffs.
“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” U.S. Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote in the decision. “To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”
Texas argued in its filings with the Supreme Court that the lower-court ruling was misguided: The new maps were created to give advantage to Republicans, not to disadvantage minority voters. In addition, officials said the court’s intervention came too close to the election and would sow confusion among candidates and voters.
“This summer, the Texas Legislature did what legislatures do: politics,” attorneys for Texas wrote. “It redistricted the State’s 38 congressional districts mid-decade to secure five additional Republican seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.”
After Texas’s redistricting push, other states joined the fray. Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio drew maps favoring Republicans. California adopted a Democratic-friendly map that attempts to offset the five seats the GOP might gain in Texas.
Other states are also laying out plans, but Trump’s demands have encountered legal and political headwinds. A court ruled against a redistricting push in Utah, while lawmakers in New Hampshire and Kansas have so far balked at redrawing maps.
In Indiana, Republicans this month are considering a new map that would probably give them two more House seats, but it’s unclear if they have enough votes to pass the plan in the state Senate.
Legal experts expect some of these other fights could make it to the Supreme Court as well.
The Texas case is one of a handful of major election-related cases the court is weighing this term. During arguments in October, the justices seemed open to further restricting the use of race in drawing legislative maps.
Such a ruling could gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires states to craft legislative districts under certain circumstances to ensure Black and other minority voters have an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. It’s the last major pillar of the landmark law the court has not invalidated and could lead to fewer minority officeholders.
In another potential blockbuster, the justices will decide whether laws that allow states to count ballots that are postmarked by—but arrive after Election Day—are legal. They are also considering whether to strike down limits on the amount of money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates.
See also:
Thanks to unprecedented gerrymandering battles, redistricting lawyers are busier than ever
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