Last summer, the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature gathered for an impromptu special legislative session to—on direct orders from President Donald Trump—redraw the state’s congressional maps to give Republicans an edge in five more seats in the U.S. House. These redraws were, by and large, centered on the principle that the historic vote shifts that Trump won in 2024 among heavily Hispanic South Texas were to be exploited—and recreated—in the 2026 midterms. This, the thinking went, would help insulate a GOP majority in the U.S. House and prevent Dems from taking back the chamber and holding Trump to account.
It harkened back to the time that the Texas Legislature engaged in another mid-decaded congressional redistricting back in the early aughts, gutting Democratic seats across rural Texas, in order to manufacture a new majority in Congress. It worked then.
But this latest mid-decade power grab was seen as a politically dicey maneuver at best. In hindsight, they were completely high on their own supply.
Just over a year later, congressional Republicans failed to flip a single one of the South Texas seats that they redrew for their own purported benefit—in Laredo and its surroundings, embattled Democrat Henry Cuellar trounced Republican opportunist Tano Tijerina by some 30 points or more. Vicente Gonzalez won his Rio Grande Valley district, centered around Brownsville, by easy double digits. Republican incumbent Monica De La Cruz was trounced by the Tejano star-turned Democratic phenom Bobby Pulido. In 2024, Trump carried that 15th District by 18 points.
In the new 35th Congressional District, which was moved out of Austin and into San Antonio and its exurban surroundings, Democrat Johnny Garcia won in a walk. Trump won it by about 10 in 2024.
The 9th Congressional District, which was previously a historically Black seat held by Trump antagonist Al Green, was redrawn into a GOP-favored district centered in Harris County’s more conservative outer reaches. Leticia Guterriez, an utterly unheralded Democrat who only yesterday put out press releases to the media announcing her unexpected competitiveness, defeated Republican Alex Mealer (who narrowly lost a bid for Harris County judge in 2024) with… you guessed it, utter ease.
Up in North Texas, the 32nd Congressional District, a suburban Dallas county seat that Dems flipped back in 2018, was remade into a red district that extended from Dallas into deep East Texas. Trump won it by 18 in 2024. As of nearly midnight, a Democrat by the name of Dan Barrios was in a tight race there with right-wing Republican Jace Yarbrough.
All that, to put it mildly, wasn’t supposed to happen.
There appear to be even more casualties, too, well beyond the confines of the dummymandered maps.
Brandon Herrera, the edgelord extremist gun-fluencer who ran to represent the people of Uvalde, and a sprawling mass of southwest Texas, trailed Katy Padilla Stout by eight points late Tuesday.
The blue tsunami threatened containment even beyond those handful of congressional seats.
As of this writing, Republicans Pete Sessions, Steve Toth, Lance Gooden, and Jake Ellzey were all hoping to eke out wins in districts that were never supposed to be competitive in the least.
As the last votes continue to be tabulated, we don’t know the full scale of this massive upheaval just yet. But one thing is clear: Texas Republicans’ political hubris and subservience to Trump will have contributed to their losing national control of Congress in disastrous fashion.
That, again, wasn’t supposed to happen.
The post Yep, Texas Got Dummymandered appeared first on The Texas Observer.
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