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A federal court ruling against Texas Republicans’ new congressional map marks a major victory for Democrats ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
On Tuesday (November 18), a three-judge federal panel in El Paso struck down the Texas GOP redistricting plan, saying the new map would dilute the voting power of Black and Hispanic Texans, per HuffPost.
"Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map,” U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote in the majority opinion.
The ruling comes after Texas GOP leaders approved a Trump-backed redistricting plan in August aimed at creating five additional Republican House seats ahead of the 2026 midterms. The NAACP and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law sued the state of Texas over its newly drawn congressional map, alleging that the effort was racially motivated. Texas State Rep. Vince Perez (D-El Paso) said the map favored white voters 5 to 1 over Black Texans.
“The state of Texas is only 40 percent white, but white voters control over 73 percent of the state’s congressional seats,” Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, previously said in a statement. “It’s quite obvious that Texas’s effort to redistrict mid-decade, before next year’s midterm elections, is racially motivated. The state’s intent here is to reduce the members of Congress who represent Black communities, and that, in and of itself, is unconstitutional.”
Democrats celebrated Tuesday's ruling as a win for the party and voting rights.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose state just approved a ballot measure allowing the Democratic-controlled legislature to draw its own partisan maps in response to Texas gerrymandering, said, “Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned ― and democracy won.”
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), who would have been forced into a different race under the rejected map, added: “Old Don bout to be BIG MAD!”
Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke called the decision “GREAT NEWS,” while other social media users labeled the ruling as “sweet, poetic revenge."
The ruling marks another setback for Republicans who faced stunning losses in elections held across the nation earlier this month.
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