On June 9, 2025, The New York Times reported that U.S. President Donald Trump's administration was pushing the state of Texas to redraw its federal congressional district maps, in an attempt to maintain a thin Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. The maps, which were last drawn in 2021, generally last for a decade, and redrawing them without a legal challenge is incredibly rare.
Over the next two months, that plan was slowly implemented, despite immense backlash from members of the public and state Democrats at hearings. California and Illinois Govs. Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker openly described the plan as an effort to "steal" U.S. House seats. But as the Texas process moved forward, posts appeared on social media sites like X claiming that the Republican-led state legislators currently redrawing the maps weren't the ones to blame.
According to one post, it was Democrats who were "fighting to save gerrymandering," the practice of drawing district maps to favor one party over another. Another post, showing a map of Texas' 35th congressional district, currently represented by Democrat Greg Casar, called the district an example of "what a stolen house seat actually looks like."
(X user @RealJessica05)
The map of Texas' 35th congressional district in the posts is accurate. However, the House seat wasn't "stolen" by Democrats in any sense of the word.
In 26 states, including Texas, the state legislature is responsible for drawing the decade's congressional district maps. According to Ballotpedia, Republicans have controlled both chambers of the state legislature continuously since 2003. Therefore,
In fact, Republicans almost certainly drew the district knowing that Democrats would win as part of an effort to gerrymander the state. The practice has been around for about as long as the country has — the word "gerrymander" comes from a particularly salamander-shaped state Senate district in Massachusetts signed into law in 1812 by then-Gov. Eldridge Gerry. Gerrymandering solely on partisan grounds isn't actually illegal, according to PBS. In a 5-4 2019 Supreme Court case, Chief Justice John Roberts held that gerrymandering solely on partisan grounds couldn't be judged by a federal court.
There are two basic techniques in gerrymandering: "cracking" and "packing." Using a basic example, let's say a state has a green party and a yellow party, and the green party has the power to draw new district lines.
"Cracking" involves splitting up regions of yellow-party supporters across different districts and ensuring that each of those districts has enough green-party voters to overpower the yellow party voters. As a real life example, Illinois' 2021 congressional district map features several districts split between deep blue Chicago and more rural exurbs, creating a lot of thin, snaky districts that reliably vote for Democrats.
"Packing," meanwhile, does the exact opposite — cramming as many yellow-party supporters into as few districts as possible. Even though the green party will lose those heavily concentrated districts, every other district will have significantly fewer yellow party voters. The district featured in the claim, Texas' 35th, is a perfect example of packing. It contains downtown San Antonio, a few suburbs and a thin strip of land running about 80 miles northeast that captures half of Austin, and votes for Democrats occur in large margins while several of its surrounding districts vote Republican.
According to NPR, a district court did find Texas' 35th district unconstitutional in 2017, because Republicans considered race while drawing the lines. Texas appealed to the Supreme Court, which reversed the decision in 2018, allowing the district to stand in a 5-4 ruling. Its boundaries weren't significantly changed in the 2021 redistricting.
This isn't the first time Texas Republicans have attempted a redistricting in the middle of the decade. In 2003, the first time the party held the governor's office and both legislative houses, they passed a redistricting bill aiming to strengthen Republican control over the state. State Democrats boycotted the vote by traveling outside of Texas to break the legislature's quorum, the same strategy being used more than 20 years later. In that case, the redistricting bill did eventually pass.