In the battle over Texas’ redistricting plan to pick up Republican House seats, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott have made competing claims.
Hochul, a Democrat, said at an Aug. 4 briefing, “Congressional districts are never redrawn mid-decade as they are, but here they are, flagrantly breaking the rules so they can hold on to power.” Districts have been redrawn mid-decade many times, but that’s usually due to legal challenges — making Texas’ mid-decade redistricting without court action rare.
Abbott, a Republican, said in an Aug. 5 appearance on Fox News, “There are no states more gerrymandered than California and Illinois and New York. … I don’t think those states can gerrymander any more than they have.” Illinois is among the most skewed states for partisan congressional maps, but California and New York get favorable marks in analyses from nonpartisan organizations.
The fracas began because, ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, President Donald Trump has said he wants Texas state lawmakers to redraw congressional district lines to pick up Republican House seats. The move could touch off a redistricting arms race since some Democratic governors have threatened to counter with redistricting in their states if Texas Republicans move forward with their plan.
Trump referred to the plan as “a very simple redrawing,” when reporters asked him about it on July 15. “We [Republicans] pick up five seats. But we have a couple of other states where we’ll pick up seats also,” he said.
We asked the White House for more details about the plan, including which other states may be involved, but we didn’t get a response.
Texas Republicans announced a redistricting proposal in July, and Democratic state representatives grabbed headlines when they left the state on Aug. 3 in order to block a vote on the proposed map. Two weeks later, those lawmakers said that they would return to Texas if California releases a redrawn congressional map of its own.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is planning to hold a special election on Nov. 4 to get voter approval for a redrawn map that could give Democrats five additional seats in the House. But if Texas or other states abandon redistricting plans, California’s map would stay as is under Newsom’s proposal. Hochul has also pledged to help Democrats pick up seats, but state laws in New York would likely bar any changes before the midterms. The governor has said that New York should disband its independent redistricting commission, which could allow Democrats to draw more favorable maps.
We’ll explain how redistricting has been done and differences among the states as we assess Hochul’s and Abbott’s claims.
When Are District Lines Drawn?
Congressional districts are usually drawn at the start of the decade, but Hochul is wrong to say that lines are “never” redrawn later.
Typically, lines are redrawn every 10 years, following the census. The process is meant to result in fair representation based on population.
“Our modern congressional redistricting system was effectively set up in the early 1960s in a series of Supreme Court decisions that enforced a ‘one person, one vote’ standard on congressional districts,” Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told us in an email, referring to a trio of cases in 1962 and 1964.
“This specified that congressional (and state legislative) districts had to essentially have equal population within states,” Kondik said. “Previously, states had allowed huge disparities in district populations, which led to rural areas being overrepresented and urban/suburban areas being underrepresented.”
Since 1970, states have gotten into a more regular habit of redrawing districts every 10 years to account for changes uncovered by the census, he said.
“However, starting in the 1964 congressional election cycle and going through 2024, at least one congressional district’s lines were changed in 24 of the 31 two-year election cycles since then. This cycle will make it 25 of 32, assuming a map officially changes,” Kondik said. “So, mid-decade redistricting is common. Now what is uncommon about Texas (and states that may follow) is that mid-decade redistrictings almost always include some sort of court action.”
Sam Wang, director of Princeton’s Gerrymandering Project and president of the Electoral Innovation Lab, told us the same thing.
“In recent decades, the only times that mid-decade redistricting has occurred are (a) when a court or the law requires it (PA, NY, MD, NC, OH…), or (b) when it’s Texas – they did it in 2003,” Wang said in an email.
Following the decennial redistricting process, civil rights and good government organizations often file lawsuits challenging the new maps — usually alleging gerrymandering or race discrimination. The Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks these cases, says that the courts “play an important role” in determining where the lines will eventually fall.
According to a 2021 paper that collected about 60 years’ worth of data, there had been more than 900 challenges to various redistricting plans — for local governments, school boards, statewide offices and congressional districts — in federal courts. A Brennan Center analysis of challenges brought following this decade’s redistricting found 90 cases, “split roughly evenly between state and federal court, a change from last decade when the overwhelming bulk of challenges to maps were in federal court.”
“What Texas is doing is different than the norm in that there’s no court action,” Kondik said.
It’s not completely unprecedented, though. As both Wang and Kondik pointed out, in 2003, Texas redrew its congressional map, replacing the one that had been adopted following the 2000 census. That redistricting led to a lawsuit that was eventually decided in 2006 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which found that part of the map violated the Voting Rights Act but did not find that the state was prohibited from redrawing its electoral maps at will. Redistricting is largely handled by the states, and there is no federal prohibition on redistricting outside of the census schedule, the Congressional Research Service has explained.
Colorado and Georgia also redrew their electoral maps around the same time as Texas in the early 2000s. In Georgia, Republicans took what has been described by some scholars as a more “modest” approach to redistricting than Texas had taken and the map was used in the 2006 midterms. But the Colorado map was rejected when that state’s Supreme Court found that Colorado’s constitution “not only requires redistricting after a federal census and before the ensuing general election, but also restricts the legislature from redistricting at any other time.”
At least three other states — New York, North Carolina and Tennessee — specifically prohibit mid-decade congressional redistricting, according to Helen Brewer, senior policy specialist at the National Conference of State Legislatures. Seven other states — Alabama, Alaska, Kansas, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico and Pennsylvania — prohibit state legislative mid-decade redistricting, which may extend to congressional maps, although that would be a state-specific legal question.
We reached out to Hochul’s office about her claim, but we didn’t get a response.
Which States Are the Most Gerrymandered?
In an interview with Fox News’ Will Cain, Abbott referred to the practice of gerrymandering, or drawing district lines for partisan gain, saying, “There are no states more gerrymandered than California and Illinois and New York. In Illinois, I think they may have maybe three congressional seats for Republicans, despite the fact that Trump won more than 40 percent of the vote there. Same thing applies in states like California and New York. I don’t think those states can gerrymander any more than they have.”
But Abbott is wrong about California and New York. Both of those states’ congressional maps fare well in nonpartisan assessments.
As Wang put it, “Governor Abbott is incorrect on everything except Illinois.”
According to Wang’s nonpartisan Gerrymandering Project and PlanScore, which also analyzes legislative maps, there are several states that have skewed congressional maps, but the degree to which they are skewed varies and the party that is most often favored is Republican.
The two most skewed congressional maps are in Wisconsin and Illinois, according to both organizations.
“Wisconsin [has] a strong pro-Republican skew,” Michael Migurski, PlanScore’s executive director, told us in an email. “Illinois [has] a strong pro-Democratic skew.”
Wisconsin is more biased than 95% of the plans his organization analyzed, and Illinois is 57% more biased, according to the analysis.
The Gerrymandering Project has given both states an “F” for their latest redistricting. They are among a total of 11 states that have received a failing grade. Utah, Texas, Kansas, North Carolina and Florida also failed with maps that heavily favor Republicans, while Nevada failed with a map that heavily favors Democrats. Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia had maps that failed on racial grounds.
As for the two other states Abbott named — California and New York — neither one is particularly weighted.
The Gerrymandering Project gave California’s map a “B,” noting that it gives an advantage to incumbents, rather than to a party. And, according to the most recent report on voter registration from California’s Secretary of State, issued on Feb. 10, there are almost twice as many registered Democrats in the state as Republicans.
“That map was prepared by a citizen commission that included Democrats, Republicans, and independents,” Wang told us. “The reason the map elects so many Democrats is that having single-member districts tends to over-reward the majority party, no matter how the lines are drawn. Voters tend to cluster, and that affects representation. Think of it like this: in one district, winning 51% of the vote gets 100% of the seat, which is a bonus of 49%.”
New York received an “A” from the Gerrymandering Project, after courts rejected maps drawn by the state Legislature that had heavily favored Democrats and appointed a special master to redraw the lines in time for the 2022 midterms.
“In the end, the maps adopted by the court are among the most competitive and politically balanced in the nation — New York is one of only a handful of states where competition increased rather than decreased after redistricting,” wrote Michael Li, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, in June 2022.
“That Congressional map created competition on Long Island and up the Hudson River valley,” Wang said. “Republicans were able to flip 4 seats in 2022. That would never happen under a partisan gerrymander.”
In the end, “[b]oth sides can point to individual states and complain about gerrymanders,” Kondik said. “Overall in both 2022 and 2024, the national House map was relatively fair, I think. One way of looking at it is that Donald Trump won the median House seat (the seat right in the middle if you ordered all 435 districts from where Trump’s margin was best to where it was worst) by 3 points. He won nationally by about 1.5 points. That’s a small Republican bias, but not some sort of overwhelming one. What I am curious to see is how much more Republican does that median seat get when this 2026 redistricting round is over.”
We reached out to Abbott’s office about his claim, but we didn’t receive a response.
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