That’s Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, attempting to justify his party’s attempt to steal away five Democratic House of Representatives seats in a new redistricting/gerrymandering scheme endorsed by President Donald Trump.
The move would provide Republicans additional wiggle room to work with in the 2026 midterm elections next year. Although it’s early yet, polls show most voters across the country are so upset with Trump and the GOP that they prefer Democrats to control Congress next fall. Generally speaking, the president’s party has traditionally fared poorly, too, in midterms, losing seats in the House during these contests.
With the slim majority that Republicans currently hold, any small number of races flipping from Republican to Democratic, in any part of the country, could mean Dems could win the House, providing them a huge tool for upsetting Trump’s agenda over the last two years he’s in office.
That’s where Texas comes in. By redistricting their state way ahead of the decennial census, as directed by the Constitution, they can disrupt the potential flips by flipping “blue” seats in their own state. The special session called by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott led to Democratic state lawmakers fleeing the state, to disrupt a quorum required for a vote on the matter.
Patrick’s statement — that Texas is a “red state” and thus deserves to have more seats — is blatantly false and wrong for multiple reasons.
Firstly, that’s not how elections work. Statewide races do not determine how voters, at the local levels — including in congressional districts — decide their lawmakers. If that were the case, why even have a state legislature? Or a state lieutenant governor, for that matter? The argument Patrick is making here could be used to suggest he shouldn’t even be able to run for his own office — just have the party that wins the state in presidential elections choose who runs the state, right??
But secondly, even if that WAS how things are done, the congressional delegation in Texas would look a lot different than it does now, if we went by how the state overall voted.
Texas has 38 congressional seats. Of those, Republicans hold onto 25 seats, while Democrats have only 12. The state is already considered a gerrymandered one as it is, and it’s easy to see why: when it comes to statewide contests, the results do not show that two-thirds of voters want Republicans in control, despite nearly two-thirds of House seats going to that party.
Indeed, in the 2024 presidential election, Trump won with 56 percent of the vote, while Democratic candidate Kamala Harris obtained 40 percent. That’s a clear majority for Republicans, to be sure, but if that rate were to be extrapolated to the House of Representatives, it would mean Democrats should have 15 or 16 seats instead of the 12 they now have.
Look at the results of Patrick’s own race back in 2022 — He won with just 54 percent of the vote, with 43 percent voting for the Democratic candidate, and a small percentage voting for third-party options. That means more than 9 in 20 voters in the state didn’t support him for the office he currently holds, with fewer than 11 in 20 backing him. Despite this, Republicans ended up winning nearly 66 percent of the state’s House of Representatives seats.
Patrick’s demand that more House seats lean Republican is the opposite of what SHOULD happen, based on these numbers. More importantly, it’s a move that hurts voters, who should be allowed to pick their representatives, and not the other way around. Texas Republicans think differently, believing that their ideology, and only their ideology, should be given a voice in Washington. That’s fascism, plain and simple.
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