Ed Castillo/Houston Public Media
Texas state representatives will convene at the University of Houston Saturday to hear public comments on plans to redraw congressional maps mid-decade. The hearing will take place in the UH Student Center beginning at 11 a.m. Public testimony will be allotted a maximum of five hours, with each speaker having up to two minutes to testify. Texas residents wishing to submit written comments may do so electronically.
The redistricting hearing is expected to be heated following what critics, particularly Democrats, have called “a partisan power grab” by the Republican-led Legislature.
“There are a lot of people who look at what Republicans are doing and say that they’re essentially letting the lawmakers pick their voters, instead of having the voters pick their lawmakers, that’s going to raise a lot of ire and so this will be a very contentious hearing,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at UH.
Renée Cross, senior executive director of the UH Hobby School of Public Affairs, expects a heavy turnout for the hearing, particularly among Democrats.
“From what I have seen, there’s already been quite a concentrated effort on outreach to Democratic voters to come and speak against redistricting at this point in the decade,” Cross said.
Saturday’s hearing will focus on 10 congressional districts that sit wholly or partly in Houston and its surrounding counties. Among them are Districts 2 (Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R), 7 (Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, D), 8 (Rep. Morgan Luttrell, R), 9 (Rep. Al Green, D), 14 (Rep. Randy Weber, R), 18 (vacant), 22 (Rep. Troy Nehls, R), 29 (Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D), 36 (Rep. Brian Babin, R), and 38 (Rep. Wesley Hunt, R). However, the House Select Committee on Congressional Redistricting will hear testimony on all areas of the state.
President Donald Trump has said he expects the redistricting to enable Republicans to pick up a net five seats in the 2026 midterm elections. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has flagged four seats specifically as “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” These include three seats in the Houston area – congressional districts 9, 18, and 29, all of which have majority nonwhite populations, and which are or previously have been represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats. The fourth seat named in the DOJ letter, Dallas-Fort Worth’s 33rd Congressional District, is represented by Congressman Marc Veasey, a Black Democrat.
Cross said she expects the mid-decade redistricting will sow confusion and depress turnout among voters, particularly in the 18th Congressional District, which has been without a representative since the death of Democratic Congressman Sylvester Turner in March. That said, she does not expect it to dramatically change the Houston area’s partisan breakdown in representation.
“Because of our population, particularly the diversity of our population here in the Houston region, I think it’s going to be really hard for Republicans to gain too much out of the Houston area,” Cross said. “They might be able to gain one [seat], but you know, if they go too much further than one in this area, it’s going to threaten incumbents such as Troy Nehls or Wesley Hunt.”
Cross and Rottinghaus agree that the Houston Democrat most at risk in the redistricting process is not one of those whose district the DOJ letter named as problematic, but rather Rep. Lizzie Fletcher’s 7th Congressional District, which is bordered by Troy Nehls in District 22 and Wesley Hunt in District 38.
“There’s just, I think, more opportunities to bring Republicans into that particular district, then there might be say with the 29th [represented by Sylvia Garcia],” Cross said.
Cross said that Republicans’ best chance for a pickup anywhere in the state is not in Houston but in the Rio Grande Valley, specifically Congressional District 28, represented by Congressman Henry Cuellar, generally viewed as the most conservative Democrat in the Texas congressional delegation.
“There are plenty of Democrats that wouldn’t even consider him a Democrat,” Cross said.
There’s a risk that trying to pick up as many seats as President Trump wants could backfire on Texas Republicans.
“If lawmakers want to squeeze more Republican districts out of Texas, they’re going to have to make some of those [existing Republican] districts swing districts, which means taking support from current Republican districts and putting them into the new perspective Republican districts,” Rottinghaus said. “That’s going to bleed support from incumbents who are worried that they’re not going to get the same level of intense Republican support that they once had.”
When Republicans last pushed through a mid-decade round of redistricting, under then-U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in 2003, it was on the theory that Democrats then had greater representation in the Texas delegation than warranted by the partisan breakdown of Texas voters. Cross said that is far from the case today.
“If, for whatever reasons, Republicans are successful in adding these five Republicans seats, we’ll end up with 80% of the congressional seats being Republican,” Cross said. “This state doesn’t go 80% Republican.”
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