Texas can use a redrawn congressional map that adds as many as five Republican-friendly congressional districts, the supreme court ruled on Thursday, handing Donald Trump a major win in his push to boost Republican seats ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
In an unsigned order, the 6-3 conservative majority court granted a request by Texas to lift a lower court’s ruling that struck down the state’s new map in November. The supreme court’s three liberal justices dissented.
“The district court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections,” the supreme court said in an order explaining its decision.
The lower district court had previously found that Texas had likely sorted voters based on their race – an unlawful practice called racial gerrymandering – when it adopted the new maps, and ordered the state to use the maps it had adopted after the 2020 census for next year’s election.
In a sharply worded dissent, Justice Elena Kagan objected to the decision by the supreme court’s majority, arguing that it disrespected the work of the lower court, whose ruling actually was authored by a judge appointed by Trump.
“We are a higher court than the district court, but we are not a better one when it comes to making such a fact-based decision,” Kagan wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“This court’s stay guarantees that Texas’s new map, with all its enhanced partisan advantage, will govern next year’s elections for the House of Representatives. And this court’s stay ensures that many Texas citizens, for no good reason, will be placed in electoral districts because of their race. And that result, as this court has pronounced year in and year out, is a violation of the constitution,” she continued.
The ruling comes amid a nationwide battle over the redrawing of electoral maps. Texas is a key piece in Trump’s effort to transform the US House map to secure Republicans’ fragile House majority for the second half of his presidential term. Democrats need to flip only a handful of congressional seats to win the House gavel, and the opposition party has historically gained ground during the midterm elections, particularly if the president’s approval ratings are low, as Trump’s are.
Typically, redistricting happens after a new decade’s census results. Yet the decision by Texas Republicans to move ahead with a brazen mid-cycle redistricting earlier this summer set off a chain reaction among other states.
Republicans in Texas, North Carolina and Missouri have passed new maps that could add as many as seven GOP-friendly seats. Democrats, meanwhile, have countered that effort with new maps in California – where Republicans and the Trump justice department are suing to overturn the map – and in Virginia, which could offset those gains.
In Utah, a judge handed Democrats an unexpected victory by choosing a House map for 2026 that gives the party one pickup opportunity.
Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, welcomed the supreme court ruling in favor of the state’s Republican party.
In a statement carried by the Associated Press, Paxton said the order “defended Texas’s fundamental right to draw a map that ensures we are represented by Republicans”.
“Texas is paving the way as we take our country back, district by district, state by state,” he added.
Trump’s attorney general Pam Bondi also celebrated the decision, saying that the federal district court had “no right to interfere with a state’s decision to redraw legislative maps for partisan reasons”.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) lamented the decision. “It’s incredibly disappointing that the Court has rubber stamped a map enacted by Texas Republicans which, simply put, is an extreme, racially gerrymandered map,” said Suzan DelBene, chair of the DCCC.
Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, said the court had “once again shredded its credibility by rubber-stamping a racially gerrymandered map in Texas”.
In a statement, Jeffries added: “Tonight’s ruling by far-right justices on the supreme court is further proof that the extremists will do anything to rig the midterm elections. The gerrymandered Texas congressional map is a partisan and racially discriminatory power grab designed to subvert the will of the voters – particularly in Black and Latino communities.”
