The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, has granted Texas’ request to stay a lower court ruling blocking it from using a heavily gerrymandered congressional map the state legislature passed at the behest of President Donald Trump.
The ruling means Texas’ new map can go into effect for next year’s midterms. It marks a significant victory for the president’s national effort to rig the election by pressuring states to draw more GOP-friendly congressional districts.
Under the new Texas map, Republicans could pick up five more seats in Congress.
The court concluded that Texas had engaged in a partisan — as opposed to an illegal racial — gerrymander.
In the majority ruling, the justices wrote that Texas was likely to succeed on the merits of its claim that the lower court had “failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith” on the part of the Texas legislature and that the plaintiffs “did not produce a viable alternative map that met the State’s avowedly partisan goals.”
The majority emphasized the timing of the lower court’s injunction, invoking its election law doctrine known as the Purcell principle to argue that judicial changes this close to candidate filing threaten the functioning of elections.
“Texas has also made a strong showing of irreparable harm and that the equities and public interest favor it,” the majority added. “This Court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, sharply criticized the majority for intervening.
“Today’s order disrespects the work of a District Court that did everything one could ask to carry out its charge—that put aside every consideration except getting the issue before it right,” Kagan wrote. “This Court reverses that judgment based on its perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record.”
Kagan also rejected the majority’s reliance on the Purcell principle altogether.
“Texas is not on the eve of an election,” she added. “If Purcell prevents such a ruling, it gives every State the opportunity to hold an unlawful election.”
Kagan further argued that the full factual record strongly supported the conclusion that race played a central role in the redraw.
“It was plausible — perfectly plausible in light of the full record — that Texas drew its new map mainly on racial lines,” she continued.
Democrats, critics respond
Democrats — both in Texas and the national party — were quick to react to the Supreme Court’s decision.
Texas House Minority Leader Gene Wu denounced the ruling as a direct blow to the decades-long struggle for fair representation for minority voters in the state.
“The Supreme Court failed Texas voters today, and they failed American democracy,” Wu said in a statement. “This is what the end of the Voting Rights Act looks like: courts that won’t protect minority communities even when the evidence is staring them in the face.”
Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, called the decision “wrong — both morally and legally.”
“Once again, the Supreme Court gave Trump exactly what he wanted: a rigged map to help Republicans avoid accountability in the midterms for turning their backs on the American people,” he said in a statement. “But it will backfire. Texas Democrats fought every step of the way against these unlawful, rigged congressional maps and sparked a national movement. Democrats are fighting back, responding in kind to even the playing field across the country.”
“Republicans are about to be taught one valuable lesson: Don’t mess with Texas voters,” Martin continued. “The DNC stands committed to building power in Texas, no matter the maps in play, one election at a time.”
In Virginia, Senate President Pro Tempore Louise Lucas (D) hinted that the state would respond to the Texas decision with another redraw of its own — potentially a 10–1 map, with 10 Democratic-leaning districts out of the state’s 11 congressional seats. Virginia’s current map holds six Democratic and five Republican districts.
Voting rights advocates also condemned the ruling as an escalation in partisan manipulation of the redistricting process.
Marcia Johnson, chief of activation and justice at the League of Women Voters, and Joyce LeBombard, president of the organization’s Texas chapter, warned of the decision’s broader harm to democratic institutions.
“The League is outraged by the politicization of redistricting and manipulation of voters as political pawns,” Johnson and LeBombard said in a joint statement. “Allowing this map to remain in place for the next election signals a dangerous tolerance for authoritarian tactics in how political power is drawn and justified.”
Redistricting wars
Texas’ decision this summer to gerrymander at Trump’s demand has set off an unprecedented arms race of mid-decade redistricting across the country.
Since then, California voters have approved a plan to offset the Texas gains with five more Democratic-leaning districts. Republicans are now challenging the California map in court, assisted by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
Missouri and North Carolina have passed their own GOP gerrymanders, while lawmakers in some Republican-controlled states like Indiana are resisting Trump’s plan. Virginia legislators hope to ask voters to approve a new map next year that could help Democrats counter those moves.
In August, Texas leaders pushed their rushed gerrymander through the legislature despite hours of public testimony against the plan. Democrats in the Texas State House only managed to briefly delay them by leaving the state and denying the GOP the quorum required to take a vote.
Throughout the redistricting process, Republicans kept Texans in the dark, refusing to answer basic questions about who drew the map, how the mapmaker was paid or why the gerrymander was happening.
When minority voters and voting advocates challenged* the map in federal court, a nine-day hearing finally provided some of those answers.
In his testimony, Adam Kincaid, the national GOP’s leading mapmaker, revealed that he had been hired by the Republican National Committee to draw the new map. He told the court that, when he drew Texas’ previous map in 2021, he had been instructed to protect some districts where minority voters are able to elect their candidate of choice. In 2025, however, he received no such guidance. Rather, he took instructions only from the White House, as well as some requests from the state’s Republican congressional delegation.
Kincaid has since appealed to GOP donors to fund more gerrymandering, telling Bloomberg News: “If you’re looking for a return on your investment, redistricting is second to none when it comes to the value for what you can accomplish.”
Texas attorneys defended the map in court as a partisan gerrymander, not a racial one. Federal courts have been unable to block partisan gerrymandering since a 2019 Supreme Court ruling, but racial gerrymandering remains illegal.
But opponents of the map argued that race was the predominant factor motivating the gerrymander.
A panel of three federal judges agreed.
Judge Jeffrey Brown, appointed by President Donald Trump, issued a striking majority opinion pointing to a much-scrutinized letter sent by the DOJ to Texas leaders as evidence of racial gerrymandering. It instructed Texas to redraw specific congressional districts because of their racial makeup and threatened swift legal action if it failed to comply.
Gov. Greg Abbott received the letter just two days before adding redistricting to a special legislative session agenda, citing the DOJ’s concerns as his reason.
Brown was joined in his opinion by Judge David Guaderrama, an appointee of former President Barack Obama.
Judge Jerry Smith, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, dissented in a bizarre opinion rife with personal insults aimed at Brown and more than a dozen references to philanthropist George Soros, a common bogeyman for the right.
Texas’ attorneys quickly appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court, arguing the plaintiffs had failed to prove that race, rather than partisanship, motivated the redraw. They also argued that blocking the new map would cause confusion for voters, candidates and election officials.
*Some Texas voters are represented by the Elias Law Group (ELG). ELG firm chair Marc Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.
This story has been updated.
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