With less than two weeks left until the filing deadline for the March primary, it’s still not clear which congressional map the state will use.
AUSTIN, Texas — The battle over Texas’ congressional district map is now in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court is set to decide whether the state can use it in next year’s midterm elections.
On Friday night, Justice Samuel Alito granted the state a temporary victory by pausing a lower court’s ruling, which would have required Texas to use the map lawmakers drew in 2021. For now, Texas can temporarily use its 2025 congressional map while the court battle over its legality plays out.
Over the summer, President Donald Trump pushed Texas lawmakers to redraw the map, aiming to secure five additional Republican seats in Congress to strengthen the party’s narrow House majority.
Organizations, including the League of United Latin American Citizens, sued over the Republican-led mid-decade redistricting, arguing the new map is unconstitutional. The groups that are suing argue that the map strips power from black and Latino voters. They said the map is a racial gerrymander, which is prohibited by the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution.
Last week, a federal court in El Paso blocked the map after finding strong evidence that it was racially gerrymandered. The lower court ordered the state to use the 2021 map for next year’s midterm elections. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed the court’s decision to the Supreme Court and asked for an emergency stay on the temporary injunction.
Paxton argued that the high court needed to intervene to avoid confusion heading into the 2026 election, and that the lower court’s ruling was made too close to an election and did not follow judicial precedent. One avenue the court could use to rule is Purcell, which Texas Solicitor General William Peterson cited in the state’s brief to the high court.
“That is a doctrine that’s followed by the Supreme Court, where you’re really not supposed to change the rules of the game for elections when you get too close to those elections. The fact that the filing process had already begun when the three-judge panel issued its injunction is what would be presented as evidence by the state of Texas,” Rice University Political Science Professor Mark Jones said. “The plaintiffs would argue that that’s not really that big an issue, that the 2021 maps are what people actually know best, and that they can always extend the filing deadline a couple of weeks without jeopardizing the March primaries.”
Midterm candidates have until December 8th to officially file with the Secretary of State’s Office to get their name on the March primary Ballot. Paxton has asked the high court to rule by December 1.
The U.S. Supreme Court will have to decide whether to allow Texas to move forward with the new congressional map state lawmakers passed over the summer or uphold the district court’s ruling in El Paso.
Justice Alito could grant an emergency stay on his own, in which case, more likely than not, Texas would use the 2025 maps for the 2026 election. He could also reject the request for an emergency stay, in which case Texas would most likely use the 2021 maps for the 2026 election. He could also bring it before the entire Supreme Court and have the nine justices vote on whether to grant the emergency stay.
“The majority of the three-judge panel issued the injunction because they believe that the plaintiffs are likely to prevail in any eventual case or at least have a reasonable chance of prevailing,” Jones said. “If, on the other hand, a majority on the Supreme Court or Alito himself disagrees with that. If they believe that, based on the evidence that the plaintiffs don’t have a good chance or a reasonable chance of prevailing in the actual, legal case, then they would revert to the 2025 map simply because there would be no reason to change things if you don’t think the plaintiffs are going to be successful.”
There is precedent for extending the filing period or delaying the primary, as happened in 2012 due to redistricting litigation.
“That’s a pretty draconian decision to make and one that has a pretty dramatic effect on elections across the entire state of Texas, not just for these 38 congressional seats,” Jones said. “That’s probably a last resort, and the least likely scenario, although it is always a possibility.”
Jones said there is a great deal of urgency because time is of the essence, and the Supreme Court will have to make a decision soon.
“There’s strong pressure on the Supreme Court to make a decision as soon as possible, and a lot of that pressure is centered on Justice Alito himself,” Jones said. “If Alito were to bring it to the full court, he needs to move quickly than if he’s going to make the decision himself.”
The Trump Administration filed an amicus brief supporting the 2025 map and urging the justices to pause the lower court’s order. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the federal judges in the lower court misconstrued evidence, specifically a July letter from Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon that expressed legal concerns about four districts in the Dallas and Houston areas, all of which are represented by Democrats.
The DOJ said those districts constitute “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act. In the letter, the DOJ stated that TX-9 and TX-18 sorted voters along racial lines to create two coalition seats, thereby creating a majority-Hispanic district in TX-29.
In the brief, Sauer said the DOJ did not direct Texas to engage in racial gerrymandering, but rather to eliminate race from consideration when redrawing those four districts and others.
“The evidence clearly demonstrates that Texas was not doing DOJ’s supposed bidding—much less in a race-conscious way—but instead was engaged in a race-blind partisan gerrymander that happened to affect the districts DOJ identified,” the DOJ said. “The record shows that Texas did not actually follow any purported DOJ directive to engage in racial gerrymandering.”
When Gov. Abbott placed redistricting on the call for the first Special Session, he cited “constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice,” but did not cite those same concerns in the second special session call.
In the ruling that blocked Texas’s new map, Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, said that it was not enough to “cleanse the first proclamation’s racial taint.” In short, the lower court concluded that the letter undermined the state’s argument that the mid-decade redistricting was all about politics and partisan gain.
“The map that the Legislature passed during the second session was largely identical to the first, indicating that racial considerations had already infected the map by the time the Governor issued the second proclamation,” he wrote.
Jones said that the letter was a significant strategic error by the DOJ.
“There was no reason for the letter, and in fact, it’s not even clear that the letter was the real reason why this was actually occurring,” Jones said. “It might have been a fig leaf or a cover to carry out the more extreme partisan gerrymander, but for whatever reason, that decision by the Department of Justice really undermined the State of Texas case because that’s really what the two judges who agreed to the injunction focused on was that DOJ statement.”
After issuing the stay, Justice Alito set a Monday evening deadline for plaintiffs to respond and others to file briefs.
“When a State receives an explicit directive to engage in racial redistricting, publicly announces it will redistrict to satisfy that racial directive, and then produces a map that achieves the directive’s racial targets with mathematical precision, the Equal Protection Clause is violated,” the Mexican American Legislative Caucus wrote in its brief. “No amount of post-hoc partisan explanation can erase the record of what actually occurred.”
The back-and-forth battle over which map Texas will use in next year’s midterms is leaving some Congressional candidates in limbo.
If enacted and upheld in court ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, the new map would likely have forced Democratic Congressmen Lloyd Doggett and Greg Casar into a primary face-off to represent parts of the Austin area.
Back in August, Doggett – who was first elected to Congress in 1994 – said if the maps went into effect ahead of the midterms, he would not run for reelection.
But after the lower court ruling on Friday, Doggett said he had a “renewed opportunity” and planned to seek reelection. After Friday’s order by Justice Alito, Doggett said he is still hopeful that he will be able to run for reelection.
“Justice Alito’s temporary order does not indicate what the entire Supreme Court will do,” Doggett said in a statement. “Given the strong 160-page opinion by Judge Brown, a Trump appointee, I remain hopeful of a final ruling within the next 10 days, affirming that the Trump/Abbott map is an illegal racial gerrymander, which should not be used in the upcoming election. That would preserve the current congressional districts, allowing me to continue representing the only town I have ever called home.”
Texas Republican Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz filed an amicus brief with the court on Monday, in support of Texas’s newly drawn congressional district map.
“Anybody who says they know for certain how a court will rule will lie to you about other things as well,” Cornyn told reporters at an event on Monday. “The truth is nobody knows exactly what will happen.”
Republican candidates also filed briefs on Monday to support the state’s argument in the Supreme Court.
“There have been candidates who’ve been actively campaigning all across the state, which is an enormous outlay of money,” Trey Trainor, who is running for Congress in the 21st Congressional District, said. “People had already decided that they are living in certain districts, and the voters and everybody have kind of adjusted to that.”
He is one of six republican candidates who filed an amicus brief in support of the redrawn map. Eric Flores (CD-34), Chris Gober (CD-10), John Lujan (CD-35), Alexandra del Moral Mealer (CD-9), and Jessica Steinman (CD-8) were also a part of the brief.
Trainor said he has no plans to leave the race, regardless of which map the court selects, because the district is roughly the same, with the addition of Greater Austin and less of San Antonio. For others, there are much greater changes.
“If you force us back into the old map, you have to go meet a whole new set of voters,” Trainor said. “You have certain candidates, particularly on the brief that I filed, that, at the end of the day, they may not even run under this particular map. You’ll have some people who would drop out of the race in 2021.”
In addition to hitting the reset button on the campaign and disrupting voter outreach efforts, Trainor said running under the 2021 map will also complicate fundraising.
“We all face the same deadline of having the end of December be a fundraising deadline. And you always want to show donors from inside the district,” Trainor said. “So if you have a new portion of the district that comes in or a portion of the district that gets excluded, that puts a lot of pressure on you to go and find new donors.”
Trainor said candidates like himself have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to run in the newly redrawn districts.
“They all paid a $3,100 filing fee for the seat that they think they’re running in, and they’ve spent money,” Trainor said. “I’ve done advertising, I’ve reached out to voters, I’ve printed material that has specific counties and specific neighborhoods on it, and all of that would be for nothing if you end up running in a new district.”
Trainor said he is also concerned about how switching the map this close to an election would disrupt precincts and voter registration rolls.
For election administrators, he said it would throw everything in the state into turmoil.
“You have counties that have redrawn precinct lines, all of those types of things have happened with the understanding that the 2025 map that the legislature passed would be what they would use,” Trainor said. “Now you’re forcing all 254 counties to go back and reevaluate what they’ve done to get ready for an election under that map and go back to the old maps that were used as far back as 2021.”
On Tuesday evening, the state filed a new brief in response, asking the court to keep the new map in place. Now that that has happened, the high court can take action at any time.