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Texas’ redistricting fight can be confusing. Here’s what El Pasoans need to know [1]
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Date: 2025-08-05
Texas lawmakers are locked in a bitter fight over congressional redistricting. Gov. Greg Abbott, acting on a request by President Donald Trump, included a congressional redistricting proposal in the agenda for a special session of the Legislature. As the Texas House of Representatives was preparing to vote, dozens of Democrats fled the state, denying the necessary quorum for the chamber to conduct any business.
Redistricting is a complicated topic that many voters don’t understand. Here’s a brief explainer on what’s happening right now in Texas.
What is redistricting?
Redistricting is the process of redrawing political boundaries. Usually, redistricting for bodies like Congress, the state Legislature and local governments like city councils, county commissioners courts and school boards takes place the year after the census. Political boundaries were redrawn in 2021.
Mid-decade redistricting is rare, but the courts have said it’s legal. Texas last did it in 2003 to create more Republican seats, and Democrats staged a quorum break that delayed the plan. But the Democrats eventually returned and Republicans pushed through their plan.
Political parties have long used the redistricting process to their benefit. Drawing unusual boundaries to benefit one party over the other is called gerrymandering.
The Supreme Court has established a series of guidelines around redistricting over the years, but has become increasingly reluctant to reject political maps. Generally speaking, the Supreme Court has said it is legal to draw boundaries for partisan advantage, but not for racial or ethnic reasons.
Republicans have had control of Texas government for more than three decades, and have largely had their way in redistricting efforts during that time. In the 2021 congressional redistricting, the Legislature created lines that yielded 25 Republican seats and 13 Democratic seats.
The lines were drawn in a way that meant none of the state’s 38 House districts were competitive among the parties, so members of the House are basically elected in party primaries.
What’s this fight about?
Republicans currently have a narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, and Democrats see an opportunity to regain control of that chamber in the 2026 midterm elections, which would likely prevent Trump from enacting much of his agenda over the last two years of his term.
Gov. Greg Abbott
Trump told Texas Republicans he wanted the state’s congressional lines redrawn to yield five more likely GOP seats. Doing so would make it more difficult for Democrats to win control of the House in 2026, though several Democratic states are considering their own redistricting efforts to offset Republican gains in Texas.
Abbott included congressional redistricting in his agenda for a month-long special session that began July 21. The first two weeks of the session have been dominated by redistricting. Democrats have argued that the focus should be on the flooding in the Texas Hill Country on July 4. Republicans are accusing the Democrats of blocking flood relief by disrupting the special session.
The House Redistricting Committee voted 12-6, along party lines, to approve a congressional redistricting plan that would give Republicans a significant chance of winning 30 of the state’s 38 congressional districts.
What is a quorum break?
Under current rules, 100 of the 151 members of the Texas House of Representatives must be present to conduct business. The 62 Democrats in the House generally have little power. But they have enough members to block a quorum if at least 51 members don’t show up.
That’s what’s happening now. More than 51 Democratic House members have left the state. If they stayed in Texas, they could be subject to arrest. By going to Democratic-controlled states like Illinois, New York and Massachusetts, they are unlikely to be arrested and face extradition.
The United States has a long history of quorum breaks. Perhaps most famously, Abraham Lincoln dove through a window in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prevent a quorum in the Illinois Legislature in 1840.
As U.S. politics has become more polarized, states have taken steps to prevent legislative walkouts. Voters in predominately Democratic Oregon approved a measure in 2022 that would bar lawmakers from seeking reelection if they boycotted legislative sessions. Eight Republican lawmakers who refused to attend legislative sessions for six weeks in 2023 were declared ineligible to seek reelection by the state Supreme Court.
In Texas, Republican lawmakers approved a rule in 2023 that would make members subject to $500 daily fines for missing legislative sessions. That action came after a 2021 quorum break by Democrats who were ultimately unsuccessful in their efforts to block a Republican bill to change election laws. Media reports have said Democratic donors have raised money to pay any fines the lawmakers may face in the latest quorum break.
What’s at stake for El Paso?
El Paso County isn’t included in Republican efforts to pick up additional seats in Texas. But the GOP proposal does make changes to the boundary lines of the two congressional districts that currently include El Paso. Those are the 16th Congressional District currently represented by Democrat Veronica Escobar, and the 23rd Congressional District represented by Republican Tony Gonzales.
El Paso County is the only county in the 16th District; the 23rd includes parts of 29 counties stretching from El Paso to San Antonio.
The current redistricting plan doesn’t significantly alter the partisan balance of the two districts. Under either the current map or the proposed new map, a Democrat would be heavily favored in the 16th Congressional District, and a Republican heavily favored in the 23rd, based on historic voting patterns.
The revised map essentially moves the population living on Fort Bliss to Gonzales’ district, with a few thousand people in other parts of the county moving to Escobar’s district.
Both maps are based on data from the 2020 census. In both maps, 766,986 El Paso County residents counted in the census are in Escobar’s district and 98,671 are in Gonzales’ district.
In the current boundaries, 82.1% of residents in Escobar’s district are Hispanic; in the part of El Paso County in Gonzales’ district, 86.7% are Hispanic.
Under the proposed map put forth by Republicans, the Hispanic population in Escobar’s district would grow to 82.5%; Hispanics in the El Paso County portion of Gonzales’ district would drop to 83.5%.
While redrawing congressional boundaries in El Paso isn’t likely to change outcomes in the 2026 election, it reignited an often bitter fight from the 2021 redistricting effort.
Gonzales, whose district includes military bases in San Antonio, also wanted Fort Bliss included in his district. Throughout Texas’ history, Fort Bliss has been part of El Paso’s primary congressional district.
The original redistricting plan put forth by Texas Republicans included Fort Bliss in Gonzales’ district, which drew complaints from Democratic and Republican political and business leaders in El Paso. The final redistricting map approved by the Legislature in 2021 included largely unpopulated Fort Bliss rangeland in Gonzales’ district, but kept the post’s housing area and headquarters in Escobar’s district.
Escobar and other Democratic leaders have criticized the proposed redistricting plan’s impact on El Paso, saying Fort Bliss and El Paso International Airport are key economic engines for El Paso and should continue to be part of the 16th Congressional District.
El Paso business leaders, who were critical of the 2021 plan to put Fort Bliss and the airport in Gonzales’ district, have generally not yet taken a public stance on the proposed new map.
Why is El Paso County in two congressional districts?
El Paso’s population is too big to be contained in one congressional district. That wasn’t always the case.
Through most of the 20th century, the 16th Congressional District covered much of West Texas, including El Paso County. El Paso’s population growth during the century made it progressively more influential in electing the representative for that seat.
After the 1990 census, El Paso had too many people to fit in one congressional district.
Beginning with the 1992 election, parts of El Paso County were included in the 23rd Congressional District. The boundaries of that district have changed several times, but generally it has included much of Far West Texas and the state’s border with Mexico.
A series of court rulings over the years had said congressional districts within states must have similar populations. In the 2020 census, El Paso County had just over 865,000 residents. Texas congressional districts were drawn to each have about 767,000 residents.
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