Supreme Court Clears Texas '26 Map in Huge Win for GOP

The Supreme Court on Thursday paved the way for Texas to use its redrawn congressional map, a major victory for Republicans who could gain as many as five seats in the 2026 midterm elections.

In an unsigned order, the justices granted Texas' emergency request to block a three-judge federal district court ruling that barred the map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

"Texas is paving the way as we take our country back, district by district, state by state," Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement. "This map reflects the political climate of our state and is a massive win for Texas and every conservative who is tired of watching the left try to upend the political system with bogus lawsuits."

The high court said Texas is likely to win when the case comes back on the merits. In the brief order, the justices said the state satisfied the "traditional criteria for interim relief" and faulted the lower court for "at least two serious errors" in striking down the map.

First, the majority said the three-judge court failed to apply the usual presumption that lawmakers act in "good faith" and instead construed "ambiguous direct and circumstantial evidence against the legislature."

Second, it said the lower court should have drawn a "dispositive or near-dispositive" adverse inference against the challengers because they never produced an alternative map that would have met Texas' stated partisan goals without the racial features they attacked.

The justices also leaned heavily on timing, given that Sunday is the deadline for candidates to file for next year's elections.

Quoting earlier election cases, the majority wrote that lower courts "should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election" and said the district court had "improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign," causing confusion and upsetting the "delicate federal-state balance in elections."

The order keeps the new map in place for 2026 so long as Texas files a timely appeal.

Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, wrote separately to underscore that politics, not race, was the real driver behind the map. He said it was "indisputable" that the "impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple."

Alito argued that the normal "clear-error" standard of review did not apply because the district court "based its findings upon a mistaken impression of applicable legal principles."

Given the close relationship between race and party in voting behavior, he warned that racial-gerrymander claims can "easily" be used "for partisan ends," and said challengers must "disentangle race and politics" by offering their own map that serves the same partisan aims.

Because the plaintiffs' experts did not do that, he said, the record supports a "strong inference that the State's map was indeed based on partisanship, not race."

Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, filed a sharply worded dissent. She said the three-judge court had done "everything one could ask" to resolve the case.

She accused the majority of tossing aside the strict "clear-error" standard and reversing a detailed factual record "based on its perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record."

The court's order, she wrote, "guarantees that Texas's new map, with all its enhanced partisan advantage, will govern next year's elections" and "disserves the millions of Texans whom the District Court found were assigned to their new districts based on their race."

Texas House Democrats wrote on their X account that "the Supreme Court failed Texas voters today, and they failed American democracy. Every Texan who testified against these maps should be angry.

"Every community that fought for generations to build political power and watched Republicans gerrymander it away should be angry. Democrats will continue to fight."

President Donald Trump has encouraged Republican-led states to redraw their congressional maps to help the GOP preserve its narrow House majority in the 2026 midterms.

His call for unusual mid-decade map drawing sparked Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Utah to approve new maps, which together could add as many as nine additional Republican seats.

Republican leaders in Florida and Indiana have opened redistricting discussions or special sessions but have yet to enact new maps amid internal divisions and legal concerns.

Democrat-led states responded with their own efforts to blunt possible Republican gains.

California voters approved a constitutional amendment backed by Democrat leaders that suspends the state's independent commission for this cycle and replaces it with a map projected to make about five more seats safely or strongly Democratic.

In Virginia and Maryland, Democrat officials are exploring ways to bypass or influence existing commissions and are weighing new maps that could net their party several seats, though those efforts remain in preliminary stages and face internal pushback and likely court challenges.