Texas Democrats abandoned their constituents on Sunday to avoid doing their jobs — which included voting on a redistricting map they claim is gerrymandered. So where did they run off to in protest? The most gerrymandered state in the county — Democrat-run Illinois.
Fifty-seven Texas House Democrats ditched their constituencies on Sunday, with a majority leaving for Illinois while a few stragglers headed to Boston, Massachusetts and Albany, New York over a redistricting proposal. Last month, Gov. Greg Abbott called a special legislative session to address, in part, the redrawing of congressional districts. The move followed a DOJ finding that four districts were unlawfully gerrymandered on racial grounds. The DOJ contends that Texas’ current congressional maps violate the Voting Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. The DOJ pointed to the recent Petteway v. Galveston County ruling from the 5th Circuit, which held that the Voting Rights Act (VRA) does not require minority-coalition districts. Minority-coalition seats are voting districts where multiple racial or ethnic minorities are grouped together to form a majority of the population.
The DOJ argues the four districts in question were originally drawn to create minority-coalition seats (or were the result of coalition districts nearby) and therefore must be redrawn.
Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu said that Abbott and President Donald Trump, however, are working to “steal these communities’ power and voice.”
“We’re not here to play political games,” Wu continued.
But you don’t protest alleged gerrymandering in defense of voters by hiding out in places where the ruling party approved a map that completely undermined Republican voters.
As Nathaniel Rakich and Tony Chow wrote in 2022 in FiveThirtyEight, the state’s gerrymandered congressional map “seems hell-bent on making Republican congressman from Illinois an endangered species.”
Democrats, who were in charge of redistricting, “drew a map that packed all five Republicans [in Illinois’s U.S. House Delegation] into just three congressional districts.” As Chow and Rakich predicted, Democrats now hold 14 of the state’s 17 congressional seats despite them not winning even 60% of the popular vote. Chow and Rakich ultimately rated Illinois “the worst gerrymander in the country drawn by Democrats.”
Other Texas House Democrats who deserted their constituencies went to New York — the same state that approved a congressional map prior to the 2024 election that gave Democrats yet another edge.
The state Democrats blocked a proposal drawn by the state’s bipartisan redistricting committee so that they could use their own map that, as NBC News’ Jane C. Timm wrote, gave “Democrats a slight boost.” While this map did not try to increase the amount of seats Democrats held, it did provide aid for several incumbents. (Notably, Democrats had previously been shot down by the courts after they, as Timm described, passed maps “that so significantly boosted their congressional prospects” in 2022.)
Cook Political Report analyst and senior editor David Wasserman told Timm the map was a “mild gerrymander.”
“Any map that makes deliberate choices to benefit a party is a gerrymander on some level, but this is not an aggressive or maximal gerrymander by any means,” Wasserman said.
Notably, New Yorkers passed a constitutional amendment in 2014 creating the Independent Redistricting Commission that is tasked with drawing new maps every 10 years. And yet Democrats disregarded the will of the voters and instead decided to use their own map proposal, which makes Texas’ Democrats fleeing to New York so ironic.
In fact, some Texas House Democrats were seen wearing shirts that read “Let the people vote” while they boarded their plane to ditch their duties.
But in New York, Democrats surely didn’t care when people did vote because they ignored their constituents — who voted in 2014 to approve the IRC — and instead used their own, partisan map.
You see, Democrats are not actually concerned about principles or people. It’s not about fairness. In fact, it’s the exact opposite of what Wu said — it is about politics. They just want to save Democrat-held seats even if those seats are the result of unlawful racial gerrymandering.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
