Donald Trump is weaponizing redistricting to make one of the worst racially gerrymandered congressional maps in the country even worse — and Governor Greg Abbott is gladly bending the knee. As Trump and Texas Republicans prioritize disenfranchising voters instead of providing much-needed disaster relief for Texans in need, the DNC is out with a new explainer video featuring Litigation Director Dan Freeman on what every American should know about Texas Republicans’ latest gerrymandering scheme.

WATCH: 

Key Points: 

• “The first thing to know about Texas is that it’s already home to some of the worst gerrymandering in the country. Every decade since the 1970s, courts have found that at least one of Texas’ maps violated the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act. In 2003, the Texas Legislature drew its congressional map in the middle of the decade, just like it’s doing now. Once again, that map was struck down by the Supreme Court as violating the Voting Rights Act. Between 2010 and 2020, Texas grew enough to get four new congressional seats, but white residents made up less than 5% of that growth. Even so, in 2021, Texas drew its map to avoid creating any new districts where minority voters could elect the candidates they preferred.”

• “The Justice Department challenged the map under the Voting Rights Act. The Trump administration dropped the case. Now, President Trump is telling Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Texas Republicans to make a bad map much, much worse. He’s telling Texas officials that they need to adopt a map drawn in DC, and Republicans are bending the knee, telling President Trump it’s just fine for a New Yorker to mess with Texas.”

• “… Texas Democrats want to focus on disaster response and prevention, but for Governor Abbott, the first priority is redistricting. Republicans want the same votes that won them 25 of 38 seats in 2024 to give them 30 of 38 seats in 2026, and they’ll probably do this using the same tricks the Republican map drawers used in 2021.
  
• “Number one: packing — they cram as many Democrats as possible into dense urban districts. Democratic members of Congress win by 30, 40, or 50 points, and Democrats have less impact on surrounding districts. Next up: cracking — they spread the remaining Democrats across as many districts as they can, so the Democrats don’t form a majority in any of those districts. Then, there’s stacking — they pair struggling communities that support Democrats with wealthier voters. … Stacking creates the illusion of majority working class support, but still gives Republicans the upper hand at the ballot box. … Sometimes they just carve Democratic voters out of swing districts. That all sounds like cheating, because it is.” 

• “Because Republicans are using the floods as an excuse for this special session, they’re using Texans as pawns in the political short term, just so they can hurt them even more in the long term by electing more Republicans and passing more unpopular legislation.”