Democrats plan $20 Million fund to target Texas Republicans for redistricting

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas speaks with reporters outside the White House in Washington, Feb. 5, 2025. (Eric Lee/The New York Times)

By Shane Goldmacher and Nick Corasanti

The largest super political action committee backing House Democrats is creating a new fund with upward of $20 million to target congressional Republicans in Texas if legislators there follow through on plans to redraw district lines to eliminate Democratic seats before the 2026 midterm elections.

At the direction of President Donald Trump, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, has called a special session of the state Legislature to remake the lines in the state in order to squeeze as many as five Democrats out of office in an effort to pad the current slim Republican majority in the House.

National Democrats have decried the redistricting effort — lines are typically drawn once a decade after the census — as an effort to rig a Republican majority.

“Republicans are trying to steal five seats in Texas,” said Mike Smith, the president of the House Majority PAC, which is creating the new account, called the Lone Star Fund.

The new account, he said, is partly a bid to tell congressional Republicans from Texas that their own jobs could be put in jeopardy by the remapping as Republican voters are shifted into formerly Democratic seats. But he said it was also a bid to recruit some unlikely Republican allies to oppose the new maps because they fear for their own careers.

“They should be scared and they should be vocal about being scared because they’re about to get a bunch of money dropped on their head,” Smith said.

The advertising assault on those Republicans will actually begin Monday, when Unrig Our Economy, a liberal-leaning outside group, is starting an ad campaign worth more than $2 million focusing on four current Republican congressional districts in Houston, Dallas and near the Mexican border, the group said.

Unrig Our Economy views the four districts — currently held by Reps. Dan Crenshaw, Lance Gooden, Beth Van Duyne and Monica De La Cruz — as likely to be more competitive, or vulnerable to a Democratic challenge, should Texas Republicans go through with their redistricting plan.

The ads themselves make no mention of redistricting but rather focus on cuts to Medicaid and tax breaks for billionaires in the bill recently passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump.

Republicans currently hold 25 of the 38 congressional seats in Texas.

Abbott has justified the remapping push by pointing to a letter from the Justice Department arguing that some majority Black and Hispanic districts were unconstitutional; the letter came after Trump’s operation had pushed for new maps.

The Texas remapping fight is one of the biggest in politics nationwide, and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top Democrat in the House, is planning to travel to Texas in the coming days, according to his office. He is also planning to go to California later this week, where Democrats have threatened to counter Texas by redrawing their maps.

The midterm elections are typically a treacherous time for whichever party holds the White House, and Smith warned that redistricting could backfire for Texas Republicans ahead of a potential Democratic wave.

“They’re basically moving their incumbents into vulnerable positions in a cycle that’s going to be really bad for the Republican Party,” he said.

The new spending will go toward a combination of voter registration, advertising and added investment in communicating with Hispanic voters, who swung sharply in the Republican direction in 2024 but traditionally have leaned Democratic.

The Texas fund will be large enough to finance robust efforts in major media markets like Dallas and Houston, where Republicans are expected to draw new GOP seats, as well as the Rio Grande Valley. But Smith said the final sum would be determined by how exactly Republicans choose to carve up the state.

“They’re basing some of these redistrictings on the assumption that Hispanics are going to swing in their direction,” he said. “And our theory of the case is the opposite.”

Smith said Trump had made gains last year largely by focusing on affordability and that, once in power, the party had jettisoned that focus and was now shedding those gains.

National and Texas Democrats have few tools available to stop Republicans from remapping. Democrats in the state Legislature on Friday flew to Illinois and California to appear with Democratic governors there who have threatened to redo their own maps if Texas does. Options for new maps in blues states, however, are fairly limited.

State legislators have considered a possible walkout to deny Republicans a legal quorum to pass new lines. But Republicans have imposed a $500 daily penalty for those who participate, and past walkouts during redistricting fights in 2021 and 2003 were unsuccessful.