Why Fleeing Texas Democrats Won't Stop Republicans

Time​ Magazine

7 hours ago

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If you're one of the millions of Texas residents living in a blue state House district, there's a better-than-even-odds chance your state rep has fled the state. Even if you live in a red district, or really anywhere else in the country, those truancies could determine the final two years of President Donald Trump's time in Washington.
More than 30 Texas lawmakers are in Illinois. Another six are in New York. Massachusetts was a draw for others as their comrades gathered for an unrelated wonkfest. And a few are in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom first floated a plan that has become a national script for Democrats preparing to retaliate against Texas, where Republicans plan to further gerrymander the state's U.S. House districts to improve their chances at maintaining the national balance of power in Washington.
In a striking reminder just how fragile politics can be, roughly 60 state lawmakers—each standing as proxy for just shy of 200,000 constituents—stand to potentially decide who will be the next House Speaker dictating policy for 345 million Americans. They split from their state on Sunday in what boosters have branded a 'Texodus,' one day after a GOP-led panel in Austin moved forward with a partisan rewrite of the state's district maps. And yet, despite serving as a rallying cry among Democrats nationally, this gambit by Texas Democrats is going to fail if history is to be a guide.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called a special legislative session that would, if successful, shrink the number of Democrats the state sends to the U.S. House by five. That would leave Democrats with eight seats, roughly 20% of the 38 Texans there, despite Democratic nominee Kamala Harris netting more than 42% of the vote in Texas last year.
In response, 57 of the Texas House's 62 Democrats fled the states rather than allow a quick vote approving the new lines. And in turn, Abbott threatened to remove those citizen lawmakers from their elected positions unless they hoofed it home while hinting they may face felony charges. Even if Texas Democrats run out the clock on this special session, nothing is stopping Abbott from calling another immediately after, setting this up for a perpetual stand-off that could cost each absent lawmaker $500 a day, as well as months away from their families and jobs. When Democrats fled Texas in the past to block similar GOP power grabs, they ultimately gave up.
Nationally, Democrats loudly cheered the move, even if they quietly knew it would ultimately prove a delay but not a defeat. Lacking a unified front since Harris' stinging loss last year that brought Trump back to the White House, Democrats have been rather listless as they try to regain their footing. The base wants a fight. The Establishment wants to spare itself the tough conversations. The consultant class wants to keep the cash flowing. All of which is to say this: Democrats will take anything passing muster for a win, albeit a brief one, especially if it triggers Democrats in other states to respond.
The Texas walkout drew a collective huzzah, with the chief Democratic group focused on state legislative power calling on their members to retaliate in spades.
'All options must be on the table—including Democratic state legislatures using their power to fight back and pursue redistricting mid-cycle in order to protect our democracy,' Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee chief Heather Williams said.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin seemed to signal his concurrence: 'Democrats everywhere should be ready to fight fire with fire to combat Trump and Republicans' craven scheme to rig the maps in their favor.'
But this tit-for-tat escalation has national implications, both in terms of who will hold gavels after the 2026 midterms and also for the slate of candidates on the national ticket in 2028. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who has been loudly assembling his own campaign-in-waiting for 2028, is fanning the flames of retribution. New York, another deep-blue state where the governor is threatening to redraw their own congressional map in response to Texas, might be the launching ground for a campaign from progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a natural heir to the movement helmed by Sen. Bernie Sanders of New York. Never count out Massachusetts, where Gov. Maura Healey is toying with following fellow Bay Staters Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, John Kerry, Mitt Romney, Deval Patrick, and Elizabeth Warren onto a national ticket. And Newsom, the California Governor and not-so-subtle contender for the Democratic nomination for President next turn, has threatened through allies to respond in kind to Texas' gamesmanship.
It's no accident those states have become Ground Zeroes for evacuating Texans, even as nonpartisan redistricting processes remain on the books of some of those states. Nor is it happenstance that national Democrats are looking to elevate those political refugees into proxies for their protest to come.
In turn, leaders in Republican-led states like Florida, Missouri, and New Hampshire have said they may throw open their maps as well.
Politics has always carried an element of performance art and a common winning playbook is pretty basic: Find a pariah, brand it toxic, shame it into folding, declare victory, move on. But there's a problem which assumes the playing field is level. Few in Texas believe Republicans are trying to draw a map that better represents the state's 31 million constituents. Yet Republicans are assuming their voters won't mind. For more than two decades, Republicans have outnumbered Democrats in the state legislature. Texas has the longest dryspell in the nation for electing a Democrat statewide despite a perpetual phantom hope that this will be the cycle that finally breaks the fever.
Despite this reality, Democrats are jumping onto the hopes that the planned tweaks to districts in Houston, Dallas, and Austin, and along the U.S.-Mexico border might be a step too far for centrist voters who just want the government to function normally. Even so, even in places where Democrats have a free hand to do their own shenanigans, such as Oregon and Illinois, there aren't many districts that haven't already been designed to their advantage.
For now at least, that reality isn't blunting the temporary ardor for counter-attack. At Monday's opening of the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures summit in Boston, the Texas defectors earned a standing ovation when they arrived and they planned a Wednesday press conference at the statehouse. Their compatriots in Illinois planned a media event on Monday near Chicago. And they were all looking forward to a quorum call on Monday in Austin that was doomed to fail because not enough lawmakers would be present. How Abbott responds stands to dictate the rest of this week, the first of a congressional recess until after Labor Day.
Still, this is a lot of posturing ahead of the inevitable given Democrats' past iterations of this ploy that failed for two decades. Texas Republicans have the votes to put in place the new maps. Texas Democrats are all but certain to lose five House districts. That might, if everything else holds, preserve Republicans' razor-thin majority in Washington after next year's U.S. House elections. Texas Democrats have never stopped a political map from taking shape and they don't have the numbers now to break that cycle. Instead, this is a moment of name-and-shame politics—in an era powered by the churn of Trump's tumult and insult. It's a waiting game that has triggered an unexpected optimism among Democrats, one completely unmoored from the current reality or not-so-distant history.
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