Houston: packing the diverse city
Harris County, the county that is Houston, holds nearly five million people, heavily Black and Latino, voting about 55 percent Democratic. In 2025 it became the centre of the biggest redistricting fight in America.
Texas Republicans redrew the state's congressional map in the middle of the decade, at President Trump's urging, to try to flip five Democratic seats before the 2026 midterms. Democratic legislators fled the state to deny a quorum; the map passed anyway. A court struck it down as a racial gerrymander, but the Supreme Court first stayed and then, in April 2026, reversed that ruling, so the redrawn map stands for the midterms.
The map above shows Harris County before that redraw. Three of the four districts the Justice Department flagged as racial gerrymanders, the pretext for the whole exercise, sit here; the 2025 move, below, was to pack those blue seats tighter still and crack a seat like Al Green's 9th into a new Republican district.
You are playing the Democrats. Your voters are the majority here, but they are stacked in the city where a majority is easy to waste. Draw the lines so that 55 percent wins a majority of the districts, instead of being packed into a handful.
Clinton 54.0%, Trump 41.6%. Harris County's 2016 presidential vote.
Harris County before the 2025 redraw, shaded by the 2016 vote. Three deep-blue seats soak up the city; the pale red ones around them stay safe.
The 2025 map: the 18th packs even tighter, the 7th becomes a second blue sink, and the 9th, 81 percent Democratic above, is redrawn to lean Republican.