Vol. II, No. 151 From Our Region to Yours
Politics

Texas Republicans Redrew Five Districts to Win Them, Won One, and It Is Their Only Pickup in America

The 2025 map was built to add five Republican seats. On Wednesday Jace Yarbrough won the 32nd, the one that worked, and NBC News logged it as the party's first gain of the 2026 elections.

By 2 min read

The Texas State Capitol dome lit up at night against a black sky, with red light glowing in the lantern near the top, an American flag and a Texas flag flying from a pole on the left, and dark trees in silhouette across the bottom.
The Texas State Capitol, where the map was drawn. The chart of how it went has five bars, and four of them are the wrong color. Photo: Bravodelnorte / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

AUSTIN, Texas — Republicans finally flipped a seat on Wednesday afternoon. It was in Texas, in a district they had drawn for that purpose, and it was the only one of the five they drew that did what it was told.

Republican Jace Yarbrough won Texas’ 32nd Congressional District, NBC News projected. He led Democrat Dan Barrios 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent with 99 percent of the expected vote in. NBC News called it the Republicans’ first gain of the 2026 elections in the House, the Senate or the other statewide races its Decision Desk tracks.

This reporter’s model has been waiting for this moment since the summer of 2025, when the plan was drawn up. The model said five. The model was very clear about five.

The plan

In 2025, at President Trump’s urging, Texas Republicans redrew the state’s congressional map in the middle of the decade. The goal was to take the party from 24 Texas seats to 29, the Houston Chronicle reported. Democrats in the Texas House left the state to slow the vote down. The map passed anyway. California answered by redrawing its own.

The 32nd was one of the five. It used to be a compact Dallas district that ran about 62 percent Democratic on the Texas Partisan Index, The Texan reported. The new lines stretched it east into rural counties and made it about 60 percent Republican. Its Democratic congresswoman, Julie Johnson, ran in the neighboring 33rd instead.

The results

The other four seats did not follow the plan. The Hill counted one Republican win out of the five. In Houston’s 9th, Democrat Leticia Gutierrez led Republican Alex Mealer by 15 points. The party’s plan leaned on Latino voters repeating their 2024 support for Trump, and “that support failed to materialize,” The Hill reported, contributing to Republican losses in three South Texas districts.

Net result for the Texas delegation, by The Hill’s count: Democrats gained a seat. The map that was built to add five Republican seats has, so far, subtracted one.

Nationally, NBC News counts 35 seats flipped by Democrats and one by Republicans. The one is the 32nd. Our chart of Republican pickups for the entire country is a single bar, and the bar is in East Texas.

“In this business we do not say the plan failed,” said Dr. Rhonda Tallyman, director of the Institute for Retrospective Certainty, which this desk consults when the numbers are already in. “We say the plan achieved its full one-fifth potential.”

The model weighs in

The model ran the numbers again after the call. It now projects that Republicans will win every seat they draw by hand, provided they draw only one. It has a margin of error of four districts.

Yarbrough will be sworn in on Jan. 3, 2027. He will join a House that Democrats will control, and he will have the distinction of being his party’s entire answer to the question of what it picked up this year.

The model calls that a perfect record. One flip attempted where it worked, one flip won. The chart is very clean if you stop it there.

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