After months of pushback and hurdles, Texas Republicans just may get their way.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court finally cleared the way for the Lone Star State to use a new congressional district map. 

The newly drawn map is expected to boost Republican gains in the 2026 midterm elections, despite findings from a lower court that the plan will likely discriminate against Black and Latino voters. 

According to NBC, the 6-3 ruling is a major victory for the current administration and Texas conservatives, who engineered the map to lock in a stronger GOP majority in the state’s U.S. House delegation.​ The outcome means Texas can implement the new map as candidate filing deadlines loom — which will lock in the disputed districts for the 2026 cycle as litigation continues.

In a statement, Justice Elena Kagan said the decision “disrespects the work of a district court that did everything one could ask” and it also “disserves the millions of Texans whom the district court found were assigned to their new districts based on their race.”

Texas officials designed the plan to help Republicans secure control of up to 30 of the state’s 38 congressional seats, potentially adding as many as five GOP-held districts compared to the current map. The shift comes even as Texas has become a Latino-plurality state.

“Texas is now a Latino-plurality state, yet we don’t have that kind of representation in the 2021 map and certainly not in the proposed 2025 map,” said Lydia Camarillo, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP), to Democracy Docket this August. “Districts where Latinos could decide elections are being dismantled. We believe that Texas is not only violating the Voting Rights Act, but it’s also violating the U.S. Constitution.”

A lower-court majority previously decided there was “substantial evidence” that mapmakers diluted the political power of Black and Latino voters by breaking up or overconcentrating minority communities. The panel found that districts where Latino and Black voters could previously elect candidates of their choice were dismantled or reconfigured in ways that weakened their influence.