Brookings Analysis Authors See GOP
Only Winning 2 of 5 Texas Target Seats
Capitol Inside
May 4, 2026
A Brookings Institution study that was released on Monday predicted that Republicans only pick up two congressional seats in Texas where Governor Greg Abbott said the day before that the GOP would flip all five that were targeted for takeovers on a map that the majority party's members approved here last year.
The Brookings analysis of the U.S. House battlefield in Texas was conducted by two of the most prominent political experts here, Rice University professor Mark Jones and Bill King, a fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. The Rice pair's assessment echoed what Capitol Inside has been saying for months - that GOP lawmakers here made a major tactical blunder when they gambled that record support that President Donald Trump received among Latino voters represented a permanent realignment in that crucial voting bloc in three South Texas districts that were targets on the new map.
Capitol Inside has a pair of incumbent Democrats - U.S. Reps. Henry Cuellar of Laredo and Vicente Gonzalez of Brownsville - as the favorites in re-election races in two of the South Texas districts in question while the third has been rated here as a toss up in an open contest on the ballot this fall.
But the authors of the Brookings report noted that Trump's approval rate among Hispanic voters had plunged 20 points in a development that could put all three targeted South Texas districts out of reach for the Republicans while putting the GOP at risk of coming out behind in the competition for Congress in Texas in 2026.
"In 2025, Texas ignited the national redistricting fire that has swept across the country from California to Virginia," according to the Brookings study. "The Texas redistricting was initiated by President Trump requesting that Texas create five new Republican U.S. House seats for the midterm elections. However, the resulting plan will almost certainly not yield five new Republican seats. It will most likely add only two seats, and in a perfect electoral storm for Democrats, Republicans could actually lose seats."
The report cited Congressional District 15 as an example of a red Texas district that could go blue in the fall based on the current conditions. Jones and King pointed out that the incumbent in CD 15 - U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz - lost three of every five constituents when the district was redrawn on the new map to make it more Republican. The Brookings study authors noted that De La Cruz faces a highly unconventional Democratic foe in Bobby Pulido, a Grammy-winning Tejano music star.
Abbott may have set himself up for embarrassment on Sunday when he told Fox News that the U.S. House would have five more Republicans from Texas even though such an achievement appears highly unlikely based on all the signs, trends and projections for the midterm elections this fall by independent experts like the pair from academia that penned the Brookings report. The Brookings Institution, which is based in Massachusetts, is one of the oldest think tanks in the U.S. It's been widely regarded as slightly right or left of center in terms of political ideology.
But Abbott told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo would pick up a dozen congressional seats or more in November with Texas and Florida accounting for three-fourths of those. "Texas is going to add five Republican seats," Abbott said as though the gains would be a mere formality at the polls in 2026. "Florida's going to add 4 Republican seats."
Abbott suggested that back-to-back U.S. Supreme Court rulings in Texas and Louisiana set the stage for a double-digit gain for the GOP - with most of the gains coming in southern states. Abbott said the high court's decision last week in a case from the Pelican State was similar to its findings a week before when it reversed a lower court ruling that blocked Texas from using the congressional map. Neither side had expected a split decision from a three-judge panel in Texas to stand on appeal.
"The fact of the matter is, for decades Democrats have been using racial discrimination to draw these crazily drawn lines to try to protect Democrats," Abbott contended. "And now those crazy jigsaw puzzle lines have been using to protect members of the Democratic caucus in Congress can no longer be used."
But the five-seat GOP gain that the governor foresees in the competition for Congress in Texas could be an acute case of wishful thinking in a state where the GOP could flip four in the best case scenario for the party while breaking even with the Democrats in the worst narrative that's a possibility in November.
The GOP's prospects have been slightly brighter in Texas in the eyes of national prognosticators like the Cook Political Report and the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato. The Cook report and Sabato both have the GOP favored in three of the five targeted districts on the Texas map. The seat that Gonzalez is seeking again is rated as a toss up on the Cook and Sabato sites while both have Cuellar's seat as leans Democrat.
more to come ...
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