Dems gerrymandered NM beyond recognition—Now crying about TX maps

As the national redistricting battle escalates, New Mexico has emerged as one of the most glaring examples of partisan gerrymandering—drawing renewed attention to the state’s congressional maps crafted by Democrats during the last redistricting cycle. While Texas Republicans face criticism for efforts to redraw maps in their favor ahead of the 2026 elections, what’s being ignored by many in the media is that Democrats in states like New Mexico and Illinois have already executed aggressive power grabs of their own.

In 2021, New Mexico Democrats used their legislative majority to redraw the state’s congressional districts in a way that dramatically altered political representation. The new map carved up conservative-leaning areas and created districts sprawling across vast and unrelated parts of the state, allowing Democrats to gain control of all three of New Mexico’s congressional seats. The most extreme example is the Third Congressional District, which now stretches from the southeastern city of Hobbs to the Four Corners region in the northwest—a drive that takes over eight hours and 35 minutes. The district covers radically different economic and cultural regions, making coherent representation nearly impossible. Communities of interest were fractured, and rural voices were diluted, all to ensure a Democrat stronghold.

This approach mirrors what far-left Democrats in Illinois did when they designed a map that created a 14-3 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation. In both states, political expediency—not fair representation—was the guiding principle. While Democrats in New Mexico loudly decry gerrymandering elsewhere, they executed the same strategy they now condemn.

The New Mexico map is also under scrutiny for its reliance on racial considerations in the line-drawing process. The Supreme Court recently announced it will rehear a case out of Louisiana that challenges the constitutionality of creating majority-minority districts using race as the primary factor. That decision could directly impact states like New Mexico, where race-based gerrymandering may be subject to strict judicial review.

Meanwhile, Democrats in Texas are traveling the country to sound the alarm about what they call Republican efforts to suppress minority votes through redistricting. A group of Texas House Democrats recently met with New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham in Santa Fe to rally support for their cause. Texas Rep. Joe Moody claimed, “Right now in Texas, there is a political power grab coming from Washington, D.C., coming from the Trump White House to dismantle districts, to racially gerrymander districts, disenfranchising brown and Black Texans.”

Moody and his colleagues warned that redistricting battles in Texas are not isolated incidents, and that they could set a precedent for other states. Yet there was no mention of the fact that Democrats in New Mexico already redrew maps that broke up conservative and rural communities while artificially stacking others to secure safe Democrat seats.

While media and Democrat leaders label Republican-led redistricting efforts as “assaults on democracy,” they have remained largely silent on similar, and in nearly all cases worse, gerrymandering moves by their own party. Republicans in Texas are now doing exactly what Democrats in New Mexico have already done: redrawing maps with unashamed political motivation. The only difference is who’s holding the pen.