Top GOP Map-Drawer and Right-Wing Law Firm Team Up to Target Texas Minority Voters

The Republicans who run one of Texas’ biggest counties have recruited the national GOP’s top map-drawer, as well as a leading Washington, D.C.-based anti-voting group, to ram through a new gerrymander that aims to expand their majority. 

The effort — finalized Tuesday in a 3-2 party-line vote by county leadership — has spurred furious opposition from local minority communities whose right to fair representation is at risk.

It underscores how the GOP’s sweeping national strategy to use map-drawing to boost the party’s power at the expense of non-white voters is now playing out at the local level.

And, highlighting how the effort has leveraged some of the most powerful and well-connected figures in the conservative anti-democracy movement, the Washington, D.C.-based attorney who oversaw much of the redistricting process took over last month as the top voting lawyer at the U.S. Justice Department.

Voters in Tarrant County — Texas’s third-largest county, with a population of around 2.2 million, and home to Fort Worth — elect four commissioners who, along with the County Judge Tim O’Hare, make up the county’s five-member governing body, known as commissioners court. (In Texas, a county judge is not a judicial officer, but a regular elected official.)

Last year, O’Hare, a hyper-partisan Republican, tried to remove polling sites from college campuses. Now, he and the panel’s other two GOPers are out to flip one of the two seats held by Democrats to win a supermajority in the 2026 elections.

That’s the goal of the new map approved by Republican commissioners Tuesday, which packs many of the county’s Black and brown voters into one heavily Democratic district, meaning the other seat that’s currently held by Democrats now leans Republican. The map was shared publicly only in the past week and had not been discussed at public hearings.

“My entire intention is to allow Tarrant County to go from three Republicans, two Democrats on the commissioners court to four Republicans, one Democrat,” Commissioner Matt Krause, a Republican, told constituents at a public hearing.

Sure enough, within hours of the vote, a GOP state lawmaker announced that he plans to run for the Democratic seat that’s been gerrymandered to favor his party.

Of course, there’s nothing new about lawmakers, even local ones, ensuring that maps are redrawn in their party’s favor. After the 2020 Census, Democrats in Harris County – home to Houston – redistricted to win a fourth seat on the commissioners court.

Still, the involvement from the outset of national-level conservative and Republican operatives highlights the striking sophistication and coordination of the right’s multi-pronged campaign to suppress democracy.

Democrats on the commissioners court, meanwhile, say there’s no need to conduct a mid-decade redistricting — that the maps adopted in 2021 accurately represent the population and provide fair representation. 

And an analysis by the UCLA Voting Rights Project found that all the draft maps created in the new process showed “a consistent pattern of racial packing” that dilutes the power of minority voters, who make up a clear majority of the county’s population. 

“It is impossible to draw any conclusion other than this being racially motivated when you look at how the maps are drawn,” Commissioner Roderick Miles Jr., a Democrat, told Democracy Docket. “What other conclusion can be made other than this is racially motivated, this is racial gerrymandering?”

READ COMMISSIONER MILES’ POWERFUL OP-ED ON TARRANT COUNTY’S REPUBLICAN GERRYMANDER. 

‘This person is the Wizard of Oz — you just can’t see him’

To carry out the scheme, Republicans hired the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a prominent Washington-D.C.-based anti-voting law firm whose board boasts some of the leading lights of the conservative anti-democracy movement. Its founder, Christian Adams, was a member of President Donald Trump’s short-lived commission on voter fraud, launched in 2017.

Maureen Riordan, until recently a lawyer for PILF, oversaw much of the firm’s redistricting work with Tarrant County, according to staff in Miles’ office. Riordan took over last month as the acting chief of the voting section at the U.S. Department of Justice, Democracy Docket reported Saturday. 

PILF has a long record of working to make voting more difficult and to deny fair representation to communities of color. It has sued at least a dozen states over access to voter registration records and allegations of inadequate voter roll maintenance. In 2019, PILF was forced to apologize after its false claims of voter fraud in Virginia prompted a defamation suit from voters who were publicly identified by the group. It represents Galveston County, Texas in an ongoing lawsuit challenging the county’s 2021 maps. 

But PILF’s involvement in Tarrant County may suggest the group is now looking to step in earlier in the process, before gerrymandered maps are even approved, said Kareem Crayton, vice president of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Washington, D.C. office.

“Their choice to be more active in local redistricting represents a more robust agenda to make their vision apparent in more parts of the country than used to be the case,” Crayton said.

To actually draw the maps, PILF turned to Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust (NRRT), the party’s national redistricting organization. Politico recently described Kincaid as “the GOP’s mapmaking expert in the states Republicans controlled redistricting.”

Kincaid’s involvement was revealed by Joe Nixon, a lawyer for PILF, in response to questioning at a public hearing last month.

It isn’t clear whether NRRT is formally involved in the effort, or whether Kincaid is working in a personal capacity. Neither PILF nor NRRT responded to requests for comment, and PILF has declined requests by Democrats on the court to release more information about Kincaid’s role or how much he’s being paid.

Nor has PILF said much about the approach taken in redrawing the maps.  

“They have not provided any data, no information, and their presence and engagement has been limited at best,” Miles said.

At a May 20 hearing, Commissioner Alisa Simmons, the other Democrat on the panel, said she had repeatedly asked to speak with Kincaid, but was denied.

“This person is the Wizard of Oz,” Simmons said. “You just can’t see him.”

Still, the goal has been clear. PILF and Kincaid ultimately produced seven draft maps, all of which packed the county’s Black and Hispanic voters into Miles’ district. That leaves the district represented by Simmons with a Republican-voting majority, making it much harder for her to hold on to her seat next year.

At a May 6 hearing, a procession of county residents came to the microphone to vocally express their opposition to the redistricting effort.

Mendi Tackett, a local Democratic activist, said the map-drawers’ goal of “packing Democratic and minority voters to ensure Republican power” was “so obvious it’s breathtaking.”

‘What happens here will not stay here’

The mayors of ten cities in Tarrant County — including Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker, a Republican — signed an open letter last month warning that the maps could invite a racial discrimination lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act.

O’Hare and other Republicans on the court have insisted that their goal is to sort voters based on their political preference, not their race. But since there’s a close correlation between the two, especially in the South, that’s a complicated claim to make.

“It’s hard to make an argument about politics in the South without acknowledging the racial component of it,” Crayton said. “And the fact that [O’Hare] suggests otherwise is sort of straining credulity.” 

Indeed, the county is a long-time conservative stronghold in Texas that has been trending blue in recent years, in part thanks to the growth of its non-white population. By a narrow margin, Joe Biden won the county in 2020 over Trump, though Trump won it by around 5 percentage points last year. 

“Texas is one of the most demographically dynamic states in the country, and in many of these places, that challenge of demographics posing a threat to the existing order is not very kindly seen by a lot of people,” Crayton said.

Indeed, Tarrant County Democrats fear that the county’s decision to give PILF and Kincaid the keys to its maps could be just the start of a trend in which the national GOP takes an interest in local-level redistricting battles that might previously have fallen under their radar.

“What happens here will not stay here,” Miles said. “It will shape what comes next for other communities across the nation that are facing similar threats.”

Late Update, 3:26pm ET: Minority voters in Tarrant County have filed a federal lawsuit against the redistricting plan, alleging that it violates the Voting Rights Act.