GOP lawyer who headed Texas redistricting wins congressional primary

A Republican attorney who played a key role in President Donald Trump’s unprecedented mid-decade Texas gerrymander last year is now the GOP nominee to represent one of the very congressional districts he helped redraw. 

Chris Gober won a crowded primary this week, beating out nine other contenders for the chance to represent Texas’ 10th Congressional District, a bizarrely-shaped district that cracks off a segment of Austin and stretches across 150 miles of rural areas to end in west Houston. He will face Democrat Caitlin Rourk in November in the GOP-leaning district.

Gober stepped into the race after incumbent Rep. Michael McCaul (R) announced Sept. 15 he would not seek reelection. 

Gober is one of the only Texas Republicans known to have played a central role in last year’s redistricting scheme, a process conducted so secretively that even the Texas House and Senate’s Republican redistricting chairs insisted in federal court that they had little to no knowledge of the proceedings. 

Until at least October, Gober was reportedly on retainer with the Republican National Committee (RNC) and appears to have helped direct the mapdrawing effort. 

Gober did not testify in the federal court challenge* to the redrawn map. But the GOP mapmaker who drew the new Texas districts – Adam Kincaid, the director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust – was questioned about Gober’s involvement when he took the stand in October.

He said that the RNC hired Gober to represent the Texas Republican congressional delegation in redistricting in both 2021 and 2025. 

“I was retained by the RNC,” Kincaid said, describing the 2025 redistricting process. “Chris Gober is also retained by the RNC to represent the delegation in this matter. And so Chris was giving me direction – well, requests from the delegation as part of this work.”

During that time, Gober served as one of Kincaid’s few local contacts, providing the mapmaker with instructions and “requests” as he drew the map. But Kincaid refused to answer questions about the requests he received from Gober, claiming the information was protected by attorney-client privilege.

In his testimony, Kincaid revealed that the Texas congressional map was drawn and paid for by the RNC, not the state.

Gober isn’t running in one of the five districts that the GOP aimed to flip through last year’s gerrymander, but his district was nonetheless substantially redrawn. The new 10th Congressional District retained just 55% of its population from the 2021 map, according to court filings. 

Gober, the founding partner and CEO of law firm Lex Politica, has represented a litany of high-profile Republicans throughout his career. 

He defended Elon Musk and his America PAC’s activities aimed at helping a conservative win a Wisconsin Supreme Court election. And he represented Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a State Bar of Texas inquiry into Paxton’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

By publication time, Gober had not responded to questions from Democracy Docket about whether he is still retained by the RNC and to what extent he was involved in redrawing District 10’s boundaries.

Last year, Trump called on Republican-controlled states to conduct unprecedented mid-decade redistricting in order to help the GOP win the 2026 midterm elections. Texas was one of the first states to answer his call.

The resulting gerrymander was designed to help Republicans flip five congressional seats currently held by Democrats, a plan that will dilute the voting power of minority voters. They now will likely have fewer opportunities to elect the candidates of their choice. 

However, it remains to be seen whether the new map will deliver as planned in the November general election.

*Some Texas voters are represented by the Elias Law Group (ELG). ELG firm chair Marc Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.