How redistricting is reshaping political power in 18th Congressional District

Since Barbara Jordan walked into Congress in 1973 as the first Black woman elected from the South, Texas’ 18th Congressional District has been a pillar of Black political power in Houston. 

But after two rounds of redistricting in less than four years and the deaths of Congressmen Sheila Jackson Lee and Sylvester Turner,  TX-18 is headed for yet another election cycle in May.

After a special election and a runoff, Congressman Christian Menefee is currently at the helm of the district, but only until the end of the year, when the term concludes. For the next full term, he is running against longtime 9th Congressional District representative Al Green.

After more than two decades serving TX-9, redistricting efforts redrew his home into the 18th.

The question facing voters and civic leaders in Houston’s historically Black communities is whether the district can remain a vehicle for Black political representation.

Per voting rights activist Pamiel Gaskin, 79, the redistricting saga was a way of impacting minority voter participation. She said the Texas redistricting has diluted Black voting power by “packing” Black voters into fewer districts (like Congressional District 18) while scattering others into heavily white, Republican districts. She argues this is intentional and has weakened Black political representation statewide.

“You either crack them, which means you split them up, or you pack them and you pack them into a small area,” Gaskin told the Defender. “They packed the Black district so that they don’t have as much power.”

She contrasts today’s declining Black voter turnout with the 90-95% turnout she witnessed in her youth and called for Black voters to mobilize in the midterms.

“The net effect is that Black citizens and voters don’t get the representation,” Gaskin said. “We are with 12-14% of the population…nobody’s gonna be on the ballot that’s gonna save us. What’s gonna save us is us and we have to vote. We are the last guardrail to protect the democracy that we were promised.”

The changes in the district

When Texas Republicans redrew the state’s congressional map in October 2021, the 18th Congressional District underwent one of its most significant transformations in decades.

The GOP legislature removed downtown Houston, Texas Southern University, the University of Houston, and the historically Black Third Ward from the 18th, pushing the district into Green’s neighboring TX-9 and Rep. Sylvia Garcia’s TX-29.

Jackson Lee’s home of nearly 50 years was removed from the new maps.

But after negotiations between Texas state representatives and senators, Jackson Lee’s home was redrawn back into her district, and Green regained control of TX-9.

During last year’s redistricting efforts, the 18th underwent similar changes.

Green’s district moved to the 18th-CD and remained unchanged.

“Most of the Black and brown voters were moved out of those districts, and most of them landed in the 18th congressional district,” said Michael O. Adams, director of the Master of Public Affairs Graduate Program at TSU’s Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs.

The consolidation, he explained, turned CD-18 into what redistricting analysts call a “minority opportunity district,” a seat designed to concentrate rather than expand minority political influence.

A federal court blocked the 2025 map in November 2025, but the Supreme Court’s December stay reinstated it for the 2026 primaries.

New maps

In August 2025, Texas Republicans pushed through a new mid-decade map at the urging of President Donald Trump, who wanted five additional Republican seats ahead of the 2026 midterms.

According to a study by Texas Southern University, only five congressional districts have fewer than 40% of their former (2021 map) residents under the new map.

Three of these districts are located in the Houston metro area, including TX-29, TX-18, and TX-9, and differ “dramatically” from the old maps.

The revised plan, in particular, reshaped the 18th Congressional District, stretching it from the suburbs southwest of Houston diagonally across the city to its northeast limits.

According to that map, roughly 45% of the voting-age population would be Black, 32% Hispanic, 15% white, and 8% Asian.

Residents weigh in

For residents like Ken Rodgers, president of Super Neighborhood 67 in the Greater Third Ward, the immediate consequences of redistricting boiled down to the resources his neighborhood would receive.

“We’ve always been in 18,” Rodgers told the Defender. “I’ll tell you what the real effect was…the drought of government money. We actually felt that before, because we didn’t have Congresswoman Jackson Lee funneling that money down into the 18th. So it’s just looking at the makeup of it, what it’s going to look like when we go to vote, and how the voting turns out, whether we can still elect representation that looks like us.”

His neighborhood’s concerns include a lack of affordable housing, transportation, and food insecurity, spurred by a dearth of healthy grocery stores.

“You can’t fix one of those things,” Rodgers said. “You have to fix them all so that we can shift from fighting to thriving. That’s what we want to be fighting for…to thrive and not to survive.”

Edna Griggs, 75, a lifelong resident of the 18th Congressional District, shared her personal experience of being redistricted into the 29th Congressional District after spending her entire life in the 18th. She reflected on the district’s historic power as a Black democratic stronghold, noting that Acres Homes was once one of the largest Black communities in the United States. Griggs argued that the redistricting was a deliberate effort to break up that voting power.

“This is where anyone who wanted to run for office came to the 18th congressional district to win an election,” Griggs told the Defender. “That’s just how strong it was. Now, the community has changed…no longer a total Black community as it was before.”

Despite her sadness over the change, she remains civically active, helping revive her neighborhood civic club.

“We the people, which is what people forget…we make the decision on how strong our neighborhood is,” she said, urging voters to turn out in the upcoming runoffs in the 18th Congressional District and midterm elections. “If we sit back and say nothing, then we get nothing. If the people don’t vote and the people don’t get out and do what they need to do, we can’t blame the candidates for what they’re doing.”

What the data says

The demographic transformation of the 18th Congressional District is documented in the numbers.

Under the 2021 map, no single racial group held a majority among voting-age citizens in the district as it was a “coalition district.”

Under the redrawn maps, the TX-18 would have a 50.8% Black electorate, with Black residents from the 9th Congressional District redistricted into the new TX-18.

Hector De Leon, Senior Advisor for Governmental Affairs, Public Engagement, and Elections for the Harris County Clerk’s Office, has spent more than two decades watching as raw data on voter registration is weaponized or ignored. 

He recently described independently compiling voter registration rosters from publicly available files and uploading them to Microsoft Access to build analyses that campaigns and political consultants typically guard closely.

Turnout, a hidden variable

Primary turnout in TX-18 has historically been low, a pattern that has allowed organized blocs to determine outcomes with outsized consequences.

Adams pointed to Sheila Jackson Lee’s first primary victory as a cautionary tale. Fewer than 40,000 votes were cast in the race that launched her 29-year congressional career.

“We saw in this cycle a tremendous increase in voter turnout on both sides of the aisle in terms of the Republicans having a competitive U.S. Senate primary, and also we had Talarico running and Jasmine Crockett,” Adams said. “It’s a midterm election, and the voters may be trying to send the current administration a message. That always happens with the power of the party that controls the White House. Normally, they tend to lose the midterm elections.”

With the 2026 primary runoff set for May 26, the precincts in Third Ward, Sunnyside, and the historically Black northeast Houston corridor are the battlegrounds that will define what kind of district the 18th truly becomes.

Adams framed it as a “descriptive representation,” the principle that voters can select someone who reflects their own identity and experience.

“I would say that the 18th Congressional District is a minority opportunity district,” he said. “That’s what we say in terms of redistribution terminology. It was increased because of what they did with the breakup of the 9th and portions of the 29th congressional district.”

The TX-18 boundaries have changed, and its electorate is evolving. Per experts, its future will not be decided by who votes in May.