The legal misstep that imperiled Trump’s midterm strategy

This past week, that letter created major legal problems for Republicans and a setback for the Trump administration.

Dhillon’s warning to Texas was the central evidence a federal court cited in blocking a House district map that could have yielded Republicans as many as five additional seats. The result: President Trump’s push to protect his party’s House majority through gerrymandering is now at risk of costing the GOP seats, rather than producing a net gain.

The Texas ruling left the White House working to shore up the firewall it has been trying to build to ensure that Democrats are unable to gain control of the House, where Republicans currently hold a narrow, six-seat majority, with three seats vacant. With four GOP-led states already putting maps in place that are more Republican-friendly, the White House is pushing Indiana, Florida and other states to follow suit, aware that a Democratic-led House would stymie the president’s agenda in Congress and possibly impeach him.

Late Friday, the administration got good news as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued a temporary pause on the lower-court ruling, restoring the contested map for now. Alito, the justice who handles emergency appeals from Texas, ordered the groups that challenged the map to respond by Monday.

Still, the Dhillon letter “was clearly an unforced error," said Jacob Rubashkin, an editor at Inside Elections, a nonpartisan newsletter.

The Supreme Court has ruled that drawing House districts to give one party an advantage is legal and beyond the purview of federal courts to intervene. Dhillon’s misstep, analysts and critics of the administration said, was to tell Texas officials that they needed to redraw four districts to satisfy race-based requirements under federal law and the Constitution—matters in which federal courts still play a role.

A divided three-judge court on Tuesday ruled that Texas state lawmakers drew their House map to satisfy the Justice Department’s racial concerns—and in doing so produced an illegal racial gerrymander. The 2-1 ruling, written by a Trump-nominated judge, said Texas must use its prior House map, which lawmakers had approved just after the 2020 census.

“She gave them a bomb, and they ran with it," Michael Li, a lawyer who tracks voting rights with the liberal Brennan Center for Justice, said of Dhillon’s letter.

While White House officials acknowledged the ruling as a setback, they expressed confidence it would be overturned soon by the Supreme Court. The officials said the new Texas map was in fact drawn to help Republicans gain seats, not to achieve any racial goals.

If the Texas ruling stands, Democrats would be on track to come out ahead by about three seats from the unusual, mid-decade redistricting rush that Trump set off this summer, according to David Wasserman, a redistricting expert with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “Talk about a backfire," he said.

Wasserman calculated before the court decision that Republicans had gained a net one seat from redistricting, with some uncertainty about the tally. He counted likely gains from just-approved maps in Texas, Ohio, North Carolina and Missouri, where Republicans control the legislatures, offset by changes in California and Utah benefiting Democrats. On deck could be additional GOP seats in Florida and Indiana, as well as Democratic seats in Virginia.

The tit-for-tat redistricting among the states has frustrated some members of Trump’s own party who are in danger of losing their House seats.

“This whole thing has been just one of the dumbest things that we’ve seen in recent American political history, and it’s going to benefit no one," said Rep. Kevin Kiley, a California Republican. His district along the Nevada border was cut into six pieces by a new map that California voters approved this month. The push for a new map, urged by Gov. Gavin Newsom, was intended to counter the GOP redistricting push in Texas.

The Justice Department is suing to rescind the new California map, but Kiley for now is left trying to decide which segment of his district to run in next year. He had been warning his fellow Republicans for months that their redistricting push could produce districts they ultimately lose.

Rep. Doug LaMalfa, a California Republican who said his current seat is shattered into three pieces under the new map, pointed to local reports in his farming-heavy district that found even Democratic voters uneasy with the outcome, owing to concern that the district’s agriculture hub wouldn’t be well-represented by urban legislators.

“I shudder at how much is going on all across the country," LaMalfa said. “This traces, of course, to the Texas deal, which I don’t support, either…. Two wrongs do not make a right."

States commonly draw new district lines early in a decade, once the decennial census shows how population has shifted across the country. While mid-decade remapping occurs, this year has been unusually fluid.

Trump set off the redistricting battle in the summer, when there was little prospect that Democratic states such as California would respond in kind. The White House is still pressing lawmakers in several states to draw new maps. The president and his allies are threatening to support primary-election candidates against Indiana Republican lawmakers.

“Republicans are simply asking them to…give the voters proper representation in their states," Alex Bruesewitz, a Republican consultant and Trump ally, said. “I don’t know why some of these so-called Republican legislators are dragging their feet."

Republicans have said that their party was responding to legal challenges and gerrymandering by Democrats in such states as Massachusetts, where none of the nine House members are Republican, and Illinois, where Republicans have long complained about Democratic-drawn districts.

“You have case after case after case where Democrats maximized their opportunities, and Republicans for various reasons chose not to do so," said Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust. “This was not a fight that started in Texas."

Legal challenges to the maps in Texas and California, as well as those in North Carolina, Louisiana and elsewhere, might create a clash between the courts and the election calendar. The deadline for candidates to file their intent to run for office is coming up soon in some states—as early as December in Texas and North Carolina.

Some Democrats, such as Rep. Marc Veasey of Texas, whose seat was targeted by the state’s Republicans, said supporting Democratic efforts to draw more-favorable maps should be a litmus test for those in the party who have aspirations for higher office. Failure to do so should be disqualifying, Veasey said.

“Two years from now, if you’re going to want to be mentioned as a presidential contender, or you’re going to want a cabinet post, or you’re going to want a prime-time slot speaking at the convention, absolutely not," said Veasey. “Fight now, or you don’t fight later."

Kincaid said Republicans would continue to act, in part to respond to Democratic “lawfare," or political combat in the courts. “Republicans had a choice either to sit back and let Democrats sue the Republican majority away, or to try to gain seats. And that’s what you’re seeing here," he said.

Write to Olivia Beavers at Olivia.Beavers@wsj.com, Aaron Zitner at aaron.zitner@wsj.com and Meridith McGraw at Meridith.McGraw@WSJ.com