Texas's 25th congressional district of the United States House of Representatives stretches from Arlington and Fort Worth to some of its outer southwestern suburbs, as well as rural counties east of Abilene.
Senator and Houston resident Lloyd Bentsen) over adopted son and Vice President George H. W. Bush with over 51 percent of the vote.
The new district would take a combination of mostly white moderate and working-class communities in southwest and southeast Houston as well as southern and eastern Harris County, including most of Pasadena, Baytown and Channelview along with the Texas Medical Center, along with an eastern spur of Fort Bend County including a mostly Black southwest section of the city of Houston.
After Andrews vacated the seat to make an unsuccessful run for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 1994 against Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, Democratic investment banker Ken Bentsen, a nephew of Lloyd Bentsen (who by this time was serving as Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton), won the seat in a close race with 52.3 percent of the vote against Republican opponent Gene Fontenot who polled 45 percent.
However, in 2010 Doggett faced his toughest reelection, winning 53 percent of the vote against Republican physician and future state senator Donna Campbell.
In July 2011, Texas Governor Rick Perry signed into law a redistricting plan ("C185"), approved by the Texas legislature in June, which gave the 25th district a completely different geography for the 2012 elections, including part of Travis County, and stretching as far north as Johnson County, south of Fort Worth, with Fort Hood situated in the geographic heart of the district.
Former Texas Secretary of State and auto dealer Roger Williams, who had previously been a candidate for the U.S. Senate as early as 2010 while Kay Bailey Hutchison was still serving (she would eventually retire the following year and would be succeeded in 2012 by Ted Cruz), ultimately won a crowded Republican primary and would go on to win comfortable margins or better in a district where Democrats were only competitive in the western Travis County portion of the district (which includes some of the most Republican areas in the county including much of the area surrounding Lake Travis; Mitt Romney won 60 percent of the vote in the new district in 2012.
As the 2010s progressed, fast-growing Austin and Travis County became even more Democratic than they already were, with Donald Trump's nationwide struggles with suburban voters beginning to impact Republican candidates both in presidential and in midterm elections.
For a number of years, there was a consolidated lawsuit against the redistricting;[6][7] in March 2017, a panel of federal judges ruled that the new 35th district and two others were illegally drawn with discriminatory intent.
On June 28, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the Texas legislature's 2003 redistricting plan violated the Voting Rights Act in the case of the 23rd district.
In the 2008 election Doggett faced Republican George Morovich, a structural engineer from La Grange and Libertarian Jim Stutsman, a retired Army veteran.