GOP seals control in drawing districts
The stakes were crystal clear for Texas Democrats heading into 2020.
Republicans had a lock on the state Senate, governorship and at least four of the five seats on a little-known board charged with settling disputes over redistricting, the decennial exercise of redrawing political maps to account for population changes.
Democrats could only break Republicans’ two-decade stranglehold on the process by winning control of the Texas House and electing a Democratic speaker, who would serve as the lone non-Republican on the redistricting board. The party went all out in pursuit of the nine seats needed for a majority, while Democratic groups from outside the state spent tens of millions across a broad battlefield of districts.
Instead, they failed to net any seats in the lower chamber, and state Rep. Dade Phelan, a Republican from Beaumont, is the presumptive House speaker. Republicans are set to wield full control over the shape of Texas’ state and congressional districts through 2030, allowing them to reinforce seats around Houston and other areas where Democrats recently came within striking distance.
And for the first time in decades, lawmakers will be unbound by a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had placed Texas’ political maps under automatic federal supervision due to the state’s history of discriminating against minority voters.
“That’s why there has been, nationwide, a desire among the Democratic Party to regain control of various statehouses, including in Texas — because of redistricting,” said Sherri Greenberg, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and former Democratic state legislator.
Wielding the map-drawing power will not be entirely painless for Republicans, who have seen their grip on dozens of state and federal districts erode. Though Democrats failed to flip any of their targeted congressional seats in 2020 and fared about as poorly in state House contests, their single-digit defeats in once ruby-red districts point to Democrats’ growing advantages in urban and suburban counties, even as Republicans retain an overwhelming advantage in rural Texas.
Republicans, then, will have to decide how aggressive they want to be in redrawing political boundaries to their benefit, balancing the need to fortify their numbers in battleground districts with the opportunity to flip back some of the districts they lost in 2018, when Democrats picked up 12 seats.
“I see this redistricting opportunity for Republicans as more of a defensive play than an offensive play,” said Texas Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak. “This is one of the tough things when you’re engaging in redistricting if you’re the party in power, because you can be sort of allured by the short-term potential to win an extra seat or two. But you can take two steps forward to eventually take three steps back if you’re not thinking about demographic changes over a 10-year period.”
For now, the looming redistricting fight is far from the minds of most state lawmakers. Pandemic-related Census delays mean that Texas may not get the census numbers until after the Legislature leaves town in late May.
“If the data is not delivered during the regular session, it creates a whole set of cascading problems that impact the drawing of lines, even down to the county and municipal levels, because everyone is going to be put on an even greater time crunch,” said Eric Opiela, an attorney and former executive director of the Texas Republican Party who has worked on prior redistricting efforts.
During normal times, officials might already be using population data from the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey (ACS) to strategize or even draw up preliminary maps. But the pandemic has forced census workers to adopt unconventional survey tactics and generated unprecedented population shifts due to the rise in remote working, factors that make any pre-2020 population data highly unreliable, Opiela said.
“I think it’s going to be very important to wait until the official data is received to draw any conclusions as to where Texans live.” Opiela said.
Even if the Census data arrived on time, COVID-19 would likely force lawmakers to prioritize the state’s pandemic-inflicted budget gap.
Whenever redistricting does come up, Democrats will have few options. They faced a similar situation in 2011, when Republicans held a supermajority in the Texas House and were free to gerrymander, drawing districts to cement their power.
“It was one of the worst sessions that we’ve ever had,” said state Rep. Armando Walle, a Houston Democrat who serves on the House Redistricting Committee. “They scored a whole bunch of touchdowns and spiked the ball in our face every time.”
Even if they had won control of the House, Democrats would have had little power to stop Republicans’ redistricting plans. If the Legislature fails to agree on new maps during the session or soon after, the Legislative Redistricting Board — formed by the House speaker, lieutenant governor, attorney general, comptroller and land commissioner — is tasked with redrawing the maps, which it has done only three times since its founding in1951. All five members are Republicans.
Perhaps the only remedy for Democrats will be to challenge the maps in court, which most political observers say is inevitable.
Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said he expects Republican lawmakers to be more cautious than last time about spreading themselves too thin, even if theymay be emboldened by recent favorable court rulings.
“I think you’re going to see districts much more tightly focused around places they know where Republican voters are,” Rottinghaus said. “The fact that this is coming off the 2020 election when you had a spike in Republican voters is good for them. They have a clearer sense of where their voters are, and the courts have allowed them to draw lines that maximize that potential.”
Because of those factors, some Democrats are expecting a bloodbath.
“I’ve had a history of working with Republicans in a constructive way to get things done formy constituents and for Texas, but when it comes down to redistricting, I think unfortunately the collegiality prettymuch goes out the window,” Walle said. “Because redistricting is about power, and the folks that are in control, I would doubt that they would somehow throw us a solid.”