What Texas is this?
GOP redistricting maps protect incumbents, ignore huge growth in minority populations.
If power reveals character, as LBJ biographer Robert Caro has argued, then what does the power of Texas Republican lawmakers in Austin say about them? When it comes to the proposed legislative maps they’ve released this week, it says elected officials here are plum terrified of the voters in the districts they now represent.
How else to interpret the outrageous maps presented this week, ones that aim to dilute the voting power of growing pockets of minority voters and keep incumbents — especially Republican incumbents — in office no matter how much the voting population in their districts has changed in the past decade?
Texas’ total population grew by 4 million in the last decade. Nearly 95 percent of that growth came from Latino, Asian and Black residents. Those new voters brought change across Texas, including turning many of the state’s largest suburban counties purple and putting Democrats firmly in control of local government in Harris and Dallas counties. Across the state, congressional seats that were reliably Republican in 2012 were fiercely competitive by the end of the decade.
But rather than embrace that competition and fight to persuade new voters that Texas is in good hands under nearly allRepublican rule, Republicans are running from it. In doing so, they aren’t just making it harder to win for Democrats, who currently hold just 13 of Texas’ 36 congressional seats. The proposed maps for the U.S. House and Texas House and Senate released this week also dilute the impact of Texas’ fast-growing minority communities. Minorities often vote for Democrats, but as 2020 showed, especially among Texas Latinos, that’s not a foregone conclusion.
Of the current congressional districts, 22 have white majorities, eight have Latino majorities, one is majority Black and five are without a clear majority. The new map proposes 23 districts with white majorities, seven with Hispanic majorities, none with a Black majority and eight without a majority.
And in the Texas House map proposal released Thursday, it’s the same story. The new maps have fewer Hispanic and Black-majority districts than the current maps, no Asian majority districts, and more white majorities. The Texas Senate map under consideration is marginally better. It doesn’t significantly dilute the racial representation in each district, but still manages to draw boundaries in a way that protects incumbents. While Donald Trump carried 16 of 31 districts in 2020, he’d have won 19 under the proposed boundaries.
Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston and chair of the redistricting committee, said this week race played no role in drawing the new maps. But regardless of intent, the results speak for themselves.
These racial impacts are likely to put the Legislature in court. Renée Cross, senior director of the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs, told us that challenges to the new maps “will have a pretty strong case” that they were drawn in a way that disadvantages voters of color. That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: Texas lawmakers have violated the Voting Rights Act in every redistricting cycle since 1970 with racially gerrymandered districts.
What’s new this time, however, is that the Voting Rights Act no longer requires states such as Texas to submit its maps to the Justice Department or to a federal court before they go into effect. Any who allege racial gerrymandering in these maps can only sue after the fact. In practice, given how slow courts can move, that’s not much of a deterrent.
“The only real constraint on Republicans this time is not getting too greedy,” Rice political scientist Mark Jones told us Wednesday.
But the racial aspects of the maps are only the most cringe-worthy aspects of these new boundaries. At their heart, the new maps are designed to lock in existing GOP majorities in the delegation and in the Legislature, despite fast-changing voting demographics that have been breathing life into Democratic hopes for something long rumored but rarely seen in Texas: political diversity .
Wherever Huffman and company saw a competitive race in 2020, they’ve used their pen to rejigger the boundaries to keep as many seats safely Republican as possible. In 2020, 12 congressional districts had a presidential race margin of 5 percentage points or less. Under the new maps, that number drops to one.
Take Rep. Mike McCaul’s 10th Congressional District, for instance, which stretches from Austin and San Antonio to parts of Harris County. His reputation as both a Trump supporter and a respected independent voice on national security helped carry him to re-election over a spirited, liberal challenger in 2020. He won by 7 percent but it didn’t come easy, as many who voted for him were not Trump fans. The president carried the district by only 1.6 percent.
Where we see good governance and the triumph of good politics, Huffman and company see much too close of a call. They made certain that it won’t be so close next time. Based on the new map, voters in the 10th district would have gone for Trump by 20 points.
What all this means for Texas voters is that Republican mapmakers are clearly afraid of you. Combined with the relentless push to restrict voting, their fight to diminish the voting power for huge swaths of Texans is morally indefensible. It’s also craven.