Galveston may lose Black commissioner
County GOP planning map that would sink African American official’s re-election odds
During the last moments his political precinct was still intact, the lone Black member of the Galveston County Commissioners Court delivered a closing message to his all-republican colleagues, as they prepared to approve a map that would effectively doom his re-election chances.
“We are not going to go quietly in the night,” Commissioner Stephen Holmes said, half turning to address the other members at a Nov. 12 meeting. “We are going to rage, rage, rage until justice is done.”
The new map, approved seconds later, dramatically reshapes Holmes’ Precinct 3, uprooting it from areas that he had represented since being appointed to the court in 1999.
While the precinct had previously cut through the middle of Galveston County, covering an area where the majority of eligible voters were Black and Hispanic, it is now consolidated in the largely white and Republican northwest corner of the county, taking in Friendswood and League City.
Under the freshly drawn boundaries, Galveston County Republicans have laid the groundwork for winning a 5-0 majority on Commissioners Court in a county where 38 percent of voters cast their ballots for President Joe Biden last year. Holmes, the court’s only Democrat, is up for re-election in 2024.
The dismantling of Holmes’ precinct mirrors the aggressive redistricting efforts seen across the country in recent months, with members of both parties using data from the 2020 census to draw new political boundaries that expand or preserve their majorities — often at the expense of their fellow elected officials.
No longer bound by strict federal supervision, Texas and other Republican-led Southern states have crafted new maps in which minority voters are drawn into predominantly white districts. They’ve also enacted voting restrictions that critics say are aimed at suppressing turnout of minority communities.
Holmes said he expects to be replaced by a white candidate, given that only about a quarter of the eligible voters in his new precinct are minorities.
“Even though Galveston County is 45 percent minority, every single member of the Galveston County Commissioners Court, under the new map, is going to be Anglo,” Holmes said in an interview. “Minorities would
not be represented by, or have the opportunity to elect, the candidate of their choice.”
The map will likely give Republicans all but unchecked power to enact conservative policies on the court, which adopts the county’s annual tax rate and budget, approves its spending and maintains its infrastructure, such as county buildings, roads and bridges.
County Judge Mark Henry, who was elected in 2010, has brought a conservative posture to his role, which includes presiding over the court. He refused to enforce some of Gov. Greg Abbott’s COVID-19 restrictions last year and more recently issued an executive order that sent local authorities to the border, citing what he called an ongoing crisis there.
A spokesperson for Henry — who was joined by Commissioners Darrell Apffel and Joe Giusti in adopting the maps — said he was not available for comment.
Apffel said he supported the new map because it brings Galveston Island and Bolivar Peninsula into a single precinct, replacing the prior layout that split those areas among three commissioners, the Galveston County Daily News reported.
This is not the first time that redistricting, the decennial process of redrawing political maps to ensure each commissioner precinct has roughly the same number of residents, has threatened Holmes’ political career.
In 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice struck down Galveston County’s maps, finding that the plan — which had been drawn up by a Republican consultant — diluted the strength of minority voters in commissioner, constable and justice-of-the-peace precincts. Federal officials also concluded that Holmes was deliberately excluded from “meaningful involvement” in the map-drawing process, which had resulted in a proposal to fold the bright red Bolivar Peninsula into his precinct.
This time, Galveston County’s maps are no longer subject to Justice Department review. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the so-called preclearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act that forced Texas and other states with a history of racial discrimination to obtain DOJ approval for changes to political maps and election laws.
“There is no longer an incentive not to be aggressive,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert and senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “In other words, you can be aggressive in drawing maps knowing that those maps ultimately may get struck down, but that getting them struck down will take time — and in the meantime, you get to use them in one or multiple election cycles.”
Holmes did not say whether he planned to challenge the new map in court, though he has called on the Justice Department to do so, arguing that the redrawn boundaries violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The section broadly bars racially discriminatory voting practices, including those that minimize the voting strength of racial minority groups.
As Gop-led legislatures across the South enact new maps that consolidate their power, Li said it has become clear that Republicans are preparing to argue that the Voting Rights Act only protects districts where a single minority group forms a majority — unlike Holmes’ former precinct, where Black and Hispanic voters combined to form a majority.
That question has never been decided by the high court.
In recent weeks, other commissioners courts in the Houston area have also reconfigured their boundaries to protect or bolster the majority party, including courts in Democrat-controlled Harris and Fort Bend counties, where longtime Republican commissioners are now in jeopardy of losing re-election.
But those new maps were not drawn up “at the expense of communities of color,” Li said, drawing a distinction with the Galveston County map.
“Here, people of color are being used sort of as the tool by which you accomplish this partisan power grab,” Li said. “You’re diluting their power, and you’re depriving them of a seat at the table.”