Why Texas's New Map Is A Racial/Partisan Gerrymander:
The Texas GOP Is Daring To Open Itself Up To Voting Rights Act Litigation
Feel free to check the past Biden Era archives and follow the editions to come in the Trump Era on Substack, Medium, and LinkedIn, including those on the 2024 Autopsy, Bench-Building, DOGE News, Project 2025 Authoritarianism, Progressive Populism, and more (First Come, First Serve!).
With the Help of the 2020 Census and Statistical Atlas:
24 of 38 congressional districts in the state would still be majority-white (or 63% of all the state’s congressional districts). 10 districts would be either majority-Latino or majority-Black. According to the 2020 Census, Latinos comprise 39% of the population, whites comprise 40% of the population, and African Americans comprise 12% of the population. The number of majority-Black and Latino districts should roughly be double the number in this map.
Minority voters are packed into a number of the few Democratic districts on the table. For instance, Kamala Harris won TX-18 in Houston with 69% of the vote in 2024. Under this new map, she would take 76% of the vote.
Tarrant County, with its pool of voters of color, is heavily split among multiple solidly Republican districts, in a county that Joe Biden won before it flipped to Trump in 2024, and which is also very racially diverse (43% white, 29% Hispanic, 17% Black, 6% Asian).
30 seats would be Republican under this map, which means that Republicans would take almost 80% of all of Texas’s congressional districts, even though they only won 56% of the vote on the presidential level in 2024 (their high point of recent years).
There are no truly competitive districts on this map. The closest districts on record are those Trump carried by about 10 points.
Texas’s 35th Congressional District, which was made under a court order to protect racial minorities in Austin & San Antonio, is radically reshaped to encompass the San Antonio exurbs and nearby rural counties.
Texas’s 10th Congressional District slices-and-dices up the Austin area further (with a third of the city itself Latino) and breaks it off with much whiter Houston exurban counties.
Texas’s 7th Congressional District, in conjunction with the more Republican TX-22 district and more Democratic TX-18 district, carves up the rapidly growing and diversifying Houston suburbs, including increasingly Asian Sugar Land and heavily Black Missouri City.
Texas’s 21st Congressional District represented by Republican incumbent Chip Roy creeps up to the inner city of San Antonio (majority-Hispanic) and conjoins it with the more Republican, and much whiter, Texas Hill Country.
The predominantly Hispanic Rio Grande Valley is fractured significantly in three, with the TX-15 district particularly encompassing both heavily Hispanic border counties and whiter, non-Rio Grande northern counties northeast of San Antonio.
McAllen County’s communities of interest are also broken up by two congressional districts, with the cities of McAllen and Mission separated from the rest of the county to protect GOP Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz.
Travis County is split up immensely, with the northwestern Asian American community placed into TX-10 and TX-11 that expand into different corners of Texas, and Hispanics and Blacks mostly packed into TX-27 and TX-37.
Multiple county boundaries across Texas are not contiguous under these districts, though this is especially the case with the big cities, often with suburban or urban districts that spread out to encompass hundreds of miles of rural land.
“No Republican incumbents’ districts were made significantly more competitive under this new map.”
Great post, Mike!