Texas Will Gerrymander the Two New House Districts the Census Just Handed Them. Here’s What That Means.

Now that the Census has announced how the Congressional House seats will be reapportioned, the task now falls to the various states whose delegate numbers have changed to redistrict, meaning redraw the boundary lines for their congressional districts. Today, I want to look at Texas, which is gaining two House seats, and at the history of gerrymandering in that state.

Texas’s population is booming, with growth coming largely from the Latino and African American communities. But you wouldn’t know this from the make-up of its state government, which since 2003 has been firmly in the hands of the GOP after Rep. Tom DeLay began a concerted and unprecedented effort to redraw the state’s representative districts.

When the 2010 census came out, it showed that Texas had grown by a whopping 4 million people in ten years, with ninety percent of that growth from Black or Latino residents, according to NBC News. Despite the racial make-up of its residents, the new maps that were created in 2011 did not have a single district that would represent those communities. In other words, they were gerrymandered in such a way as to dilute the voting power of these groups.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) estimates that since 2010 there have been 59 seats in the House of Representatives that were tipped because of unfair gerrymandering. It gave Michigan as an example:

“From 2012 to 2016, the people of Michigan cast more than 50 percent of their ballots for Democratic Party legislative candidates. They voted for Democrats 52 percent of the time for the Michigan House of Representatives; a little more than 50 percent of the time for the Michigan Senate; and 51 percent of the time for the U.S. House of Representatives.1 So one would expect that slightly more than half of Michigan elected officials during this time were Democrats.

Instead, Republicans held a decisive advantage at every level of government. Despite earning a majority of the vote, Democrats received only 44 percent of seats in the Michigan House of Representatives; 31 percent of the seats in the Michigan Senate; and 35 percent of the seats in Michigan’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives.”

It’s not just the GOP that gerrymanders. As the CAP report noted, the practice affects both parties. “In Maryland, for example, Republicans received 37 percent of the votes for the U.S. House of Representatives but won only 13 percent of the congressional seats. And in North Carolina, Democrats received 48 percent of the vote for the U.S. House of Representatives but won only 26 percent of the congressional seats.”

It is fair to say, however, that the GOP uses the process far more aggressively and with greater political success than the Democrats. The CAP report indicates that the GOP swung 19 additional seats in their favor because of districts that were drawn with a bias in their favor:

It’s useful also to take a look at how gerrymandering generally operates to disenfranchise subsections of voters. By drawing districts cleverly so that minority voters are overwhelmed by white voters, for example, legislatures can make it very difficult for minority communities to ever elect one of their own:

From WashingtonPost.com/Wonkblog

In response to this unfairness, many states such as California have turned to independent commissions to redraw their Congressional districts. While this process is fundamentally fairer, the states that use gerrymandering have little incentive to do the right thing, especially if other states with fairer practices are effectively handicapping themselves politically.

That brings us back to Texas. In 2011, Obama’s Department of Justice rejected the redrawn maps, as it had the power to do under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the 5-4 Shelby County decision by the Supreme Court in 2013 gutted the “pre-clearance” section of that law, with Chief Justice John Roberts essentially claiming that the problems of racial unfairness in elections had been solved and that such oversight was outdated. (In her scathing dissent, Justice Ginsberg quipped, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”)

Shelby County leaves minority voters at the mercy of the GOP-controlled legislatures which can draw maps that dilute their votes. It also often leaves liberal Democrats with little recourse. Take the mostly Democratic suburbs around Houston. As noted by The Fulcrum, for the radically right-wing Representative Dan Crenshaw, known for his pirate’s eyepatch, to win in such an area his district would have to be very carefully drawn. Indeed, it is one of the oddest shaped districts anywhere, snaking its way through otherwise blue zones:

Similarly, the state’s capital, Austin, is a deeply “blue” city, liberal to its core. That’s precisely why the GOP has chopped it up into six different congressional districts, concentrating liberal votes into a single blue one while lumping the rest in with wide swaths of GOP heavy voters:

We can expect the GOP-controlled legislature and State House in Texas to perform new contortions to squeeze out two more GOP-controlled House districts from this round of apportionment. That is why many have pressed for the passage of the For The People Act, which would mandate that redistricting be performed by independent commissions instead of by partisan legislatures. Because that law is unlikely to get past a Senate filibuster (and is opposed in principle already by Joe Manchin), such a reform is not realistically possible before this next round of redistricting.

That leaves litigation as the only effective tool to block gerrymandering, and the Democrats have already begun to file preemptive suits. They are led by Marc Elias (who beat the Trump Campaign and the GOP over sixty times in election-related suits in 2020-21) but the legal terrain is admittedly not favorable given the Supreme Court’s current 6-3 conservative majority.

Because the Democrats hold only the slimmest of majorities in the House (just six votes, likely to rise to nine after some special elections), every seat will count in 2022. That is precisely why the GOP will fight with all it has to gerrymander the reapportioned seats and give themselves a net five-seat advantage out of them.

No matter how bad the gerrymandering winds up hurting Democrats, 2022 will be a decisive election for the future of the Biden administration’s agenda as well as the direction of the country. Speaker Pelosi’s Democratic caucus will go into it with a strong handicap that is unlikely to be erased by timely court decisions. The deficit must instead be overcome once again at the ballot box—which is also precisely why the GOP has scrambled to pass voter suppression bills across the country.