*UPDATE*
Wow, thanks everyone for the compliments and (very gentle) criticism – a great welcome to the SSP community! In particular, you've all decided to let me self-correct the mythical 37th leaning-Democratic district in central Houston without any (much-deserved) harassment. Once I decided that settling for incumbent protection and one new, solid Republican seat was optimism too far for the Texas Republican Party, I forgot to take it out, is all. You gotta admit, Greg Wythe's theorizing on it was pretty compelling.
*What to look out for* This map is the accumulation of several weeks' occaisional free time, so I don't know that I'll be able to post an edit taking into account everyone's very good suggestions for a little while. However, look for better, district-by-district explanations, as Englishlefty was quite right: I wrote my diary as a Texan apportionment nerd to apportionment nerds everywhere; the slight was unintentional, I assure you. I'll give everything the once over to take into account 2008 population estimates, and districts in Central and Southeast Texas will get an especially close review (Sandlin has indeed moved to South Dakota and met himself a powerful woman. Guess he wasn't that conservative). And Chet Edwards-centric commenters, you have not been forgotten! In the meantime, here's an updated map with district numbers.
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A huge tip of the hat to Nathaniel90, who went and inspired me to consolidate my generalized interest in political process issues into one article. I've taken his attempt at Texas redistricting, whatever maps of previous Congresses that I can find, and tried to figure out how to read the information the State of Texas provides to produce the map that follows after the jump.
Yet another huge hat tip to Greg Wythe of Greg's Opinion, whose post on additional possibilities for Texas's four shiny new congressional seats was great help where the combined illumination of Nathaniel90 and my own meager internet search skills was not sufficient to deobfuscate the Republican political mind. If you think of any of their proposals when you take a look at my map, it's because I did too.
I know I've gotten the county map from somewhere, too. Probably Wikipedia, but knowing how much I tinker with maps I can't say for sure – if you see something that looks like yours, feel free to lambast me and I'll edit in a hat tip for you, too.
Follow me after the jump for the map and its explanation.
So there you have it. I'd like to think that planning for the worst but hoping for the best includes charting out what one hopes the best would look like, and this is definitely it. Eerily pre-DeLaymander is what my fellow political junky friends called it. What I basically did was take the opportunity of astonishing population growth, and making lemonade out the lemon that is the GOP-trending rural Texas to allow bygones be bygones (who said moving on is the art of forgetting how much you hate the other guy without letting that bastard screw you over again?).
–(updated) I must admit, I gave only grudging solace to Michael McCaul, and I wish I could renumber all the old districts back to the way they were, but I don't know how the Texas Republicans would feel about that. But the best thing about the now-25th, granularity at this level of zoom is such that I can just claim to have about the number necessary for a seat (it's at 725,000-ish per seat this time around, isn't it?) and leave it at that. Hopefully Chet Edwards will find his new district to be a lot like his old district, because I indulged in one of the two fits of (egregious) sentimentality that are present on this map and gave him the chance to get back on I-35 where he started out. John Carter can move to Granbury, the people there are nicer than the anti-liberals in Williamson County (“Keep Round Rock Mildly Eccentric”) anyways. If he and Representative Edwards decide to switch places, though, he'll find that Brazos and Walker Counties are (somehow) trending blue, long-term.
-Essentially, most of the Democrats targeted by DeLay were conservative Democrats, and I think everyone knew that by the time they were gone the national party would be too far to the left to have much more than a fifty-fifty chance of retaining the seat. Nowhere is this more true than in East Texas, so what's the harm in reshaping our current districts to look a little like the old ones? Jim Turner's or Max Sandlin's old districts could almost pass for attempts at gerrymandering top-of-the-ticket Republican voters, were it not for trends in Harris county and the moderately slower march to the GOP that is Smith and Nacadogches Counties.
(Although I'm not gonna lie, I like me a fighter, and Nick Lampson is him, so I did my due diligence on Ted Poe only to find out he was as inane a Republican Congressman as you could ask for, and decided it wouldn't hurt to try and give Lampson his old seat back)
-I couldn't really figure out a way to do DFW better than Nathaniel90, except that I didn't know exactly how the population was distributed in Tarrant County, so I figured I'd just treat it as if it was pretty much equally distributed except for the center of Fort Worth, and if I was egregiously wrong I could hope for the wisdom of large crowds to help me out. Also, despite Martin Frost being instrumental in the idiotic gerrymander that did almost everything the Republicans did in 2003 but years earlier, and to the Republicans, I still like the guy – especially compared to Joe Barton.
-In South Texas, I liked Nathaniel90's idea of letting Republicans prove they're not completely lily white and proud of it by giving Henry Bonilla another chance at elected office – but I must admit, I checked his record, and where I could find it I did not see much trace of his district. So I threw in some more Democrats than was perhaps wise to hopefully moderate our theoretical Henry Bonilla II out a little bit. But hey, now that Webb County's got so many people, we've only got one “fajita strip” left!
-Last but not least, we've got West Texas, where the South Plains area was startlingly receptive to the Obama message – trend-wise, at least. In not a single county did Obama brake the 40% mark of the vote, but it was still a huge improvement over Kerry, and even Gore to some extent. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that even if we did manage to elect a Democrat there, he'd most likely just be another old, white, conservative, corruptible candidate for AgSec. No, Charlie Stenholm isn't moving to Lubbock.
Well, there you have it. Any questions? Concerns? Criticisms?
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I love when people post these diaries!
However, I think my eyes are bad. Is there one district with Coryell, Bell and western Williamson counties (in a light orange) that would be for Carter and then the one next to it, presumably Edwards’, with Waco and Bryan-College Station and Huntsville (in a yellow)? Or is it one big district that would pit Carter and Edwards in an incumbent v. incumbent showdown (that Chet would pretty handily win)? It would be nice for Edwards to represent Fort Hood (in Bell, the orangey county on 35) again.
To really get him some semblance of the old district, and if the Dems have a hand in redrawing the maps, I could see them cutting off the southern Fort Worth suburbs at the top of the district and then cutting off College Station at the bottom of the district and adding back in Bell and possibly a portion of Williamson.
Good job, enjoyable read!
Your map is a heck of a lot prettier than mine. I really like what you did with the Hispanic seats in South Texas. It looks like you drew a new, Martin Frost-ish seat in D/FW that would probably be “Hispanic opportunity” (though the Supreme Court ruling in Bartlett v. Strickland means that until this hypothetical Fort Worth-to-west Dallas seat that both you and I see as likely to be created is fully 50% Hispanic, it won’t be VRA-protected from future gerrymandering). So we both see a new Dem seat in D/FW, and a new urban seat in Houston. Newly released Census estimates suggest that Harris County has been seeing major white flight, offset by massive immigration…and you know what that means. It looks like Houston is overdue for a genuine VRA Hispanic seat, which could finally mean the end of Gene Green if he gets a credible Latino primary challenge. The Strickland precedent isn’t clear on how Green’s district (already Hispanic-majority) should be treated since it hasn’t “successfully” elected a Latino, but my guess is the GOP will seek to replace him with a Latino by making District 29 as much as 70-75% Hispanic, and then create a new GOP-leaning seat in Harris County. Of course, with the whole county becoming minority-dominated and Democratic, it’s only a matter of time before Pete Olson, John Culberson, and New GOP Congressman X see real trouble.
I see that your two other new seats are similar to the ones I drew but more compact (the purple district stretching south and west of Fort Worth is a cleaned-up cousin to my 34th, while your hypothetical “Bonilla II” seat is similar demographically to my 36th — significant Hispanic minority but clearly GOP-leaning thanks to Central Texas and northeast San Antonio). These, like most of the map, seem very sensible.
Actually, I only have two qualms with this map, both in the middle of the state The first is that Mike McCaul would have to move, and it’s unlikely that GOP mapmakers (or a bipartisan plan, if Dems somehow win the House in 2010) would cut one of their own out of his district. If there’s anyone who can afford to lose Austin, it’s Lamar Smith, since he lives in San Antonio. McCaul’s home base is in eastern Travis County. The other thing is that any GOP-drawn map will seek to hurt Chet Edwards, not return him to his former stomping grounds. Yes, his seat is already heavily Republican, but they will try to put it over the 70% mark to see if he can possibly be knocked off. More importantly, they will seek to give him new turf (my map added some of Montgomery County to the 17th).
And your East Texas districts may be a little nostalgic, like you said. Republicans won’t draw a map that revives the old grounds of Sandlin, Turner, and Lampson, especially since none of them are too old yet to make a comeback. Actually, I think the next map will make only minimal changes to East Texas, since the GOP likes the lines there very much. The areas that will see shakeups are where the four new seats pop up (D/FW, Houston, Central-South Texas, North-Central Texas).
Overall, damn good map!
I admire the effort, but I can’t readily identify which district is which. I imagine a lot of non-Texans have problems with this due to the large number of districts and the necessity to have several districts clumping around the metropolitan areas.
Wouldn’t it be easier to give Chet Edwards the light Orange district based in Williamson County plus McLennan County and then give John Carter the yellow district plus the portion of district 10 (purple) which lies in Williamson County, thus preserving his home in Round Rock and avoiding a Edwards-Carter matchup and making Edwards safer?
How Republican would the new South Texas district be? and how Hispanic? It looks like it’s made of counties that are currently all within Democratic districts, so it may be susceptible to a Democrat.
And where is the new Harris County district located? I presume that it would be Republican leaning, right?
Given the changing demographics in West Texas, you have to wonder just how long it will stay so heavily Republican. El Paso obviously is heavily Democratic, but other areas are seeing their Hispanic populations grow. Ector County (Odessa) is now 49.4% Hispanic (and just 44.4% Anglo); Lubbock County is 30% Hispanic; Potter County (Amarillo) is 32.5% Hispanic; and even that conservative bastion of Midland is now 35.7% Hispanic. Yet the best Obama could do in these counties was 31% of the vote in Lubbock.
Some rural counties, too, are majority Hispanic or close to it but retain their heavy Republican edges. Notorious Ochiltree County gave Obama 8 percent of the vote despite being 42.6% Hispanic.
Does anyone know the pre-2003 redistricting PVIs for the congressional districts in Texas?
Or at least the presidential election results for the districts in the ’92, ’96, and ’00 elections?