GOP pushing changes for 5 more U.S. House seats
AUSTIN — Redrawn voting maps pushed by the GOP-dominated Legislature could have an impact on congressional representation for Williamson County, officials said.
In quick order this week during a second special session, state Republicans in the House in a process called redistricting approved new congressional maps to yield a Republican advantage in next year’s elections for the U.S.
House of Representatives.
Redistricting — also known as gerrymandering — was furthered when Democratic legislators returned to the Capitol after having fled the state to delay the process for lack of a quorum during the first special session.
The Republican effort was fueled after President Donald Trump previously directed GOP lawmakers to reconfigure the voting map to gain five more seats for Republicans ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.
At press time, the state Senate continued deliberations on the newly drawn map with almost-guaranteed passage, and it likely will end
“
I don’t approve of gerrymandering at all, and it’s just blatant in the middle of an election cycle.”
— Rick Kennedy, Texas Forward Leadershipn up soon on Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk for his signature.
Democrat lawmakers and other groups have vowed immediate legal action. Meanwhile, in Democrat- controlled California, lawmakers want to put a counter measure before voters to create five Democratcontrolled seats to offset the Texas move.
Earlier this week, Abbott issued a statement thanking Texas House of Representatives Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, for having spearheaded the effort.
“I congratulate Speaker Burrows and the Republican members of the Texas House of Representatives for passing congressional districts that better reflect the actual votes of Texans,” he said.
“I will sign this bill once it passes the Senate and gets to my desk,” he said of House Bill 4.
The map was adopted along party lines in the House in an 88 to 52 vote.
Williamson County to be touched by redistricting
Although largely Republican, parts of Williamson County are potentially impacted by the redistricting amid a trend of narrowing margins of victory for GOP candidates.
The map calls for merging Democrat U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett’s District 37 – predominantly in Travis County with a small portion of southern Williamson County – with District 35 headed by U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, a former Austin councilman.
Those redrawn district boundaries would potentially position the Democratic incumbents for an intra-party battle.
But in a preemptive move on Thursday, Doggett said he would retire should the new map be implemented rather than run against a fellow party member.
“I had hoped that my commitment to reelection under any circumstances would encourage Congressman Casar to not surrender his winnable district to Trump,” the 78-year-old lawmaker said.
“If Trump extreme gerrymandering prevails, I wish Congressman Casar the best,” Doggett added, referring to his 36-yearold counterpart.
The potentially merged districts emerge amid a trend of narrowing margins of victories in the area for Republican candidates.
According to an analysis late last year by KXAN, Williamson County has given Republicans an average margin of 3.07 percentage points.
Other Democratic strongholds elsewhere around Austin along with Dallas and Houston were eyed in the redistricting while making Democrat-held seats in South Texas more red without compromising any of the 25 districts already controlled by Republicans, as the Texas Tribune reported.
Jeff Le, managing principal of 100 Mile Strategies – a public sector navigation, communications and policy consultancy and a Fellow at George Mason University’s National Security Institute — said another Republican advantage resulting from new map permutations would be adding more Republican votes to the new district from existing congressional districts already solidly Republican.
Those voters could come from District 17 encompassing Round Rock led by Pete Sessions and District 31 represented by John Carter that includes the Williamson County portion of Austin and much of the area surrounding Fort Hood.
“Williamson County would be impacted with the redrawing of portions of Rep. Doggett’s district which would take in more Republican voters from the districts of Rep. Sessions and Rep. Carter,” Le told the Taylor Press in an email. “These were safe R+20 seats.”
The term R+20 refers to congressional districts that lean heavily Republican as measured by the Coo Partisan Voting Index.
Concerns arise from mid-census redistricting
Beyond the gerrymandering itself, the specter of mid-census redistricting raised eyebrows given that such endeavors typically occur after census counts taken every 10 years.
Calls have emerged for reforming the process to prevent midcensus redistricting in the future in favor of traditional redrawing of maps based on population shifts revealed every 10 years.
Rick Kennedy, state chairman of Texas Forward Leadership, said the GOP’s redistricting effort underscores the need for additional political parties.
Having run twice for the U.S. House in the state’s 17th district, he told the Press the experience informed him about the need for alternatives to the legacy parties on their ballots.
“I don’t approve of gerrymandering at all, and it’s just blatant in the middle of an election cycle,” he said during a telephone interview. “What they’re saying is the people don’t choose who their representatives are – the states choose. In my opinion, these are the roots of the denigration in the tone, tenor and operation of our democracy.”
Ben Michael, an attorney at Austin’s Michael & Associates and a follower of politics, also noted midcensus gerrymandering is rare.
“Though the way in which Texas Republicans are going about this redistricting isn’t exactly illegal, the fact that it’s happening at a time where it normally wouldn’t is causing a lot of concern for people, and it’s rightfully
calling into question the fairness of their actions,” he told the Press via email.
He added, “The new proposed map would make it so that Republicans have 30 out of the 38 seats, giving them almost 80 percent. In comparison, in the last presidential election, only 56.2 percent of Texas voted Republican while 42.5 percent voted Democrat.”
