Texas redraws its political districts in 2021. What’s going to happen?
Texas is slated to redraw its political maps in 2021. If the past is any indication, there will be decisions made behind closed doors, lawsuits and — if things get really wild — maybe even an exodus of lawmakers to Oklahoma or New Mexico. Nobody likes the process, which is typically the Legislature’s most partisan undertaking: Phil King, a Weatherford Republican who chairs the House Redistricting Committee, describes redistricting as “a thing we dread every 10 years.”
And his Republican Party is in power. That’s more than the Democrats and various public interest groups can say. Democrats, who had hoped to gain a majority in the House, will be assuming a backseat role for the third consecutive redistricting cycle. Civil rights and voting rights activists, who have litigated numerous racial discrimination cases over the drawing of Texas’ districts, will have a greater burden toward stopping any map because of court decisions made over the last decade.
In other words, Texas’ redistricting process will have the same partisan tensions with potentially more room for legal action and controversy.
“It’s for all the marbles,” said William DeSoto, a political science professor at Texas State who follows state politics. “This can end some political careers, and it can help some political careers flourish.”
The 2021 redistricting process, which will encompass 150 House, 31 Senate and between 36 to 39 Congressional districts, is set against the backdrop of a booming, changing state. Census projections show Texas has added nearly 4 million people since 2010, and areas of the state once considered locks for a particular party — South Texas Latinos for the Democrats and suburban whites for the Republicans — shifted in the 2020 election. How will this mixture of demographic and political change end up looking on the new political maps, which Republicans will have the opportunity to bend to their advantage?
King says his first priority is fairness. “I believe that the committee’s job is to follow the law, to have a very, very transparent process and to strive to treat everybody fair, which I interpret as treating people the way we want to be treated.”
King has been heavily involved in Texas redistricting since 2003. With Democrats hanging onto control of the House in 2001, Congressional maps were not finalized during the regular legislative session, and then-Gov. Rick Perry did not call a special session to finish them. After Republicans won the House in 2002, King’s 2003 maps helped produce a seismic shift in Republican influence at the Congressional level. Republicans went from having 15 of 32 Congress seats after the 2002 election to 21 of 32 in 2004.
The maps from the next redistricting cycle continued to help Republicans hold advantages in Congress seats and retain majority status in both houses of the state Legislature. Just like in 2003, the Democrats, who had just 49 seats in the House, had almost no influence during 2011 redistricting.
Chris Turner, a Grand Prairie Democrat and the vice chair of the redistricting committee, believes it will be different this time. Although the Democrats did not win a House majority in this year’s election, they have 67 House seats for the second session in a row, a number that Turner says gave the party more power in 2019.
“I have every reason to believe Democrats will be effective in the House, including fair redistricting plans,” Turner said. “I acknowledge redistricting has inherently become a partisan process and unfortunately Texas Republicans have shown they will abuse the process to artificially preserve their power, as they have done in the past. ”
Turner uses Tarrant County as an example. The county went blue for Beto O’Rourke and for Joe Biden. Yet eight of Tarrant County’s 11 House seats are held by Republicans.
“By any objective measure the state House map is gerrymandered to enhance Republican voting power,” Turner said, “and this map doesn’t fully reflect the political power of Tarrant County.”
In Texas, partisan gerrymandering has been more or less sanctioned by the courts. Texas federal judges dismissed cases about the subject in 2011 and 2014. The Supreme Court declined to hear a Texas case on partisan gerrymandering in 2018. A year later, in a case involving North Carolina and Maryland, the Supreme Court, split along conservative-liberal lines, ruled 5-4 that partisan gerrymandering was beyond the scope of the court.
Racial gerrymandering, however, is illegal, with restrictions codified in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In every redistricting cycle since 1965 Texas’ election maps, drawn at first with Democrats at the helm and more recently by Republicans, have violated the Act.
Several discrimination lawsuits were filed in 2011, delaying the 2012 primary and prompting federal judges in San Antonio to draw a temporary electoral map that was adopted, to a large extent, by the Legislature in 2013. The San Antonio judges had warned their map was meant to be a placeholder, and they later found 11 state House and Congressional districts on the 2013 legislature-approved map to be discriminatory. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against the lower court, finding one district — Fort Worth’s House District 90 — was the lone district created with racial discrimination.
Asked if the 2011 and 2013 maps were fair, King says: “We could’ve done a better job. The House really worked hard at trying to draw fair maps and at the end of the day after litigation one (had to be redrawn). And it was a Democratic district.”
One tool used for fighting discrimination in Texas — known as preclearance — no longer exists because of the Supreme Court’s rescinding of portions of the Voting Rights Act. Until 2013, states had to submit their redistricting plans to a federal court that could halt the use of a map drawn with discriminatory intent. Texas was denied federal preclearance in 2011, leading to the delayed primary and temporary election map.
Without preclearance, says Nina Perales, vice president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, voters’ rights groups will shoulder a greater burden to prevent the use of discriminatory maps. “What will happen is the discriminators will enjoy the fruits of their discrimination until we can get a full court ruling,” said Perales, who successfully litigated the landmark voting rights case Lulac v. Perry. “It shifts the burden from the discriminators to the people who are being discriminated against.”
The lack of preclearance has added greater importance to public hearings, where citizens and various groups can explain why communities of interest should stay together in a given district. Communities of interest can include racial and ethnic groups, as well as individuals united by industry or business and other categories. These hearings — set at inopportune times and not held frequently enough in big cities in 2010 — were inadequate for the 2011 redistricting cycle, according to Stephanie Swanson, the issue chair for redistricting and census for the League of Women Voters of Texas. The League helped persuade the Redistricting Committee to add more urban hearings for this cycle. “We took that as a very good sign,” Swanson said.
Then COVID hit. Many of the public hearings were canceled, and the League of Women Voters of Texas and the Fair Maps Texas Coalition have been working to ensure the committee will listen to virtual public testimony both before and during the legislative session. Their end goal is more public input and a more transparent process than in the past.
“We’re hoping to slow down the timeline for redistricting,” Swanson said, “and see the process unfold.”
However that process turns out, there is another key factor at play for 2021 redistricting: Texas’ increasingly diverse and unpredictable electorate. The maps favored by Republicans in 2011 and 2013 withstood population growth in cities, population loss in rural areas, increased voter turnout and the flipping of many suburban voters. But it’s possible that whatever map makes sense for Republican control in 2021 will no longer hold in a few years.
“It’s harder to maintain the same kind of dominance,” DeSoto said. “They can’t control where the population is growing.”
This story was originally published December 1, 2020 at 5:45 AM.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the name of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
