Not Every Texas Race Will Be a Contest — by Design
Federal judges proposed new political maps for the state late Thursday and hope to have new congressional and legislative maps in place for Texas on the Monday after Thanksgiving.
That’s the court-set date when candidates for the Texas House and Senate and for the state’s 36 congressional seats will officially start filing papers declaring their intentions. By the end of the day on Dec. 15, they’ll be done and the primary races will be underway. Less than two months later, more than half of those races will be over.
Really over. There’s another round of balloting ...
Comments (4)
jimrtex
TX-23 currently has 150,000 too many people. The federal government's "expert" thought that you could reduce the population by 150,000 and not have any fewer voters. In fact, the share of Hispanic voters and Anglo voters is virtually unchanged.
WUSRPH
The Court plan does not help all Democrats…For example; HD 43 (Kingsville) is one long-time strong majority Democratic seat that could be lost under the Court's plan. They took it out of Cameron altogether and replaced that with San Patricio and Refugio...That makes it a slight majority GOP District...I was always afraid that the Leg. would do this..but they kept it a Democratic District (probably because they needed to siphon off some Valley Democrats to save Pena)...but the Court did it instead.
As to the Congressional districts…I only hope that the Republicans in DC who drafted that trash are having a few nights “of fear and trembling unto death” waiting to see what the Court will do to them.
WUSRPH
And that is only in the plan proposed by the judge from the 5th Curcuit…The plan backed by the other two judges takes Kingsville (Kleberg Co.) completely out of the old HD 43 and ties it into half of Nueces County (Corpus Christi) to the north…It looks bad for Kingsville either way…Either you get a Republican or someone from Corpus…
Erin Anderson
"Those lawyers, legislators and litigants are conflating race and party". Therein lies the rub.
Unfortunately, the is the consequence of the Voting Rights Act, which requires gerrymandering to protect "minority-majority" districts even though the Supreme Court has ruled gerrymandering based solely on race to be unconstitutional.
Texas' large Hispanic population adds to the confusion. "Hispanic" isn't considered a "race", though people with "Spanish surnames" are (unrealistically) assumed to be non-English-speaking "language minorities". Beyond the difficulty of defining "minorities" is erroneous assumption that all people of the same "race" vote the same way. Looking at our Hispanic-majority districts represented by Republican Hispanics illustrates this fallacy that racially-defined groups constitute cohesive political & voting blocs.
In the political arena, "diveristy" should focus on ideas, not color. Until the law stops conflating race with party, and drawing district lines on the false assumption that voters can only be fairly represented by people who look like them, redistricting maps will continue to end up in the courts.