From Texas Redistricting: Current Districts

To help out with understanding the second written assignment.

- Click here and follow the links for each map.

Texas Legislative Council: DistrictViewer

For both 2305 and 2306:

This link takes you to District Viewer, an interactive map of legislative districts in the state of Texas, made available by the Texas Legislative Council.

You can use this to get familiar with the nature of the various legislative districts in the state. By clicking on the map, you can zoom in on the local area. If you also look at the top of the map, you'll see a small box with the word "plans" in it. Click on it and a box will open up where you will see the maps for congressional, state board of education, state house, and state senate districts.

2305 students are to focus on the congressional districts (these are the districts where members of the US Congress are elected from - US Senators represent the entire state, so no need to draw those districts). 2306 students are to choose either a state house or state senate district (these are where members of the Texas Legislature - either House or the Senate - are drawn from).

Here's a key point - something you'll be told later in the semester in each class. The U.S. Constitution reserves to each state the ability to drawn legislative districts - including that of the U.S. House of Representatives. So the districts you see are the result of political conflict that plays out every 10 years or so in the Texas Legislature following each census.

For more detail - click here on the Texas Legislative Council's Texas Redistricting page.

I'll post a few maps relevant to the assignment soon.

How Happy is Your Congressional District?

Find out here.

The Gerrymandered Texas Senate and the Threats to the Senate's 2/3rds Rule

Rick Casey comments on what he calls the most stable job in Texas politics: Texas State Senator.

There is one Texas elected body that is so stable that it offered a safe harbor for Democrats even in the political monsoon that blew on Tuesday.

Is this good news for the Democrats? Not hardly, as we shall see. The body is the state Senate.

Consider this: While Democrats lost 21 seats in the 150-member Texas House of Representatives and most likely three veteran congressmen, the 31-member Texas Senate had 12 Democrats and 19 Republicans before the election and will have exactly the same margin after the new Legislature is sworn in next January. And only two are newcomers, one Democrat and one Republican having stepped down voluntarily.
But while Democrats are safe in body, its districts have been designed so that they underrepresent Democrats in the state -- as is the case with most other offices in the state. Republicans, who control the districting process, accomplish this feat by packing Democrats into fewer seats than they might otherwise occupy, but Democratic incumbents are hardly likely to complain because this makes their seats more secure.

Even with this small number of seats, Democrats -- and the minority party in general -- has been able to leverage this small number of seats into a type of veto power since as long as they are at least one-third of the Senate, they can block legislation from going through the floor. From the Legislative Refrence Library:

For almost half a century, blocker bills have routinely been placed at the top of the Senate's Daily Calendar, which in effect forces a suspension of the regular order of business on every bill. Blocker bills are bills that are introduced and passed out of committee as early as possible in a legislative session in order that they may occupy the first positions on the calendar. They are not intended to be worthy of serious consideration or passage. The sole purpose of a blocker bill is to ensure that at least two-thirds of the membership have an interest in debating a measure before it can come to the floor. Bills that do not enjoy substantial support cannot make it past the blocker bill.

Though it has been set aside on rare occasions, this practice -- known as the "two-thirds rule" -- has been an honored tradition in the Senate. Among other things, it is generally acknowledged that the Senate's two-thirds rule fosters civility, a willingness to compromise, and a spirit of bipartisanship.

Republican Senators have argued that this rule undermines democracy -- and certainly their agenda -- and have made efforts to remove it in the past. Similar efforts are underway currently.

- In Defense of the Two Thirds Rule.
- Bill Hobby comments on the rule.

Did Roll Call Votes Matter?

More analysis of the 2010 vote from the Monkey Cage:

Did votes on the controversial bills (stimulus, cap and trade, TRAP and heath care) the past two years make a real difference in the elections? Overall, the answer is no, but for those Democrats who were defeated (many of whome were in districts that did not vote for Obama in 2008), the answer seems to be yes. There's the outside (very outside) chance that had these Democrats all voed against these bills that Democrats woudl stil be in the majority.

What does this model tell us about roll call votes on these four bills? Simple answer: they mattered. A lot. A Democratic incumbent in the average district represented by Democratic incumbents actually lost about 2/3 of a percentage point for every yes vote. That doesn't sound like a lot, but that's for incumbents in districts that voted 63% for Obama.

For Democrats in the least Democratic districts (Chet Edwards of TX or Gene Taylor of MS), the model suggests a loss of about 4% for every yes vote. Does that mean poor Chet lost 16 points on roll call votes alone? No, because he wasn't a big supporter of Obama's agenda. But he did vote for both TARP and the stimulus. In fact, virtually every Democratic incumbent on the ballot yesterday supported at least one of these four bills. That support was costly.
Again, this suggests that what really matters more than votes, is the way that districts are drawn. Had each district been more balanced, not gerrymandered one way or the other, the election would have turned out differently. What does this tell us about democracy?

A Simple Explanation of the 2010 Vote

According to the Monkey Cage, its the 2008 vote:

If you had one thing, and one thing only, to predict which Democratic House incumbents would lose their seats in 2010, what would you take? The amount of money they raised? Their TARP vote? Their health care vote? Whether they had a Tea Party opponent? A Nazi reenactor opponent?
The best predictor by far is none of those. It is simply how Democratic their district is. ... In all 402 contested House elections, the 2008 presidential vote in that district would explain 83% of the variation in the Democratic House candidate's vote share. Nothing else in our dataset comes close.


Focusing on the Democratic incumbents who lost shows how crucial the partisanship of their district was



Campaigns seem to matter much less than how districts are drawn. A comment on this story pointed out how many districts had more than 75% Democrats, and how few had more that 75% Republicans. This seems to indicate successful gerrymandering on the part of Republicans.

Regional Texas Representatives

A list of the current members of the Texas Legislature from this general area. Click here for access to maps.

- 23rd District, Craig Eiland.
- 24th District, Larry Taylor.
- 25th District, Dennis Bonnen.
- 27th District, Dora Olivo.
- 29th District, Randy Weber.

Texas Gerrymandering

One of the goals of gerrymandering is for the majority to pack as many of the other side into as few districts as possible. According to a new study, Texas Republicans have succeeded in doing it:

A majority of the state's congressional districts -- 20 of the 32 -- give the GOP an edge of at least 10 percentage points in electoral contests, Cook found. Only one of those -- the 17th district, which includes Waco and Aggieland, is currently represented by a Democrat (Chet Edwards).

How heavily weighted are Texas districts? Four of the ten most Republican districts in the country are in the Lone Star State. Those reps are: Clarendon's Mac Thornberry (#2), Midland's Mike Conaway (#3), Lubbock's Randy Neugebauer (#5) and The Woodlands' Kevin Brady (#7).
Texas Democrats are packed into five overwhelmingly Democratic districts, all represented by minorities.

Just eight Texas districts are "swing districts" -- with neither party having a built-in electoral edge of more than 8 percentage points. And seven of those eight districts are represented by Democrats, meaning that there is more opportunity for Republicans to pick up Texas congressional seats than Democrats (setting incumbency aside).