As they sat down to draw the state’s congressional maps in 2021, Republican state lawmakers in charge of the once-a-decade process pored over detailed electoral and demographic data. This allowed them to pick with precision which voters they’d like to have in each district—a process known as gerrymandering.
Typically, the party in control of the state legislature has two ways to protect its legislative and congressional candidates and weaken the power of voters who lean toward the opposition. “Packing” takes voters who favor the other party and places as many as possible in a single district, thus ceding one seat to political opponents but increasing the majority party’s odds in multiple adjacent districts. A second tactic, “cracking,” splits voters for the opposition into multiple districts that are dominated by the majority party, thus diminishing the opposition’s chances.
In the congressional maps that were in place most of last decade, voters based in deep blue Austin, for example, were largely “cracked” into three Republican districts, with one stretching more than two hundred miles into Republican territory. A small group was simultaneously “packed” with other Democratic voters into a narrow district that extended some ninety-plus miles down to the South Side of San Antonio. Republicans tried to increase their advantage by creating a larger number of winnable seats, at the risk of diluting their advantage in the ones they already held. Over the ensuing decade, population growth made ten of the state’s congressional races competitive in 2020, up from one in 2014.
So in 2021, GOP mapmakers shifted their priority to protecting incumbents. They packed Austin and San Antonio voters into two heavily Democratic districts to shore up Republican advantages in seats that radiated out from the two cities, where races had gotten too close for comfort, and into more-Republican rural communities. Three years later, Texas elections are about as noncompetitive as possible. Texas Republicans hold 25 seats in Congress, and Democrats hold 12, with 1 vacancy (the heavily Democratic seat last held by the late Sheila Jackson Lee). In only one congressional race, that for South Texas’s Thirty-Fourth Congressional District, currently represented by Democrat Vicente Gonzalez, do both parties have similar chances of winning. Two others, one Democratic and one Republican, could enter “swing district” territory in the event of a “wave election.”
Successful gerrymandering requires drawing unusual-looking maps, with districts often resembling balloon animals made by clown-college dropouts. Some skinny ones stretch for hundreds of miles. Others loop around a region to scoop up as many as possible of one party’s voters. Check out what the Dallas-area Thirty-Third Congressional District looks like now, on the right (a snake attempting to eat its own midsection), compared to its already wildly gerrymandered form from the last decade, on the left (more like a fluffy cumulus cloud floating by on a warm spring day.)
This is how a state whose voters have preferred Republicans to Democrats by an average of fewer than seven points in elections for federal office—including for President and Senate—from 2016 through 2022 can send twice as many Republicans as Democrats to Congress.
But what if the maps were drawn by the other party? How much power could Democrats claim without convincing anyone new to vote for them? To answer that question, I used a tool called Dave’s Redistricting that allows users to go precinct by precinct to select the constituents of each seat. The rules are simple. Each district must contain roughly 767,000 voters (drawing from real-life court decisions, the website allows a deviation of 0.75 percent from seat to seat, or no more than 5,752 voters). Compactness is favored, and it’s generally frowned upon to shape districts like complex doodles. But except in cases with evidence of blatant racial discrimination in gerrymandering, which the Voting Rights Act forbids, today’s Republican-dominated federal courts have not been inclined to get involved. For the most part, court rulings have largely allowed a simple maxim to determine how gerrymandering actually works: Might makes right.
Here’s, roughly, what a map of Texas congressional districts gerrymandered to maximize seats for Democrats might look like.
We’ve shown here how Democrats could draw several long, winding districts that violate the spirit of proportional representation, just as Republicans have done. Assuming voting behaviors from 2020, the last presidential election year, hold, Democrats could create 11 packed Republican seats and 15 relatively safe Democratic ones. Another 11 seats could lean Democratic by between five and ten percentage points, while 1 to the northeast of Dallas could favor the GOP by six. Assuming population change doesn’t dramatically change the electorate over the next half decade, in a given election cycle, Democrats could reasonably expect to lead the state’s congressional delegation with 26 members, versus 12 for Republicans—a flip of the ratio today.
If they were shameless enough to disregard reason, good taste, and the will of the voters, Democrats could even carve a district into the deep red swath of the state between Amarillo and Fort Worth that would favor Democrats by about seven points. They could also crack the voting power of a bloc of Republicans in the Big Thicket area of East Texas by sticking some into a safe Democratic seat centered in Austin, 240 miles to the west.
Of course, Democrats are unlikely to control the redistricting process anytime soon—in significant part because of how wildly the districts for state legislators have been gerrymandered. Republicans safely hold 19 of the 31 seats in the Texas Senate, while Democrats safely retain 11. The final seat, held by Rio Grande Valley Democrat Morgan LaMantia, is close enough that the GOP is targeting it as a pickup opportunity this year. Meanwhile, in the Texas House, Republicans won 86 of the chamber’s 150 seats in 2022; heading into 2024, only 10 districts are even being actively contested by the parties that don’t hold them. The math renders it virtually impossible for Democrats to claim control of the chamber and get into a position to dictate what the maps look like after the 2030 census.
Texas Republicans can reasonably argue that the other side gerrymanders in states it controls too—and that they have no choice but to draw the maps here in ways that minimize the opposition party. In New Mexico, for example, voters tend to go blue by a margin of 55–45, but all three of the state’s congresspeople are Democrats; in Illinois, where Democrats outvote Republicans by around twelve percentage points, the party controls fourteen of the state’s seventeen seats, or 82 percent. The result of the national race between the parties: Only 43 of the 435 elections for the U.S. House are competitive this year, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
Eight states have laws that require a nonpartisan commission to draw congressional districts. In those states, lawmakers represent areas that tend to be compact, largely follow county lines, and proportionally represent the preferences of voters. In Colorado, for example, where 55 percent of voters tend to cast ballots for Democrats, the Democratic Party holds four safe seats compared to two drawn for the GOP, while two others are usually highly competitive. In 2022 the parties split them, leading to a 5–3 advantage for Democrats.
What would the Texas map look like if it were drawn by nonpartisans? We took another crack at redistricting—this time without looking at the vote spread by precinct.
In this map, Republicans would hold sixteen safe seats, while Democrats would control thirteen; each party would have two that lean its direction, while another five would be true swing districts, where neither side would have received more than 51 percent support in 2020. This is what a map that actually represents Texas would look like. Republicans would hold an advantage, but not an overwhelming one. Democrats would be represented fairly. And many candidates would have to moderate their positions to appeal to voters of the other party in order to win. It’s a nice thought.
