WASHINGTON — When the new Congress opens for business Tuesday, two-thirds of the Texans taking the oath of office will be Republicans.
Texas is a red state. But it’s not that red.
Compared to their share of the electorate, Republicans should have nabbed 21 U.S. House seats from Texas, not 25. And as it turns out, the GOP’s razor-thin majority hinged on the success of the latest once-a-decade exercise in gerrymandering.
Without those four extra seats from Texas, Republicans would control the House by a single vote. And GOP leader Kevin McCarthy’s uphill effort to secure the speakership — resisted by a group of conservatives including Austin Rep. Chip Roy — would be even more difficult.
“There’s no question that gerrymandering exists and that it benefited Republicans overall across the country,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice
Torrid growth in the last decade yielded two extra House seats for Texas after the 2020 census. Republicans won 25 of those 38 seats.
That’s 66%.
Statewide, GOP candidates have averaged 55% in the last decade. That would correspond to 21 out of 38 seats.
The GOP-controlled Legislature sliced and diced Texas with surgical precision to draw that sort of map. As art, the districts are a whimsical collection of fire-breathing dragons, lightning bolts and doodlebugs.
As partisan politics, it was a brilliant execution of methods that both parties have wielded for decades, packing the other side’s supporters into some districts, diluting them in others.
Purple suburbs of Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin and Houston were paired with deep red rural areas.
Nationwide, the red wave Republicans expected in the midterms failed to materialize.
In the House, they gained just nine seats. They regained power, but it was a hugely disappointing showing given the weak economy, high gas prices, Joe Biden’s low approval ratings, and the history of drubbings handed to the party in the White House halfway into a president’s term.
Republicans will control the House by a margin of 222 to 213. Without those four “extra” seats from Texas, the Republican tally would drop to 218, and Democrats would have 217. That’s as tight as it gets.
Exact proportionality isn’t possible in a system that includes geographic districts. Elections would have to be conducted parliamentary style to achieve that, with each party assigned seats in relation to its share of the overall vote. That’s not the American way.
Still, said Li, “it’s a useful measure” to assess the fairness of a particular map — a “good back of the envelope” calculation.
How far out of proportion was the GOP yield of 25 seats in Texas?
Donald Trump won 52% of the vote in 2000. Sen. John Cornyn drew 53.5%.
Sen. Ted Cruz won 50.9% two years earlier.
Gov. Greg Abbott fell just shy of 55% in November, as fellow Republicans topped 56% in races for land, agriculture and railroad commissioner.
The average: 55%.
The congressional map isn’t the only one the Legislature drew to Republicans’ advantage.
The GOP will run the state Board of Education 10-5 — also two-thirds control.
The GOP holds 19 of 31 seats in the Texas Senate — 61%, and two “extra” seats.
The split in the Texas House is much closer to the baseline: 86 Republicans out of 150 seats, or 57%. (That’s only three more seats than they’d have at 55%.)
None of this is unlawful. Congressional Democrats tried to make it so, but couldn’t get past a Senate Republican filibuster in January. A Brennan Center analysis identified Texas as one of nine states whose new congressional maps were so skewed, they would have violated the bill. Republicans drew the maps in five of those states.
In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that gerrymandering driven by partisan motivations is not unconstitutional, unlike gerrymandering intended to suppress a racial or ethnic minority.
In Li’s view, that’s an artificial distinction.
“If you can cast it as partisan, it’s get out of jail, but not if it falls in the racial bucket,” he said.
Republicans have no monopoly on gerrymandering. But they held a distinct advantage in 2022 in having control of the process in large, diverse, suburban states — Texas, Georgia and Florida — where they could shape the playing field and win seats at far higher ratios than they win votes.
Li pointed to Wisconsin, where Democrats account for about half the electorate but hold only three in 10 legislative seats.
Ticket splitting has been widespread lately in Georgia, where GOP Gov. Brian Kemp won reelection with 53% over Democrat Stacey Abrams, and Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock collected 51% in his runoff against former Dallas Cowboy Herschel Walker.
In a state like that, it’s hard to say for sure what a “fair” ratio of congressional seats would be.
Texas voters have been more consistent. Republicans haven’t lost a statewide race since 1994, and their statewide candidates consistently end up in the low to mid 50s.
“There’s no exact science to this,” Li said.
