Since I last wrote about the Texas redistricting issue two weeks ago, both Republicans and Democrats continue to devote more and more time, energy, and effort to advance their respective positions. Particularly noteworthy are both the hypocrisy of the Democrats and the probability of their failure to block Republican efforts. But Republicans must be careful lest they go too far in trying to make Texas state representatives return to the state, and they must remember that Democrats in Texas and elsewhere are perfectly capable, someday, of doing unto the GOP as the GOP wants to do unto them today.
However much Democrats complain about Republican redistricting efforts, numbers compiled by the Wall Street Journal and its TV Editorial Report show that Democrats in Illinois, California, New York, and other blue states are just as proficient, if not more so, than Texas Republicans at the gerrymander game. Consider:
- In 2024, President Trump won 44% of the popular vote in Illinois, and Republicans won 48% of the vote cast for candidates for Congress. But of Illinois’s 17 representatives in Congress, 14 are Democrats and only 3 (18%) are Republicans.
- Trump won 38% of the popular vote in California against Californian Kamala Harris, but California’s congressional delegation nonetheless consists of 43 Democrats and only 9 (17%) Republicans.
- Trump won 43% of New York’s popular vote, but only 7 (27%) of New York’s representatives are Republican.
Clearly, in each of these blue states (to which most Texas Democratic state representatives have fled to “break quorum”), congressional district lines were drawn to overrepresent Democrats and underrepresent Republicans. Of course, it must be admitted that in 2021, following the last census, Texas’s GOP-dominated state legislature did the reverse: It drew district lines to produce more GOP-friendly congressional districts than the GOP might have been entitled to on the basis of the presidential popular vote. Trump won 56% of the Texas popular vote, but the GOP currently holds 25 (66%) of Texas’s seats in Congress. But the discrepancy between the % of the GOP popular vote for Trump and the % of Republican members of Texas’s congressional delegation is smaller than figures for Democrats in the above-mentioned blue states.
To try to avoid charges of obvious hypocrisy, Democrats actually are not complaining about Republican gerrymandering efforts per se. Rather, Texas Democrats, as well as the governors of Illinois and California and other leaders are saying that Governor Abbott is “cheating” and not playing fair, not because he’s pushing for redistricting, but because he’s pushing for mid-decade redistricting. That, the Democrats say, breaks the fundamental rule that redistricting be done only once, every ten years following the census, and that the states accept whatever redistricting plans are then adopted.
But there is no such “rule.” True, the U.S. Constitution mandates that redistricting be done every ten years following each census, but nothing in the Constitution prohibits a state from doing more than one redistricting. The Supreme Court said as much when it rejected Democrats’ complaints about Texas’s 2003 redistricting, which the GOP-dominated legislature had used to produce more Republican congressional seats after the 2002 congressional elections produced a congressional delegation with 17 Democratic representatives and only 15 Republicans. And the Supreme Court has also always maintained that gerrymandering to maximize the advantage of one party over the other, however politically unsavory, is nonetheless perfectly legal.
So where does all this leave the Democratic and Republican parties in Texas and elsewhere?
In Texas, numbers, the law, and time are all on the GOP’s side. The Democratic state representatives may continue to “break quorum”. Long enough to prevent the legislature’s adoption of the GOP’s new redistricting plan adopted during the current legislative session. But if Governor Abbott calls enough special sessions eventually the Democrats will cave, return to Austin, vote against the redistricting plan, and get rolled by the GOP. This is how the GOP triumphed during the 2003 redistricting controversy as well as the 2021 voting rights controversy.
Democratic governors in other states will no doubt push their mid-decade redistricting plans as well—California’s Governor Newsom says he has a plan to flip 5 of the 9 GOP-held congressional seats to Democratic control—but their plans may fall short if they maximized the number of seats they won following the 2021 redistricting.
But while the GOP will probably win this year’s redistricting battle, Governor Abbott, Attorney General Paxton, Senator Cornyn, and other champions of redistricting in Texas should remember that what goes around comes around. Republican dominance of Texas politics is not guaranteed to last forever, Should the Democrats ever make a comeback in state politics, one can be certain that a Democratic governor and a Democratic-dominated legislature will use the exact same tactics against the GOP as its current leaders are using now, including threats of expulsion and/or arrest of recalcitrant Texas Democratic state representatives. The Democrats, as was noted, have been highly successful elsewhere in diminishing GOP power, and someday they may well do so here as well.
Malcolm L. Cross has lived in Stephenville since 1987 and taught politics and government at Tarleton for 36 years, retiring in 2023. His political and civic activities include service on the Stephenville City Council (2000-2014) and on the Erath County Republican Executive Committee (1990-2024). He was Mayor pro-tem of Stephenville from 2008 to 2014. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Stephenville
Economic Development Authority since 2018 and as chair of the Erath County Appraisal District’s Appraisal Review Board since 2015. He is also a member of the Stephenville Rotary Club, the Board of Vestry of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and the Executive Committee of the Boy Scouts’ Pecan Valley District. Views expressed in this column are his and do not reflect those of The Flash as a whole.
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