How Texas Republicans’ redistricting radically changed one Tarrant County Senate district

Haynes, who typically votes Republican and whose family traces its roots to the area to the late 19th century, said his hometown is more culturally connected to Abilene than Fort Worth. But Brownwood’s reshuffling didn’t bother him, he said.

“Anytime you redistrict, someone’s going to feel like they were a winner and someone’s going to feel like they were a loser,” he said. “That’s just inevitable. Right?”

Reducing the voting power of nonwhites

While the latest Census Bureau estimates show Hispanic people outnumbering white people in Texas for the first time, 40.2% to 39.4%, Latinos are the majority race in only seven state Senate districts — 22.5% of the upper chamber’s 31 seats, according to the Texas Legislative Council.

It’s no different in Texas’ 38 congressional districts, which were drawn with a white majority in 23 seats, or 60% of the delegation.

In all three legislative bodies, white-dominated districts outnumber Hispanic majority districts by more than 2 to 1.

Only one Senate district — a seat in Harris County — and five of the 150 House districts have majority Black populations.

Defenders of the GOP-led redistricting effort, including state Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, who drew the Senate and congressional maps, said the districts were drawn “blind to race.” Despite her assurance, the resulting districts reduced the number of Hispanic majority seats in the state House and Congress, in which Texas gained two new seats after the 2020 Census.

“Republicans in Texas took a look in the mirror at the future and had a lot to worry about, and so they decided to draw districts to give themselves insurance,” Li said.

Huffman did not answer messages seeking comment for this article.

During a deposition in January in an El Paso federal court lawsuit over the maps, she answered yes when asked if the ones she presented were a “partisan gerrymander.”

“Partisan considerations were taken into consideration,” Huffman said.

Austin-based Republican consultant Matt Mackowiak said either party would redraw districts in its favor, given the chance. But the Republican maps have withstood legal challenges so far, something he said is significant.

“The choice the Republicans in the Legislature faced this time is, do you want to be really bold and risk uncertainty and defeat in the courts? Or do you want to be fairly modest in what you try to achieve and basically eliminate the litigation risk?” he said. “In the end, their conclusion was the latter.”

What is redistricting?

Every 10 years, elected officials are required to redraw political districts from the U.S. House all the way down to county elected seats such as commissioners and justices of the peace based on population shifts documented in the decennial census.

For Texas, the previous decade’s population growth garnered the state two more seats in the House of Representatives, bumping the state’s congressional delegation in Washington from 36 to 38.

The increase made Texas a key component in Republican efforts to flip the lower chamber and resulted in a series of districts Democrats gave pejorative names, such as “fajita strips,” for their odd shapes that in many places narrowed to tracts of land less than a quarter-mile across.

Huffman’s proposal created districts in the Rio Grande Valley that could flip as many as three congressional seats in the historically Democratic stronghold. But it also created a liberal district in Austin claimed by a long-serving Democrat, U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett.

Insiders call the strategy “cracking and packing,” a practice in which the party in power will draw some districts heavily in favor of the opposing party to dilute their opponents’ strength elsewhere.

In Texas, the result was far fewer competitive districts in all three chambers. Only one of 38 congressional districts had less than a 5-percentage-point spread between former president Donald Trump and President Joe Biden in the 2020 election, according to the Texas Legislative Council.

“It was demographically possible for Republicans to draw more districts where Republicans would have 52% or 53% of the population, which would ensure that they would control those seats,” said Doug Spencer, a Colorado University law professor and voting rights expert who has worked for plaintiffs challenging Texas’ new district maps in federal court.

“But they didn’t do so,” he said. “They opted for fewer Republican districts, but at a much safer advantage.”

In the Senate, one district would have been within that margin. And in the House, only nine of 150 seats would have been that close of a race between Biden and Trump.

Huffman redrew her district to one that would have favored Trump by a 17.3% margin. Her district voted for Biden by 4.6%. Huffman’s seat was not up for grabs in 2020.

Senate District 10

Powell’s District 10 is among those that saw the most sweeping changes in 2021. It went from favoring Biden by 7.7% to in favor of Trump by 15.8%

No one demographic dominated the district, which was contained within Tarrant County and included dense neighborhoods with people of color that created what Powell has described as a “minority coalition.”

The district required little to no alterations to meet population requirements under Texas law. And before Huffman released the first draft of the new map, Powell said Huffman explained to her the math that would drive changes to districts.

“The only conversation that she and I ever had about the map was that the district was perfect just like it was,” Powell said in an interview at her district office in Fort Worth. “We were within a standard deviation of where we needed to be and that we didn’t see that any changes to it were necessary.”

The new map Huffman presented showed a sprawling rural district stretching from the southern reaches of Fort Worth to the eastern borders of Abilene. It contained the entirety of six counties, growing in land area by nearly 15 times.