Mid-decade Redistricting

[jimrtex]

Besides Texas are there any other states where it's possible to see mid-decade redistricting?

The Texas legislature has not passed any maps that have won approval from the federal government.  They have an obligation to draw maps.

[jimrtex]

The Texas legislature has not passed any maps that have won approval from the federal government.  They have an obligation to draw maps.

On the Congressional side, can they really draw a new legal map and change the delegation much in 2014?

The SA Court has never issued an opinion on the Section 2 issues.  After their original "interim" map was slapped down by the SCOTUS, they did their latest "interim" map based on a guess of how the DC Court would rule on Section 5 issues.  During hearings in SA, the 3 judges would take a recess and apparently call the DC Court.   The first was a quick recess, and then they took a longer break, after the judges in DC called back.

The DC court did not issue their ruling in the Section 5 case until August, way after the primary, and too late to change the districts, though LULAC tried.  Somehow the two courts must have agreed to coordinate their efforts.  If the DC Court had issued their ruling during the Spring, then the SA Court might have had to do another interim map.  And since the SA Court had already decided to wait until the Section 5 ruling, it permitted the SA to not issue its order.

The Section 5 case is on appeal to the DC Appeals Court, and the SA Court is asking for advice from the parties on whether they should proceed or not until that is resolved, including the appeal to the SCOTUS.   And now the SA Court has asked whether they should wait on the Shelby County case challenging Section 5 directly.

The Legislature ought to adopt the interim plans, and then send them to the USDOJ for preclearance.   What are they going to say, they can't preclear them until the SA Court makes its ruling which they are waiting on to do for a Section 5 ruling that was submitted two years ago?

I don't think they can really improve the interim map.  I'll intersperse my comments.

The new Congressmen are...

Weber: whose district could be kept as-is because just putting Beaumont in another district would annoy someone else and force Weber to take redder areas from another Republican for no good reason

JR: The legislature added Jefferson County, partly as a tweak at Ron Paul, but mainly because Beaumont and Port Arthur are stagnating.  Refineries are highly automated, and those who work their are well paid and not as likely to blindly vote Democratic.  This leaves you the black vote.   Galveston is trending Republican, and Brazoria is growing.   The interim map just made some adjustments in the western part of the district.  When TX-2 was brought into Harris County, TX-18, TX-29, and TX-9 were slid south a bit to make room, with no real effect on the electorates.  But they managed to put a couple of district offices that happened to be a 1/2 block inside the districts to just outside.

O'Rourke: whose district could be adjusted slightly but nothing that would endanger him any more than he already is in a primary

JR: The legislature boundary held up in the interim map.  They took the part of El Paso County closest to San Antonio.  The plaintiffs wanted to take a hook around to the north to pick up more Anglo voters, as cover for grabbing more Black and Hispanic voters in western San Antonio.  If you take a 90% Hispanic area in El Paso, then you can keep more Anglo voters in northern San Antonio.  Any change to his district, will be seen as an attempt to change TX-23.

Castro: Not a lot that can be done.

JR: It would be interesting to know what would have happened if the first interim map had not been drawn.  Its northern boundary was a block past Castro's house; the new district was drawn for Rodriguez to run in, and open up TX-23 for Gallego; and Doggett got an Austin-based district.   And then Gonzalez announced immediately that he was retiring in order to make more money.  It would be interesting to know who really drew that map.

Gallego: lives in the middle of a VRA district that has been part of multiple lawsuits.

JR: The key here is Maverick County and the counties to the east Zavalla and Dimmit.  If the Democrats need votes, they can get a lot of voters to the poll.  In 2006, turnout was higher for the special runoff than for the special election which was on the same date as the general election with the 4-way gubernatorial race.

Williams: lives in a district that is a bit of a mess due to the partition of Travis County.

JR: The Republicans are quite happy with that.  About 45% of TX-35 vote was in Bexar County.  When Doggett retires, it will be hard for Austin to hold the district.

Veasey: African-American incumbent in a Hispanic plurality district, IIRC

JR: It ended up being better that way, it made the surrounding districts extremely solid R.

Vela: VRA district

JR: This only comes up because of the strange VRA accounting based on district number.  They should have given the Brownsville district the old number, and Fahrenthold the new.   Incidentally, Vela's wife was a candidate for a GOP nomination for the Texas Supreme Court, and a Republican elected to an appeals court.  She was the Republican nominee for chief justice on that court this year, but withdrew in August after Vela won the nomination.

Stockman: Super-R district.

Wouldn't it just be quicker to try and draw a way to protect most of the incumbents, while focusing on getting another supermajority in the House?

They really overperformed in 2010, winning practically everything they could.  They lost one on a narrow recount, and the other has a popular incumbent whose name is the same as the area he represents (Eiland and Galveston Island).

They concentrated on their floor so that they can't drop below around 95, rather than maybe 85.

They did 5 Republican pairs and one Democratic pair, and created 5 new Republican districts in Fort Bend, Montgomery, Williamson, Collin, and Denton counties, and one Democratic district in Tarrant.

The 3rd Tarrant Democratic district makes the 8 Republican districts pretty solid, and two of the Republican pairings were in Dallas County.  In 2008, the Democrats had picked up several seats there, which the Republicans took back in 2010.  In 2012, the Republicans held the remaining seats.

So they got rid of 3 weak R seats and one D seat, and created 3 strong R seats and one D seat, while strengthening several others.  In Travis, they created one solid R rather than having 2 vulnerable.

The court adjusted 3 seats where they were trying to hold on to a seat they had picked up in 2010 or were holding on to (El Paso, San Antonio, and Pasadena).  It would be hard to try to adjust those back - they wouldn't be a lock anyhow.  They lost a seat in Corpus Christi, but that was based on the lines they drew.  They had somehow managed to win both Nueces County seats, plus the district that extended outside.  They had 3 of 3, and now have 1 of 2, but the missing district is now in Collin County.

The three districts in El Paso, San Antonio, and Pasadena could be won back in another election like 2010, and perhaps the district in Corpus Christi.

[jimrtex]

If Lampson had somehow pulled it out in TX14, they could have easily redrawn the map and given Beaumont to Stockman as he's from Orange and the R's worrypoint here is more that Lampson ran 8 points ahead of Obama in Jefferson against a Houston Metro Republican even as it was, not the overall lean of the district.

Stockman is from the Clear Lake area.  The Democrats had gerrymandered some of the NASA area into Jack Brooks TX-9 district to take some Republicans from TX-25, and also so Brooks could use his influence on NASA's behalf. 

Stockman upset the 21-term Brooks in the 1994 Republican wave election with just enough of those Republicans the Democrats had added to the district.  Bush v Vera was decided by the SCOTUS in 1996 after the primary, and so the redrawn districts had to be contested using a special election (no primary, but the possibility of a runoff). 

TX-25 had some tweaks that pushed into TX-9.  The object of the 1990s Democratic gerrymander was to include enough minority areas to keep it Democratic, and not too many Anglos as to make it vulnerable to a Republican, while not giving a black candidate a chance to be nominated.  So it wrapped around the southern edge of TX-18 and TX-29.  If the test for using a special election was substantive change (i.e. not enough change to make the primary results unreliable), then TX-9 would have been a regular election on election day, which Stockman might have won.

There was a 3rd candidate in the special election which kept Stockman below 50%.   Geraldine Sam had lost in the Democratic primary to Lampson but ran again in the special.  She is Black, but later  became a Republican, so it is somewhat ambiguous who she took votes from.  Stockman may also have been hurt by the straight-ticket voting not applying to special elections.  The candidate's names have Democratic and Republican next to them, but you actually have to vote for them.  Ballots in Harris County are much longer than in Jefferson County, so it is not as much effort to vote for every individual candidate.

The special runoff was in December, two weeks before Christmas.  Since TX-9 was one of many districts in the Houston area, and somewhat on periphery, the election did not get much publicity.  But Beaumont has its own news media.  Relative turnout compared to November was dramiatically different: Jefferson 71.1%, Galveston 53.1%, Harris 42.5%.   Jefferson went from 43.3% of the vote to 52.2% of the vote.  Lampson was easily elected, and kept being re-elected based on overwhelming support from Jefferson County.

The 2004 redistricting moved Jefferson County in TX-2, which was converted from an east Texas district to a Harris County dominated one.  TX-25 became a black dominated TX-9.  TX-2, TX-14, and TX-22 absorbed the western parts of the old TX-9.  Jefferson County has been stagnant in population.  Fewer votes were cast in 2012 than 1992, in which it has gone from being 42% of a district to 36%.

Lampson was defeated in 2004, but he carried Jefferson County with 69% of the vote.  He then moved to TX-22 in 2006, and won after the Republicans were kept off the ballot.  He had some relatives from Stafford in Fort Bend County, and I think he may have used that as his residence.  By 2012, he only got 58% of the vote in Jefferson County.  I suspect that he is by now seen as an opportunist by some.

While he did better than Obama, he probably did worse than he could have done without Obama.   Being perceived as anti-oil is not the best way to get votes in the area with the world's largest refinery as well as the site of the first oil boom.