2020 Texas Redistricting thread

[GALeftist]

Between 25-13 and a map which seems favorable to Cisneros primarying Cuellar I will very much take it. Blue Dogs halved again in 2022 inshallah

[GALeftist]

So basically TX redistricting looks like a wash, no net pickups for either party = the most likely outcome in 2022?

If this map stands, my money is on TX-15 flipping in 2022, being swingy in 2024, and then marching right, but the RGV trends are so weird that honestly who knows. All the D seats besides that are fairly safe though

[GALeftist]

DOJ is suing Texas over its maps alleging that they violate Section 2 of the VRA.

https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1467927358019710977?s=20

Alabama too, please, while we're at it

[GALeftist]

DOJ is suing Texas over its maps alleging that they violate Section 2 of the VRA.

https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1467927358019710977?s=20

Alabama too, please, while we're at it

Given the composition of the courts, little to nothing is going to change here. The 5th circuit and obviously SCOTUS are a solid R majority.

Same with the 5th, to be fair. Those are just the two states where I think VRA violations would be easiest to argue

[GALeftist]

So I have a question regarding Section 2 claims as they pertain to Texas Hispanics. The first prong seems easy enough to satisfy, but how do prongs 2 and 3 work? Like, thinking about prong 2, I think you could for sure argue that Hispanics in Bexar County vote similarly, but it gets pretty murky elsewhere. RGV Hispanics are now like 60/40 Democratic leaning, tops; is that enough to say they vote similarly? Are just RGV Hispanics their own group for these purposes, since Hispanics farther north are much more Republican, or is something like the current TX-15 where bluer RGV Hispanics are outvoted by redder Hispanics fine? What about prong 3; can you really say white bloc voting is an issue in areas that are 90% Hispanic?

[GALeftist]

Awesome, thanks! After some research and some tinkering, here's one (partial) map I think I would submit, were I suing Texas for violating Section 2:



(Ignore the Bexar County districts, they are just placeholders)

Every district drawn here other than TX-37 in Austin is intended to be a Hispanic VRA district. The basic contentions of this map are:

1. South/West Texas Hispanics are still politically cohesive enough to satisfy prong 2 of Gingles (debatable, but I think defensible, especially when you contrast the severely weakened but unmistakable Democratic lean of these communities with the almost unanimous rural white support for Republicans in Texas)
2. The fajitas are unnecessary – assuming high relative white turnout, TX-15 already likely (by design!) failed to elect the candidate of choice of its Hispanic community, and TX-34 is approaching 90% Hispanic as-is, so this alternative is no more a racial pack than the status quo
3. TX-23 is compact enough as drawn here to satisfy prong 1 of Gingles. This is honestly pretty iffy, but in fairness, it's not a LA-02 style snake or anything, it just has a lot of sparsely populated rural territory that inflates its size. El Paso to Hidalgo isn't really that much more offensive than the status quo of El Paso to Bexar

If this or something similar was enacted, it would have several beneficial effects from the Democratic perspective. Firstly, the elimination of TX-35 as a snake from Travis to Bexar makes it much more difficult to contain all the blue in the Austin area to just one sink. If the court bites on TX-23, that would also probably flip.

[GALeftist]

I think this is a good map, but it wouldn't be sufficient in a VRA case because here you're actually taking away a Hispanic seat from the border (currently 5 on your map 4).

If you could draw 5 Hispanic Boarder seats that don't go into Bexar very much if at all, and are hence able to draw 2 Hispanic seats entirely within Bexar, and then a Hispanic seat in Austin and some surrounding Hispanic communities for a total of 8 Hispanic seats, you would've added a Hispanic seat and would be able to bring VRA claim. In order to do this though, one or two of the Border Hispanic seats probably has to be an R leaning functional district that allows Conservative Hispanics to control the primary and elect their candidate of choice.

I think that's another aspect of VRA that's unclear though. If the racial group controls both primaries, but the district leans towards the party that the majority of that racial group in the district doesn't support, is that calid under VRA?

I think part of the case I would make here is that TX-35 as it is currently drawn is not actually a performing Hispanic district for the purposes of Section 2. It's only 51% Hispanic by CVAP, so I suspect that the Hispanic community doesn't actually reliably control the primary (if there is one Hispanic community represented in TX-35 and not several different ones, which I would also dispute). My argument would therefore be that the number of performing Hispanic districts is actually increased by two; TX-23 and TX-15 should now perform, while TX-28 is replaced by TX-35.