Previously: New State House map, New Congressional map, new SBOE map.
The good news is that all 31 Senate seats will be on the ballot this year, as it is a post-redistricting year. The bad news is that the only seat likely to flip is the maybe-illegal-but-still-in-effect SD10; the second most likely is SD27, the one now held by Sen. Eddie Lucio. That will be a gain if the Dems hold it, which I think they probably will, but will put the Senate back at 20-11 for the Republicans otherwise. There are some potential opportunities for Dems going forward, but nothing likely to happen this year.
As before, I’m tracking how things changed over the course of the past decade, this time using the new data. You can find the 2012 election results for the new map here and the 2020 results here. I didn’t use the 2016 results in my analysis below, but that data is here if you want to see it.
Dist Obama Romney Obama%Romney% Biden Trump Biden% Trump%
====================================================================
06 105,626 52,984 65.8% 33.0% 145,880 72,715 66.1% 32.7%
13 187,437 43,220 80.5% 18.6% 226,746 60,286 78.1% 20.8%
14 191,555 103,810 62.4% 33.8% 345,920 108,857 74.4% 23.4%
15 142,022 106,550 56.2% 42.2% 230,947 119,685 64.9% 33.6%
16 119,834 97,550 54.4% 44.2% 187,870 99,542 64.4% 34.1%
19 109,976 83,451 56.1% 42.5% 175,552 134,463 55.8% 42.7%
20 110,074 71,399 59.9% 38.9% 144,904 118,940 54.3% 44.6%
21 117,376 71,625 60.8% 37.1% 174,822 123,149 57.7% 40.7%
23 204,165 61,090 76.3% 22.8% 264,146 72,143 77.5% 21.2%
26 139,600 92,037 59.2% 39.1% 212,130 109,171 64.9% 33.4%
27 111,764 70,555 60.6% 38.3% 136,710 124,352 51.7% 47.1%
29 120,466 64,673 64.1% 34.4% 185,726 94,771 65.2% 33.3%
Dist Obama Romney Obama%Romney% Biden Trump Biden% Trump%
====================================================================
02 94,149 177,976 34.1% 64.5% 161,107 220,682 41.6% 57.0%
05 82,888 160,877 33.3% 64.6% 156,179 228,271 39.8% 58.2%
07 79,567 188,133 29.3% 69.4% 168,148 233,850 41.2% 57.4%
08 88,143 185,954 31.6% 66.7% 191,671 245,415 43.1% 55.1%
09 90,737 172,539 33.9% 64.5% 165,645 216,751 42.6% 55.7%
10 110,253 175,089 38.1% 60.6% 155,339 214,676 41.4% 57.2%
11 93,575 181,599 33.5% 65.1% 159,989 228,246 40.6% 57.9%
12 100,021 216,120 31.2% 67.3% 199,086 253,764 43.3% 55.2%
17 86,387 190,448 30.8% 67.9% 159,728 227,577 40.7% 57.9%
18 92,022 166,546 35.2% 63.7% 154,983 232,105 39.5% 59.2%
22 95,398 182,516 33.8% 64.7% 147,821 232,500 38.3% 60.2%
24 91,044 176,436 33.4% 64.7% 156,584 233,635 39.4% 58.7%
25 93,417 215,045 29.7% 68.5% 199,751 290,020 40.1% 58.3%
Dist Obama Romney Obama%Romney% Biden Trump Biden% Trump%
====================================================================
01 87,651 239,661 26.5% 72.5% 98,697 292,767 24.9% 73.9%
03 96,180 229,714 29.2% 69.7% 102,401 286,961 26.0% 72.9%
04 75,007 202,881 26.7% 72.1% 136,167 260,866 33.8% 64.8%
28 69,681 214,055 24.2% 74.4% 90,616 255,182 25.8% 72.7%
30 73,532 181,183 28.4% 69.9% 159,983 258,982 37.6% 60.8%
31 48,092 193,082 19.7% 79.0% 62,274 239,238 20.4% 78.2%
My analysis for the 2020 election under the old map is here, and my look at the decade shift under the old map is here. You can see the new map in the District viewer, and you might find the District population by county useful.
I split the districts into three groups: Dem seats, which is to say the seats that I’d expect Dems to win in 2022 (in other words, not counting the likely doomed SD10), seats Dems could reasonably think about targeting in a future cycle, and Republican seats. For the first group, SD27 is as discussed a potential problem, in future elections if the trend in 2020 holds, though as previously noted it was more Democratic downballot. I’m actually a little surprised the Republicans didn’t go after SD19, but at least by the numbers they left it more or less as it was. SD20 is mostly Hidalgo and Nueces counties, so I don’t expect too much more movement based on past history, but we’ll keep an eye on it anyway.
The middle group contains a few districts that are mostly optical illusions, where the net voter deficit hasn’t really changed but the percentages have shifted towards the mean, because that’s how math works. It also contains some districts that legitimately moved quite a bit in the Dem direction over the past decade – SDs 02, 07, 08, 09, 12, and 17, with 08 and 12 being on the far outer fringes of competitiveness now. These are all mostly urban/suburban districts, so one would expect the trends to continue, though whether that can happen fast enough to matter is the key. I grouped these together because it’s kind of impressive to see how tightly they cluster in that 55-60% range. We talked several times pre-redistricting about what level of risk the Republicans were willing to tolerate this time around, as they were now dealing with a state that had far fewer surplus Republican voters to slosh around. All of the maps we’ve looked at have had similar clusters, of similar sizes, so I guess we have an answer to that question now.
That leaves a small number of deep red districts, and even that is a tiny bit of a misnomer, as SD30 had a modest net gain in Dem voters. Obviously, Republicans needed to have more not-so-dark-red districts to maximize their membership, but some places are just geographically inclined to be that intensely crimson. I note that SD30 went from being about one-third comprised of pieces of Denton and Collin counties to a bit more than half made up of Denton and Collin. Unlikely to be enough to make it long-term competitive, but it won’t shock me if its topline Republican percentage falls below 60 at some point.
That’s all there is for this series. The next step is to see how the 2022 numbers stack up against 2018 and 2020, and see what trends emerge, continue, and end. The single most likely outcome of this new map is that SD10 flips as it is designed to do, but what to expect after that is up in the air.
