There’s not a lot of news on Day Two of Quorum Break 2025. The session ground to a halt as expected. Greg Abbott shook his fist and threatened to Do Things to the absent Democrats that he does not have the power to do. What he does have the power to do is take redistricting off the agenda and insist that the Lege get to work on flooding issues, but he has not done that and almost certainly will not do that. The Republicans in the Lege also took symbolic action against the Dems. The Dem walkout has additionally sidelined other terrible bills, though as with redistricting there’s only so long that can happen.
In the meantime, New York’s Governor has gotten into the fight, though it’s not clear what she can do in the short term. At some point, all of this is unsustainable as well as bad for democracy, and will need to be addressed at a big picture level, almost certainly after Trump is gone. Some Texas Dems chose not to break quorum but to stay and fight here, which is a thing people will have Opinions about. The Trib is tracking stories here, though as you can see there’s not much else to add.
So with that in mind I’m breaking out this post that I drafted last November, a couple of weeks after the election, but never got around to running. Texas Monthly did a little experiment in extreme redistricting Texas Dem style, to see how many safe and competitive blue Congressional seats they could draw. The answer is probably a lot more than you think, if you don’t mid drawing a ridiculous map. Clearly, there’s no shame on that score, so click on to see what they came up with. The article may be paywalled now, but there’s enough text to give you the idea. Enjoy!
We’d get a different kind of ridiculous Congressional map.
Successful gerrymandering requires drawing unusual-looking maps, with districts often resembling balloon animals made by clown-college dropouts. Some skinny ones stretch for hundreds of miles. Others loop around a region to scoop up as many as possible of one party’s voters. Check out what the Dallas-area Thirty-Third Congressional District looks like now, on the right (a snake attempting to eat its own midsection), compared to its already wildly gerrymandered form from the last decade, on the left (more like a fluffy cumulus cloud floating by on a warm spring day.)
This is how a state whose voters have preferred Republicans to Democrats by an average of fewer than seven points in elections for federal office—including for President and Senate—from 2016 through 2022 can send twice as many Republicans as Democrats to Congress.
But what if the maps were drawn by the other party? How much power could Democrats claim without convincing anyone new to vote for them? To answer that question, I used a tool called Dave’s Redistricting that allows users to go precinct by precinct to select the constituents of each seat. The rules are simple. Each district must contain roughly 767,000 voters (drawing from real-life court decisions, the website allows a deviation of 0.75 percent from seat to seat, or no more than 5,752 voters). Compactness is favored, and it’s generally frowned upon to shape districts like complex doodles. But except in cases with evidence of blatant racial discrimination in gerrymandering, which the Voting Rights Act forbids, today’s Republican-dominated federal courts have not been inclined to get involved. For the most part, court rulings have largely allowed a simple maxim to determine how gerrymandering actually works: Might makes right.
[…]
We’ve shown here how Democrats could draw several long, winding districts that violate the spirit of proportional representation, just as Republicans have done. Assuming voting behaviors from 2020, the last presidential election year, hold, Democrats could create 11 packed Republican seats and 15 relatively safe Democratic ones. Another 11 seats could lean Democratic by between five and ten percentage points, while 1 to the northeast of Dallas could favor the GOP by six. Assuming population change doesn’t dramatically change the electorate over the next half decade, in a given election cycle, Democrats could reasonably expect to lead the state’s congressional delegation with 26 members, versus 12 for Republicans—a flip of the ratio today.
If they were shameless enough to disregard reason, good taste, and the will of the voters, Democrats could even carve a district into the deep red swath of the state between Amarillo and Fort Worth that would favor Democrats by about seven points. They could also crack the voting power of a bloc of Republicans in the Big Thicket area of East Texas by sticking some into a safe Democratic seat centered in Austin, 240 miles to the west.
Click over to see all of the crazy maps in their improbable glory. As noted, this was done with 2020 voting data; if nothing else, those more evenly-split districts might have been more likely to go red this year. This idea isn’t new – I remember a map submitted for consideration by, I believe, Rep. Senfronia Thompson during the 2003 Tom DeLay re-redistricting, that would have done the same sort of thing. Of course that was based on what the voting patterns of 2003 looked like, where Democrats from places like Lubbock and Longview could get elected. As we saw in the 2010s, rapid population growth and shifting political coalitions can undo a lot of assumptions.
We don’t know what this decade will look like, and as close as Dems got in some once thought to be “safe” Republican districts, they ultimately only won two of them before the 2021 redistricting came around and sent them back to square one. I know this will shock you, but the real change won’t happen until Dems start to win some statewide elections. In the meantime, go ahead and play around with the apps. May as well get some ideas in mind for when that opportunity does finally come.
Democracy for non-gringo type people is a very recent phenomenon. Add women to new to Democracy.