Like it or not, we have new State House districts. We may as well acquaint ourselves with them. The coverage we’ve had so far has focused on the 2020 election numbers to say whether a district will be red or blue or (in a limited number of cases) purple. I think that we need to see more data than that to get a full picture. I’ve spent a bunch of time on this site looking at how districts changed over the course of the past decade. This post will do the same for the new State House districts. I may do the same for the other types of districts – we’ll see how busy things get once filing season opens – but for now let’s look at how things are here.
We now have a full set of election data for the new districts. All of the data for the new State House districts can be found here. I am using election data for these years in this post: 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020
If you want to remind yourself of what the map looks like, use the district viewer, which allows you to zoom in all the way to street level. What would have happened in the last decade if we had had this map in place following the 2011 session?
2012 – 59 seats won by Obama
2014 – 51 seats won by Davis
2016 – 64 seats won by Clinton
2018 – 66 seats won by Beto
2020 – 65 seats won by Biden
This shows a couple of things. One is just how bad a year 2014 was. Two, how effective the 2011/2013 map was for the conditions that existed at the time. Note that with this map, the big shift towards the Democrats happened in 2016, not 2018. I have to wonder how things might have played out in 2018 and 2020 if that had been our experience. After that, it gets a lot more static. I’ll tell you which districts were won by Beto but not Clinton, and which district was won by Beto but not Biden, later in this post.
Enough setup. You’re ready for some numbers, right? I know you are. I’ve broken this down more or less by region, and am including districts that are within 20 points in the 2020 results.
Dist Obama Romney Obama%Romney% Biden Trump Biden% Trump%
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014 14,134 29,676 31.5% 66.1% 30,840 38,146 43.5% 53.8%
020 19,803 40,618 31.9% 65.4% 44,651 58,876 42.2% 55.6%
045 20,079 21,248 47.0% 49.8% 48,915 32,987 58.4% 39.4%
052 16,708 28,942 35.7% 61.8% 44,974 49,046 46.7% 51.0%
054 18,164 22,668 43.9% 54.7% 26,960 31,067 45.5% 52.4%
055 17,348 26,906 38.5% 59.8% 30,054 36,826 43.9% 53.8%
118 21,895 25,284 45.7% 52.8% 36,578 34,584 50.6% 47.9%
121 25,850 47,798 34.5% 63.8% 50,133 52,533 48.1% 50.4%
122 21,516 48,130 30.4% 68.1% 50,094 59,855 44.9% 53.7%
Call this the “Central” region – HD14 is Brazos County, HDs 20 and 52 are Williamson, HD45 is Hays, HDs 54 and 55 are the infamous “donut” districts of Bell County, and the other three are Bexar. Couple things to note, as these themes will recur. One is that if there’s a district you think might belong but which isn’t listed, it’s probably because it just doesn’t qualify as a “swing” district any more. A great example is HD47 in Travis County, which was a 52-47 district for Mitt Romney in 2012. In 2020, however, it was won by Joe Biden by a 61-36 margin. HD45 is more or less the same, but I included it here as a borderline case.
Looking at the shifts, it’s not too hard to imagine the two Williamson districts moving into (back into, in the case of HD52) the Dem column, in a future election if not this year. Note also that HD118 was once a red district. It’s one of the two that Beto flipped and which Biden held. Sure, it’s accurately described in all of the coverage of the special election runoff as being more Republican than the current HD118, but one should be aware of the direction that it has traveled. I won’t be surprised if it outperforms the 2020 number for Dems in 2022. (No, the result of this special election runoff doesn’t change my thinking on that. It’s not the first time that Republicans have won a special election in HD118.)
Not all districts moved so dramatically – that parsing of Bell County looks like it will be durable for the GOP, at least at this time. The other two Bexar districts were a lot more Democratic at the Presidential level than they were downballot, so one has to wonder if the splits we see here are entirely about Trump, or if they will be the leading edge for Dems as the 2016 Trump numbers were in places like CD07 and all of the Dallas House districts that Republicans once held.
Dist Obama Romney Obama%Romney% Biden Trump Biden% Trump%
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034 28,030 19,409 58.4% 40.4% 32,171 26,232 54.4% 44.3%
035 19,519 5,678 76.7% 22.3% 22,629 16,478 57.3% 41.7%
036 21,416 7,022 74.5% 24.4% 26,905 19,328 57.6% 41.4%
037 21,580 17,109 55.2% 43.7% 27,740 26,576 50.6% 48.4%
039 23,219 8,076 73.5% 25.6% 27,861 18,679 59.2% 39.7%
041 20,882 15,585 56.6% 42.2% 33,385 25,616 56.1% 43.0%
074 25,903 16,270 60.5% 38.0% 31,415 28,538 51.7% 46.9%
080 26,122 16,344 60.9% 38.1% 27,099 29,572 47.3% 51.6%
Here we have South Texas and the Valley, where things are not so good for the Dems. Again, the districts you don’t see here are the ones that are not swing districts; check out the linked numbers to see for yourself. HD41 was pretty stable, and I will note that the current version of HD74 was carried by Trump, so the new map is a bit friendlier to the Dems, at least for now. HD80 is the Beto district that Biden lost, and as with every other Latino district we’re just going to have to see how it performs in a non-Trump year. If State Rep. Alex Dominguez, the incumbent in HD37, does indeed primary Sen. Eddie Lucio, that puts another Dem seat squarely in the danger zone. (Modulo the pending litigation, of course.)
Dist Obama Romney Obama%Romney% Biden Trump Biden% Trump%
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033 16,134 40,104 28.2% 70.1% 35,618 53,384 39.3% 58.9%
057 13,506 30,350 30.3% 68.0% 36,387 47,660 42.6% 55.8%
061 15,178 34,157 30.3% 68.1% 43,274 50,795 45.2% 53.0%
063 20,983 40,571 33.5% 64.8% 42,303 47,444 46.4% 52.0%
065 18,851 36,946 33.3% 65.2% 43,265 51,231 45.1% 53.4%
066 19,348 41,191 31.5% 67.0% 43,902 51,608 45.2% 53.1%
067 16,268 32,870 32.6% 65.7% 39,889 47,769 44.6% 53.5%
070 23,926 36,395 38.9% 59.2% 45,111 35,989 54.7% 43.6%
084 17,622 30,644 35.8% 62.3% 25,604 36,144 40.7% 57.5%
089 18,681 39,334 31.6% 66.6% 39,563 49,499 43.5% 54.5%
093 13,971 29,638 31.6% 67.0% 34,205 45,799 42.0% 56.2%
094 23,934 46,010 33.6% 64.6% 37,985 45,950 44.4% 53.8%
096 22,912 42,668 34.5% 64.2% 39,472 48,073 44.4% 54.1%
097 21,540 40,721 34.0% 64.4% 38,218 46,530 44.3% 53.9%
099 17,899 33,551 34.2% 64.2% 31,245 43,999 40.8% 57.5%
106 12,893 30,578 29.2% 69.3% 38,447 50,868 42.4% 56.2%
108 26,544 58,932 30.7% 68.1% 54,481 55,364 48.9% 49.7%
112 24,601 44,320 35.2% 63.4% 44,881 45,370 48.9% 49.4%
So much action in the Multiplex. HD33 is Rockwall and a piece of Collin. HDs 61 and 70 are Collin, HD57 is Denton. I have lumped HD84 in here as well, even though it’s Lubbock and it remains on the fringe, but I don’t care. We will make a race out of that district yet! HDs 108 and 112 in Dallas are also much more Republican downballot than they were at the top, and while I think they will eventually fall, it’s unlikely to be in 2022. HD70, by the way, is the other district that flipped Dem in 2018.
Everywhere else I look, I see districts that are about as competitive as the formerly Republican-held districts of Dallas County were circa 2012. (Note how none of them have made an appearance in this post.) Look at how huge those splits were a decade ago. A decade in the future, either we’re going to be grimly hailing the evil genius of this gerrymander, or we’re going to be chuckling about Republican hubris and how if they’d maybe thrown another district or two to the Dems they could have saved themselves a bucketful of losses.
Dist Obama Romney Obama%Romney% Biden Trump Biden% Trump%
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025 16,141 33,014 32.4% 66.2% 29,441 43,675 39.7% 58.9%
026 14,574 36,701 32.4% 66.2% 37,863 47,532 43.7% 54.8%
028 15,831 33,229 31.9% 67.0% 36,213 46,580 43.1% 55.4%
029 18,280 37,848 32.1% 66.5% 32,787 46,758 40.6% 57.9%
126 18,574 47,202 27.9% 70.7% 35,306 50,023 40.8% 57.8%
127 19,674 45,760 29.7% 69.1% 38,332 53,148 41.3% 57.3%
129 21,321 45,292 31.5% 66.9% 38,399 51,219 42.2% 56.2%
132 13,399 31,974 29.1% 69.5% 35,876 46,484 42.9% 55.6%
133 21,508 45,099 31.8% 66.7% 40,475 42,076 48.4% 50.3%
134 34,172 42,410 43.7% 54.3% 66,968 38,704 62.5% 36.1%
138 20,133 40,118 32.9% 65.6% 37,617 42,002 46.6% 52.0%
144 17,471 16,254 51.1% 47.6% 25,928 20,141 55.6% 43.2%
148 20,954 19,960 50.4% 48.0% 34,605 24,087 58.1% 40.5%
150 14,511 34,552 29.2% 69.6% 34,151 45,789 42.1% 56.5%
Finally, the Houston area. HDs 25 and 29 are Brazoria County, HDs 26 and 28 are Fort Bend. The now-in-Fort-Bend HD76 slides in here as another former swing district, going from 51-48 for Romney to 61-38 for Biden. I threw HD134 in here even though it’s obviously not a swing district by any reasonable measure in part because it was once the epitome of a swing district, and because damn, just look at how far that district shifted towards Dems. The open HD133 is unfortunately another one of those redder-downballot districts, so even though it’s an open seat don’t get your hopes up too much for this cycle. Maybe later on, we’ll see.
I’m fascinated by HD144, which like HD74 is now slightly more Dem than it was under the existing map. I guess Republicans had other priorities in the area. As for HD148, it’s a little jarring to see it as a genuine swing district from 2012, though it barely qualifies as of 2020. Rep. Penny Morales Shaw has complained about the changes made to her district, not just geographically but also by reducing that Latino CVAP by almost ten points. Finally, I will note that while the GOP shored up HD138, it’s another district that used to be a lot redder than it is now. Again, we’ll just have to see how resilient that is. That “genius/hubris” divide will largely come down to places like that.
I hope this helped shed some light on what these districts may be going forward. As always, let me know what you think.
