but not unprecedented

The result is a mess that teaches lessons about gerrymandering and its discontents, as well as the limits of the “independent commission,” the left’s preferred method of controlling it. (This presumes arguendo that left-wing groups like Common Cause actually want to control gerrymandering, rather than simply advantage Democrats.)

The gerrymander that wasn’t (much), and the gerrymander that was

Texas Republicans drew the state’s present Congressional map after the 2020 Census, when it appeared Texas was becoming less Republican and more competitive at the state-wide level. In his unsuccessful 2020 re-election effort, Donald Trump won the Lone Star State by a 5.5 percentage-point margin, the closest since 1996 when Bill Clinton lost Texas by just 4.9 percentage points. Joe Biden’s 46.48 percent was the highest vote share for a Democratic presidential candidate in Texas since Jimmy Carter won the state outright in 1976.

There are two forms of gerrymandering: “Offensive” gerrymandering to maximize total seats a party wins, and “defensive” gerrymandering to protect a party’s incumbent legislators. Facing what appeared to be a newly purple or purple-ish state, Texas Republican mapmakers went “defensive.” As a result, the post-2020 maps yielded only two more Republicans than a statewide proportional representation election would have yielded based on 2024 House vote totals: 25 actual GOP versus 23 simulated.

Meanwhile, California has operated with a so-called “independent redistricting commission” since a 2010 referendum backed by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R). The commission was supposed to prevent gerrymandering, but it was poorly designed and easily captured by representatives of the state’s dominant liberal-progressive movement and Democratic Party. ProPublica, hardly a right-wing outlet (it is heavily funded by left-wing donors including Sequioa Capital’s Michael Moritz and Apple heiress Laurene Powell Jobs), reported extensively on the manipulations California progressives used in the 2010 census cycle to draw a de facto soft gerrymander.

The post-2020 commission didn’t do much better. The conservative elections blog RRHElections noted that the 20th district, formerly represented by ex-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), was an oddly shaped Republican “vote sink,” evidence of pro-Democratic gerrymandering.

Further evidence of pro-Democratic gerrymandering is how out of line the state’s actual delegation is from a proportional result. Based on the 2024 election results, California returned a full eleven additional Democrats than a proportional outcome, 5.5 times more than Texas’s “partisan gerrymander.” This is consistent with the results in the 2010 census cycle, which CRC analyzed in our “Myth of Nonpartisan Districts” report, which also showed the California “commission” drawing a less proportional map than Texas Republican legislators.

Texas moves

But instead of joining The Emerging Democratic Majority (R.I.P.) the left was anticipating 20 years ago, Latinos decided they weren’t going to keep voting overwhelmingly Democratic in the age of (of all people) President Donald Trump. In his return to the presidency in 2024, President Trump won Texas by more than 13 points with a 56.14 percent vote share. This nearly matched Mitt Romney’s 2012 performance in the state and beat John McCain’s 2008 performance.

Texas Republicans’ defensive map drawn amid fears of “Blexas” in 2021 might not have been necessary. So, Texas Republicans, reportedly at President Trump’s urging, have decided to switch from defense to offense, proposing a new map that would have elected up to five additional Republican Representatives.

Democrats in the state legislature have responded by busting quorum by fleeing the state. This is a delaying tactic commonly used by both parties in one-party states. It rarely succeeds in fully stopping the protested legislation since the majority parties can always apply additional compulsion to either force attendance or waive the quorum rule.

The Republicans’ gambit, a simple partisan redraw of Texas’s maps in mid-decade, is not unprecedented. Their predecessors did so after the 2002 elections gave Republicans their first majorities in the state legislature since Reconstruction. This too led to a Democratic quorum-busting attempt.

The baseline then was much different. Rather than a semi-proportional defensive map, Texas courts in 2001 had drawn a wildly aggressive gerrymander that returned a majority of Democratic representatives despite Republicans winning 53 percent of the statewide House vote.

Texas Democrats, who held the statewide trifecta after the 1990 Census, had drawn an even more aggressive gerrymander that returned nearly two-thirds Democratic Representatives in 1994, despite Republicans winning more than 55 percent of the statewide House vote. If Republicans succeed in their new round of gerrymandering, then they can tell their counterparts across the aisle “