A TJRS Deep Dive: Texas' EVEN MORE RACIST maps
Just when you thought it couldn't get grimier, Texas Republicans lower the bar
They do everything bigger in Texas, including racist gerrymandering…
On Tuesday, Rep. Jolanda Jones returned to The JoyReid Show with fresh receipts: the latest version of Republicans’ racially gerrymandered maps. And what they show is that in the week between Texas Democrats briefly left the state to deny Republicans a quorum for the initial special session demanded by Gov. Greg Abbott, and Democrats’ anticlimactic return, Republicans redrew the maps to make them even more racist.
Let’s start with the map of Texas’ Harris County — the bluest county in the state, at least until these maps pass and are signed into law — which is likely to happen this week:
View and download the full map here.
Now, what you’ll want to zoom in on in this map is the small black number 9. Look for it just to the right of the large blue field, which indicates the deep blue districts won by Kamala Harris in 2024. Note that the “new” Congressional District 9 sits in a sea of red: meaning Republicans are redrawing the seat currently held by Liberated Democrat and cane shaker, Rep. Al Green, to be Republican.
Let’s now look at the shift in both Congressional District 9 and Congressional District 18. Let’s start with the original racist gerrymander, which prompted Democrats to leave the state to deny Republicans a quorum:
And remember, that on these maps, the red numbers represent the original districts, and the black are the new. You can see that the original CD 9 and the new CD 18 fall into the same district in the August 11-era plan, with the red and black 18s suddenly very far apart. Well look at how Republicans have changed the game in the updated racist gerrymander:
View and download the full map here.
As you can see on the new-new map, CD 18 has a complete new horseshoe shape, and the new 9, in black, is so far away, it’s hard to even find it on the map (it’s in the righthand quadrant of the map, above and slightly to the left of CD26.) You’ll also notice that most of the other numbers on the map barely move, meaning that their red and black versions are still physically close together, so their overwhelmingly non-Black voters will barely notice the change.
So how does this look numerically? Let’s take a look, once again, at the old gerrymander, and the new. Here are the changes to three neighboring districts: CD 8, CD 9 and CD10 that Rep. Jones shared with us a week ago
:The first column represents the district number. Columns two and three show you which districts Republicans are pulling voters from and the percentages of those districts which will be added to the “new” district. Column four is the raw number of voters effected, and columns five and six represent the number of “Anglo” voters (column 5) and “Non-Anglo” voters. You can see that the new CD 9 was slated to retain just 34.4 percent of its original voters, while eating up 51.7 percent of CD 18’s. And you can see from the percentages that they are culling the “new” district from five overwhelmingly nonwhite congressional districts.
Now let’s look at the new plan, and zoom out so that you can see all of the category headings:
A few things to note:
The planners were very intentional about calculating not just the “Anglo” vs “non-Anglo” percentages, but also those numbers by voting age, and the combined “Black-Hispanic” totals in every district. In other words, they are very intentional about figuring out the white versus non-white populations in these districts, and balancing the new districts accordingly — presumably because they infer that the vast majority of white voters will vote Republican, and they don’t trust that Black and Latino voters — particularly when they live in proximity to each other, will do the same. But the racial gerrymandering is crystal clear when you look at the headings and the minute detail they go into in order to configure these “new” districts.
And now let’s zoom in and look at the changes to districts 8, 9 and 10.
As you can see, CD 9 now keeps just 2.9 percent of its original voters, and gets no voters from CD 18. Instead, it absorbs more than four in ten voters from overwhelmingly Latino District 29, currently represented by a Democrat (who is known locally as not particularly interested in Black people) and from 41.6 percent white District 36. The result (from the first map on this page)?
A ruby red District 9. Viola.
Let’s now look at the changes to historic CD 18, previously represented by the great Barbara Jordan, Sheila Jackson Lee and former Houston mayor Sylvester Turner.
Here is the previous change to the district, in chart form, comparing it to the changes to majority white CD 19:
As you can see, the original plan was to allow CD 18 to retain just over a third of its original constituency, while also absorbing voters from majority Latino CD 29 and CD 2. Well after the Democrats returned to give Republicans a quorum, this happened:
View and download the full file here.
And find the Republicans’ congressional districts breakdown here.
Suddenly, CD 19 is untouched. It remains 100 percent intact, while CD 18 gets gutted. It will now consist of two-thirds of what used to be CD 9, plus a quarter of majority Latino CD 18, and other districts that are also heavily Latino. Now I want you to look all the way at the right side of the chart, where you see the voting age population. Note that the white majority becomes even more pronounced in CD 19 when you consider how many of the people living there are old enough to vote. And in even the districts with smaller “Anglo” populations, the voting age numbers are boosted versus “non-Anglo” constituents, due to the lower average age of Latinos in this country generally, and — and this is important — their much lower tendency than white or Black Americans to vote at all. More on that from NPR:
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Latinos made up 40.2% of Texas' population last summer, while the non-Hispanic white share was 39.8%. The development was first reported by The Texas Tribune.
Experts say Latinos have been the biggest ethnic population in the state for a while now, but undercounting in the census delayed anything official.
Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, says this is a huge milestone for Latinos in Texas.
"But when it comes to political power," Li says, "Latinos still are very underrepresented in Texas."
Li says Latinos in Texas are underrepresented compared to their population size when it comes to both participation and representation in politics.
And there are a lot of reasons for this.
Texas Latinos are still a young population
Arturo Vargas — CEO of NALEO, a nonpartisan organization that promotes the participation of Latinos in the national political process — says one of the biggest reasons is that the state's Latino population has a lower median age than non-Latinos.
"While Latinos are now the largest ethnic group in the state of Texas, they are in fact the majority of the young people and children in Texas," he says. "Now over 50% of all Texans 18 years and younger are Latinos. So, a much larger share of the Latino population is unable to vote simply because they are not old enough."
Vargas says it could take a lot of time for all these young Latinos in Texas to become a significant political force as well, because young people don't vote at the same rates as older people.
"So there are two strikes against Latino participation that come with the youthfulness of the Latino community," Vargas says.
And in Texas, when Latinos do vote, they increasingly vote more conservatively — at least up to now.
One of the biggest stories of the 2024 election cycle was Donald Trump’s success in increasing his support among Latino voters. The exit polls in Texas suggest that Trump won 55% of the Latino vote in the state – a 13-point increase from 2020, a record high for a Republican presidential candidate and a 27-point increase over 2016. (Texas was part of Trump's 45% of the Latino vote nationally.) Even allowing for apparent signs of success from Republican aligned efforts in the state to identify and turnout likely Republican voters in heavily Latino counties, the magnitude of the swing toward Trump in 2024, especially in Texas, was still striking as it became apparent in the days after the election.
A review of extensive data on Latino attitudes in the Texas Politics Project polling archive in conjunction with election returns and exit polling suggests that the signs of Trump’s success in 2024 were hiding in plain sight, albeit amidst fluctuations in the data attributable to both methodological and empirical factors (which we flag in the more extensive discussions below). …
And the causes seem to boil down to these four:
Party identification data reveals a decline in Democratic identification among Latinos amid signs of a gradual, incremental increase in Republican identification since 2016, with a clear increase in the GOP’s baseline support in the year preceding the election.
Despite prevalent expectations, Latinos’ views of Donald Trump on the cusp of the election were closely divided, with a large share holding favorable views.
Conversely, Latinos’ opinions about Joe Biden’s job performance were in net-negative territory, with a high degree of intensity evident among those who disapproved.
On the key campaign issues of the economy and border security, which were most salient to Latinos (as they were to Texas’ overall electorate), Latino attitudes favored the positions most associated with Republicans, and trusted Trump more than Biden to handle those issues.
The polling thus provided clear indications that Democrats were likely to have a problem retaining their existing vote targets among Texas Latinos given the relative strengths and weaknesses of the respective presidential candidates, the political climate, and the issue environment that defined the election (let alone improving upon past performance).
And Texas Republicans are drawing these new lines counting on that continuing, but they’re not so trustworthy that they’re not also cracking and packing Latino voters to mute their numbers by literally “white washing” them with higher-propensity white voters, wherever they can. That’s how you wind up with this new math. With the latest maps, white voters will literally have more representation than either Latinos or Blacks:
With thanks to Texas State Rep. Vincent Perez and his staff for the data and the graphics. This is not just racial gerrymandering — it’s apartheid.
For a full rundown, watch our TJRS bonus episode from last night, in which State Rep. Jolanda Jones breaks all of this down:
If you care about democracy, please share this post with everyone you know. This case will likely wind up before the Supreme Court, and our only hope for avoiding nationwide Texas-style apartheid is stopping these maps once and for all.
To reiterate, this is a betrayal of Black Texans unlike anything since slaveholders failed to inform their “chattel” about the emancipation proclamation. It’s an 1877-style betrayal by the Republican Party; given that it’s the single largest disenfranchisement of Black citizens since the end of Reconstruction. If we don’t hold the line now, there will no longer be a line.
Support Rep. Jolanda Jones by clicking here.
Thanks for reading, and much more to come.
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