Texas GOP's redistricting plan alarms Democrats

AUSTIN, Texas — As Texas Republicans move forward with a highly unusual plan to redraw congressional lines in the middle of the decade, the state's Democrats see it as an effort to shut them out of federal power.

Earlier this month, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) called it a “five alarm fire."

Democrats point to precedent: a questionably legal mid-decade redistricting more than 20 years ago helped turn Texas solid red and polarized its politics.

Now, with Democrats in control of most of Texas’s major cities and gaining in its suburbs, the GOP — pushed on by Trump — is racing to lock in control of its congressional delegation by destroying four or five Democratic districts.

Their model is the 2003 redistricting, when Republicans flipped Texas’s congressional delegation from a Democratic majority to 2-to-1 Republican.

That year marked a watershed in both state and national politics. Before 2003, Texas was blue, trending purple. Afterward, it became a red-state bulwark, home to a solid conservative majority pulling the country rightward.

That year, said Matt Angle, head of the Lone Star Project and former chief of staff to Rep. Martin Frost, a Dallas-area Democratic leader who lost his seat, was "when the page turned for total Republican control."

Through 2002, Texas resembled today’s North Carolina or Kentucky: Republican in presidential races, contested statewide, and locally Democratic — a legacy of the New Deal coalition, especially in rural areas, where trusted Democrats kept winning even as voters backed Republican presidents.

There was a sense that “the Democrat Party was leaving what a lot of Texans kind of stood for,” said Glenn Hegar, former state comptroller, who won election to the state House in 2002 — the year Republicans won their first House majority since Reconstruction.

But even as they voted for Republicans for president and — increasingly — state office, voters still backed familiar local Democrats. Hegar recalled people saying, “‘He’s a good guy, he just happens to be in the wrong party.’”

That local loyalty helped Texas resist the South’s broader rightward drift — until Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen left to join former President Clinton’s Cabinet, Angle said. Bentsen had made sure Democratic incumbents had the resources to hold on. His departure, Angle said, “was the first really big crack" in the party infrastructure — “because there was no one to take his place.” He was succeeded by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R), then Sen. Ted Cruz (R).

Yet Democrats held local ground for years. In 1990, last-minute returns from rural East Texas — now bright red — helped elect Ann Richards, Texas’s last Democratic governor.

And while George W. Bush beat Richards handily in 1994, he governed with an entirely Democratic-controlled state Legislature until 1997 — when Republicans took the Senate — and left office with the state House still in Democratic hands. In 2001, that split Legislature drew the usual once-in-a-decade maps, which an insurgent group of Republicans sought to overturn to create a permanent majority.

In 2002, Republicans won the Texas House — thanks in part to money then–U.S. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) funneled to state leaders such as Tom Craddick, who became the first GOP state House Speaker in more than a century.

Those financial maneuverings would lead to DeLay’s political downfall, his indictment for money laundering and a prison sentence — ultimately overturned on appeal. 

Craddick, on the state level, used that money to punish Republicans who didn’t back his Speaker bid. “If you’re for them, they’re going to leave you alone,” Hegar recalled. “If you’re for somebody else, then they’re probably going to pick somebody who wants to vote for him out of the primary.” Hegar pledged support and avoided a challenge.

That election, he said, marked a “tidal wave. People just shifted. And then right after that. Boom, boom, boom, the locals go, ‘Yeah, I'm done. I'm running as a Republican, because if I don't, I'm probably going to get beat.’" 

In 2003, with full legislative control, Craddick and DeLay pushed mid-decade redistricting. As Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R) told The New Yorker in 2006, DeLay was “a fighter and a competitor, and he saw an opportunity to help the Republicans stay in power in Washington."

The goal: break the link between long-trusted Democratic incumbents and their voters, particularly targeting white Democrats like Dallas-Fort Worth’s Frost, who had tried to step into Bentsen’s role.

"Frost did not realize the lengths to which Tom Delay would go to win that political fight,” said Angle, his former chief of staff. “And I don't think Tom DeLay realized how hard and ferociously Martin Frost and others would fight to stop him."

That fight included the now-famous 2003 flight of more than 50 House Democrats to Ardmore, Okla., to deny Republicans a quorum.

But in the end, DeLay and Craddick won, replacing bipartisan 2000-era maps with aggressive gerrymanders. They “cracked” coalition districts along racial lines, diluting suburban Democrats and packing minorities into safe Democratic urban seats.

That method was “racially discriminatory — but that gave [Republicans] the advantage in the elections," allowing them to destroy the districts of leaders such as Frost, said state representative and former House Minority Leader Chris Turner (D).

The result: Texas became a partisan centrifuge home to far-right Republicans like Rep. Chip Roy and progressive Democrats like Casar and Rep. Jasmine Crockett.

“The Democratic districts got more Democratic, and Republican districts got more Republican,” said GOP strategist Brendan Steinhauser, as moderate Blue Dog Democrats disappeared from the delegation.

The 2003 gains gave Republicans long-term power — including the ability to redraw maps each decade to blunt Democratic urban and suburban growth.

In 2013, Republicans got a further boost, when the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which had required formerly segregated states such as Texas to get federal clearance before new maps were issued — something the Obama administration had been less disposed to give than the Bush administration.

Heading into the special session this July, Democrats thought their slow progress in cities and suburbs had left them with a narrow but plausible plan: win enough statewide offices by 2030 to help draw fairer maps and roll back two decades of structural GOP advantage.

If Republicans succeed in 2025, that strategy collapses — at least for congressional representation.

Helping the GOP tighten its grip, Steinhauser said, will likely accelerate a process where “independent-minded people and centrists don’t have a place because there are so few competitive districts.”

With fewer swing seats, he added, “There is no incentive as a candidate or consultant or campaign manager to appeal to the center in the general election. You just get your party to turn out.”