Drawing minority districts then and now: Lessons from Texas
One interesting side note from this week’s Texas redistricting trial is how much easier it is to draw minority districts in Texas today than in the past - and that offers important insights into just how Texas has changed over the years.
In 1991, for example, the Texas Legislature first drew TX-30, the congressional seat in Dallas County won and held ever since by Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson.
The original version of TX-30 was, to say the least, a bit sprawling - darting and weaving around Dallas County to try to pick up enough African-American voters to ensure that the district would elect an African-American candidate of choice.
Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled in 1996 in Bush v. Vera that the district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that had been drawn predominantly on the basis of race.
Flash forward two decades to today.
In the popular imagination, majority-minority districts are often are still thought of as looking something like the 1991 version of TX-30. But, in fact, demonstration maps offered at this week’s Texas trial show how much things have changed.
Consider, for example, the configuration of Dallas-Fort Worth area congressional districts in Plan C286, the demonstration map drawn by Harvard professor Stephen Ansolabehere and offered at trial by the Rodriguez plaintiffs.
Under Plan C286, TX-24 would become a coalition district with a citizen voting age population that is 36.1% Latino, 18.7% African American, and 5.8% Asian (mostly of Indian and Pakistani descent).
The district largely overlaps the Dallas County commissioner district currently represented by Elba Garcia and like that district would in all likelihood elect the Latino preferred candidate in the Democratic primary, although a candidate supported by a cross-ethnic coalition could also win. But, regardless, in the general election, the minority preferred candidate would win overwhelmingly virtually every time.
Compared to the 1991 version of TX-30, Plan C286′s TX-24 is much more compact and confined wholly to western Dallas County.
More importantly, unlike minority districts that in the past drew criticism for splitting cities and towns, TX-24 in Plan C286 keeps the cities of Irving, Grand Prairie, and Farmers Branch intact, joining them seamlessly to heavily Latino parts of the adjacent City of Dallas. (TX-33 a coalition district in neighboring Tarrant County, likewise, closely tracks municipal boundaries).
What does all this tell us about Texas? For one, it’s a vivid illustration of how much more diverse Texas has become. While in the past, it could be hard to find enough minorities to fill a district, that’s no longer the case. In fact, today simply draw natural, community-based districts, and you go a long way toward ensuring that minorities have a fair shot at electoral opportunities in Texas’ urban areas. If anything the opposite is now true - in order to deprive minorities of electoral opportunities in an increasingly diverse Texas you have to go out of your way to do so, since you no longer can rely on principles like keeping towns and cities together.
For another, it tells us a lot about how minorities are becoming more politically effective. While it used to be that the conventional wisdom was that minority districts would not perform (i.e., elect a minority preferred candidate) unless minorities were the overwhelming majority of the district’s population, that also is no longer necessarily true. Both TX-24 and TX-33 in Plan C286 have sizable white populations.
In short, while talk of minority districts sometimes seems stuck in the fact patterns of the 1990s, Texas shows it’s a whole different ball game.
