Texas's population boom should be a boon to Democrats. But Republicans are reaping the gains (WP)

[dalton99a]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/05/10/texas-population-boom-benefits-politics/

Texas’s population boom should be a boon to Democrats. But Republicans are reaping the gains.
Redistricting by the Republican-controlled legislature could help flip the House back to the GOP in next year’s midterm elections
By Arelis R. Hernández and Griff Witte
May 10, 2021 at 4:22 p.m. CDT

SAN MARCOS, Tex. — In a fast-growing city in a fast-growing state, Yvonne Flores-Cale is typical of the population surge that is transforming Texas.

The native Midwesterner is relatively young, Hispanic and politically left of center. She has lived in Kyle — a booming suburb just south of Austin, on the edge of Texas’s famed Hill Country — only for a decade but has watched as the surrounding county has morphed from red to purple to a pale shade of blue. ...

Yet the change coming to Texas is, for now, likely to be the opposite of what one might expect. The state’s growth — fueled overwhelmingly by people of color in its largest cities and their close-in suburbs — should be cause for celebration among Democrats.

But because of the way the GOP-controlled legislature is expected to redraw congressional districts, this growth is predicted to be a boon for Republicans instead. When coupled with new lines in states such as Florida and Georgia, it might even be enough to flip control of the House in next year’s midterm elections.

“Gerrymandering is an easy road map to a Republican majority,” said Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute. “They have a lot of incentive to be very aggressive.”

[TheRealNorth]

1. Texas is already gerrymandered

Sure, they can move a border here and there that may give them an advantage. But I fail to see how they can get much more of an advantage there then they already have. From what I understand, some of the "safe" districts they drew in 2010 were already beginning to look iffy.

[zipplewrath]

2. Florida

A study was done after 2016 and it showed that people moving in from out of state were far more "right" than those who had been born and grown up in Texas. Florida suffers something similar, in which the far right are attracted to the state because of low/no income taxes and sales taxes. They don't care about schools or to a great degree about infrastructure that won't be built long after they are gone.

[JCMach1]

3. I had experts who write the software explain how powerful the software is... literally you could

tell it to draw a mouse ear shaped district in Central Florida and the exact percentages of voters you want in that district and the software will do its best to comply. That was in 2002. I don't need to detail how much better the software must be today.

So yeah, advantage red.

[uponit7771]

5. +1, the digital gerrymandering is screwed up to the nth degree. It lets mostly republicans pick ...

... their voters vs the opposite, they're the anti democracy party.

[Ex Lurker]

4. It's also a function of where in Texas they're moving to

The urban areas, where the people are moving, are already blue. Shifting a district from 60% D to 70% D doesn't change anything.