Texas will pick up four new U.S. House seats

[sonias]

AAS 12/21/10
Texas will pick up four new U.S. House seats

Texas will get four new seats in the U.S. House, starting with the 2012 elections, the U.S. Census Bureau announced this morning.

The state is picking up seats because of rapid population growth — more than 20 percent — over the last 10 years. Texas will also have four additional electoral votes in presidential elections, bringing its total to 38.

(snip)
While the Texas congressional delegation is now overwhelmingly Republican, the new seats in Texas don’t necessarily amount to a Republican win. Politicos on each side of the aisle expect at least one and probably two of the state’s new seats to be won by Democrats, because much of the state’s population growth in the last 10 years has been among Hispanics and African-Americans.

But of course the repukes control the whole process with a super-majority in the Texas Lege. Don't expect anything to be fair. :(

[Richardo]

1. I understand that Voting Rights legislation pretty much requires 2 of the seats to be Dem...

...but no, I don't expect anything like 'fair' from those assholes.

[Vogon_Glory]

2. In Some Alternate Universe..

In some alternate universe, the massive turnout of minority and progressive voters that occurred in the 2008 elections repeated itself in the 2010 elections. Texas Governor-elect Bill White and Attorney General-elect Barbara Radnowsky hailed the results of the 2010 census and vowed that the new Texas congressional redistricting will be fair and equitable. The majority leader of the Texas lower house agreed, saying "We Democrats will see to it that ALL Texans will be fairly represented in Congress."

Meanwhile, defeated Republican Gubernatorial candidate Rick Perry denounced the half-million plus vote for Democrat Bill White as being riddled with fraud and said that "Democrats will redistrict strictly to increase their own partisan power."

Madge Frump, psychic and GOP political adviser, reported that there was an alternate world out there where Rick Perry got re-elected for a third consecutive term as Texas governor.

The news report inspired widespread laughter in Texas Democratic Party headquarters, who had come to take the high voter turnout in poorer and minority communities for granted after the Great Awakening during the 1998 political campaign.

"I am profoundly grateful that Texans of color and shirt-sleeve Texans vote for us and am humbled by the fact that they trust us to represent their interests in the political arena," said a senior Texas Democratic Party official.


--sigh--

:dem:

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[sonias]

3. I want to live in your alternate universe

I'm pretty sure that was the world I voted for. :hug:

[Vogon_Glory]

4. I'd Like To See Elements Of That Universe In This One

I voted for an alternate-universe Texas very much like that, one where almost all of the people who voted for President Obama back in 2008 (plus many newly-registered voters) realized that they'd have to vote again this year to make Texas a decent place we could ALL be proud of. I believe that a much better Texas than the one we'll be stuck with for the next decade or so is possible, but it will require the co-creative efforts of a lot more progressives of all colors and ethnic affiliations, even if all they can do is go to the polls during early voting or on Election Day.

[sonias]

5. Electoral Power is about Voting, Not Population

Texas Tribune 12/24/10
Electoral Power is about Voting, Not Population

You can make political districts the same size, but you can’t make them politically equal.

Lawmakers will spend the next six months drawing political maps for Texas, doing their decennial readjustment to make sure each district has the same number of people. But when they’re done, some parts of the state will still get more political attention than others, and the voters have only themselves to blame.

Politicians care most about the part of the population that votes. El Paso County has 92,680 more people than Denton County, for instance. But Denton turned out 42,043 more voters in November. Which is more attractive to a statewide candidate?

New 2010 census numbers put the state’s population at 25.1 million, up from 20.9 million in 2000. In the next few months, the counters will get more specific about where those people are. The Legislature will divide the total population by the number of members in each body — 36 Texans in Congress, 31 in the state Senate, 150 in the state House and 15 on the State Board of Education — and draw political districts of equal size for each.

Districts must have the same numbers of people so that, for instance, each of the state’s 31 Senate districts will have 811,147 Texans in it. But they’re never the same size in voter participation, and ultimately, there’s no way to tell without an election or two.

Voters have only themselves to blame - and that goes for non-voting eligible voters as well!

[sonias]

6. Hispanic-Majority Districts: Boon or Burden for Democrats?

Five Thirty Eight blog on NY Times 12/23/10
Hispanic-Majority Districts: Boon or Burden for Democrats?

The intuitive argument is that Congressional redistricting will benefit Republicans, since it will shift the allocation of representatives into G.O.P.-friendly states.

The counterintuitive argument, which some very smart people are making, is that this isn’t necessarily the case. Instead, the argument goes, redistricting will help the Democrats in some cases because of the creation of new majority-minority districts, which will be required in some states according to most interpretations of the Voting Rights Act. In Texas, for instance, which is subject to the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance process, as many as three of the state’s four new districts could be Hispanic-majority ones, according to former Representative Martin Frost.

Time for the counter-counterintuitive argument.

Yes, if three of the four new districts in Texas are majority-Hispanic, those particular districts are likely (although not by any means certain) to vote Democratic. This does not necessarily imply, however, that Democrats will benefit from their creation over all. In fact, there are many circumstances in which the majority-minority requirement can be harmful to Democrats. The key is in thinking about not just what happens with the four new districts, but also how this affects Texas’ 32 existing ones.

:kick: