The Texas primaries are happening on a legally disputed congressional map

Publish date: 2024-07-17

Domingo García had been thinking of running for Congress again. The former Texas state representative and current director of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), America’s oldest Latino civil rights group, hoped there would be a new majority-Latino district near Dallas where he could run competitively.

Texas grew so much over the past decade that the state earned two additional congressional seats following the 2020 Census. In Dallas, where García lives, the Latino population had swelled by half a million between 2010 and 2020.

Yet when the Republican-controlled legislature redrew the state’s congressional map to account for those population changes, the contorted shapes around the area resulted in no new majority-Latino district. Early voting is underway in the state’s midterm primary ahead of Election Day on March 1. García is not on the ballot.

“When the lines were drawn, the Latinos were basically packed and cracked,” García said, referring to strategies to manipulate voting blocs to gain political advantage.

“We’re going to lose another two years of representation because we’re going to have to vote here in the primaries and in the general election with the current discriminatory maps that the legislature drew,” said García, who narrowly lost in the 2012 Democratic primary for the 33rd District.

A lawsuit filed by LULAC argues Texas’s new congressional map discriminates against racial and ethnic minorities. The case, which has been consolidated with suits from other civil rights groups and the federal government, is not scheduled to go to trial until September, meaning the disputed congressional districts will almost certainly be in place when Texans elect their representatives in November.

Story continues below advertisement

“If the Texas maps are ultimately struck down (and I think there’s a good chance they will be), they will have been used for an important election. The plaintiffs don’t get a do-over,” Douglas Spencer, an election law scholar who runs the website All About Redistricting, told The Washington Post in an email.

The Justice Department’s legal brief challenges three areas of the congressional map: the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, Houston and its suburbs and a sprawling district in west Texas. In Houston, the case is similar to that in Dallas-Fort Worth.

By enacting this plan, Texas “failed to draw a seat encompassing the growing Latino electorate of Harris County,” the Justice Department brief argues.

Texas is the first state to hold its midterm primary, months ahead of any other state, leaving less time for litigation before voting began. It is the first election to be held on the new map that could produce a lasting two-to-one Republican advantage in a state where Donald Trump beat Joe Biden 52 percent to 46 percent.

Story continues below advertisement

The Supreme Court has declined to outlaw partisan gerrymandering, meaning state legislatures are allowed to draw maps that nakedly favor their own party. Drawing maps that discriminate against racial and ethnic minorities, on the other hand, violates both the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the U.S. Constitution.

“We have a compelling case that these were maps designed to empower White voters over minority voters,” said Gary Bledsoe, the president of the Texas NAACP, a plaintiff in the suit.

Over the past decade, Texas’s population grew by 4 million people, the most of any other state. Nearly all of that growth was from Latinos and other racial minorities, but the two new districts — one in Houston and the other in Austin — will be majority-White.

How Texas changed in redistricting

Texas Republicans have said they followed the law when drawing the map and that race was not a factor in where the borders ended up. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Secretary of State John B. Scott (R), both named as defendants in the case, did not respond to requests for comment but wrote in a court filing last week that the Justice Department failed to “plausibly allege discriminatory results or discriminatory intent.”

[Black and Latino voters have been shortchanged in redistricting, advocates and some judges say]

“I really, truly, don’t see evidence that it has anything to do with race in regards to the intentions of those who drew the maps,” said Brendan Steinhauser, an Austin-based Republican strategist and former campaign manager for Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.). “I think it’s just pure partisan gerrymandering more than anything else, which unfortunately has a long history in the country.”

Plaintiffs in the case say that argument is unconvincing.

Story continues below advertisement

“Whites in Texas grew by two hundred thousand. Latinos grew ten times that,” said Maria Teresa Kumar, president of the voting rights organization Voto Latino, one of the plaintiffs in the case. “So for someone to say that they’re trying to draw these not through the lens of race, you have to work incredibly hard and be blindfolded maybe six or seven times.”

[Why Texas’s laws are moving right while its population shifts left]

State Sen. Joan Huffman (R), who led her chamber’s redistricting committee, said during a hearing in September that her objectives “included complying with all applicable law, including the Constitution, the Voting Rights Act” and other considerations required by state law. Huffman did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In 2013, the Supreme Court removed the Voting Rights Act’s “preclearance” requirement, meaning Texas and eight other states with histories of racial discrimination no longer need to seek approval from the Justice Department to change their election boundaries or voting laws. This redistricting cycle, for the first time in decades, Texas was able to enact maps without the possibility that the federal government would intervene.

Between 1976 and 2013, the Justice Department objected to 61 proposed congressional, state legislative, county, city, school district, or community college district redistricting plans in Texas, according to the NAACP’s brief.

The Justice Department’s brief also argues against the newly drawn 23rd District, a 59,000 square-mile, sparsely populated expanse bounded by the Rio Grande in the southwest of the state. The district is currently represented by a Latino Republican, Rep. Tony Gonzales, and the district’s new boundaries maintain its Latino majority while increasing its Republican lean — a likely improvement to Gonzales’s reelection changes.

[From the Archive: The seven political states of Texas]

Nevertheless, the Justice Department argues the district eliminates a Latino electoral opportunity because Latinos in the district favor Democrats, as evidenced by their preference in 2020 for Gina Ortiz-Jones, the Democrat who lost to Gonzales.

Gonzales did not respond to multiple requests to comment.

About 58 percent of Texas voters identifying as Hispanic or Latino preferred Biden compared to 41 percent for Trump, the closest margin among any of the ethnic or racial groups surveyed in exit polls. South Texas counties provided some of the biggest swings toward Republicans in the 2020 election.

“South Texas is going to be a big question,” Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, told reporters last year. “[Democrats] are going to be in a hard position to say they are the party of choice for Latinos in South Texas. It’s hard to say they vote as a monolith, so they should have Democratic representation.”

The case is in the U.S. District Court in El Paso. If the court strikes the map down, Texas will likely appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ted Mellnik, Colby Itkowitz and Arelis R. Hernández contributed to this report.

Harry Stevens is a graphics reporter at The Washington Post. He was part of a team at The Post that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the series “2C: Beyond the Limit.”

Get The Post

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZL2wuMitoJyrX567tbHRmpqtoaaafHN8kWtmrZ2olsBur86nnqudo6i2sLrApWSdoaOpv6qv02akmqhf

ZingVlog

The Texas primaries are happening on a legally disputed congressional map