Austin, Texas
TEXAS DEMOCRATS are very good at gerrymandering. For decades, they shamelessly suppressed Republican prospects in the U.S. House of Representatives by manipulating district lines to minimize seats the growing Republican party could win. In 1991 Democrats packed as many Republican voters as possible into a few misshapen districts. The district of Republican Rep. Joe Barton, which crawled through the outskirts of Fort Worth like a weed, was one of the least compact in American political history. Midland County, the oil capital of east Texas and hometown of President Bush, was split among three districts. Now Republicans–having won all 27 statewide offices and gained control of both houses of the legislature in 2002–are bent on undoing the Democratic handiwork, and then some. Republicans won 56 percent of the total vote in all House races in Texas last year, but only 15 of 32 individual seats (44 percent). If they succeed in reapportionment, they expect to capture 20 or 21 seats (more than 60 percent). They’d replace Democratic gerrymandering with Republican gerrymandering and go one step further.
Democrats didn’t target incumbent Republican congressmen for defeat in 1991. They concentrated on winning three new seats created by population growth. But Republicans have targeted influential Democratic congressmen such as Martin Frost and Charles Stenholm and intend to drive them from office by substantially altering their districts.
Democrats in the legislature made a histrionic effort to prevent a vote on redistricting by fleeing the state this summer, first to Oklahoma, then to New Mexico. This drew highly favorable media attention, with the national press instantly falling for the notion that Texas Democrats were embattled defenders of representative government. (In fact, Democrats were merely seeking to preserve the old Democratic gerrymander.) Texans overwhelmingly frowned on the tactic of leaving the state (by 2-to-1 in polls) and the Democrats came home in September. “This is the state of the Alamo,” says Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News. “You don’t run. You fight.”
Republicans can’t touch the seven Hispanic and two black districts, which are protected by the Voting Rights Act. (One Hispanic seat is held by Republican Henry Bonilla, another by white Democrat Gene Green.) But there are eight white Democrats in the House–Frost, Stenholm, Chet Edwards, Jim Turner, Max Sandlin, Nick Lampson, Lloyd Doggett, Chris Bell–whom Republicans are eager to defeat. Which ones might be ousted depends on the redistricting map Republicans adopt.
The prospect of major Republican gains makes Texas more important than the other 49 states combined in the 2004 House elections. Republican chances of picking up as many as five seats outside of Texas are slim. There just aren’t enough competitive seats to target. A Republican strategist in Texas noted that the National Republican Campaign Committee will spend $50 to $60 million on House races in 2004 and produce little. But five seats can be gained in Texas for free–unless Republicans screw things up.
They might. There are three obstacles to passing a redistricting bill, and after working on reapportionment for nine months, Republicans have overcome only one. They’ve subdued the Democrats: Another walkout is unlikely. But they haven’t found a way around the bitter disagreement over a new district centered on Midland. And they haven’t decided how boldly to target incumbent Democrats, particularly Frost.
JUST A FEW MONTHS AGO, Democratic opposition in the statehouse seemed insurmountable. In 2001, Democrats gambled they’d be better off blocking redistricting and leaving the matter to federal judges. They guessed right. A three-judge panel produced new district lines for the 2002 election that gave Texas’s two new seats to Republicans but otherwise left the old map drawn by Democrats largely intact. The result: Democrats won 17 of 32 seats in 2002.
Republicans were frustrated and furious. And they began working anew on reapportionment of House seats when the legislature gathered in January. Democrats insisted the court’s ruling was the final word on redistricting, barring Republicans from enacting a new plan. It was when Republicans went ahead nonetheless that Democratic legislators began their migrations out of state.
What brought them back? Governor Perry, unfavorable polls, and Democratic state senator John Whitmire of Houston. Perry refused to yield, calling three special legislative sessions to keep the pressure on absent Democrats. “Perry stared them down,” says Jim Ellis, director of DeLay’s political action committee, ARMPAC. Once the polls turned negative and a judge ruled Republicans were entitled to draw a new redistricting map, Whitmire acted.
Exiled in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Whitmire and the other Democratic state senators had become heroes to Democrats across the country. But Whitmire, chosen by Texas Monthly as one of the top ten legislators in Austin, was wary. MoveOn.org, the left-wing group, promised to publicize the story of Texas Democrats nationally. “What about Waco?” Whitmire asked a MoveOn.org representative. “I’m more interested in Waco,” which is Democrat Chet Edwards’s district. Democratic lawyers assured him the case against Republicans was going well, but Republicans won. So Whitmire returned to Texas, providing a quorum in the state senate and thus allowing a vote on redistricting. Going into exile, Whitmire says, was “bad politics and bad PR. I’m a very good Democrat, but we just didn’t have an exit plan.”
Whitmire’s defection left Republicans to deal with their own problems, in particular the question of a new Midland district and the Frost issue. House Speaker Tom Craddick of Midland is willing to let reapportionment die unless a new Midland congressional district to his liking is drawn. He wants Lubbock in a separate district so it can’t dominate Midland in Republican or congressional politics. He’s insisted on this for months, but Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and state senate Republicans have balked. And Perry, who says he’s “not a mapmaker,” has not forced a compromise.
The problem is time. “We’re at 11:59 and 30 seconds before midnight,” a Republican says, without an agreement, and the special session ends in mid-October. If another session is called, filing deadlines and the March 7 primary will have to be pushed back. Craddick is unmoved. He was shown a proposed map last week with a new Midland district. It was endorsed by the Republican congressional delegation and one of his statehouse allies. Craddick rejected it.
Then there’s the Frost issue. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that redistricting plans should accommodate districts “where minority voters may not be able to elect a candidate of their choice but can play a substantial, if not decisive, role in the process.” Frost lives in such a district in Dallas, as does Democratic congressman Bell in Houston.
Changing these “influence districts” would require Justice Department approval and undoubtedly prompt a legal challenge by Democrats. If successful, a lawsuit could upset the entire Republican redistricting effort. But Texas House members, Majority Leader Tom DeLay, party activists, and even Republican governor Rick Perry want to go after Frost anyway.
And Republicans say they have devised a way around the legal pitfalls. By creating a new black district in Houston and a new Hispanic district in south Texas, Republicans believe any loss of influence by minority voters would be more than offset. And Frost, a smart and effective Democratic leader in Washington, would be stashed in a Republican-leaning district. This plan would make it impossible to target Democratic representative Lloyd Doggett of Austin, a noisy liberal. But, as a Republican operative declared, “one Frost is worth five Doggetts.”
Many Republican legislators here regard the get-Frost plan as dangerous overreaching. They favor a more cautious approach that spares Frost and leaves the influence districts unaltered. Instead, they would target east Texas Democrats Turner, Sandlin, and Lampson, along with Edwards in the central part of the state and Stenholm in west Texas. A potential pickup of five seats is fine with Republican legislators. The removal of Frost might gain a sixth new Republican seat, but legislators believe the attempt would look greedy. Last week the legislators lost the argument and the get-Frost plan was adopted.
WHATEVER REPUBLICANS DO, there’s still another difficulty with gerrymandering to be considered. It’s not that the process is cynical or unsavory. True, it produces politics in its rawest, most partisan, and self-interested form. But rejiggering district lines for partisan gain is an American political tradition. Both sides do it with a vengeance. The other significant factor is that gerrymandering often doesn’t work as expected. It didn’t in Georgia last year, where two freshly minted Democratic districts were won by Republicans.
In Texas, the uncertainty of gerrymandering is exemplified by Stenholm. What every Republican redistricting proposal has in common is an effort to defeat Stenholm. At the same time, Stenholm, the senior Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, has many Republican backers in the farm community. They claim he’s critical to maintaining federal support for Texas agriculture. Stenholm’s foes respond that Texas is well protected by DeLay and Bonilla, the chairman of the House agricultural appropriations subcommittee. Adds Perry: “I’m not worried about Texas being shorted. When Charlie Stenholm is gone, Texas will still be Texas and we’ll be fine.”
But Stenholm may not be gone. First elected in 1978, he’s survived serious Republican challenges before. He’s a relatively conservative Democrat who voted to impeach President Clinton. Stenholm’s current district is rated by political analyst Charles Cook as one of the most reliably Republican in the country. President Bush won 72 percent of the district’s vote in 2000. Yet Stenholm got 59 percent in 2000 and scraped by with 51 percent in 2002 despite a Republican landslide in the state.
Republicans would be hard pressed to fashion a more Republican district for Stenholm. So their tack is to give him as much new territory as possible where voters don’t know him. One plan would have put him in Republican Rep. Mac Thornberry’s district, but Thornberry didn’t like the shape of the reconfigured district. “Stenholm is popular,” a Republican operative concedes. “No matter what we do, he may still win.” The lesson here is that reapportionment promises a lot, but nothing is guaranteed.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
