New Texas Republican maps dilute Latino voting power in Austin

The Guardian

5 hours ago

When Representative Greg Casar won his election last year, he became the first Latino to represent the Texas capitol city of Austin in Congress. A panel of federal judges had drawn his district's lines after a prolonged legal battle over racial gerrymandering.
But under the map Texas Republicans unveiled last week, Casar would instead live in the modified version of his neighboring district to the west, which would swallow east Austin – a gentrifying but historically working-class area home to Mexican American and Black residents once forced by segregation laws to live on the east side of town.
'Even a conservative supreme court said central Texas Latinos deserve a district, and that's why my district exists,' Casar said. 'If Donald Trump is able to suppress Latino voters here in Austin, he'll try to spread that plan across America.'
Texas Republicans took the unusual step of redistricting several years early in an attempt to deliver more congressional seats to Donald Trump ahead of next year's midterm elections. Democratic state lawmakers fled the state Sunday to try to thwart the GOP redistricting plan by denying state lawmakers a quorum needed to pass it into law. The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, said Monday he would seek to arrest and possibly unseat and replace Democratic lawmakers who do not return.
In majority-minority Texas, where Black and brown voters have traditionally leaned left, the overtly political ploy is teeing up another in a series of legal battles over racial gerrymandering that have erupted repeatedly for more than a decade.
The dramatic reshaping of Casar's district 35 is one of the most egregious examples cited by civic groups concerned that the new map will dilute Latino voter strength and make it harder for candidates of color to win congressional elections.
'The map as proposed clearly violates the Voting Rights Act and is unconstitutional,' said Lydia Camarillo, the president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. 'It's canceling out districts that are part of the Voting Rights Act … and it's not giving Latinos the right to represent their voice based on their population growth.'
Hispanics are the largest population segment in Texas, at about 40%. Only one-fifth of the state's 38-member congressional delegation is Hispanic, however.
Since the last census, civic groups like Camarillo's have contended that the state's booming Hispanic population growth merits two more Latino-majority congressional districts under the Voting Rights Act – one in Houston and the other in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. A dozen organizations and several individuals are pressing Texas to create the two Latino-majority districts in an ongoing federal lawsuit in El Paso.
The new GOP-drawn map not only fails to provide those two Latino-majority districts, but it significantly dilutes the voting strength of the ones that exist, critics say.
'This is a calculated move that exploits Texas' historically low voter turnout for those in charge to maintain power,' Jackie Bastard, the executive director of the voter turnout group Jolt Action, wrote in an email. 'By deliberately diluting Latino voting strength across districts, these maps would severely diminish the impact of our ongoing voter mobilization efforts and silence the voices of Texas' fastest-growing demographic.'
Those intricacies are often difficult to tease out. congressional district nine, represented by Democratic representative Al Green, for example, is a so-called 'coalition district' under the current map, with no one ethnic or racial group holding a solid majority. In practice, however, it functions more like a Black-opportunity district in a state where African American voters are becoming a smaller share of the electorate.
Under the new map, district nine's Black population plummets to 11%, while the Hispanic voting age population now holds a majority.
But the historically low voter turnout rate there raises doubts that the district will actually function as a Latino-majority district, said Gloria Leal, the general counsel for the League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the plaintiffs in the El Paso case. Representative Sylvia Garcia's district 29 also dropped enough to raise concerns, while retaining a majority on paper.
Representative Henry Cuellar's district 28, on the other hand, saw the opposite approach under the new map – Hispanics voters shot up to roughly 90% of the voting age population.
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'They added like 20 percentage points to that district to pack us all in,' Leal said. 'We oppose the current map that exists and we adamantly oppose the proposed map,' she added.
Any redrawing of Texas districts is likely to draw the scrutiny of the federal courts, given the state's long history of voter suppression. The Voting Rights Act, which will celebrate its 60th anniversary on Wednesday, prohibits both diluting a protected groups' votes across multiple districts and packing voters into a single one.
Carrying out such sweeping changes so quickly at the request of the White House may also raise legal questions that go beyond the Voting Rights Act, according Tom Saenz, the director the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is representing the plaintiffs in the El Paso case.
'This is clearly improper,' Saenz said. 'Trying to circumvent judicial review by acting so close to an election is straight-up unlawful.'
Political analysts had widely viewed Republicans' goal of finding five congressional seats for Trump as an overly ambitious one that may backfire. The map that Republicans came up with in 2021 to fortify their current lopsided majority in the congressional delegation appeared hard to alter without making the party more vulnerable to Democratic challenges.
Texas conservatives appear to have exceeded those expectations, according to Rice University political scientist Mark Jones – partly by 'riding roughshod' over the Voting Rights Act.
'I underestimated the level of disregard of the Voting Rights Act,' Jones said. 'It's not clear how the Voting Rights Act constrained this map in any significant way, with the exception that Republicans focused on hitting absolute majorities of Hispanics in a few districts.'
Still, Jones said, Republicans drew the map with an exceptionally favorable year in mind. If Republicans fail to consolidate the inroads they made in last year's election, which is normal during a midterm, the new map could easily fail to produce a single new GOP congressional seat in Texas. It might even lead Republicans to lose a seat, according to Jones.
'One thing that is very clear about this whole process is these maps are being drawn under a very rosy scenario,' Jones said. 'And with Trump not on the ballot, with the natural referendum on his presidency, an economy that may be problematic – it's tough to imagine Republicans hitting 2024 numbers in 2026.'