Texas Dummymander

I am so proud of all my friends and former colleagues who turned Texas Blue on Tuesday. I am so optimistic for the future of Texas and am thrilled to see what the state government will achieve with people like Gina Hinajosa as governor or Clayton Tucker as Ag Commissioner. It was such a crazy night and there is no doubt they will breathe much needed change into Texas politics. One thing about the night that didn’t catch me as far off guard was the Congressional results. A little over a year ago I created a presentation for the DNC and other partners on behalf of the TDP and one of the things we focused on was Congress. Last Summer Donald Trump asked the Texas GOP for five more Republican seats and they supposedly delivered.

In the map above the 5 seats marked by elephants are designed to vote for Republicans. After all they each voted for Trump by at least 10 points. However, as you can see in the map below if you look at Congressional results instead of presidential we were favored in one of the supposed pickups and only narrowly losing the others.

I am very proud to have picked up on this and pointed out the weakness when I did, pitching it to partners as an opportunity to not lose as many seats as we thought. I argued that Republican analysts underestimated ticket splitting, especially in the Rio Grande Valley. They had a weird belief that this sort of voting was an aberration that would just fade away over time. It reminded me of the arguments some folks people would make on our side of the aisle in favor of Democratic Destiny.

In the end we won all of those seats I highlighted and even won the one I wasn’t brave enough to mark covering Western Texas outside of El Paso. To me this is a clear example of how good data and have huge electoral outcomes. If the Republicans gerrymandered based on the down ballot data or even just modeled a little more carefully, they might not have lost a seat in an election immediately after a 5 seat gerrymander when the map is supposed to be at its strongest before any shifts in the electorate occur.