Welcome back. I’ve been doing a little looking around, taking my new eye for a little test spin with some research. And right now, the current fury is all about the incredible wicked evils of the upcoming gerrymandering in GOP controlled legislatures. And as usual, I have something to say about that.
As I have written previously, and you have all likely read previously, gerrymandering is a rare combination of science, math, and alchemy. It is a combination of math, geography, and art. It requires supreme skill, as well as a deft touch to carve up the map of a state so that you can consistently come out on top. And when it comes to the 2020 census, the GOP is in trouble.
For a whole bunch of reasons. For starters, in the 2020 censes, for the first time in history, the white population actually shrank. This is terrible news for a political party that requires a healthy white nationalist, older, scared population to exploit. Worse, the Hispanic population posted the largest gain, followed by Asian American Pacific Islander populations, and the African American population held steady.
But when you look at the sub tabs, it gets even worse. Not only are there more Hispanics, AAPI and African American citizens, they’re better educated and better paid. Which means that they are no longer being compacted into densely populated urban areas that the Democrats control, they are spreading out into the suburbs. And displacing GOP voters who flee to the exurb areas instead.
Here’s another problem. From where I’m sitting, the Hispanic population of the United States was woefully underreported! Trump’s heavy handed attempt to kowtow Hispanic in the 2020 census with a citizenship question drove many Hispanic respondents underground. It wasn’t so much the undocumented immigrants that matter, since they can’t vote anyway, but it was the households with legal Hispanic American voters that declined to answer the census in order to protect undocumented relatives. They are what I like to call stealth voters, they are out there, but the GOP doesn’t know that they’re there.
And one last problem. Donald fucking Trump! He has enraged and alienated white suburban college and high school educated women everywhere. They spanked the GOP once already in 2018, when they turned the House over to the Democrats. And while they reverted to vote for downline GOP candidates in 2020, they spanked him, leading to his defeat. How do you gerrymander when you’re not sure of the support of one of your most reliable core constituencies?
To be sure, the GOP will do their best to gerrymander their asses off. But states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania have Democratic Governors to veto the more radical maps. And in a very real sense, these GOP legislatures are flying blind, their own incompetence having left them with flawed data to deal with. Don’t touch that dial.
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So looking at the Texas data, currently the urban districts and inner suburban are overpopulated. That means in general they will have to shrink in territory. That means underpopulated rural districts will have to absorb this new population. Basically rural districts will become less white. At the same time they will have to carve out two new districts. You can bet no incumbent republican wants to lose safe precincts or pick up new unfamiliar precincts. Texas already surgically carved up the state in 2010. There is no more easy republican districts to draw. Look for reps like Roy, Crenshaw, mccaul and others to be put at risk with new lines.
“And while they reverted to vote for downline GOP candidates in 2020,”
Yes. And it’s the downballot we need to be most concerned with. The Supreme Court is gone for the foreseeable future. If we lose Congress, we are doomed.