Plans from an alternate universe: The Veasey-West plan

Congressional redistricting, which took so long that it couldn’t be done during the regular session, has zipped through the special session, thanks in no small part to the virtual elimination of public testimony. At this point, the full House needs to pass the map that emerged from the House Redistricting Committee last week, then either the Senate must concur or a conference committee will be formed.

All this you know. What you may not know is that along the way there were some interesting alternative plans put forth by various Democratic legislators. None of them ever had a chance of being adopted, of course, but all of them served the purpose of showing what could have been for the eventual litigation. I’m going to take a look at a few of these.

We’ll start with the Veasey map, Plan C121, which was presented to the Senate by Sen. Royce West. I’ve already shown the pictures, so let’s skip ahead to the electoral numbers.

Safe R Dist Obama Houston ======================= 01 29.95 36.74 02 29.89 31.27 03 36.30 36.00 04 29.77 37.74 05 27.93 36.13 06 29.41 32.64 08 24.93 29.54 10 36.54 38.49 11 25.36 28.90 12 34.14 35.28 13 23.06 28.16 14 33.14 38.04 17 37.01 40.78 19 26.96 31.73 21 34.67 33.30 22 39.04 40.61 24 39.00 38.31 26 33.77 35.10 Likely R Dist Obama Houston ======================= 07 42.60 40.89 31 44.01 42.93 32 43.32 43.36 36 41.32 48.27 Safe D Dist Obama Houston ======================= 09 76.48 76.68 15 60.22 64.01 16 65.18 67.38 18 78.24 78.29 20 63.67 64.10 23 65.31 66.14 25 60.68 56.95 27 56.64 60.72 28 58.91 61.69 29 60.28 65.59 30 72.41 73.05 33 58.86 60.85 34 66.15 67.84 35 64.78 65.20

A spreadsheet with all the 2008 numbers is here. Arguably, CDs 27, 28, and 33 could be Likely Dem instead of Safe Dem, but as no Republican other than McCain topped 40% in any of them, I feel comfortable with this designation. CD25 is an odd duck. Obama did better than every other Democrat by up to almost seven points, but downballot Republicans didn’t best John McCain by similar amounts. It was Libertarian candidates, who got as much as 6.38% of the vote, that sopped up the extra support, while no R reached 41%. Keep Austin weird, y’all. Finally, as I expected CD31 would make for an interesting potential swing district, while CD36’s apparent Dem strength is overstated, as Jefferson and Galveston counties continue to go the wrong way.

Veasey’s plan would likely give 14 seats to the Democrats. It adds three of the four news seats to the D column – two in the Metroplex and one in South Texas – while ensuring that Blake Farenthold and Quico Canseco would be one-termers. It does not create a new Harris County seat, nor is it the most ambitious Democratic plan. We’ll see the former in the next entry.

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