Previously: New State House map, New Congressional map
I probably care more about the SBOE than most normal people do. It’s not that powerful an entity, there are only 15 seats on it, and their elections go largely under the radar. But the potential for shenanigans is high, and Democrats had about as good a shot at achieving a majority on that board as they did in the State House in 2020. Didn’t work out, and the new map is typically inhospitable, but we must keep trying. And if this nerdy political blog doesn’t care about the SBOE, then what’s even the point?
You can find the 2012 election results here and the 2020 results here. I didn’t use the 2016 results in my analysis below, but that data is here if you want to see it.
Dist Obama Romney Obama%Romney% Biden Trump Biden% Trump%
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01 247,686 187,075 56.2% 42.4% 378,468 283,822 56.3% 42.2%
02 228,834 185,412 54.6% 44.2% 291,278 291,716 49.4% 49.4%
03 264,311 232,068 52.5% 46.1% 388,240 305,696 55.1% 43.4%
04 308,644 120,097 71.2% 27.7% 403,177 148,981 72.2% 26.7%
05 300,483 239,166 53.8% 42.8% 570,541 301,308 64.1% 33.8%
06 181,278 386,445 31.5% 67.1% 368,830 466,577 43.5% 55.0%
07 224,393 362,617 37.8% 61.1% 340,566 472,253 41.3% 57.3%
08 176,409 303,391 36.3% 62.4% 298,068 395,563 42.4% 56.3%
09 199,415 406,195 32.5% 66.3% 283,337 493,792 36.0% 62.7%
10 169,390 393,365 29.6% 68.6% 303,528 543,023 35.2% 63.0%
11 190,589 395,936 32.0% 66.5% 340,611 492,562 40.2% 58.2%
12 189,192 408,110 31.2% 67.3% 370,022 505,840 41.6% 56.8%
13 335,799 130,847 71.2% 27.7% 441,894 151,002 73.5% 25.1%
14 165,093 377,319 30.0% 68.5% 316,606 503,706 38.0% 60.4%
15 126,093 440,745 21.9% 76.7% 162,347 533,181 23.0% 75.5%
You can see the new map here, so you can visualize where these districts are. The current and soon-to-be-obsolete map is here, and my analysis of the 2020 election under that map is here.
You might note that none of the new districts look all that crazy. For the most part, the districts encompass entire counties. It’s mostly a matter of which counties are joined together. A good example of that is SBOE12, which used to be Collin County plus a slice of Dallas. In the days when Collin was deep red, that was more than enough for it to be safe Republican, but now that Collin is trending heavily Democratic – SBOE12 was a four-point win for Joe Biden last year – that won’t do. Now SBOE12 is a sprawling district that still has all of Collin but now a smaller piece of Dallas, the top end of Denton, and a bunch of smaller North Texas counties that had previously been in districts 09 and 15. In return, the formerly all-rural district 9 picks up about a quarter of Dallas, in a mirror of the strategy we’ve seen in the other maps to put heavily Democratic urban areas in with deeply Republican rural ones, to neutralize the former. District 11, which had previously been pieces of Dallas and Tarrant plus all of Parker and is now all of that plus Hood and Somervell and part of Johnson counties, is another example.
The other strategy that we see echoes of here is the more careful placement of dark red suburban counties. SBOE6, which used to be entirely within Harris County, is now hiked up a bit north to include a generous piece of Montgomery County, much as was done with CD02 and SD07, to flip it from being a Biden district back to a Trump district. Ironically, this has the effect of making SBOE8, which used to have all of Montgomery plus a lot of the counties east of Harris, more Democratic as it now wears both the eastern and western ends of Harris like earflaps. (Mutton chops also come to mind as I look at the map.) SBOE8 also picks up a piece of bright blue Fort Bend County, which had previously been in district 7. Meanwhile, over in Central Texas, SBOE5 jettisoned Comal County after it could no longer keep that district red; Comal wound up in district 10, which excised all of its Travis County population in return.
As far as the numbers go, there’s not much to say. Whether Democrats can win five or six districts will depend in the short term on whether they can hold district 2, which is actually a bit more Democratic in this alignment. In the longer term, districts 6, 8, 11, and 12 could all become competitive. District 3 is no more Democratic than any of those are Republican, but as you can see it trended a bit more blue over the decade, and it’s anchored in Bexar County, which should keep it from falling. 2022 is the one year when every district is up for re-election, and that will tell us something about how the trends we saw in 2020 are going. Maybe we’ll need to re-evaluate the prospects for change in this map, or as we’ve said before, maybe we’ll end up cursing the evil genius of it all. I mean, even as SBOE6 moved strongly towards Dems, the deficit to make up is still 100K votes. Nothing is going to come easy, if it comes at all.