PREVIOUSLY:
State House 2022
A comparison with 2012
Congress 2022
As with Congress there won’t be much to see here. The fewer the districts, the more precise the redistricting can be. Here’s the State Senate:
Dist Abbott Abb% Beto Beto%
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19 96,050 43.8% 119,728 54.6%
20 78,929 44.9% 94,682 53.8%
21 88,609 40.5% 126,105 57.7%
27 87,773 49.0% 88,970 49.6%
02 168,600 59.2% 112,075 39.4%
07 172,986 60.0% 111,308 38.6%
08 195,298 58.3% 134,859 40.3%
09 161,729 57.4% 115,562 41.0%
11 164,256 58.7% 111,345 39.8%
12 205,220 58.4% 141,603 40.3%
25 237,836 60.0% 152,508 38.5%
SD27 is the former Eddie Lucio district, and Dems just barely hung on to it last year. Freshman Sen. Morgan LaMantia will be on the ballot again next year, and obviously I hope that being the incumbent plus it being a Presidential year will help her out. I’m sure Republicans will put a lot of money into it anyway. The other Dem districts don’t particularly worry me, but we will of course look for any trends.
Not much to say about the Republican-held districts. Angela Paxton, out there opposing any exceptions to Texas’ forced birth laws, and she’ll be on the 2024 ballot as well. It sure would be nice to put a lot of money into making that a campaign issue, if only to see what if any traction there is to be had with it. Her SD08 and all of the others are in that pile of “districts that moved at least somewhat in a blue direction last decade”, and if there are to be any potential flips on this part of the ledger we’ll need that to continue.
Onto the SBOE:
Dist Abbott Abb% Beto Beto%
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01 205,022 44.6% 246,944 53.7%
03 218,370 44.7% 263,062 53.8%
02 206,855 51.6% 188,418 47.0%
06 351,539 57.1% 254,937 41.4%
07 348,281 59.8% 225,552 38.8%
08 284,992 59.2% 89,318 39.3%
12 402,314 59.9% 260,723 38.8%
SBOE2, which had been on a knife’s edge last decade, is now Republican-held, meaning the Dems are back to having five seats. It seems that the new map made the now-Dem SBOE5 a lot bluer at least partly at SBOE3’s expense, as it had been a 65%-plus district before. Again, I’m not worried about either of those two, but as above we’ll keep an eye on them. I don’t know when we’ll get a crack at SBOE2 again – unlike in the Senate, the process to determine who gets the two-year term and who gets the four-year term in the SBOE doesn’t draw much coverage. Given the size of these districts, unless the state itself turns blue I don’t see any other competitive races on the horizon. I’d love to be proven wrong, but these districts have a lot of slack in them. For all that SBOE6 shifted last decade, it stayed red in the end. It’s now been reset to 2012 levels, and at this point the best case scenario looks like a repeat of that cycle. Again, I’ll be happy to be too pessimistic about that.