Good read, though not really anything we didn’t already know.
West University could have been the set for “Leave it to Beaver” when Serpell Edwards and his wife Betsy bought their home there 45 years ago. The neighbors were mostly white, the moms stayed at home and took care of the kids, and the politics were reliably Republican.
West U. was part of Houston’s Seventh Congressional District, which had flipped from Democrat to Republican back in 1966, when a handsome young oilman named George H.W. Bush won the seat.
“The Seventh” soon came to be considered the safest GOP district in Texas, if not all of America, dominated for almost 50 years by Bill Archer, who succeeded Bush in 1970, and the current incumbent Republican, John Culberson, who’s occupied the seat since Archer retired in 2000.
But now, as Texas is transformed by hundreds of thousands of new arrivals from other states and other countries, The Seventh has become one of the shakiest — among two dozen Republican districts nationally that Democrat Hillary Clinton carried in the 2016 election.
Democratic turnout surged in Tuesday’s primary election, spurred in part by President Donald Trump’s intense unpopularity among liberals and his seemingly limitless capacity to energize minorities, who now make up a majority of residents in The Seventh, reflecting the transformation of Texas as a whole.
“We have noticed a flood of vote Democratic signs,” said Edwards, 75. “This never happened before.”
If deep red Texas turns purple and then blue over the next several election cycles, as some political experts and demographers believe it could, The Seventh and other districts like it in and around Texas’ already blue major cities most likely would be ground zero.
“Politics always follows cultural shifts, and this district is coming of age right now,” said Mustafa Tameez, a political consultant born in Pakistan who lives in The Seventh, worked as a homeland security consultant for former President George W. Bush and later managed the campaign of the first Vietnamese-American elected to the Texas House, a Democrat.
“This is not the district of Bill Archer any more, certainly not the district that George H.W. Bush won for the Republicans,” he said. “And it’s not the district that John Culberson first ran in.”
Instead of mostly white Republicans, with pockets of African-Americans and Latinos, the district is now a rainbow of different cultures — 38 percent white, 31 percent Latino, 12 percent African-American and 10 percent Asian, a demographic face that looks like much of the rest of Texas, which in 2014 was 44.4 percent white, 38.2 percent Latino, 11.6 percent black and 4.1 percent Asian.
Like I said, it’s a good read, so go check it out. The main thing I have to add is that CD07 went from being solid red to semi-competitive last decade, under the previous map, as well. Look at the precinct analyses I did in 2006 and 2008 for a sense of that. The 2011 redistricting reset the clock on CD07’s competitiveness, basically by shifting Democratic-friendly precincts to other districts, including CD02, while putting more of the far western portion of Harris County into CD07. As was the case last decade, the interior parts of CD07 became a darker shade of blue, while the red parts of the district got a little less red. I figured then, and still figure now, that the future for CD07 is to shift farther west, outside the borders of Harris County, much as CD32 was redrawn to include turf outside Dallas County, to counter the increasingly Democratic trend of Harris County. But we still have two elections to get through before we have to worry about that.
The most frustrating for me is that even if we win CD 7 in 2018 and our next Presidential nominee will win this district again in 2020, the GOP can cede Houston part of the district to Jackson Lee’s or Green’s districts and transform it again into GOP – leaning district.
Let’s see how SCOTUS rules in that WI gerrymandering case.
@Fly:
Now that wypipo are a minority in Houston, you shouldn’t have a problem with carving out a district just so wypipo will have representation. There’s precedent for this kind of thing.
You sure do like playing stupid here a lot Bill. You should be careful- there’s a danger of becoming what you play on the Internet. The WI case is about gerrymandering to give a political party an advantage they don’t deserve based on numbers. Partisan gerrymandering needs to be banned, period.