The Art of the Texas Gerrymander: U.S. House District 21

 

Charging Buffalo

Wikipedia

 

Freedom Caucus Crazy Chip Roy (R-Austin) won 6th term to Congress with 62.5% of the vote.

Ballotpedia

Slate, 2/24/2021

The congressman in question is Chip Roy, “representative” of Texas’ 21st District, and to those of us who pay his way, this behavior is par for the course. Roy rarely lifts a finger for Austinites and knows he doesn’t need to in order to win—we didn’t elect him in the first place. Despite the old saw that the state capital is a “blue dot in a red sea”—a silly metaphor given that all four of Texas’ biggest cities vote Democratic—the political power of our citizenry has been severely curtailed by partisan gerrymandering. The congressman released a statement not explaining how he planned to help the struggling citizens of his district but eulogizing Rush Limbaugh. 

For the uninitiated, gerrymandering is the process of manipulating how districts are drawn to give one political party an unfair leg up. In Texas, the Republican-held Legislature is responsible for drawing the maps every 10 years, and our current boundaries were created with the sole purpose of maximizing the power of the people with the pens. 

When it comes to Austin, the preferred gerrymandering method of the GOP is called “cracking,” in which the party in control spreads the opposing party’s supporters across multiple districts, diluting their voting power. Thus, despite the fact that Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by 45 points in Travis County (which includes Austin), only one of our six different members of Congress is a Democrat. [emphasis added]

Related posts:

District 1.  (4/19/2023)

District 2.  (4/19/2023)

District 3.  (4/19/2023)

District 4.  (4/21/2023)

District 5.  (4/21/2023)

District 6.  (4/21/2023)

District 7.  (4/24/2023)

District 8.  (4/24/2023)

District 9.  (4/25/2023)

District 10.  (4/25/2023)

District 11.  (4/26/2023)

District 12.  (4/26/2023)

District 13.  (4/27/2023)

District 14.  (4/27/2023)

District 15.  (4/28/2023)

District 16.  (4/28/2023)

District 17.  (4/29/2023)

District 18.  (4/29/2023)

District 19.  (4/30/2023)

District 20.  (5/1/2023)