The Art of the Texas Gerrymander: U.S. House District 26

 

Acrobatically Avoiding Denton

Wikipedia

 

Running against a Libertarian, Michael Burgess (R-Pilot Point) won an 11th term in Congress with nearly 70% of the vote.

Ballotpedia

New York Times, 7/12/2022

The downtown of Denton, Texas, a city of about 150,000 people and two large universities just north of Dallas, exudes the energy of a fast-growing place with a sizable student population: There’s a vibrant independent music scene, museums and public art exhibits, beer gardens, a surfeit of upscale dining options, a weekly queer variety show. The city is also racially and ethnically diverse: More than 45 percent of residents identify as Latino, Black, Asian or multiracial. There aren’t too many places in Texas where you can encounter Muslim students praying on a busy downtown sidewalk, but Denton is one of them.  

Drive about seven hours northwest of Denton’s city center and you hit Texline, a flat, treeless square of a town tucked in the corner of the state on the New Mexico border. Cow pastures and wind turbines seem to stretch to the horizon. Texline’s downtown has a couple of diners, a gas station, a hardware store and not much else; its largely white population is roughly 460 people and shrinking. 

It would be hard to pick two places more different from one another than Denton and Texline — and yet thanks to the latest round of gerrymandering by Texas’ Republican-dominated Legislature, both are now part of the same congressional district.

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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)

District 21.  (5/2/2023)

District 22.  (5/3/2023)

District 23.  (5/4/2023)

District 24.  (5/5/2023)

District 25.  (5/6/2023)