AWOL Texas Dems & Congressional Elections

I've made a number of posts (first, second, third, and fourth) on the Texas House Democrats who successfully busted a quorum this week in order to kill a Republican-backed Congressional redistricting bill. Bill Hobbs asked

How many of those AWOL Texas legislators plan to run for Congress some day and would like to do so from a safe district - but whose current home within a currently-safely Democratic district is at risk of being shoved into a Republican-leaning district by the redistricting plan?

This post is the followup to my previous post which did not directly address the question.

So. Let's first lay out the situation with Texas' US House Districts (USHD). There are 32, currently 17 Democrats to 15 Republicans. Here they are, along with their election results, which are listed as the percentages for the Representative vs. the next two highest candidates and their affiliations. Any Representatives who are in bold were NOT incumbents.

District 01, Max Sandlin, D-Marshall: 56.44% to 43.55% (GOP)
District 02, Jim Turner, D-Crockett: 60.84% to 38.18% (GOP) to <1% (Libertarian)
District 04, Ralph M. Hal, D-Rockwall: 57.82% to 40.37% (GOP) to 1.80% (Libertarian)
District 09, Nick Lampson, D-Beaumont: 58.60% to 40.30% (GOP) to 1.09% (Libertarian)
District 10, Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin: 84.37% to 15.62% (Libertarian)
District 11, Chet Edwards, D-Waco: 51.55% to 47.10% (GOP) to 1.34% (Libertarian)
District 15, Rubén Hinojosa, D-Mercedes: 100%, unopposed
District 16, Silvestre Reyes, D-El Paso: 100%, unopposed
District 17, Charles W. Stenholm, D-Abilene: 51.36% to 47.38% (GOP) to 1.24% (Libertarian)
District 18, Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Houston: 76.91% to 21.70% (GOP) to 1.38% (Libertarian)
District 20, Charles A. Gonzalez, D-San Antonio: 100%, unopposed
District 24, Martin Frost, D-Dallas: 64.66% to 33.95% (GOP) to 1.38% (Libertarian)
District 25, Chris Bell, D-Houston: 54.75% to 43.09% (GOP) to 1.20% (Green)
District 27, Solomon P. Ortiz, D-Corpus Christi: 61.09% to 36.54% (GOP) to 2.35% (Libertarian)
District 28, Ciro D. Rodriguez, D-San Antonio: 71.09% to 26.86% (GOP) to 2.04% (Libertarian)
District 29, Gene Green, D-Houston: 95.16% to 4.83% (Libertarian)
District 30, Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Dallas: 74.26% to 24.18% (GOP) to 1.54% (Libertarian)

District 03, Sam Johnson, R-Plano: 73.94% to 24.33% (DEM) to 1.72% (Libertarian)
District 05, Jeb Hensarling, R-Dallas: 58.20% to 40.26% (DEM) to <1% (Libertarian)
District 06, Joe Barton, R-Ennis: 70.34% to 27.67% (DEM) to 1.21% (Libertarian)
District 07, John Abney Culberson, R-Houston: 89.18% to 10.75% (DEM)
District 08, Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands: 93.14% to 6.85% (Libertarian)
District 12, Kay Granger, R-Fort Worth: 97.87% to 8.12% (Libertarian)
District 13, Mac Thornberry, R-Clarendon: 79.27% to 20.72% (DEM)
District 14, Ron Paul, R-Surfside: 68.09% to 31.90% (DEM) [Paul is more of a libertarian than anything else, but whatever]
District 19, Larry Combest, R-Lubbock: 91.63% to 8.36% (Libertarian)
District 21, Lamar S. Smith, R-San Antonio: 72.86% to 25.30% (DEM) to 1.82% (Libertarian)
District 22, Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land: 63.17% to 35.02% (DEM) to 1.01% (Libertarian)
District 23, Henry Bonilla, R-San Antonio: 51.52% to 47.20% (DEM) to <1% (Libertarian)
District 26, Michael C. Burgess, R-Highland Village: 74.80% to 22.76% (DEM) to 1.43% (Libertarian)
District 31, John R. Carter, R-Round Rock: 69.08% to 27.36% (DEM) to 1.26% (Libertarian)
District 32, Pete Sessions, R-Dallas: 67.76% to 30.34% (DEM) to 1.06% (Libertarian)

All election data taken from here.

I will arbitarily choose an electoral victory margin of 10% and less to be the standard to judge which Representatives' seats are "in danger." The Democrats who meet this standard are District 01's Max Sandlin, District 11's Chet Edwards, District 17's Charles W. Stenholm, and District 25's Chris Bell; a total of four. The only Republican who met this standard is District 23's Henry Bonilla.

Sandlin, Edwards, Stenholm, Bell, and Bonilla would all have their current districts radically altered hundreds of square miles under the new plan.

Now, it is very hard to know which Democratic Texas House reps want to or plan on running for the US House next election. Their official House websites offer no such insight. Time does not permit me to do an extensive news search either since I don't have access to Lexis-Nexis and I'll have friends knocking at my door later this evening. Can't let the friends down for some "stupid political thing," eh? :)

Initially, I thought it would make sense to compare the Democrats' Texas House Districts (TDH) to the differences between the new and the current USHD, but after I started doing this for the first five reps (which took waaay longer than I thought) I realized that wouldn't make sense in a Congressional election. The permanent residence address of the candidate matters. Not where their TDH is located; obviously a candidate doesn't even need one of those to run.

I just wasted 2.5 hours doing the wrong thing. Damn it.

So I need their home addresses and the Texas House website doesn't list them and I can't use the district office addresses they do list, for obvious reasons. Not every rep has a biography on their page and their home addresses aren't listed there anyways. OpenSecrets.org doesn't do state-level data. I don't even know if this information is publicly available. It would take too long to track down what is available tonight, so I unfortunately must out this off again.

I will return tomorrow to finish this. However, I do have some thoughts about the situation overall.

The Dems had the right to disagree with the DeLay/Craddick map. The merits of it are beyond my scope, but I can see why they'd be pissed. However, their choice to shut down the House rather than face a full vote was wrong. If their job is to serve the state through democratic means, then they have to understand the new reality: Republicans are now the majority party in the Texas House and therefore the principles of democracy require the Democrats to respect the majority's decisions provided they are achieved through a fair and legitimate vote. They don't have to agree with them and they certainly don't have to sit down and let bills they dislike pass, but what they did was not democratic, nor mature. They escaped reality and in the process ruined the legislative agenda for both sides at a very important time.

Personally, I think the less the legislature does the better since overall it would rather restrict freedom than increase it. But from a pop politics standpoint, I think what the Democrats did was wrong regardless of the horrors imposed by a new US House district map.

And now, I get to go explain all this to my waiting friends. *sigh*

UPDATE(10/12/2003 9:33pm)
Big News: a plan has been finalized and passed by both the House and the Senate.

Posted by Drizzten at May 16, 2003 08:56 PM