September 23, 2003
The Two Redistricting Maps

Continuing from my previous post on Texas Congressional redistricting...Senate tentatively approves redistricting map

Republicans got what they wanted Tuesday night -- passing congressional redistricting.

After three failed attempts, a congressional redistricting map was tentatively approved Tuesday by the Texas Senate.

The bill was approved 18-to-13 -- largely along party lines -- and is expected to get final approval on Wednesday.

After a 45-day boycott by Senate Democrats, the Senate spent nine hours debating amendments and the merits of the map authored by Sen. Todd Staples of Palestine.


The two maps being debated are here and here, both PDFs. The former is the House of Representatives' Plan C01268 and the latter is the Senate's Plan C01353. More will be updated and posted to the Texas Legislative Council's Texas Redistricting page as it occurs.

An easy way to compare the differences is to load both in seperate windows, zoom them to the same level, maximize each window, and ALT+TAB back and forth between them. Doing this reveals a few things to me.

  1. El Paso remains the same.
  2. Travis County is largely the same with IH35 the dividing line between district 21 and district 10. However, the House map pulls this line to the west and the line looses touch with IH35 entirely. The Senate map roughly follows this method until it gets near the southern part of the county. It then cuts sharply east and crosses the highway.
  3. Both Tarrant County and Dallas County get serious makeovers in each map.
  4. Harris County gets just as jumbled-up as before in either map.
  5. Bexar County remains unchanged.
  6. District 23 (essentially the entire southwest border with Mexico) remains almost entirely unchanged.
  7. The mid- and northwest get far differing treatment in each map, currently the big hurdle among Republican solidarity.
Something will get passed. And the system will roll on until 2010.

UPDATE(10/12/2003 9:34pm)
Big News: a plan has been finalized and passed by both the House and the Senate.



Posted by Drizzten at September 23, 2003 11:14 PM

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Comments

Thank you so much for posting those redistricting maps in PDF format, I've been looking for them in a printable format all day. You are providing a wonderful service to the political curious.

Thanks

Posted by: Shirlyn on January 8, 2004 03:36 PM
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