As Texas Republicans try to muscle a rare mid-decade redistricting bill through the Legislature to help Republicans gain seats in Congress – at President Donald Trump’s request – residents in Austin, the state capital, could find themselves sharing a district with rural Texans more than 300 miles away.
The proposed map chops up Central Texas’ 37th Congressional District, which is currently represented by Democrat Rep. Lloyd Doggett, will be consumed by four neighboring districts, three of which Republicans now hold.
One of those portions of the Austin-area district was drawn to be part of the 11th District that Republican Rep. August Pfluger represents, which stretches into rural Ector County, about 20 miles away from the New Mexico border.
On a basic level the stuff rural populations need/care about is different than urban populations and suburban is again different. Whether thats farming subsidies, car pollution/traffic, etc.
Dividing simply by lat x long gives all the power to the urban areas. Like a 3rd of NY lives in NYC. However you slice rural areas on the west or north of the state hundreds of miles away with very different concerns would end up getting represented by people from the city while people on the outskirts of the city get represented by rural area interests again hundreds of miles away. And you’d still have arguments about whether to slice longitude or latitude for whatever possible advantage that could give one side or another.
Then you say OK we’ll just sorta cube the city and make a big rural area and thats basically how things started in the first place. Then you have people argue they are better fit for the district next to them try and squiggly the lines et viola you’re just back to where we are now.
Really what is needed is an open-source algorithm that we agree is fair and apolitical. But fat chance of that right now.
I had hopes for this at one point, but I think we might be in a Arrow-like situation, where there actually is no algorithm that satisfies all the fairness constraints we want to apply.
i agree re an open source algo! but also - if things are so vastly different then maybe a solution is county based or make new states, etc.
not easy or simple.
but gerrymandering is so freaking evil.