In the last presidential election cycle, four distant years ago, Texas Democrats pursued an ambitious campaign to take control of the state House. Bolstered by millions of dollars that flooded in from the national party apparatus, Dems targeted as many as 22 GOP-held seats across the Texas suburbs. The strategy was built upon Beto O’Rourke’s near-victorious U.S. Senate campaign in 2018, in which he carried a narrow majority of the state’s 154 state House districts.
All they needed to do was flip nine seats that O’Rourke had carried. Democrats were so optimistic heading into Election Day 2020 that multiple state reps, having suffered in the minority for years, announced bids for the speakership in anticipation of their party taking control of the lower chamber for the first time in nearly 20 years. With the potency of the GOP’s gerrymandered maps having waned, and the next round of redistricting on the horizon, it was now or (possibly) never.
What happened instead was, of course, a failure of disastrous proportions as Democrats failed to net a single seat. Then, a few months later in the 2021 legislative session, Republicans redrew the state’s political maps to extend their single-party control of the statehouse for another decade. Their gerrymandering this time opted for maximum protection of their current majority of red seats. Without fear of electoral backlash, the GOP-controlled House and Senate has marched a long line of extreme conservative legislation into law.
