The Democratic Angle on Redistricting

By Robert Wilonsky Tue., Jan. 4 2011 at 2:40 PM

Matt Angle, the Haltom City boy who used to be chief o' staff for Martin Frost, is at present the treasurer of the Fred Baron-founded Texas Democratic Trust. He's also head of the Lone Star Project, dedicated to making sure "all of the new districts coming to Texas should be used to bring racial, ethnic, and political balance to the Texas Congressional delegation," and good luck with all that. Anyway. It's in that capacity that The National Journal Q&A'd with Angle about redistricting today.

Read the whole thing. But till then, this relevant excerpt:

The Hotline: Texas is slated to gain four seats and population growth has been in the urban areas mostly. If you had your way, where would you draw the new districts?

MA: Where the population growth is not nearly as important as who it is. So what I would do is with all four districts I would use them to repair and improve the voting strength of people of color. Texas clearly should get two additional Hispanic districts. I believe those can be drawn in north Texas -- in Dallas -- and I believe the other can be drawn in the San Antonio to Austin corridor. And then I believe the other two districts should be used to realize the voting strength for minorities.

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Jay

Let's see. Only 70% of eligible Texans even register to vote, and in presidential elections years only 60% of them actually voted. In non-presidential elections years, the averages are half of that. So the trick for Mr. Angle is to gerrymander four new districts where the 15%-20% of "Hispanics and minorities" who bother to vote will somehow out number the 20%-25% of "whites" who bother to vote. And he plans to do this while the Republicans hold every stat-wide office and majorities in the Texas House and Senate, and a huge majority of US Congressional seats.

Maybe we should create one new district solely for former California residents.

Rooster

Does it matter? Rest assured the seats will be gerrymandered to add 4 GOP seats.

Bet on it.

This is ironic, as extreme gerrymandering is what ran Martin Frost, a good man, out of a job in the first place.

I think we should let computers draw the lines, based strictly on population numbers. But I'm just a caveman.

Heywood U Buzzoff

How about adding the districts in the areas that had the most growth regardless<./i> of color, creed, and party affiliation? Or does that deprive Mike Angle of cash going into his pocket??

El Rey

That would make too much sense. If the Census did not measure household income, race, age, and the other myriad categories that cause Americans to identify as 'Hyphenated-Americans' rather than as just 'Americans', we would be much better off.

Politicians (both Democrats and Republicans) make their living exploiting class warfare. Just look at how often the current crop of politicians and pundits use the phrases 'middle class tax cut', 'tax cuts for the wealthy', 'taxing the poor', 'robbing Medicare', 'robbing Social Security', etc.