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.
Local representation is valuable. In the Netherlands it is practically automatic since it is only 41,850 km^2. My state is 134,771 km^2 so you’d need to split it into about 4 pieces/districts to get as local representation. Oddly enough we get 4 congressional districts: https://bdistricting.com/2020/AR/ but we still have issues with Gerrymandering has the largely R government applies cracking approaches to any D voting localities.
Texas is much larger, with more population density variance, so the problems are magnified.
I do agree that instead of a lot of small, geographically compact districts, proportional representation in a larger, but still compact multi-member district is preferable, but that’s not quite the problem we are having with districts.
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That doesn’t sound like local representation to me. And, honestly, I’d like parties to have less influence on our elections, not more, but I guess that’s a pipe dream.
What happens if you prefer a local politician that is an independent / has no permanent party affiliation? Bernie Sanders and Joseph Lieberman have held federal office without a party affiliation.
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