Politico (9/27/21) on Emerging Contours of Texas U.S. House Map (TEXAS)

The Texas legislature appears to be getting close to a new map for its U.S. House districts, Politico reports. The Lone Star State will receive two more seats due to population growth, upping its delegation from 36 (23-13 in favor of the GOP) to 38 seats. The following two passages convey the key points of the article, in my view:

While the precise boundaries are still being finalized, the new map is likely to shore up all of the state’s GOP incumbents by packing Democrats together in three new deep-blue seats in the biggest metro areas: Austin, Houston and Dallas, according to several sources close to the redistricting process. 

The end result is likely to give Republicans control of at least two dozen of the state’s 38 districts — but it is not expected to significantly reduce Democrats’ footprint, which grew slightly over the past 10 years. That's a far cry from the ruthless redistricting happening elsewhere — but also a realization of the GOP's already maxed-out advantage in Texas.

In other words, the Republicans are not following a pizza-slicing strategy (depicted here), as they've done in the past with the Austin area. Instead, they're following a "vote-sink" strategy, creating three new districts whose residents vote overwhelmingly Democratic, so that these Democratic voters don't have to go into predominantly GOP districts. We've seen recently how, particularly in suburban areas, districts that have a small share of Democrats at the beginning of the decade pick up more Democrats over the years and become competitive by the end of the decade.

The Politico article talks about Hispanic voters' swing to the Republicans in 2020 in south Texas (which took place elsewhere around the nation, as well). Whether this is a lasting phenomenon or merely an artifact of other factors (the Democrats' cutting back on door-to-door campaigning due to COVID or Hispanic voters' tendency to increase their support of incumbent presidents from their initial election to their re-election bid) remains an open question.

The bottom line, though, is that this latest Texas redistricting map suggests the GOP will hold 24-25 of the 38 seats.