Democrats Hopes of Taking Back the House Could Hinge on Two Districtsin Texas
Texas Democrats have big plans for the 2018 midterm elections. Popular Rep. Beto O’Rourke is gunning for Ted Cruz’s Senate seat. Scandal-plagued Republican Rep. Blake Farenthold is retiring at the end of his term, and his district could be redrawn before his last day on the job. And there’s a Democrat running in all 36 of the state’s congressional districts—something, according to the state party, that hasn’t happened in more than 25 years.
But as my colleague Tim Murphy wrote in his September/October cover story, voting in Texas is more difficult than in almost any other state—often to the detriment of Democrats. Thanks to the state’s infamously gerrymandered districts, Democrats have few places where they can realistically pick off incumbent Republicans, even with the kind of increased African American turnout that propelled Doug Jones to his surprise Senate win in Alabama. That’s why Texas Democrats are focusing on two solidly Republican districts that Hillary Clinton flipped in 2016: Rep. John Culberson’s District 7, near Houston, and Rep. Pete Sessions’ District 32, around Dallas.
Both districts primarily consist of white, educated, and reliably Republican voters, many of whom couldn’t stomach pulling the lever for Donald Trump last year. “Trump will represent a millstone around both Culberson and Sessions’ necks,” said Mark Jones, a political science fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute. “The lower his approval rating, the worse Culberson and Sessions will do.”
Culberson, in particular, already has seen an outpouring of grassroots opposition tied to his support for the president. As Murphy wrote in his piece earlier this year:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/12/democrats-hopes-of-taking-back-the-house-could-hinge-on-two-districts-in-texas-2/
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