A Lot on the Line as Both Parties Seek to Flip the Texas House
While Democratic efforts to win back the state House have fallen short over the years, results of the 2018 midterms offered hope that flipping the chamber might be within reach this year. Enthusiasm for Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s challenge of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Houston), combined with demographic shifts, boosted Democratic turnout to flip 12 Texas House seats, primarily in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Republicans also attributed those losses, as well as positions for two state senators and a slew of judges across the state, to straight-ticket voting, which has been eliminated, although a pending court battle seeks to restore the single punch option for the Nov. 3 election.
With the pickup of those 12 seats in 2018, Democrats need only to flip nine seats this cycle to gain control of the 150-seat Texas House. With redistricting set to occur in 2021, Democrats see an opportunity to have a bigger say in how Congressional and state legislative districts are drawn.
“There’s no doubt Republicans will continue to control the Texas Senate and the governorship in 2021, and thus all Democratic hopes of avoiding another GOP partisan gerrymander lie in taking control of the Texas House,” Mark P. Jones, political science fellow in political science at the Baker Institute and a political science professor at Rice University, said in a statement.
The Baker Institute’s latest ratings of Texas House races have five Republican seats and one Democratic seat rated as toss-ups. Dallas incumbent Morgan Meyer is the most endangered as the lone Republican on the institute’s “Lean Democratic” list.
But Democrats are looking beyond those six seats and targeting 18 open or GOP-held seats that were won by incumbents by a margin of 10 percentage points or fewer in 2018. Most of these seats are in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston areas, where diverse districts give Democrats their best chance of picking up seats, according to political observers.
https://www.reformaustin.org/elections/a-lot-on-the-line-as-both-parties-seek-to-flip-the-texas-house/
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