Win, Lose, Redraw

Heading into the November election, Texas Democrats sounded more bullish than they had in decades, and it wasn’t because of Joe Biden. A burgeoning partisan realignment in the state’s sprawling suburbs over the last four years had brought them to the brink of flipping the state House of Representatives. Such a breakthrough would halt 18 years of unchecked conservative control over the nation’s largest red state and give their party a seat at the table when new legislative maps are drawn after the census—a process that has crushed their spirits and disempowered their base for most of the last two decades. Candidates leaned into this message, framing the election as not just about the next two years, but about the next 10.

“The only check you have on the Republican power in Texas is to take a chamber, especially at the moment of redistricting,” Ann Johnson, a Democrat running for a statehouse seat in suburban Houston, told me a few