Daily Kos Elections' project to calculate the 2016 presidential results for every state legislative seat in the nation turns to Texas, a GOP-dominated state that did still noticeably move away from Donald Trump last year, and where a court order may force the GOP to redraw the state House map soon. You can find our master list of states here, which we'll be updating as we add new data sets; you can also find all of our calculations from 2016 and past cycles here.
Trump defeated Hillary Clinton 53-43 statewide, a large margin but quite a bit weaker than Mitt Romney’s 57-41 win against Barack Obama four years before—and the lowest share for a Republican in 20 years. The GOP has run the Texas state House since 2002 and the Senate since 1996, and they’re unlikely to lose either chamber anytime soon. The good news for Democrats is that in April, a federal court struck down the state House map that Republicans drew in 2013 as unconstitutional. However, it may be a while before the litigation concludes, and even if the GOP is forced to redraw the state House seats, the current map may still be in effect in 2018. (See Stephen Wolf’s post for more.)
Republicans currently hold a 95-55 majority in the state House and a 20-11 edge in the state Senate. The entire state House is up every two years, while half of the Senate was up in 2016 and the remaining seats will be up in 2018. The GOP is a few seats short of a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers, but unlike in California and a few other states, a supermajority isn’t particularly valuable in Texas. The state Senate used to require two-thirds of its members to agree to advance a bill toward final passage, but Republican Dan Patrick, who as lieutenant governor controls the chamber’s workings, killed that rule in 2015. And with ultra-conservative Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in charge, the GOP legislature won’t be needing to override many vetoes.
Still, Democrats may have the opportunity to make some real gains in the lower chamber next year, which could help Team Blue build up a bench and set them up for future gains if the Lone Star State becomes more hospitable to national Democrats. To help follow along, Stephen Wolf has created an interactive map of the state House where each seat is colored based on whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump won it, and whether the seat is held by a Republican or a Democrat.
Donald Trump carried 85 of the 150 state House seats, losing 11 Romney seats while picking up no districts that Obama won. However, Trump’s problems didn’t do much for Democrats down the ballot, at least not in 2016. Of those 11 Romney/Clinton seats, Democrats hold just one of them. Last year, Democrat Victoria Neave narrowly unseated Republican state Rep. Kenneth Sheets 51-49 in HD-107, a Dallas County seat that swung from 52-47 Romney to 52-43 Clinton. Democrats hold all of the state’s 54 Obama/Clinton seats, but Neave is the one Democrat who represents a seat Romney carried.
Of the 10 state House Republicans who hold Romney/Clinton seats, seven of them are in Dallas County, two are located around Houston, and one represents a suburban Austin seat. Texas Republicans have been arguing that Trump’s problems in the suburbs are Trump’s problems alone, and that the 2016 results show that the GOP brand remains strong. The year 2018 will be a good chance for Democrats to test that idea: If Team Blue can turn some of these anti-Trump areas blue up and down the ballot, it will go a long way toward setting up future Democratic success elsewhere, including the opportunity to unseat some potentially vulnerable Republicans in the U.S. House.
The biggest shift to the left came in HD-134, which includes the suburb of Bellaire near Houston. However, while this district went from 56-42 Romney all the way to 55-40 Clinton, Republican state Rep. Sarah Davis won her fourth term 54-43. The largest shift to the right was in HD-31, which takes up part of the Rio Grande Valley. The seat went from 62-37 Obama to 55-42 Clinton. Despite the move, though, Democratic incumbent Ryan Guillen was re-elected without opposition.
Quite surprisingly, while the GOP did all they could legally do to lock in their state House majorities (and perhaps some things they couldn't legally do), their map may not actually favor Team Red that much thanks to the state’s underlying political geography. One way to visualize how much these lines do, or don't, favor one party is to sort each seat in each chamber by Clinton's margin of victory over Trump and see how the seat in the middle—known as the median seat—voted. Because the state House has an even number of seats, we average the two middle seats to come up with the median point in the chamber. The median seat backed Trump 51-44, which is actually to the left of his 53-43 statewide showing.
By contrast, Romney carried the 2012 median district 59-39, a little to the right of his 57-41 win statewide. It seems that Trump scrambled the map in a way the GOP cartographers didn’t account for, though it won’t matter much if Democrats can’t win over Trump-skeptical conservatives.
As for the Senate, Trump carried 19 seats, losing only one Romney district. That seat was the Dallas-area SD-16, which swung from 57-42 Romney to 50-45 Clinton. Republican Donald Huffines was elected in 2014 after he unseated an incumbent in the primary, but he faced no opposition that November. Huffines, who is up again next year, is the only senator who represents a seat that backed the opposite side’s presidential nominee in either 2012 or 2016.
There were two other seats worth noting that Trump only carried narrowly. SD-10, located in the Fort Worth area, went from 53-45 Romney to just 48.2-47.6 Trump. Democrat Wendy Davis held this seat in 2012 and left it behind to run for governor in 2014, and Republican Konni Burton won it 53-45 that year; Burton is up again in 2018. SD-17, located in the Houston suburbs, shifted even further, going from 59-39 Romney to just 48-47 Trump. However, Republican Joan Huffman was re-elected in 2014 63-34. The median Senate seat backed Trump 53-42, close to his statewide margin.