On Monday, Republican state Rep. Jonathan Stickland announced that he would not seek re-election to Texas' state House next year, but the news has implications well beyond his seat. Not only could Stickland’s retirement point to a path for Democrats to retake the chamber for the first time since 2002, but doing so could spell an end to GOP gerrymandering in the second-largest state in the country.
A conservative hardliner, Stickland only won re-election by a 50-47 margin last year over Democrat Steve Riddell as GOP Sen. Ted Cruz carried his Fort Worth-area 92nd District by a similar 51-48 spread. That makes Stickland’s seat a top pickup target next year for Democrats, who need to flip nine seats to win the 150-member Texas House, and Riddell has already said he’ll run again.
And this district is emblematic of many others. The Texas Legislative Council has calculated that Democrat Beto O'Rourke won a majority of seats in the House—76 in total—meaning, coincidentally, that exactly nine Republicans hold districts that voted blue in 2018's Senate race. That’s a huge improvement from 2016, when Hillary Clinton carried just 65 seats. What’s more, another eight Republicans sit in districts where, as in Stickland’s, Cruz only won by 4 points or less. These are the seats that offer Democrats a roadmap to a majority.
Stickland's near-loss was a result of the tidal wave that hit Texas in 2018, which saw Democrats gain 12 seats in the state House: After a series of easy victories, Stickland ran into the reality that diversifying and highly educated suburban districts such as his had veered sharply to the left in reaction to Donald Trump and would no longer reflexively tolerate his extreme views. With demographics continuing to shift, resulting in people of color and college-educated white voters making up an increasing share of the electorate, Texas’ once-red suburbs will be fiercely contested in 2020.
Lone Star Democrats will go all-in on the House next year, both because the state Senate is safely red and because if they can win the lower chamber, they’ll be able to block all the diabolical legislation the GOP can currently pass with no resistance. That includes everything from bills to strip abortion rights to another Republican gerrymander of Texas’ congressional map.
Redistricting is particularly consequential: If Democrats can force a deadlock, a court would step in to draw new lines, which would be guaranteed to be fairer than anything the GOP would come up with and would likely see Democrats and Latinos win several more seats. (Republicans would, however, still retain control over legislative redistricting under the state constitution.)
Of course, Republicans know they’re finally vulnerable, and fighting across a battleground as big as Texas is an expensive proposition. But the demographics—and the data—should give Texas Democrats a reason for optimism they haven’t enjoyed in quite some time.
