By Dr. Richard Murray
Published: 02-02-09
Craddick lost his job & power because the 2001 Delay redistricting plan turned out to be flawed.
What happened to the man Texas Monthly cited just a couple of years ago as the most powerful politician in Texas?
Most press stories today are casting Speaker Craddick’s fall as largely personal – his arrogant style of leadership had gradually alienated enough of his colleagues so that a challenger like Representative Joe Straus a moderate Republican from San Antonio could round up enough votes to wrestle the top job in the Texas Legislature from the man from Midland.
I have a somewhat different take.
Back in 2001 when new census numbers became available and all representative districts across Texas had to be redrawn the Republican leadership in Austin decided to block the usual process wherein the Texas House of Representatives and Texas Senate redraw their own lines to comply with “one person-one vote” requirements. The Texas Constitution mandates in such cases of legislative inaction that new House and Senate districts be drawn by a five-member Legislative Redistricting Board (LRB).
Back in 2001 the LRB was controlled by a bloc of three statewide elected Republicans who were very responsive to the wishes to U.S. Congressman Tom Delay then Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. As a consequence the leaders of the respective bodies House Speaker Pete Laney and Lt. Governor Bill Ratliff were effectively shut out of the process of redrawing the 181 state legislative districts.
The 2001 LRB plan for the Texas House effectively dictated by Congressman Delay was a very skillfully drawn partisan gerrymander aimed at wiping out the 78 to 72 Democratic majority in that body. The Delay plan gave Republicans an opportunity to win as many as 100 seats in the November 2002 General Election but virtually assured a new Republican majority would run the House after January 2003.
Republicans fell a bit short of their maximum goal but still ended up with 88 of the 150 seats enough to comfortably elect their longtime leader Representative Tom Craddick of Midland as the new Speaker.
Most analysis assumed Craddick could retain his position health permitting for the next ten years until the 2010 census would require another round of redistricting. However on January 4 2009 a hale and hearty Speaker Craddick was forced to step aside when it became clear he could not muster anywhere close to the minimum 76 votes needed to hold his job.
Craddick lost his job and power in my opinion because the 2001 Delay redistricting plan which he signed off on turned out to be badly flawed over the next seven years.
While the original plan delivered in the 2002 General Election it worked less and less well in every succeeding cycle so that by November 4 2008 the Republicans had been whittled down to a 76 – 74 majority and that 76th GOP member prevailed by just 19 votes out of about 40000 total votes in a Dallas County district. In my view it was the steady erosion of the Republican majority that gave enough members the gumption to stand up against a powerful speaker known for his vindictiveness.
Where did the 2001 House Republican plan fail? The answer is: in the big urban counties of Harris Dallas Tarrant Bexar and Travis.
In the 2002 General Election Republicans won 38 of the 67 House districts in these five counties.
In November 2008 the GOP held on to just 25 of these seats while the Democrats won 42 – a 13 seat swing that accounts for all Democratic gains since 2002. The table below shows the county-by-county changes.
Why did the House gerrymander fail? For two reasons.
First the Delay map-drawers overestimated Republican strength in these urban counties by relying on recent statewide election results from 1998 and 2000 that had been unusually favorable to their party’s nominees because of weak Democratic opponents like gubernatorial candidate Gary Mauro matched up against popular Governor George W. Bush.
But more importantly the map-drawers did not foresee how quickly the demographics in urban districts could change to the detriment of Republican representatives.
In my next blog I’ll zero in on the Harris County case where the 2001 map produced a 14 – 11 Republican majority in 2002 but yielded the reverse Democratic margin in 2008.
