Explaining the most bizarrely shaped districts in Texas’s proposed congressional map

There’s nothing quite like lying on a nice patch of grass, trying to spot shapes in the fluffy cumulus clouds drifting by. Observing Texas’s congressional maps is a similar experience. For decades, the state’s U.S. House districts have been so wildly gerrymandered by the party in power—the GOP for the last generation and Democrats during the previous one—that their shapes can be downright psychedelic. On Monday, the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature unveiled its proposed map for the next decade—and fans of weird district shapes were not disappointed. While previous fan favorites such as Dan Crenshaw’s TX-2—a Mario Bros.–looking elongated pipe of a district—were reconfigured, there are plenty of entertaining newcomers to stare at. Most of the state’s handful of swing districts got a lot less swingin’. Republicans, reportedly aided by an operative who previously helped craft gerrymanders in Wisconsin, plan to shore up their prospects for holding a handful of seats that the party won narrowly in 2018 and 2020. To do so, they’ve proposed siphoning Democratic voters out of such districts and into two formerly contested seats that Democrats won in both of those years—Colin Allred’s seat north of Dallas and Lizzie Fletcher’s based in Houston.

A seat rooted in the Rio Grande Valley, TX-15, currently occupied by Democrat Vicente Gonzalez and never held by a Republican, is the only one proposed under the new map that would have been within a five-point margin had it existed during the 2020 election. It was redrawn to include rural Republican voters farther north, and appears intended to take advantage of the recent shift by Tejano voters toward the GOP. Dan Crenshaw’s district got a glow-up: the new maps drop the portion of the district that snaked out into central Houston—where there was a high-density of Democratic voters—in favor of a big ol’ swatch of Montgomery County, the largest overwhelmingly Trump-voting county in Texas. As a result, Crenshaw’s district, which Trump won by only a single point in 2020, is now proposed to become one that the former president would have claimed by a whopping 23 points. (Crenshaw himself outperformed the former president by 12 points in the election, but the race was still perhaps too close for GOP comfort.)