THREAD: Tonight I will be doing an overview of (relatively) recent Democratic gerrymanders of the state of Texas. I picked these four maps which I think best show the evolution of Democratic gerrymanders from the '60's until the beginning of the 21st century... #Texas

The 1968 map is one of the first maps where the then Republican counties (Tarrant and Dallas) were split between multiple districts. Although the two main Dallas-based districts went to Nixon (fair given he won the county by 17%), Tarrant (Ft. Worth) was clearly gerrymandered...

Democrats intentionally packed Tarrant's main congressional district (TX12) to have as many African Americans and white laborers as possible. This caused the district to support Humphrey 47%-40%, despite Nixon winning the county by 1%. But that's not all they did...

To add insult to injury, the Republican portion of Tarrant (which supported Nixon 48%-31%) was drawn in with the rural Democratic areas of the 6th district, stretching from DFW to Houston. Overall the 6th backed Humphrey by just 276 ballots, effectively splitting the GOP vote.

In 1974, DEMs made additional changes. They pushed as many GOP areas of the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metro into the 3rd while pushing the 5th and new 24th into the Southern and more DEM areas of Dallas County. They also packed the GOP areas of Harris into the 7th...

Despite winning the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area by mid-high single digits during his 1976 bid, Republican Gerald Ford would carry only 1 of the 4 districts centered completely within the area. If you include all districts which shared parts of the metro, that falls to 1 in 7.

Gonna continue this thread tomorrow.