Sharp rural-urban contrast in story about Texas gerrymandering

Jesse Wegman's piece is titled "Gerrymander USA," and it features a photo of a two-lane road stretching through a rural area in West Texas.  The piece is about how gerrymandering reconstructed Texas' 13th district to include Denton, which is part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.  It contrasts that urban part of the gerrymandered district with its most rural stretches at the New Mexico state line, a town called Texline, population 507.    

The downtown of Denton, Texas, a city of about 150,000 people and two large universities just north of Dallas, exudes the energy of a fast-growing place with a sizable student population: There’s a vibrant independent music scene, museums and public art exhibits, beer gardens, a surfeit of upscale dining options, a weekly queer variety show. The city is also racially and ethnically diverse: More than 45 percent of residents identify as Latino, Black, Asian or multiracial. There aren’t too many places in Texas where you can encounter Muslim students praying on a busy downtown sidewalk, but Denton is one of them.

Drive about seven hours northwest of Denton’s city center and you hit Texline, a flat, treeless square of a town tucked in the corner of the state on the New Mexico border. Cow pastures and wind turbines seem to stretch to the horizon. Texline’s downtown has a couple of diners, a gas station, a hardware store and not much else; its largely white population is roughly 460 people and shrinking.

It would be hard to pick two places more different from one another than Denton and Texline — and yet thanks to the latest round of gerrymandering by Texas’ Republican-dominated Legislature, both are now part of the same congressional district: the 13th, represented by one man, Ronny Jackson. Mr. Jackson, the former White House physician, ran for his seat in 2020 as a hard-right Republican. It turned out to be a good fit for Texas-13, where he won with almost 80 percent of the vote.

This was before the 2020 census was completed and Congress reapportioned, which gave the Texas delegation two more seats for its growing population, for a total of 38. State Republicans, who control the governor’s office and both houses of the Legislature, were free to redraw their district lines pretty much however they pleased. They used that power primarily to tighten their grip on existing Republican seats rather than create new ones, as they had in the 2010 cycle. In the process, they managed to squelch the political voice of many nonwhite Texans, who accounted for 95 percent of the state’s growth over the last decade yet got not a single new district that would give them the opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.

Denton offers a good example of how this played out. Under the old maps, downtown Denton, where the universities lie, was part of the 26th District — a Republican-majority district, but considerably more competitive than the 13th. If Texas politics continue to move left as they have in recent years, the 26th District could have become a tossup. The liberal residents of Denton could have had the chance to elect to Congress a representative of their choosing.

Now that the downtown has been absorbed into the 13th District and yoked to the conservative Texas panhandle, however, they might as well be invisible.

The story features lots of photos of Denton, fewer of the rural reaches of the Texas panhandle, including Texline, Shamrock, Groom and Amarillo.