Redistricting Texas in 2011

Redistricting Texas in 2011: What Do the Recent Census Estimates Tell Us About Our State and Local Congressional Representation? (1st of an Occasional Series)

By Richard Murray

In late December 2008 the U.S. Census Bureau issued its annual estimate of the total U.S. population broken down by states as of July 1, 2008. These estimates, coming just 21 months before the official census count date of April 1, 2010, give us a pretty good idea of the “raw material” state lawmakers will be working with when they have to redraw all the congressional, Texas House and Senate, and State Board of Education districts in the 2011 legislative session.

Today, let’s focus on the U.S. House of Representatives The constitutional requirement that seats be apportioned among the states based on population is the original reason for our decennial census count, starting in 1790. What are we likely looking at in the congressional area based on recent available data?

For Texas the news is good. The U.S. population is estimated to have grown from about 281 million in 2000 to over 304 million as of July 1, 2008 – a gain of 8.04 percent. However, the Texas estimate is for a gain from 20.9 to 24.3 million – or 16.7 percent. Since the Lone Star State is growing more than twice as fast the country as a whole, we stand to do well when the official 2010 census numbers are released in January or early February 2011. A fairly complicated mathematical formula is used by Congress to divvy up the 435 seats in the U.S. House among the fifty states, starting with giving every state one representative and then apportioning the remaining 385 among the 42 or 43 states that have sufficient populations to get additional seats.

Using the July 2008 estimates, we can project the likely national and Texas populations as of April 1, 2010 with a fair degree of confidence because we are now relatively close to the actual count. So let’s do that projection, and see what it means for Texas and our area. By my calculation, if present trends continue, the U.S. count on 4/1/2010 will be 308.9 million and the Texas tally will be 25.1 million. We can roughly estimate how many additional seats Texas will get by dividing the total U.S. population by 435 to see how many people will be in the average district in the country, and then divide that number into the Texas population to estimate how many seats we’ll end up with.

To illustrate, the 2000 census counted 281.4 million Americans, so if we divide that number by 435 we get an average population per district from the last census of 646,947. Now if we divide that into the total Texas population of 20.9 million, this projects Texas getting 32.23 seats. Rounded to 32, that gave Texas two additional seats over the 30 we got after the 1990 census. Repeating this for our 2010 estimates, we get a projection of 35.86 seats, which would likely round up to 36 seats, a net gain of four, which would be the largest increase in the country. Even if the estimates are off, it now seems virtually certain that Texas will get at least three new seats in the 2011 reapportionment, and quite possibly four.

What does that mean for the Houston area? Well, congressional districts have to be drawn to have exactly equal populations, so we can make a pretty good guess for the metropolitan region based on the county-by-county estimates provided by the Census Bureau. Unfortunately, we’ll have to use the July 1, 2007 county estimates because more recent numbers have not been released. Here’s what those numbers, projected out to 2010, show for Harris County and the other populous counties in the Houston area.

County

Estimated Seats if Texas Gets:

	2000 Pop	House Seats	2010 Pop	35 Seats	36 Seats
Harris	3,400,578	5.22	4,138,891	5.78	5.94
Fort Bend	354,452	.54	568,755	.79	.82
Montgomery	293,768	.45	457,727	.64	.66
Brazoria	241,767	.37	314,134	.44	.45
Galveston	250,158	.38	296,819	.41	.43
TOTAL	4,540,723	6.97	5,776,326	8.07	8.30

  The bottom line is that whether Texas ends up with 35 or 36 seats, the Houston metropolitan area is going to gain an additional U.S. House seat in two years, with some population to spare. That said, we need to keep in mind that while the apportionment of districts among the states is driven by a mathematical formula, and within a state every district’s population must be equal, there is still an enormous amount of discretion in exactly where the congressional district lines will be drawn in 2011, starting with the question of will the Texas Legislature be able to enact a plan and will that effort be sustained after review by the U.S. Justice Department and the federal courts.

In coming blogs, we’ll look at what the U.S. Census estimates suggest for our Texas House and Senate representation across the state and in our area.