Flores Gets Ex-Colleague Love
with Creative Senate Map Dance

Capitol Inside
September 19, 2021

Former Republican lawmaker Pete Flores scored a potential ticket back to Austin on Saturday with the public unveiling of a Texas Senate map that scoops his hometown of Pleasanton into a district that GOP State Senator Dawn Buckingham of Lakeway is giving up to run for land commissioner in 2022.

The Senate's baseline redistricting plan would defuse a potential rubber match between Flores and Democratic State Senator Roland Gutierrez of San Antonio in one of the only two true swing districts in the plan that State Senator Joan Huffman filed today for consideration in a special session that starts on Monday.

Huffman, a Houston Republican who's chairing a special Senate Redistricting Committee, represents the other district that could be in play at the polls next year. The plan that Huffman proposed in Senate Bill 4 could give her a slight boost with an expansion of Senate District 17 into suburban Waller County and a corresponding reduction in the Asian population that she represents in Fort Bend County from 17 percent to 13 percent.

GOP State Senator Lois Kolkhorst of Brenham would get a larger slice of Fort Bend County in a neighboring district where the Asian population would jump by 3 percent if the plan in SB 4 remained intact. The number of white residents in Senate District 18 would drop from 46 percent to 40 percent on the proposed Senate map while the Black share of the population increased 3 percent.

Huffman is one of Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick's highest-ranking lieutenants - having chaired the State Affairs Committee until her casting into a dual role as the leader of the Jurisprudence Committee and the special mapmaking panel. Kolkhorst also is a major Patrick lieuteant who's the Health & Human Services Committee chair.

The starting Senate plan would put the GOP in position to pick up two Senate seats with a shot at a third in Senate District 19 where Gutierrez will be on the defensive after knocking Flores out of the east wing of the Capitol last fall.

Democratic State Rep. Beverly Powell of Burleson would face a potentially insurmountable disadvantage in the new version of Senate District 10 that includes heavily-Republican Johnson and Parker counties. The Senate redistricting plan would turn a heavily-Democratic district that State Senator Eddie Lucio Jr. of Brownsville represents into a seat that he could have better odds to win as a convert to the GOP.

But Flores appeared to the biggest initial winner in the proposed Patrick map that would remove his home base from Gutierrez's district into Senate District 24 where the job will be open in light of Buckingham's decision to run statewide next year.

The Senate baseline plan would chop off the northern half of SD 24 with Abilene as the anchor city. But SD 24 would take in the Austin-area suburbs of Cedar Park and Leander that Republican State Senator Charles Schwertner of Georgetown currently represents. SD 24 would also include Medina County - a GOP stronghold that Gutierrez might be glad to lose on the outskirts of the Alamo City.

Flores pulled off a major upset when he flipped SD 19 red in a special election in 2018 when Gutierrez failed to make a runoff. But SD 19 had been Democratic turf until that point - and Gutierrez bounced back with a victory in the rematch in 2020 when he beat Flores by 3 points with 49.9 percent of the vote.

more to come ...

 

 

 

 

 

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