Texas has never been that red. The GOP first took over the state legislature in 2003 riding Bush’s 9/11 bump.

And the first thing they did was a mid-decade gerrymander, and the Dems tried fleeing the state to prevent quorum. Sound familiar?

And it was way worse than what they did last year. Between the 2002 and 2004 elections, Texas’s US House delegation went from majority Democrat to 2/3 Republican with about the same number of voters for either party.

Then they started rolling out voter suppression schemes and catering to out-of-state Republicans. They imported a conservative base.