The Platform Committee of the Texas Republican Party has proposed a state-level electoral college, modeled after the federal system, which would check the rise of Democratic urban power and leave rural areas with more say in the governance of the state.
The proposal is contained in the final report of the 2020 Platform Committee, which met July 13-15. Convention delegates were scheduled to deliberate that report over the weekend, but technical and organizational problems forced the convention to adjourn without final approval of a platform.
The draft platform says, “Be it resolved that the state legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment creating an electoral college consisting of electors selected by the popular votes cast within each individual state senatorial district, who shall then elect all statewide office holders.”
Under this system, a candidate for state office like governor or attorney general could lose an absolute majority of the popular vote yet still win the office, if he won a majority of the state senate districts. For example, a candidate for governor might win a massive landslide of votes in one area, but could still lose if he failed to perform well in other areas.
Dianna Greenwood, Chair of the Bastrop County Republican Party, told Honest Austin, “Many here in Bastrop and frankly around Texas are worried that the influx of folks from increasingly liberal/Democrat controlled states who are settling in the major metropolitan areas is going to cause the rural areas to have less of a voice in our political choices.”
She added that the Texas Electoral College would be modeled on the federal one, which “ideally prevents a few large states from dictating to the rest of the country what our political direction should be.”
The Bastrop GOP was one of several county organizations that endorsed the idea of an electoral college back in March when they submitted paperwork to the state platform committee.
Political and Legal Obstacles
The idea of a state electoral college, if implemented, likely would put Texas afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court precedents Baker v. Carr (1962) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964). Those rulings established the principle of “one person, one vote,” and forced some states to change how they apportioned legislative districts.
Today, state senate districts are apportioned based on population, with boundaries redrawn every ten years depending on the results of the U.S. census. But prior to Baker and Reynolds, some states elected one senator per county, a system that gave relatively more power to rural areas. In New Hampshire, from 1776 to 1964, the state senate was apportioned based on taxes paid, rather than population.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1868, says that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The judges in Baker and Reynolds interpreted this to mean that states couldn’t adopt their own unequal voting systems, even though the federal constitution itself contains undemocratic elements like the electoral college and U.S. Senate.
This means that if Texas did adopt its own state electoral college, it almost certainly would be challenged in federal court and likely would be struck down by a District Court under the Baker and Reynolds precedents. Unless the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to revisit those precedents, the state would then be confronted with federal demands to revoke its new apportionment system.
Federal vs. State Power
During a meeting of the platform committee last week, Committee Chair Mike Dorazio was asked in a point of order whether party rules prohibited the party from adopting a platform plank that was contrary to state or federal law. He replied that they did not.
In fact, part of the point of the platform is to express views on aspects of the political system that the party would like to see changed. By that reasoning, the Texas GOP in recent years occasionally has adopted platform planks that go against federal precedents or laws, even calling for open defiance of federal authority. The 2018 platform says, for example, “federally mandated legislation that infringes upon the 10th Amendment rights of Texas, should be ignored, opposed, refused, and nullified.”
“Regulation of Commerce in Article I Section 8 of the Constitution has exceeded the original intent. All attempts by the federal judiciary to rule in areas not expressly enumerated by the United States Constitution should be likewise nullified.”
Elected Republicans, including the governor and the Republican-controlled legislature, have tended to ignore calls for a standoff with the federal government.
An example of this is abortion. One wing of the Texas GOP wants to “ignore and refuse to enforce any and all federal statutes, regulations, executive orders, and court rulings that would deprive an unborn child of the right to life,” according to the 2018 platform.
Another wing of the party has tried to enact incremental restrictions that roll back abortion, while waiting for the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse itself on Roe v. Wade. The Texas House judiciary committee chair, Jeff Leach, is representative of this perspective. In April 2019, he blocked a bill banning all abortions, over the objections of more militant grassroots conservatives.
Greenwood, the Bastrop County chair, commented that delegates knew that the state couldn’t set up an electoral college overnight. She said, “Over the weekend, I chatted with some of our delegates as we had a watch party for the state convention and they were very enthusiastic about establishing a state based electoral college but also understood that it would take several years to establish one.”
For their part, Texas Democrats are portraying the recently completed Republican convention as rife with infighting and a display of incompetence, owing to technical glitches, and because the party had voted to hold an in-person convention, before being blocked by local officials from doing so, on the basis of coronavirus health restrictions.
Texas Democratic Party Communications Director Abhi Rahman said the GOP has failed to build an “inclusive, welcoming party.” He called the Texas GOP “a party that is tethered to Donald Trump, losing members, and doesn’t have the infrastructure or organization to compete in the 21st century.”
Democrats this year are hoping to flip the Texas House. Provided that Republicans retain control the state senate, they would be able to block Democrats from enacting a legislative agenda, but also would have to compromise with them on congressional redistricting, a process that takes place every ten years.
The governorship this year is not being contested.
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