Texas's 1st congressional district

Texas's First congressional district in the United States House of Representatives is a Congressional district that serves the northeastern portion of the state of Texas. As of the 2000 Census, the First District represents 651,619 people. It consists largely of three small East Texas metropolitan areas—Lufkin-Nacogdoches, in the south, Longview-Marshall, and Tyler.

Contents

• 2012 redistricting
• Recent election results
• Demographics
• References

The First District once encompassed large parts of North Texas and Central Texas, but as the population of Texas grew, the district got smaller until it only encompassed about half of Northeast Texas.

For most of its history, the district was based in Texarkana. However, in a controversial 2003 redistricting orchestrated by then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Texarkana was drawn out of the district and moved to the neighboring Fourth congressional district. Lufkin, Tyler and Longview were added in its place.

The district was predominantly rural for much of its history, and thus was far friendlier to electing Democrats to Congress even as most of Texas swung toward the Republicans. The district's four-term Democratic incumbent, Max Sandlin, was a particularly severe critic of the DeLay-led redistricting effort, claiming that lumping rural areas with urban ones stifled the voice of rural voters. Indeed, the 2003 redistricting made the district more urban and Republican, especially with the addition of the Republican strongholds of Tyler and Longview. Sandlin was heavily defeated in November 2004 by Republican Louie Gohmert, a longtime judge in the Tyler area. Gohmert is the first Republican to represent the district since Reconstruction. Proving just how Republican the reconfigured 1st was, Gohmert has been reelected five times with no less than 68 percent of the vote (and faced only token opposition in 2010 and 2012).

The district's best-known congressman, Wright Patman, represented the district for 47 years — the second-longest tenure of anyone in Congress from Texas. He was an early supporter of the New Deal, and later chaired the House Banking Committee for 12 years.