Texas's 17th congressional district


Texas's 17th congressional district of the United States House of Representatives includes a strip of central Texas stretching from Waco to Bryan-College Station, including former President George W. Bush's McLennan County ranch. The district is currently represented by Republican Bill Flores.
From 2005 to 2013, it was an oblong district stretching from south of Tarrant County to Grimes County in the southeast. The 2012 redistricting made its area more square, removing the northern and southeastern portions, adding areas southwest into the northern Austin suburbs and east into Freestone and Leon counties. The district includes two major universities, Texas A&M University in College Station and Baylor University in Waco.
Before 2005, the district stretched from the Abilene area to the outer western fringes of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

Representation

After the 2003 Texas redistricting, engineered by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, TX-17 was the most heavily Republican district in the nation to be represented by a Democrat, according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index, which rated it R+20. The district was drawn to make it Republican-dominated and unseat its longtime incumbent, conservative Democrat Chet Edwards. While several of his colleagues were defeated by Republicans in 2004, Edwards held on to the seat in the 2004, 2006 and 2008 elections.
But in the 2010 Congressional elections, the district elected Republican Bill Flores over Edwards by a margin of 61.8% to 36.6%. Flores was the first Republican to be elected to represent the district since its creation in 1919. This reflected the disfranchisement of minority voters at the turn of the century, and the Solid South political dominance of the Democratic Party, which was long made up of white conservatives in Texas. At that time white conservatives predominately belonged to the Democratic Party. They dominated that district by population and by suppressing Republican opposition among its minority supporters.
After passage of civil rights legislation and other changes, through the late 20th and early 21st centuries, white conservatives began to shift into the Republican Party in Texas. They first supported presidential candidates, and gradually more Republicans for local, state and national office, resulting in Flores's victory.

List of members representing the district

Election results

Historical district boundaries