Texas 5th District

Not all of Dallas is glitz and postmodern marble. East of downtown, on one of the three street grids that skew to each other, is an older Dallas with neighborhoods of old mansions, modest bungalows and shotgun houses. They extend past the old airport at Love Field, and past the State Fair Grounds and the Cotton Bowl in east Dallas. Some of this older section of Dallas is being renovated and rebuilt, with chic cafes and trendy stores. Other once middle-class neighborhoods are filling up with immigrants from Mexico and are once again noisy with children as they were in the 1950s when people moved here not from Mexico or Central America, but from the almost all-Anglo counties of north and central Texas. With the economic downturn and the scarcity of jobs, some of them are returning to Mexico.

The 5th Congressional District includes much of east and southeast Dallas County, including neighborhoods in east Dallas and suburban Mesquite, which has become a destination for immigrants moving up the economic ladder. It also covers a more upscale slice of Dallas inside the freeway, including parts of Lakewood and White Rock Lake, which was rescued by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps during the New Deal. Nearly half of the district’s population is in Dallas County. The 5th contains six counties in East Texas, the largest of which are Henderson and Kaufman, which are the next high-growth areas in the Metroplex. One of the booming small towns is Forney, which has become a destination for young families. Each of the outlying counties is more heavily Republican than the Dallas portion of the district. As rural areas have swung away from the Democrats, the district switched from being a battleground in the early 1990s to safely Republican. In 2008, GOP presidential nominee John McCain won 63% of the vote in the district and 53% in Dallas County.