Texas 6th District

The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex—a name even the locals use—has spread outward from its historic nodes in downtown Dallas and downtown Fort Worth. Although Dallas is the larger population center, much of the development has moved west, across the plains and the barely perceptible Balcones Escarpment, the geologist’s boundary between green and grassy East Texas and brown, barren and hilly West. The plains have been filled in with subdivisions and shopping centers under the enormous Texas sky. Among the larger suburbs is Arlington, right between Dallas and Fort Worth and an easy highway commute to both cities. Its location has made it ideal as a site for regional attractions like Six Flags over Texas and the Ballpark in Arlington, commissioned by the former part-owner of the Texas Rangers, George W. Bush. In 2009, the Dallas Cowboys football team opened a new stadium in Arlington. The city’s population of 371,000 in 2007 was 26% Hispanic, 17% African-American and 6% Asian. Arlington provides extra pay to police officers who can speak Spanish or Vietnamese. As Arlington has filled up, the big growth now is to the south in Mansfield, where the population increased 76% from 2000 to 2007, and in Crowley. Growth in the area has been so robust that Tarrant County, the third-largest county in Texas, was the 18th largest in the country in 2007.

The 6th Congressional District of Texas includes all of Arlington and the southern fringe of Fort Worth to the west. Two-thirds of its people live in Arlington and Tarrant County. Much of the rest are in Ellis County, directly south of Dallas County, which has grown 24% since 2000. The district includes all or part of six counties to the southeast, reaching most of the way to Houston. Politically, this territory was ancestrally Democratic for many years, but no longer. It twice voted for Republican native son George W. Bush with 66%, and it voted for Republican nominee John McCain in 2008 with 60% of the vote.