Texas's 13th congressional district
Texas
In 2012, Barack Obama got a smaller share of the vote here than in any other congressional district in the country.
Barack Obama's worst congressional district in the entire country was this one. In 2012 he took just over eighteen percent of the vote here. Four years later Hillary Clinton did worse, gathering about seventeen percent against Donald Trump's roughly eighty. Only one district in the nation, in Alabama, beat her by a wider margin. The district covers most of the Texas Panhandle and stretches east across the Red River Valley, more than forty thousand square miles in all. That makes it the nineteenth largest district in the country. Amarillo, Gainesville and Wichita Falls are the main cities. The partisan rating sits at R plus twenty-four. In most recent elections the sitting congressman has run unopposed, or faced only a third-party candidate, and still cleared seventy percent of the vote.
This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
In 2012, Barack Obama took just 18.5% of the vote in the 13th, his lowest percentage of any congressional district in the nation.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Nearby, on the same roads
- Memphis, Texas 8.3 mi Trains wouldn't stop here, so townspeople smeared the rails with lye soap until the railroad gave in.
- Clarendon, Texas 18 mi Cowboys called this town Saints Roost, because a Methodist preacher built it to be dry.
- Estelline, Texas 22 mi A town of about a hundred and twenty people got nearly ninety percent of its money from traffic fines and seized property.
- Childress, Texas 35.7 mi The man who wrote the Texas Declaration of Independence had been dead more than forty years before this town took his name.
- Acme, Texas 56.9 mi Miners digging gypsum here turned up mastodon fossils.