Case Study 1 — A Model Democracy Audit Deliverable: Texas's Imaginary 7th District

This case study is a worked example, not a real district. The "Texas 7" referenced here is composite — drawn from features of several real Sun Belt districts but altered enough that it does not correspond to any actual congressional seat. The composite is necessary because publishing a model audit of a real district would lock the example into a single political position; the composite lets us walk through what a model deliverable looks like across the twelve sections without endorsing any current incumbent. Treat this as a template. Your own district's audit will look different — different specifics, different data points, different tensions — but the structure should be familiar.

Section 1 — The District

Texas's imaginary 7th congressional district sits in the inner suburbs of a major metropolitan area. Its boundaries enclose roughly 770,000 residents, the standard House-district size. The district is racially and ethnically diverse: roughly 38 percent non-Hispanic white, 28 percent Hispanic of any race, 18 percent non-Hispanic Black, 13 percent Asian-American, and 3 percent multiracial or other. Median household income runs slightly above the state median; college-completion rates run materially above the state average. The district contains two large hospital systems, a regional university, several corporate headquarters in technology and energy services, and a large cluster of small-business retail and services. The district's geography includes both inner-ring 1950s-era suburbs and outer-ring 1990s-and-later master-planned communities. Boundaries were last redrawn in the 2021 cycle following the 2020 Census.

Section 2 — Constitutional Position

The district is one of 38 House districts in Texas, the second-largest state delegation. Texas's two senators serve six-year staggered terms; both are currently of the same party, which has held both Texas Senate seats since 2002. The state's Electoral College allocation is 40 votes (38 House plus 2 Senate), making it the second-largest single-state prize after California. Texas is a former Voting Rights Act preclearance state under §5 (no longer required after Shelby County v. Holder, 2013). The district has not been the subject of post-2013 §2 voting-rights litigation, though parts of the surrounding state are subject to ongoing litigation over redistricting. The district is not adjacent to any tribal-sovereignty land or interstate water-compact boundary.

Section 3 — Your Representative

The current House member, by composite construction, was first elected in 2018, won reelection in 2020 and 2022, and won reelection in 2024 with a final margin of 4.8 percentage points (a competitive but not toss-up district). She serves on House Energy and Commerce (a high-prestige committee for a district with energy-services and healthcare clusters) and on Education and the Workforce. Her party-unity score in the most recent Congress was 91 percent — high but not maximal; she has occasionally voted against her party on infrastructure, semiconductor industrial policy, and a small number of cultural-issue votes where she has staked out a position to the center of her caucus. She has introduced eleven bills as primary sponsor in the current Congress; one has advanced out of committee, none has reached the House floor. Her press releases emphasize bipartisan work on healthcare costs and workforce training; her voting record is more party-aligned than the press releases suggest, which is the gap a careful audit surfaces.

Section 4 — The Institutions

Federal presence in the district includes a regional VA outpatient clinic, two Social Security field offices, the regional headquarters of a Department of Energy contractor, and substantial federal research grants flowing to the regional university. State institutions are visible in the form of the state university system, the state Department of Transportation, and the state's Medicaid program (Texas has not expanded Medicaid under the ACA, an issue the audit notes for Section 11). Local institutions include the city government, the county government (the district crosses two counties), several independent school districts, and a regional mass-transit authority. Federalism is visible in the audit through the patchwork of programs and the active intergovernmental tension over Medicaid expansion, which has been a recurring issue in the representative's healthcare policy work.

Section 5 — The Voters

Roughly 76 percent of the district's voting-age citizens are registered. Turnout in 2024 was 71 percent of registered voters in the presidential general (a high mark by historical standards); turnout in the most recent midterm was 51 percent; turnout in the spring 2024 primaries was 19 percent of registered voters across both parties. The active electorate is whiter and older than the district's adult population; Hispanic registration runs about 12 points below white registration. Turnout among voters under 30 ran 22 points below voters over 65 in the most recent election. These gaps are typical of Sun Belt suburban districts and are central to the district's competitive dynamics: a one-percentage-point change in the youth-and-Hispanic turnout share would shift the partisan balance.

Section 6 — Money

The 2024 House race in the district saw $14.7 million in direct campaign spending across both major-party candidates (incumbent: $7.9M; challenger: $6.8M). Outside spending added approximately $11.2M, bringing the total to roughly $25.9M — making the race one of the more expensive House contests of the cycle. The incumbent's top contributing industries, by FEC disclosure, were healthcare, financial services, and pharmaceuticals; the challenger's were lawyers/lobbyists, retired persons, and education. About 18 percent of the incumbent's contributions came from in-state donors; about 12 percent of the challenger's. Small-donor share (under $200): roughly 24 percent for the incumbent, 31 percent for the challenger. These numbers, drawn from FEC data accessed through OpenSecrets.org, illustrate the access dynamic Chapter 33 examined: top-industry donors received substantially more meeting time with the incumbent's office, by the office's own published meeting calendar, than non-donor district constituents.

Section 7 — Media

The district is covered by one daily metropolitan newspaper (regional, with declining but still substantial print and digital subscription bases), two local broadcast television stations whose news divisions cover state politics intermittently, three local talk-radio stations of differing political character, and a regional public-radio station whose news coverage is widely respected across partisan lines. National media cover the incumbent occasionally, primarily during the election cycle. Digital and social-media coverage of district affairs is fragmented across Facebook neighborhood groups, Nextdoor, two regional political podcasts (one left-coded, one right-coded), and several Substack newsletters covering Texas politics. The audit notes that the regional public-radio station and the metropolitan newspaper are the two most reliable sources for sustained, sourced coverage of the district's local-government activity. Both are paid-subscription supported in part. Subscribing to either is a Section 12 action.

Section 8 — Interest Groups

Active organized interests in the district include the regional chamber of commerce; two healthcare industry associations (hospital systems and pharmaceutical); the state's largest teacher's union with a local; the local diocese's Catholic Charities and several Protestant denominational networks active on housing and refugee-resettlement issues; the local affiliate of an environmental advocacy organization; the regional firearms-owners association; the local Hispanic chamber of commerce; an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization with a regional office; a tea-party-aligned local activist network that has been active since 2010; and a progressive housing-affordability advocacy group founded in 2019. The associational ecology of the district is, by Tocquevillian standards, robust; the audit identifies fifteen named organizations that an engaged citizen could plausibly join.

Section 9 — Polarization

The district is partisan-competitive at the general-election level (recent margins between 2 and 6 points) but each party's primary is dominated by its more ideological wing. Sorting in the district is moderate: there are visible majority-Democratic neighborhoods and majority-Republican neighborhoods, but several precincts are nearly evenly split. Affective polarization, measured through available state-level surveys, has tracked the national upward trend over the past decade. The audit notes that cross-cutting institutions — the regional university, the major employers, the larger churches, the youth-sports leagues — still bring residents from both parties into regular sustained contact, which is a source of resilience against the more extreme effects of national polarization.

Section 10 — Democratic Stress

The district shows several stress signals consistent with national trends. Two school-board races in 2022 and 2023 saw threats against board members serious enough to require police presence at meetings. Two county-level election workers in the broader region resigned in 2021–22 citing harassment. The 2024 primary in one of the surrounding districts saw an organized challenge to the certification of results that was rejected by both county election officials and state courts. None of these signals is unique to this district; the audit lists them not to alarm but to give the engaged citizen a clear picture of where additional civic attention is currently needed.

Section 11 — Reforms

The reform menu most relevant to this district, ranked from feasible to ambitious: (1) civic-association investment and local-journalism support (already feasible, citizen-driven); (2) state-level adoption of automatic voter registration (currently not enacted in Texas; would require legislative action); (3) state-level same-day registration (not enacted); (4) ballot-initiative reform allowing citizens to ballot-initiate certain changes (Texas does not currently allow statewide citizen ballot initiatives, a structural fact about the state's politics); (5) Medicaid expansion under the ACA (state-legislative); (6) federal voting-rights legislation expanding §2 enforcement (federal); (7) campaign-finance disclosure improvements (federal and state). The audit deliberately includes reforms across the political spectrum and notes which ones have local organized support.

Section 12 — Civic Engagement Opportunities

The audit closes with a list of concrete actions, with dates and contact information.

• The next county-commission meeting is the second Tuesday of next month at 9:30am at the county administration building; public-comment sign-up opens at 9:00am.
• The next school-board meeting (for the audit-author's district) is the third Monday of next month at 7pm at the district administration building.
• The state primary election registration deadline is approximately thirty days before the primary; the state's online registration portal is at [state SOS website]. Early voting begins eleven days before election day.
• Three named civic associations the auditor is considering joining, with meeting schedules and contact information.
• Local-journalism subscription: [metropolitan newspaper] at $X/month, [regional public radio] at $X/month suggested membership.
• One bill currently before the U.S. House (with bill number) on which the auditor intends to write a personal letter to the representative.
• Two cross-partisan relationships in the auditor's life that have weakened over the past three years and that the auditor intends to invest in.

What the cross-chapter analysis reveals

The integration of the twelve sections produces several insights that no single chapter would have surfaced:

• The gap between the representative's press-release profile (bipartisan healthcare focus) and her voting record (party-unity 91 percent) is detectable only by reading committee testimony, GovTrack roll-call data, and FEC disclosure together. A constituent reading only press releases would have a skewed picture; a constituent reading only voting-record data would miss the genuine areas of cross-partisan work.
• The competitiveness of the district at the general-election level is real but smaller than national-media framing suggests; the more consequential election in the next cycle, given the shape of the primary calendar and the field of announced challengers, may turn out to be the dominant party's primary.
• The civic-association ecology is robust enough to support substantial engagement on either side of the political spectrum without requiring the citizen to invent new institutions; the existing infrastructure is the engagement opportunity.
• The local-journalism ecosystem is functional but precarious; one of the two reliable sources is a paid newspaper whose subscription base has declined substantially over the past decade, making citizen subscription itself a civic-engagement act.

What this template gives you

If your own audit looks like this — twelve sections, sourced, specific, with a Section 12 list of dated actions — you have a working document for your civic life. Update it after each election. Update it when your representative changes, when district boundaries change after the next decennial census, when major reforms pass or fail. The audit is not finished when you submit it for a grade; it is a living document. Five years from now, the version you produce in this class will be substantially out of date. The skill of producing it will not be.