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| Elections in Texas |
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 Government |
The 1972 Texas Senate elections took place as part of the biennial United States elections. Texas voters elected state senators in all 31 State Senate districts. The winners of this election served in the 63rd Texas Legislature, serving staggered terms, with half of them up for election in 1974 and the other half up in 1976.
Democrats had controlled the Texas Senate since the 1872 elections. [1] In 1971, a number of high-profile Democratic politicians came under scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission for alleged illegal stock trading. The ensuing scandal, which became known as the Sharpstown stock-fraud scandal, enveloped figures such as governor Preston Smith, lieutenant governor Ben Barnes, and House Speaker Gus Mutscher. Mutscher, among others, would later be convicted for his part in the scandal. [2]
The legislature failed to pass new districts for the Senate during its regular session, and they did not pass them during the subsequent special session, either. This forced the Legislative Redistricting Board, made up of four statewide elected officials and the Speaker of the House, to convene for the first time to draw them, instead. [3] The board had been established by a 1948 constitutional amendment passed in response to the legislature's failure to redraw state legislative boundaries after the 1930 or 1940 censuses. [4] [5] The board was made up entirely of Democrats, and they passed a map that was gerrymandered to favor them. [6] The map drew two lawsuits, one by Republicans who challenged the districts in Bexar County, and another by Dallas Democrat Curtis Graves, who argued the districts in Harris County illegally diluted the votes of minority voters. These lawsuits were consolidated with two other suits against the board's map for the House of Representatives under Graves v. Barnes. The district court denied both claims, upholding the board's map, a decision which would later be upheld by the U. S. Supreme Court in Archer v. Smith. [7]
The Sharpstown scandal rocked both the primary and general elections. Reform-minded candidates, both Democrats and Republicans, ousted dozens of incumbents across both chambers. Of the 31 seats up for election to the Senate, 15 elected new members. Alongside Republican Richard Nixon's landslide victory in the concurrent presidential election, Republicans gained one seat, reducing the Democratic supermajority to 28 out of 31 seats. [8]
