Election 2014

Endorsement watch: Stay the course

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Harris County Democrats have one incumbent up for re-election: County Attorney Vince Ryan. The Chron gives their approval for another term.

Vince Ryan

[Ryan] said that he actively pursues pollution enforcement lawsuits against big companies – such as Volkswagen after it lied about emissions tests, or the corporations responsible for the San Jacinto waste pits. But in a state where legislators and regulators routinely erect barriers to citizens seeking justice from the industries that poison our water and pollute our air, Ryan’s headlines over matters of public concern look more like necessary leadership than disregard for cooperation.

That’s not to say Ryan hasn’t been an important team player with other law enforcement agencies across the county. He’s harnessed the power of the county attorney’s office to go after dangerous gangs, sex traffickers and Kush merchants. He also helped the county cut through the Gordian Knot of same-sex marriage by quickly and clearly instructing judges to follow the U.S. Supreme Court after it held bans to be unconstitutionally discriminatory, yet refrained from hounding individual county employees who preferred to pass onto their coworkers the historic duty of marrying same-sex couples.

Running for his third term, the former District C councilman and longtime assistant under former County Attorney Mike Driscoll brings a steady and experienced hand to an important position that has a vast spectrum of responsibilities, including advising county officials, preparing contracts, defending the county from lawsuits and protecting communities through civil action. He’s served the county well, and voters should keep him in office.

Other than some judges, Vince Ryan is the only Democrat elected countywide in 2008 to remain in office. Loren Jackson, who won a special election to fill the remaining term of District Clerk, lost in the 2010 sweep. HCDE At Large trustees Jim Henley, who resigned in 2014, and Debra Kerner, who lost in 2014, and Adrian Garcia, who stepped down as Sheriff to run for Mayor in 2015, followed. I feel pretty good about the Dems’ chances of adding to that roster this year, but it starts with Vince Ryan.

Voter ID may have had broader effects than we thought

Aug 11th, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Interesting.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Texas’ strict voter identification requirements kept many would-be voters in a Hispanic-majority congressional district from going to the polls last November — including many who had proper IDs — a new survey shows.

And the state’s voter ID law – coupled with lackluster voter education efforts – might have shaped the outcome of a congressional race, the research suggests.

Released on Thursday, the 50th anniversary of the federal Voting Rights Act, the joint Rice University and University of Houston study found that 13 percent of those registered in the 23rd Congressional District and did not vote stayed home, at least partly, because they thought they lacked proper ID under a state law considered the strictest in the nation. And nearly 6 percent did not vote primarily because of the requirements.

But most of those discouraged Texans had the proper documents to vote, says the study, which came one day after a federal appeals court ruled that the four-year-old Texas law has a “discriminatory effect” on Hispanics and African-Americans.

The researchers surveyed 400 people who registered but did not vote in the 29-county district, which stretches from San Antonio to El Paso and along a large slice of the Texas-Mexico border. The study found that less than 3 percent lacked proper identification during November’s election.

“The voter ID law depressed turnout in the 2014 election, but it did so primarily through confusion, not through actually keeping people without IDs from voting,” said Mark Jones, a professor at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and an author of the study.

[…]

“The voter ID law depressed turnout in the 2014 election, but it did so primarily through confusion, not through actually keeping people without IDs from voting,” said Mark Jones, a professor at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and an author of the study.

The law requires most citizens (some, like people with disabilities, can be exempt) to show one of a handful of forms of allowable photo identification before their election ballots can be counted. Acceptable forms include a state driver’s license or ID card that is not more than 60 days expired at the time of voting, a concealed handgun license, a U.S. passport, a military ID card or a U.S citizenship certificate with a photo. The acceptable list is shorter than any other state’s.

The new study suggests that the state’s effort to educate voters about the requirement – which included postings on the secretary of state’s website – fell flat.

“It was a very limited education campaign in CD-23,” Jones said. “Most voters who are confused by the voter ID law don’t regularly go to the secretary of state’s website to see what’s new.”

The secretary of state’s office took issue with that description, saying it spent $2 million on voter education efforts statewide on radio, television and print advertising among other outreach efforts.

But Democrats and other outspoken opponents of the law may have also contributed to the problem, seeing their criticism boomerang into confusion for would-be voters, Jones added.

“If the message they received was that there’s this new strict voter ID law, but they didn’t receive the second part — of what the several forms of ID are — that may have caused part of the problem,” he said.

The voters of CD23 were picked for this study because it was one of the few truly close races in the state last year. I’d like to see the result of a similar study over a wider portion of the state, perhaps with a bigger sample. I don’t doubt that some people were confused, for all the reasons stated. But let’s not kid ourselves, this was a feature and not a bug. As we’ve discussed many times before, there were lots of things the Lege could have done to mitigate the effects of this law – allowing more forms of ID, having more DPS locations for the EICs, doing real outreach and education to voters – but this was what we got. It’s why the Fifth Circuit ruled the way it did on the voter ID appeal. The real surprise would have been if there had been no confusion at all. Hair Balls and ThinkProgress have more.

Precinct analysis: Abbott versus Perry in Latino districts

Mar 30th, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

5 comments

District level election data for 2014 has been available for a few weeks now. Seems like as good a time as any to return to a favorite topic, namely how Greg Abbott did in heavily Latino areas. An exit poll from November claimed Abbott drew 44% of the Latino vote, which would be a very impressive accomplishment. My complaint whenever I read a story like that is that no one ever bothers to go back and check the actual election results later to see if that kind of number makes sense. No one but me, of course, because I’m a crank about that sort of thing. Now that we have this data, how does it look? Here’s a comparison to Rick Perry in 2010 in the most heavily Latino districts:


Dist   SSVR%   Perry   Abbott
=============================
031   76.46%  42.01%   44.80%
035   76.58%  37.19%   39.11%
036   87.34%  29.55%   31.21%
037   81.21%  36.96%   38.13%
038   80.92%  39.11%   40.39%
039   85.14%  27.03%   32.12%
040   88.14%  25.37%   28.59%
041   71.98%  46.69%   47.84%
042   88.70%  22.58%   29.69%
075   83.70%  29.04%   30.84%
076   84.73%  23.57%   24.32%
079   72.70%  38.89%   39.26%
080   80.84%  34.79%   37.78%

SSVR data is from here. I’d like to think that this would put those 44% assertions to rest, but I know better by now. Abbott clearly did better than Perry, though by only a point or two in most districts. Some of that may simply be due to Perry doing worse overall than Abbott. Still, his actual number among Latino voters is nothing to sneeze at. But as I’ve said before, while the actual results provide a reality check on exit polls and from-the-ether assertions, they’re more suggestive than conclusive. We don’t know what percentage of actual voters in these districts was Latino. To see what I mean, consider a district with 10,000 voters and an SSVR of 80%. Imagine also that Abbott gets 70% of the Anglo vote, which is likely to be at least what Abbott would need to get to almost 60% overall. How does the vote break down if Abbott scored 40% (i.e., 4,000 votes) in that district?

If the actual mix of voters is 80% Latino and 20% Anglo, then Abbott got 1,400 Anglo votes, which means he needs 2,600 Latino votes to get to 40% overall. 2,600 votes out of 8,000 is 32.5%.

If the actual mix of voters is 70% Latino and 30% Anglo, then Abbott got 2,100 Anglo votes, which means he needs 1,900 Latino votes to get to 40% overall. 1,900 votes out of 8,000 is 23.75%.

Basically, the share of the Anglo vote, even though it is relatively small in a district like this, has a large effect on the share of the Latino vote. Changing the assumption that Abbott got 60% of the Anglo vote in this district instead of 70% doesn’t make that much difference. In scenario 1, Abbott needs 2,800 Latino votes instead of 2,600, or 35%. In scenario 2, it’s 2,200 instead of 1,900, or 31.4%. Even in a scenario where you assume the Latino vote exceeds the SSVR%, you get the same kind of result. In a 90/10 situation with a 70% Anglo vote, the corresponding Latino percentage is 36.7%; with a 60% Anglo vote, it’s 37.8%. The only way for the Latino vote percentage to be higher than the overall percentage is if the Anglo vote is less than the overall. I suppose it’s possible Abbott could fail to break 40% of the vote in these districts, but I’ve yet to see anyone offer objective evidence of it. Therefore, the numbers I present above represent the upper bound for Abbott among Latinos in these districts. Anyone who wants to claim otherwise needs to show me the numbers.

(To be completely fair, one scenario under which the Latino vote could be higher than the overall would be if some other segment of the electorate was voting disproportionately against Abbott. A significant portion of African-American voters in these districts could do that. Take the first scenario above and change the voter demography to 80% Latino, 10% African-American, and 10% Anglo. Now assume a 70% Anglo vote for Abbott and 10% A-A vote for him. With those assumptions, 3,200 Latino votes are needed to get to 40% overall, and as it happens that’s a 40% share of the Latino vote. However, in the districts above, the largest African-American population is four percent; it’s less than one percent in most of them. As such, this variation pretty much can’t exist.)

Another way we can look at this is to see if other Republicans did better in these districts as well, or if the effect was limited to Abbott. For that, we turn to a comparison of David Dewhurst in 2010 to Dan Patrick.


Dist   SSVR%     Dew  Patrick
=============================
031   76.46%  45.47%   40.46%
035   76.58%  37.99%   34.86%
036   87.34%  29.04%   26.67%
037   81.21%  35.77%   33.85%
038   80.92%  38.91%   35.40%
039   85.14%  26.44%   27.50%
040   88.14%  25.11%   23.00%
041   71.98%  48.27%   42.16%
042   88.70%  24.68%   23.67%
075   83.70%  30.16%   29.72%
076   84.73%  24.67%   23.37%
079   72.70%  41.50%   37.98%
080   80.84%  35.40%   34.59%

With the exception of HD39, Dewhurst did better than Patrick. Obviously, Dewhurst did better overall than Perry, while Patrick was roughly equivalent to Abbott. That suggests that while Abbott may have improved on Perry’s performance, he wasn’t necessarily a rising tide. To be sure of that, we should compare him directly to his comrades on the ballot. I’ve thrown in Perry as well for some perspective.


Dist   Abbott    Perry  Patrick   Paxton    Hegar     Bush
==========================================================
031    44.08%   42.01%   40.46%   41.36%   40.97%   45.24%
035    39.11%   37.19%   34.86%   35.93%   35.70%   39.45%
036    31.21%   29.55%   26.67%   27.89%   28.06%   32.42%
037    38.13%   36.96%   33.85%   34.16%   34.13%   39.77%
038    40.39%   39.11%   35.40%   36.30%   36.15%   41.98%
039    32.12%   27.03%   27.50%   28.58%   28.68%   33.18%
040    28.59%   25.37%   23.00%   23.92%   24.24%   29.45%
041    47.84%   46.69%   42.16%   44.51%   44.77%   49.92%
042    29.69%   22.58%   23.67%   22.48%   23.40%   33.23%
075    30.84%   29.04%   29.72%   29.33%   29.21%   28.75%
076    24.32%   23.57%   23.37%   23.52%   22.91%   24.76%
079    39.26%   38.89%   37.98%   37.94%   37.41%   37.76%
080    37.78%   34.79%   34.59%   34.14%   33.71%   39.13%

A few observations:

– Clearly, Abbott did better in these districts than anyone except Baby Bush. Playing up their own Latino connections – wife in Abbott’s case, mother in Bush’s – helped them, at least to some extent. We have seen this before, with several other candidates – Ted Cruz, Eva Guzman, Hector Uribe, and as you can see above, Leticia Van de Putte. The effect isn’t much – a couple of points – but it exists. It should be noted that since these candidates’ overall totals don’t differ much from their ballotmates’, there’s an equivalent but opposite effect elsewhere. Just something to keep in mind.

– Note that the effect for Abbott was greater in South Texas and the Valley, and lesser in El Paso (HDs 75, 76, and 79). Bush also did worse in El Paso, no doubt due at least in part to having former El Paso Mayor John Cook as his opponent. Consider this a reminder that the Latino electorate is not monolithic, even within the same nationality. What works well here may not be as effective there. This should be obvious, but I feel like we all sometimes act as if that’s not the case, and yes I include myself in that.

– Along those lines, I wish that the SSVRs were high enough in the urban Latino districts to include them here, but they’re not really comparable. Having written that, I’m now curious enough to do that comparison in another post, just to see what I get.

– At the end of the day, Greg Abbott in 2014 was a lesser known quantity than Rick Perry in 2010. He had a chance to introduce himself as a more or less clean slate. That won’t be the case in 2018, if Abbott is on the ballot for re-election. He’ll have a record to defend, for good or bad. We’ll see how much his wife and madrina can help him then.

BGTX’s self-assessment

Mar 5th, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Texas Monthly has a good overview of where Battleground Texas stands – and where the people inside it think they stand – two years and one electoral beatdown into their existence.

Still, it’s the winners who write the history books. In the meantime, the losers have some explaining to do. With that in mind, last week I traveled to Austin and spent two days in the company of Battleground Texas’s senior staff: Bird, Brown, Lucio, communications director Erica Sackin, political director Cliff Walker, digital director Christina Gomez, legal director Mimi Marziani, and fundraising director Adrienne Donato. I had interviewed most of them in Battleground’s earlier, happier times. As a species, field organizers tend to be sunny, even gratingly so (where political journalists are uniformly sullen), and that remained in force at their new offices on 1519 E. Cesar Chavez. The disaster in November has not caused them to second-guess the group’s core premise that Texas can one day turn blue. “The fundamental underlying demographics of Texas, people who are unregistered, the number of Democrats who voted in previous elections but not this one—taken together, it’s enough to win,” Jenn Brown told me. The theory that increased turnout in Texas will help its minority party would seem to be confirmed by the ruling party’s determination to make voting in Texas more difficult than elsewhere in America (about which more later).

Nonetheless, I could detect a whiff of humility among the group, albeit one mingled with defiance. In the first two years of its life, Battleground had received about $10 million in donations. Post-defeat, it would now have to get by with a fraction of that sum. It was in that somewhat wounded posture that the group discussed with me those areas where they must improve in order to have any relevance in future election

It’s a good read, and I encourage you to check it out. I came away from it with a fair amount of optimism that the hard-won lessons of 2014 were in fact learned, and future efforts will yield better results. A lot of things went wrong last year, some due to circumstance, some to inexperience, some to too many people who should be working together working instead at cross purposes. I’m glad they’re sticking it out for the longer term. Someone has to, and besides as I’ve said before, there are still plenty of opportunities to get involved this year and make a difference in local elections. Pasadena is one, but it’s far from the only one. There will be plenty of opportunities to make gains at the local level next year as well. BGTX has some work to do to mend fences and prove that they’ve learned from last year’s debacle – as the Trib reported last month, they spent a lot of time going around talking to volunteers and donors and whoever else would listen about those thing. But it’s not all on them. Ben Franklin’s words about hanging together or hanging separately ring as true now as ever. We are all on the same team. We should act like it. Trail Blazers has more.

Gilbert Pena

Jan 4th, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Let the man have his victory lap, but let’s not read more into his victory than there is.

Gilbert Pena

By the time Harris County’s conservative leaders fished for their car keys at their Election Night watch party, there were few candidates left to congratulate. Nearly every Republican had won, and each had earned a handshake or name-check from the movement’s political class. Every one, that is, but Gilbert Pena.

Pena finally had triumphed in his fifth run for political office to score the biggest local upset of the evening, but his name remained unsaid. Amid the post-election jubilation, the new state representative was unnoticed. Pena’s supporters would argue that’s because he had been underestimated – again.

“If you underestimate Gilbert Pena, you’re making a mistake,” said his treasurer, Bill Treneer.

Pena, an unassuming retiree derided as a perennial candidate by those Republican signal-callers, rode a GOP wave to oust Pasadena Rep. Mary Ann Perez by 155 votes in November. Pena struggled to woo any donors or political support – Perez’s war chest was 250 times the size of his – but the short and reserved man is used to upending how others perceive him.

The 65-year-old rose from a hardscrabble early life to become a new legislator thanks to ~~a work ethic that can make him impossible to ignore~~ off-year partisan voting tendencies.

I fixed that last sentence for you. Here are the average vote totals for statewide candidates in HD144 in the last four elections. Let’s see if a pattern emerges.


Year   Avg GOP  Avg Dem   GOP%   Dem%
=====================================
2008    10,899   12,813  46.0%  54.0%
2012    11,027   12,128  47.6%  52.4%

2010     7,887    7,367  51.7%  48.3%
2014     6,091    5,357  53.2%  46.8%

For what it’s worth, soon-to-be-former Rep. Mary Ann Perez was above average in each of the last two elections, receiving 12,446 votes in 2012 and 5,863 this year. Pena and 2012 candidate David Pineda were both a pinch below average, scoring 6,015 and 10,885, respectively. Maybe Pena will get the establishment support next year that he lacked (and won without) this year. Maybe some local opportunist will primary him out. Maybe the establishment will continue to be unimpressed with him and decide to spend their money elsewhere, on the assumption that turnout patterns will continue as before and they’d be wasting their money. Maybe Pena will vastly exceed expectations as a legislator and as a constituent service provider and will win re-election with or without establishment money. Who knows? The guy has a decent bio, and he has a chance to be an unconventional legislator, which is something we don’t see as much of as we once did. But there’s nothing unconventional about why he won.

We need to understand why our voters didn’t vote

Jan 3rd, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

So now we know that Battleground Texas wasn’t pursuing a base turnout-increase model for the 2014 election, for reasons that have not yet been adequately explored. I’m mad about that, but I don’t want to get bogged down in that. I want to learn from what happened and I want to move forward, in whatever form. I refuse to accept that the way things are now is the way they will always be. It’s just ten years ago that much (mostly virtual) ink was spilled about how hard it is for Democrats to win the Presidency, what with Republicans having such a lock on the Electoral College. Things are a bit different today, and I daresay they will continue to evolve, usually as a result of things most of us (though not all of us) didn’t see coming.

Basically, at a national level we have had two elections in which that “Emerging Democratic Majority” has held sway, and two in which they stayed home. Here in Texas, Democratic turnout was significantly higher in 2008 and 2012 than it was in 2004, but turnout in 2010 and 2014 was basically indistinguishable from 2002. Here’s that chart again from my previous post:


County     2002 GOP  2002 Dem  2010 GOP  2010 Dem  2014 GOP  2014 Dem
=====================================================================
Harris      330,801   272,032   423,275   334,098   358,425   299,255
Dallas      218,496   198,499   196,103   209,001   179,014   206,546
Bexar       133,733   124,129   161,443   131,397   156,144   134,876
Tarrant     195,384   125,416   208,976   123,200   213,812   138,944
Travis       93,524   110,026    95,431   127,803    91,372   155,335

County     2002 GOP  2002 Dem  2010 GOP  2010 Dem  2014 GOP  2014 Dem
=====================================================================
Harris       17.64%    14.50%    22.05%    17.42%    17.53%    14.64%
Dallas       18.08%    16.43%    17.13%    18.25%    14.83%    17.11%
Bexar        15.14%    14.05%    17.88%    14.55%    16.27%    14.06%
Tarrant      22.42%    14.39%    22.30%    13.15%    21.37%    13.89%
Travis       17.18%    20.22%    15.80%    21.16%    14.00%    23.81%

We can argue all we want about why Travis County is “different” and whether or not Battleground Texas had anything to do with it, but the fact remains that Travis is the only county to improve performance over 2002 and 2010. Harris County saw a huge improvement in Democratic turnout in 2010, and then it basically disappeared in 2014. What I want to know – what I hope everyone would want to know – is why this happened.

Look at those numbers. Some 35,000 people that voted Democratic in 2010 did not turn out at all in 2014. Forget the Presidential year/off year conundrum for a moment. What happened to those voters? Why didn’t they vote last year? Maybe it would be a good idea to take a sample of 400 or 500 of those didn’t-show-up voters, and call them and ask them that question. Why didn’t you vote this year? What if anything could we have done differently to have gotten you to vote? I don’t know about you, but I’d sure like to know the answer to those questions.

And why stop there? Nearly half of the people who generally voted Democratic in 2012 didn’t show up in 2014. That’s true in Harris County, and it’s true in the state of Texas as a whole. Maybe instead of cursing our fate we could contact some of those people and ask them why they didn’t vote this year. We probably won’t like a lot of the answers we’d get. Some will be nonsensical, some will be deeply frustrating, some will be of the “shit happens” variety. But at least if we knew what those answers were, maybe we could do better the next time. We might also check on some of those brand-newly registered voters, and as those that voted why they did, and those that didn’t why they didn’t. Wouldn’t that be nice to know?

As I see it, we can accept that our turnout sucks in non-Presidential years, as it has done in the entire history of the United States going all the way back to 2010, or we can try to understand it and maybe do something about it. I don’t care who tries to find out the answers to these questions – this isn’t a scientific poll, it shouldn’t be a big expense; hell, a half dozen or so volunteers could probably make the 500 calls needed to get a decent sample of answers in fairly short order – as long as they share the answers they get. We can try to learn about what happened, or we can just give up and nominate Jim Hogan for Governor in 2018 and save us all a lot of heartache. I know which choice I prefer.

On BGTX, Wendy Davis, and the future

Jan 2nd, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

5 comments

This has been a pretty busy Christmas break, as far as blog-worthy news has gone, so in order to preserve the small illusion that I’m taking a breather and recharging my batteries, I’m just going to give three quick thoughts on this Observer postmortem of the 2014 election and Battleground Texas, which you really should read.

1. I can’t tell you how stunned and disillusioned I am to read that their strategy for 2014 was a swing voter/crossover strategy, and not the base-building one that it sure sounded like they were going to do, and which was screamingly obvious we needed. I mean, even the most cursory review of election data for the past few cycles should have made this clear. The only semi-optimistic thing I can say about this is that I hope it proves, once and for all and beyond any semblance of a doubt, that nothing else matters in Democratic campaigning until we get our base turnout up. We had a huge leap forward from 2004 to 2008, then regressed a bit in 2012, but at least we made progress in Presidential years. Non-Presidential years have been a flat-lined albatross since 2002. I thought BGTX had figured this ridiculously easy insight out and was working on a plan to combat it. I can only hope they’ve figured it out now.

2. Much of the story is about friction between BGTX and the local and state Democratic parties and other organizations. I can’t speak to any of that – I get why the folks that were here first felt steamrolled, and I get why BGTX thought they could do things better – but I will say this: The story notes that in Travis County, there was a formal agreement between BGTX and the locals to work together. Well, if there was one honest success story in terms of performance in Texas in 2014, it was in Travis County. Here’s some data I’d collected for a post that I may or may not ever get around to finishing, about off-year turnout patterns in the five biggest urban counties:


County     2002 GOP  2002 Dem  2010 GOP  2010 Dem  2014 GOP  2014 Dem
=====================================================================
Harris      330,801   272,032   423,275   334,098   358,425   299,255
Dallas      218,496   198,499   196,103   209,001   179,014   206,546
Bexar       133,733   124,129   161,443   131,397   156,144   134,876
Tarrant     195,384   125,416   208,976   123,200   213,812   138,944
Travis       93,524   110,026    95,431   127,803    91,372   155,335

County     2002 GOP  2002 Dem  2010 GOP  2010 Dem  2014 GOP  2014 Dem
=====================================================================
Harris       17.64%    14.50%    22.05%    17.42%    17.53%    14.64%
Dallas       18.08%    16.43%    17.13%    18.25%    14.83%    17.11%
Bexar        15.14%    14.05%    17.88%    14.55%    16.27%    14.06%
Tarrant      22.42%    14.39%    22.30%    13.15%    21.37%    13.89%
Travis       17.18%    20.22%    15.80%    21.16%    14.00%    23.81%

The numbers in question are (for the top chart) the average vote totals for judicial candidates (*) in each year and for each party (I skipped 2006 because it was such an atypical down year for Republicans), and (for the bottom chart) the percentage of registered voters that each of those totals represents. As you can see, the only county with consistent growth, in terms of total numbers and share of registered voters, is Travis County. The Dallas County miracle is largely the result of the bottoming out of the Republican vote there; the Dem vote has grown somewhat, but not that much, and it backslid from 2010. Harris and Bexar are stuck in the mud, while Tarrant is still catching up to 2002. Whatever happened elsewhere in the state and with the Wendy Davis campaign, what happened in Travis County worked. We should learn from that.

(*) – These totals are from contested races only, for which there are a limited supply in Travis and Tarrant. I used statewide and circuit appeals court races in those counties in addition to the rare contested local judicial election; in Harris and Dallas I used district court races, and in Bexar I used district and county court races.

3. If I see any indication that BGTX plans to direct Texas volunteer effort and/or contributions to other states in 2016, I’m going to be very seriously pissed off. That’s not what we were promised, it’s not what anyone signed up for, and it’s not what we deserve. I don’t want to ever have to discuss this again.

As far as the story about Wendy Davis contemplating her political future, which I have not gotten around to reading yet but which Campos has, I see no reason why she can’t run again, whether it’s for SD10 in 2018 (she’d have as good a shot at it as anyone) or statewide again. Remember when we were all calling Rick Perry “Governor 39%”? Everyone had forgotten about that by the time 2010 rolled around. The public has a very short memory. As for Davis, if she has learned the lessons that should have been learned before this year, she might be a much stronger candidate next time out. Bottom line, she was a really good State Senator who won two tough races and served her district very well, and she’s only 51. I see no reason why she can’t have a second act.

A Denton fracking overview

Dec 26th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

The Trib has a long piece on the Denton fracking fight, also published in Politico to help non-Texans understand what this was about. It’s a good read that goes over all the main points if you need a refresher on the details. There are two bits of interest I’d like to highlight:

Cathy McMullen taps the brakes of her Toyota Prius after driving through a neighborhood of mostly one-story homes in Denton, about an hour northwest of Dallas. “There,” she says, nodding toward a limestone wall shielding from view a pad of gas wells. McMullen, a 56-year-old home health nurse, cruised past a stretch of yellowed grass and weeds. “They could have put that pad site on that far corner right there,” she says, pointing ahead. “The land’s all vacant.”

Instead, the wells sit on the corner of Bonnie Brae and Scripture Street. Across the way: Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. Across another street: the basketball court, picnic tables and purple playground of McKenna Park. That was where Range Resources, a company based in Fort Worth, wanted to start drilling and fracking in 2009.

McMullen, who at that time had just moved into a house about 1,500 feet away from the proposed site, joined others in raising concerns about bringing the gas industry and hydraulic fracturing — widely known as fracking — so close to where kids play. Fracking, which involves blasting apart underground rock with millions of gallons of chemical-laced water to free up oil and gas, “is a brutal, brutal process for people living around it,” McMullen says.

Their efforts in city hall failed.

If McMullen felt invisible five years ago, she doesn’t anymore. Today, state lawmakers, the oil and gas industry and national environmental groups have become acutely aware of Denton, home to two universities, 277 gas wells and now, thanks to a rag-tag group of local activists, Texas’ first ban on fracking.

Thrust into the saga is George P. Bush, who in January will take the helm of the Texas General Land Office, an otherwise obscure office that manages mineral rights on millions of acres of state-owned property. In his first political office, Jeb’s eldest son and George W.’s nephew will inherit one of two major lawsuits filed against Denton, home to a sliver of that mineral portfolio.

“We don’t need a patchwork approach to drilling regulations across the state,” Bush, a former energy investment consultant, told The Texas Tribune in July as the anti-fracking campaign gained steam. It appears to be his only public statement on the issue.

Bush’s role in the dispute — however peripheral — only brightens the spotlight on Denton, and it forces him and others to choose between two interests Texans hold dear: petroleum and local control.

I’m sorry, but the idea that “local control” is a dearly-held ideal, especially by Republicans, is a complete myth. Just look at the myriad bills Republican legislators have introduced in recent sessions and/or will introduce this session to limit or eliminate the ability of cities to pass and enforce anti-discrimination ordinances and to regulate a wide variety of things, from fracking to single use plastic bags to payday lending. Throw in other top legislative priorities to require cities to enforce federal immigration laws and to limit their revenue growth via tighter appraisal caps on top of that. As I said before, Republicans are at least as interested nowadays in nullifying municipal laws as they are of nullifying federal laws. Whatever fealty there is to the idea of “local control” has long gone out the window any time some local entity has tried to do something state Republicans – or more specifically, their corporate masters – don’t like. It’s time we recognized that.

McMullen’s group — Frack Free Denton — persuaded nearly 59 percent of Denton voters to approve a fracking ban on Nov. 4, after knocking on doors, staging puppet shows and performing song-and-dance numbers. The movement had help from Earthworks, a national environmental group, but its opponents — backed by the oil and gas lobby — raised more than $700,000 to spend on mailers and television ads and a high-profile public relations and polling firm. That was more than 10 times what Frack Free Denton collected.

[…]

Trying to make sense of the Nov. 4 landslide vote, some industry officials suggest that the voting power of Denton’s roughly 51,000 university students effectively drowned out the town’s permanent residents. The gowns, the argument goes, drove the town. “If we’re looking at Denton and trying to glean some sort of national significance out of this,” says Steve Everley, the national spokesman for Energy In-Depth, which promotes the petroleum industry, “then the significance is that activists are having success in college towns and in populations with few if any wells.”

But Denton’s voting records cast doubt on that argument. It’s not clear that college students turned out in high enough numbers to single-handedly tilt the vote. Voters closer to campuses overwhelmingly supported the ban, as well as Democrat Wendy Davis in the race for governor. But plenty of conservatives also rejected fracking. Both Republican Greg Abbott, who ultimately defeated Davis, and the ban prevailed in 11 of Denton’s biggest 33 precincts. Roughly 25,000 votes were cast in the fracking question and those opposed to fracking outpaced supporters by some 4,400 votes. Denton would have still passed the measure by 412 votes even if voters younger than 30 were disregarded. Voting data also shows that the average age of a voter was 52.

I’ve mentioned before that Democratic turnout in Denton was helped by the referendum, and that’s good, but it could and should have been better. I wonder how many people in Denton voted for the fracking ban and also voted for Ryan Sitton for Railroad Commissioner and George P. Bush for Land Commissioner, perhaps without realizing that by doing so they were partially undermining their own vote. Some of that was probably force of habit – partisan affiliation is strong – some of it was probably just not making the connection. I’m sure there were missed opportunities for Dems to work with the anti-fracking folks to help make that connection. Of course, that can be a dicey proposition when you need Republican support to win and thus need for your effort to appear as non-partisan as possible so as not to turn any of those folks off, and besides I’m sure it would have been difficult to get that message through when the city is already drowning in pro- and anti-fracking ads. I don’t have a good answer here, I’m just saying this is the sort of thing we need to be thinking about.

Abbott and the Latino vote

Dec 8th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

The Trib drops a number on us.

I guess I need to find a new Abbott avatar

Along with his 20-point margin of victory, Gov.-elect Greg Abbott accomplished something on Election Day that many naysayers doubted the Republican could: He took 44 percent of the Hispanic vote.

For Texas conservatives, Abbott’s performance indicated that Republicans are making headway among this increasingly crucial voting bloc, which tends to lean Democratic. But upon taking office, Abbott will find himself in turbulent political waters.

[…]

But election results show that despite Republican outreach efforts, Abbott does not have a strong hold on areas of the state where most of the population is Hispanic, particularly the border counties Abbott repeatedly visited during his campaign.

In Cameron County, which Abbott had set out to win, he garnered 42 percent of the vote while Davis took 55 percent. He fared worse in Hidalgo County, with only 35 percent of the vote to Davis’s 63 percent.

The results could prove troublesome for a party looking to hone its outreach efforts as the state’s Hispanic population swells. Although they make up less than a third of eligible voters in the state, Hispanics are expected to make up a plurality of Texas’ population by 2020.

Abbott outpaced his predecessors in winning support among Hispanics, but navigating the crosscurrents of appealing to a far-right base and conservative Hispanics continues to prove difficult for Republicans when it comes to immigration.

The article is about how Abbott is going to try to balance his madrina-friendly image with the ugly xenophobia of his party. I’m not going to prognosticate about that – lots of people have been opining about what the Abbott-Dan Patrick dynamic is going to be like – but I am going to focus on those numbers. I presume that 44% figure comes from the exit polls we were promised. I know they were done and I’m aware of some complaints about their methodology, but I’ve seen basically no reporting or other analysis on them. Be that as it may, I’m going to do three things: Check the actual results to see if they line up with the 44% figure given, compare Abbott to Rick Perry in 2010, and I’ll hold the third one back till I’m ready to show you the numbers.

Comparing Latino voting performances is always a bit dicey, since the best we can do at this level is use county and State Rep district data, which is a reasonable enough rough approximation, but which can be distorted by the presence of non-Latino voters, especially if Latino turnout is lower than expected. But it’s what we’ve got, and we can at least draw some broad conclusions. A full comparison to Rick Perry in 2010 won’t be possible until all the legislative district data is published by the TLC in early 2015, but we’ll use what we do have. Here’s a look at county comparisons:


County      Perry   Abbott   White   Davis
==========================================
Cameron    40.82%   42.01%  57.30%  55.46%
El Paso    36.76%   37.25%  61.29%  60.32%
Hidalgo    31.75%   34.79%  66.82%  62.70%
Maverick   26.83%   26.27%  71.86%  70.27%
Webb       22.92%   28.86%  75.60%  68.03%

So yes, Abbott did improve on Rick Perry, but not by that much. In Cameron County, which as the Trib story notes Abbott was claiming he wanted to win, he beat Perry by a bit more than one point. He did do three points better in Hidalgo and six points better in Webb, but only a half point better in El Paso and a half point worse in Maverick. Again, this is incomplete data – the State Rep district data will tell a better story – but if Rick Perry was scoring in the low thirties in 2010, it’s hard for me to say that Abbott did any better than the mid-to-upper thirties. It’s an improvement, and he gets credit for it, but I don’t see how you get to 44% from there.

I do have State Rep district data for Harris County, so let’s take a look at that:


Dist        Perry   Abbott   White   Davis   Dewhurst    LCT
============================================================
HD140       27.9%    32.2%   70.7%   66.3%      31.6%  65.9%
HD143       29.6%    35.0%   68.9%   63.7%      33.4%  63.9%
HD144       45.2%    51.7%   52.7%   46.3%      50.8%  46.0%
HD145       36.3%    40.8%   62.0%   57.2%      41.6%  54.8%
HD148       36.3%    39.1%   61.6%   58.7%      45.0%  50.8%

The caveat here is that the Hispanic Citizen Voting Age Populations (Hispanic CVAPs) are lower in these districts than in many other Latino districts. HD140 is the most Latino, at 60.6%; by comparison, the lowest CVAP in the six El Paso districts is 59.4%, with the other five all being greater than 70% and three of the six topping 80%. Be that as it may, Abbott clearly beat Perry here, by four to six points. That also comes with an asterisk, however, since as we know Bill White outperformed the rest of the Democratic ticket on his home turf by about six points. I included the David Dewhurst/Linda Chavez-Thompson numbers as well here to serve as a further point of comparison. Add it all up, and Abbott got 39.6% of the vote in Latino State Rep districts in Harris County. That’s impressive and a number Democrats will have to reckon with, but it’s still a pretty good distance from 44%.

I’ll revisit this question later, once the TLC has put out its data. In the meantime, there’s one more dimension to consider: How well Greg Abbott did in 2010 versus how well he did in 2014:


County     Abb 10   Abb 14
==========================
Cameron    48.21%   42.01%
El Paso    42.43%   37.25%
Hidalgo    37.72%   34.79%
Maverick   26.31%   26.27%
Webb       29.12%   28.86%

Dist       Abb 10   Abb 14
==========================
HD140       35.1%    32.2%
HD143       37.2%    35.0%
HD144       54.0%    51.7%
HD145       46.4%    40.8%
HD148       48.6%    39.1%

Now of course this isn’t a real apples-to-apples comparison. Abbott was running for Attorney General in 2010 against a candidate who had no money and a self-described “funny name”. That’s a formula for him to do better. Of course, one could say that voters in these places liked him more when he had a lower profile. The more they heard about him, the less likely they were to vote for him. Make of that what you will.

Kolkhorst wins SD18

Dec 7th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

One special election begets another.

Rep. Lois Kolkhorst

State Rep. Lois Kolkhorst won a promotion to the Texas Senate on Saturday, leveraging her 14-year incumbency and high-profile endorsements to fend off a fellow Republican opponent who spent nearly $2 million of his own money portraying Kolkhorst as soft on the border.

Kolkhorst eclipsed the 50 percent mark needed to avoid a runoff with Fort Bend businessman Gary Gates in Senate District 18, which stretches from Katy and Rosenberg to near Corpus Christi and Austin. Kolkhorst won 55 percent of the vote, 20 percentage points higher than Gates earned.

“We have an opportunity to have the most conservative session in recent history, responding to the demand of the voters of Texas,” Kolkhorst said. “I’m truly humbled by the results.”

Though the three-week sprint only officially began when Glenn Hegar announced his intention to resign after winning statewide office last month, the leading candidates have treated the seat as vacant since Hegar won the GOP primary for comptroller in the spring. Hegar officially resigned Friday.

Kolkhorst and Gates have spent that time looking to outflank one another on perhaps the most resonant issue in this largely rural district along U.S. 59: border security. Gates has hammered the seven-term state representative for a vote granting in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants a decade ago, which Kolkhorst now says she regrets.

Strictly speaking, of course, this applied to people who were brought to this country as children. Because we once thought it was a good idea to encourage college-ready students to go to college. Now Republicans want to deport such children, which is as compassionate as it is sensible. I don’t even know what to say any more.

Kolkhorst’s elevation creates yet another vacancy in Austin: A special election will now be held for her old seat, House District 13. Just as Kolkhorst ran for Hegar’s seat, candidates are already running for hers.

There are currently vacancies in HDs 13 and 17, with one to come in HD123 and later on in SD26; the special election in SD26 will likely create another vacancy in either HD116 or HD124. And you thought the 2014 election season was over.

Full election results are here. Turnout was 39,200 votes, or maybe less than percent overall. The dollars per vote total was pretty high in this race. The Trib has more.

Whining about the fracking ban

Dec 4th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

These guys just can’t believe they lost.

Did college students tilt the outcome of Denton’s vote to ban hydraulic fracturing?

That question has stirred debate since the city – home to the University of North Texas and Texas Woman’s University – became the first in Texas to ban the oilfield technique that sparked a drilling boom and spawned tension in some urban areas.

Overall, the vote wasn’t close. Nearly 59 percent of voters supported the ban, even though its opponents – buoyed by contributions from energy companies – spent far more money. That margin, the ban’s supporters say, amounted to a mandate.

But ban opponents (meaning supporters of fracking) argue that college students disproportionately affected the vote, effectively drowning out Denton’s permanent residents – particularly those living alongside natural gas wells.

“The election returns clearly show the permanent residents of Denton favor property owner rights, economic benefits from responsible drilling and American energy independence while our city’s college students did not,” Bobby Jones, treasurer of anti-ban group Denton Taxpayers for a Strong Economy, said three days after the election.

The ban’s supporters reject that narrative.

“They’re treating a whole group of people as if their votes don’t count as much as other people,” said Adam Briggle, a board member of Frack Free Denton, a group pushing the ban. “My second reaction is, it’s wildly inaccurate.”

See here for the background. The Trib does some number-crunching to show that the pro-frackers’s complaints are largely without merit, but let’s be clear. This is about denigrating the value of the students’ votes, making it seem like their votes don’t, or shouldn’t, count as much as other votes. There’s a reason why student IDs were not deemed acceptable for voter ID purposes. It won’t matter for the purposes of the litigation that’s already been filed, but it is of a piece. Some people’s votes count more than others, and when those others help swing an election, the first reaction in some (Republican) quarters is to de-legitimize those votes. It’s the reality we live in these days, and it’s going to take a lot of effort, and electoral victories, to change that.

A look at how Democratic legislative challengers did against the spread

Dec 2nd, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

It’s been long enough since the election that I feel like I can go back and look at some numbers. Not a whole lot of good out there, but we’ll try to learn what we can. To start off, here are all of the Democratic non-incumbent candidates for the State House and a comparison of their vote total and percentage to those of Bill White and Linda Chavez-Thompson from 2010:


Dist Candidate    Votes   White     LCT  Cand%  White%  LCT%
============================================================
014   Metscher    6,353   9,980   7,540   28.5    36.3  27.8
016     Hayles    4,744   8,490   5,995   13.6    22.5  15.9
017      Banks   12,437  17,249  12,852   35.4    43.3  32.8
020      Wyman   10,871  15,512  11,232   22.7    31.4  22.9
021     Bruney    9,736  13,174  10,499   25.6    31.3  25.3
023      Criss   14,716  19,224  15,866   45.4    50.1  41.8
026      Paaso   11,074  16,104  12,290   30.3    37.0  28.4
043   Gonzalez   10,847  14,049  12,635   38.6    45.8  41.7
044   Bohmfalk    9,796  13,369   9,847   24.3    32.1  23.7
052     Osborn   12,433  12,896  10,539   38.5    39.4  32.4
058   Kauffman    6,530  10,672   6,913   19.5    29.0  18.9
061      Britt    7,451  10,103   6,725   17.0    23.4  15.6
063      Moran    9,016  10,797   8,107   22.7    27.4  20.6
064      Lyons   12,578  12,238   9,722   33.8    38.0  30.3
065    Mendoza   10,419  10,926   8,921   35.7    37.3  30.5
083     Tarbox    6,218   9,664   6,250   18.7    25.9  16.8
084    Tishler    6,336   9,444   6,969   27.3    33.7  24.9
085     Drabek    9,628  14,460  10,758   33.4    44.8  33.6
087    Bosquez    3,656   6,945   4,736   15.6    25.4  17.4
089   Karmally   11,105  11,192   8,925   28.4    31.7  25.4
091      Ragan    9,346  10,214   8,039   28.2    32.2  25.4
092     Penney   12,553  12,374  10,020   36.4    35.7  29.0
094    Ballweg   16,461  14,852  12,247   40.5    37.1  30.7
102    Clayton   12,234  15,709  12,110   37.5    44.1  34.3
105     Motley   10,469  11,766   9,793   42.7    43.8  36.7
106  Osterholt    9,586   9,112   7,212   27.5    30.1  23.8
107    Donovan   13,803  14,878  11,936   45.0    46.3  37.5
108     Bailey   16,170  17,401  12,859   39.3    42.0  31.3
113    Whitley   12,044  13,483  11,575   40.6    44.8  38.7
115   Stafford   11,761  12,428   9,955   39.5    39.8  32.0
129        Gay   12,519  17,441  12,896   32.2    37.5  28.0
132      Lopez   10,504  12,016   9,677   33.8    37.9  30.8
133      Nicol   11,728  19,800  12,595   25.4    35.7  22.9
134       Ruff   20,312  31,553  21,380   38.8    51.0  35.1
135      Abbas   10,162  13,971  11,005   34.1    39.6  31.4
136       Bucy   15,800  14,742  12,031   41.1    39.7  32.6
138     Vernon    8,747  12,918   9,878   33.2    40.5  31.2
150      Perez   10,317  13,086   9,829   26.8    31.0  23.4

The most encouraging numbers come from Williamson and Tarrant Counties. I discussed the race in HD94 before the election, where the combination of Wendy Davis’ presence on the ballot plus the outsized wingnuttery of Republican candidate Tony Tinderholt helped boost the performance of Democratic challenger Cole Ballweg. Tina Penney, running in HD92 against freshman Jonathan Stickland, also benefited. We’ll want to see what the full comparisons for this year look like, but Tarrant Dems ought to look to those two districts for a place to try to make further gains in 2016.

Nearby in Denton County, Emy Lyons in HD64 and Lisa Osterholt in HD106 both exceeded Bill White’s vote total, though not his percentage. I don’t know offhand where those districts are relative to the city of Denton, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the fracking ban referendum helped them a bit. These results are a reminder of two things – the importance of local issues in engaging voters in off years, and that it’s not enough in places like Denton County to increase vote totals. You have to keep up with the overall population increase as well. Otherwise, you’re falling farther behind even as you move forward. I’ll give Sameena Karmally in Collin County’s HD89 a nod for a decent showing in that tough district as well, with the same caveat about keeping up with the overall growth.

In Williamson, John Bucy’s strong showing in HD136 against freshman Tony Dale should make it a top target for 2016. Bucy nearly equaled President Obama’s 41.2% in HD136 from 2012, so there’s plenty to build on there. Chris Osborn didn’t do too badly in HD52, either. Note that in each district, the Libertarian candidate scored around five points – 5.03% in HD52, and 4.70% in HD136 – so the win number in each of those districts could wind up being less than 48%.

Finally, in Dallas County, the Battleground-backed candidates all fell short, but generally didn’t do too badly, and they continue to offer the best pickup opportunities for continuously Republican-held seats in HDs 105, 107, and 113. An ambitious goal for the Presidential election year would be to win back HDs 117 and 144, and take over 105, 107, 113, and 136. With no statewide race above the level of Railroad Commissioner but Presidential year turnout – if we work at it – to make things more competitive, I see no reason not to view that as a starting point.

That’s not all we should focus on, of course – I agree with Campos that we should put a lot of effort into local race around the state, which in Harris County means finding and funding a challenger to County Commissioner Steve Radack. Frankly, we should be doing that in 2015 as well, in municipal and school board races. Maybe that will help some people understand that we hold elections in the other three years, too, and their participation in those elections is needed and would be appreciated. This is something we all can and should work on.

Kris Banks: Comparing turnout, or where the vote was lost

Dec 1st, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

(Note: This is the first of two guest posts submitted by Kris Banks, past President of the Houston GLBT Political Caucus.)

Democrats lost big last month. We lost at every level, from statewide all the way down to the countywide candidates. Every challenger and every incumbent lost.

That first paragraph kind of defies the rules of journalism, I guess. You’re supposed to lead with the news. Not only does everyone know what I said above, but it’s not exactly a new experience for Harris County Democrats. We’ve lost all countywide races in nearly every single election since the 1990s. The only exceptions have been 2008 and 2012.

I lead with it because it was a fact that didn’t quite square with what I saw in my precinct when I looked at the canvass. I’m Democratic chair of Precinct 60, a square section in the southwest side of Montrose between Westheimer, Richmond, Mandell and Shepherd that votes at Sydney Lanier Middle School.

It’s a solid blue precinct, and this election was no different. Wendy Davis pulled in 67 percent of the vote. Every Democrat won Precinct 60, and nearly every Republican lost – with the exception of Ed Emmett, every Republican not contested by a Democrat was defeated by the Green Party candidate in Precinct 60.

None of that was unusual. What struck me was how many votes the Democrats were getting. I knew turnout would be down from 2012. I was hit with a pang of disappointment that it was also down from 2010. In 2010, 47.2 percent of registered voters in Precinct 60 cast their ballot. In 2014, that dropped to 43.2 percent. With all the excitement I was seeing in my community for Wendy Davis and the Democratic ticket, how did we lose turnout?

Then I started looking at the numbers, and I started comparing them to my 2010 canvass. The 2014 numbers looked bigger. In 2010, the average Democrat (I’ll explain the “average Democrat” concept shortly) pulled down 671 votes. In 2014, the average Democrat won 722 votes.

So how did turnout go down? Well, I took a look at the other side. In 2010, the average Republican picked up 328 votes in Precinct 60. In 2014? 257.

Democrats didn’t drop off in my precinct. They turned out stronger than the last midterm. All of the dropoff in turnout in Precinct 60 came from Republicans.

I wish I could say it’s because I’m a particularly good precinct chair. And, you know, maybe I am. But I could see the same thing happening around Montrose. So why didn’t we win countywide? We must have lost somewhere else, and big. Where?

I’ve long loved the maps that I see Greg Wythe and others put out, and wanted to be able to make them myself. So I headed down to the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector’s Office, picked up a shape file, and determined I was going to teach myself how to make elections maps to answer these questions.

And here they are.

First, I wasn’t all that interested in Wendy Davis or anyone else statewide. No statewide candidate will ever win a statewide election in Texas until Harris County Democrats start winning midterms. So I needed to look at one number to figure out how Republicans did across the county. But I didn’t want to look at one race, because different dynamics might create skewed figures – for example, a candidate with a Hispanic surname might do unusually well in a majority Latino precinct.

So I took every Democrat running countywide, including the statewide, and made an average of their votes. Republicans were a little more difficult. Some of their numbers were much higher than other Republicans because they had no major party opposition. So to create the average Republican candidate, I took every countywide GOP candidate who was opposed by a Democrat.

The average Democrat got 298,145 votes in Harris County. The average Republican got 356,700.

The standard map you see has precincts colored red or blue as they were won, respectively, by Republicans and Democrats. The colors are shaded according to the margin of victory – dark red precincts are where the Republican picked up more than 70 percent of the vote, and pink ones are where the Republican won by just a hair.

Here’s that map for the average Democrat vs. the average Republican in Harris County in 2014:

Bam, and you now know nothing you didn’t know before. Democrats won African American, Latino and urban precincts, Republicans won the west side and suburbs. Some groundbreaking political analysis there. Move over, Bob Stein.

The main reason that map doesn’t matter is because it only tells you the strength of the vote in accordance to how big of a share each candidate got. That doesn’t mean much. Let’s say I’m a Democrat who wins Precinct A with 80 percent of the vote, but loses Precinct B with 40 percent of the vote. Things are looking pretty good until you find out that 200 voters turned out in Precinct A and 2,000 voters turned out in Precinct B. I’m now losing by 280 votes.

Let’s take a look at the average Republican vs. average Democrat map again. But this time, instead of the precincts shaded by the portion of the vote the winner got, they are shaded by the margin that the winner picked up there. For instance, for Precincts A and B above: the winner of Precinct A, me, got 160 votes there, and the Republican, my opponent, got 40. The margin I got there was therefore 120 votes. Not that many, so even though I won 80 percent, it would be light blue. In Precinct B, my opponent picked up 400 votes, so it would be a darker shade of red.

Here it is:

Democratic parts of the map are sky blue, for the most part. The darkest shade of blue only gets used four times, three in the south and once up north. Contrast that with the blood red sea in Cypress, Kingwood and Katy. Even the inside-the-Beltway Republican areas are darker than most Dem areas.

That’s how we lost 2014, by the numbers. The Republicans ran up bigger margins in precincts where they won. We won our areas like we always do. We carried some competitive precincts in the Southwest side of town. But the turnout just wasn’t there overall.

It’s important to put these maps in context. The best comparison to the 2014 election is the 2010 election. So how did we do in comparison to 2010?

Disclosure: In 2011, Harris County drew new precinct lines to fit redistricting. Most stayed the same, but 184 new precincts were created, which were carved out of old precincts. A perfect precinct-to-precinct comparison isn’t possible, therefore. What I did was figure out how the old 2010 precincts got carved up and apportion the 2010 votes according to the 2014 figures.

For example, Precinct 16 was cut into Precincts 16 and 890. In 2014, the average Democrats got 182 votes in Precinct 16 and 159 votes in Precinct 890. So, 53.4 percent of Democrats remained in Precinct 16, and the rest went to the new Precinct 890. To make the comparison, I split the 2010 vote accordingly. In 2010, the average Democrat got 314 votes in Precinct 16. So I put 53.4 percent – 168 votes – in Precinct 16 and the remainder, 146, in Precinct 890. End of disclosure; just wanted the reader to be aware that it’s not a perfect comparison.

So how did Democrats do in comparison to 2010? Here’s a map of where Democrats gained or lost a raw number of votes, with precincts where we gained colored blue (darker shades mean we gained more) and precincts where we lost votes colored red:

Not pretty. That is a rather pink map. In the vast majority of areas, especially in core Democratic areas, we lost votes. Sometimes a lot of votes. The few areas where we gained are no match for the areas where we lost.

So how did Republicans do? They won, so they must have done well, right? Here’s the flip side map for them:

Not exactly fields of crimson. In fact, the GOP map is bluer than the Democratic map is red.

Probably most interesting is the next map. It’s sort of a combo of the two. It compares the percentage of the change in votes from 2010 to 2014. In red precincts, the change was more positive for Republicans – in most cases, where the drop in Democratic votes was greater than the drop in Republican ones. Vice versa for blue precincts. The borders of the precincts are colored according to the 2014 winner of the precinct:

Big portions of this map look inverted from the first map above, especially in Republican areas. In 2010, the average Republican got 423,281 votes. That number dropped 15.7 percent in 2014. In 2010, the average Democrat got 333,021 votes. That number dropped 10.5 percent in 2014.

Republicans won all the races, but not because they did a better job. In fact, in comparison to 2010, they did worse.

But they still won, both in 2010 and 2014. If you’re trying to figure out where the Democrats truly lost, I think those numbers are important in context. But if you want to really understand it, you have to compare the numbers to a different situation – a situation where the Democrats won.

Let’s look at 2012. In 2012, the average Democrat got 568,317 votes, and the average Republican got 551,131.

It’s truly hard to compare 2012 and 2014 because of the disparities between a presidential election and a midterm election. As a diehard Democrat, I would love to be a visionary and an optimist and say that we shouldn’t throw our hands up in the air and say “A midterm election will never have the same turnout as a presidential one!,” never say never, all that B.S. The problem is that statement is true. It’s true across the country for red and blue states alike. Maybe not to the extent it’s true in Harris County, but it’s still true.

But both Republicans and Democrats dropped in every precinct. So we can compare how much they dropped. Here’s a map comparing 2012 and 2014 like the immediately one above, where the change in votes is compared. Red means Republicans had a smaller dropoff than Democrats, vice versa for blue.

There’s your crimson field.

Both Republicans and Democrats had big drop-offs. It’s just that while Republicans lost 35.3 percent of their vote, Democrats lost 47.5 percent.

Republicans didn’t do well in 2014. They actually lost more votes than the Democrats did from the prior midterm. But when no one turns anyone out, the Republicans win by default.

I’m going to look at persuadable voters and the base soon.

Early voting begins today for SD18

Nov 26th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

From the inbox:

The early voting period for the December 6, 2014 Special Election to Fill a Vacancy for State Senate District 18 will take place Wednesday, November 26 from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Monday and Tuesday, December 1 and December 2, from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

“An estimated 20,000 registered voters who reside in Harris County voting precincts 49, 119, 121, 149, 639, 901, 919 and 920 are eligible to participate in the Special Election in State Senate District 18,” informed Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart. “The SSD18 precincts are situated in west Harris County.”

Harris county registered voters can vote early at any of the three following locations:

1. Main Office: Harris County Administration Bldg., 1001 Preston, 4th Floor, Houston, TX 77002

2. Far West/Katy: Katy City Park Building #3, 2046 Katy City Park Road, Katy, Texas 77493
(NW of Katy Police Department, 5456 Franz Road and South of Mary Jo Peckham Park, 5597 Gardenia Lane)

3. Hockley: Harris County Community Center Hockley, 28515 Old Washington Road, Hockley, Texas 77447
(between Premium Drive and Kermier Road).

There are five candidates vying to replace Glen Hegar who submitted his resignation from the Texas Senate after being elected Comptroller of Public Accounts for the State during the November Election. Senate District 18 spreads through 21 counties in Southeast Texas.

For information about voting by mail, list of acceptable Photo IDs to vote, or other election information, please visit www.HarrisVotes.com or call 713.755.6965.

Yes, that’s three whole days of early voting, before and after Thanksgiving. Good luck being the field director for one of those candidates. Fort Bend voters, your information for this election is here. My understanding is that there will be Saturday early voting hours in Fort Bend as well. Lucky you.

Not that it’s likely to matter much since there’s a clear frontrunner who has a decent campaign treasury and establishment support, and has been effectively running for this seat for months.

Rep. Lois Kolkhorst

State Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, is seen as the front-runner. She was first elected to House District 13 in 2000, and hasn’t faced a serious challenger since. Kolkhorst pegs border security as a top priority

“Our border surges seemingly work when we do them, so we’re going to have to look at how we secure it — and do something right and good for Texas,” Kolkhorst said. “I don’t think the federal government is going to step up and do that for us.”

The race is Kolkhorst’s to lose, said Renée Cross, associate director at the University of Houston’s Hobby Center for Public Policy and a political science lecturer. Kolkhorst has pulled in endorsements from Gov.-elect Greg Abbott, Hegar and several PACs, including the Conservative Republicans of Texas PAC.

“She’s shown a very conservative record in the house,” Cross said. “She’s a farmer, she’s got somewhat of a suburban link being in Brenham, she’s an athlete, she’s a hunter, she’s a fisher. I mean she’s got all the stereotypical Texas attributes that I think are going to play well, particularly in a very short election period.”

She’s also running a typical scare the old white people campaign, which has always worked well in this kind of election.

Her Republican challengers include Gary Gates, a real estate agent and cattle rancher from Richmond, and Charles Gregory, a businessman and the former mayor pro tem of Simonton.

Should Kolkhorst win, Abbott will have to call a special election for her House district. Kolkhorst has not resigned from her seat, so will stay in the legislature if she loses.

[…]

Democrat Christian E. Hawking, a lawyer from Rosenberg said she found out about the election just days before she filed to run. She previously ran unsuccessfully for a city council seat.

“I am optimistic, you have to be,” Hawking said. “I think this is exciting. It is a clean slate; we get to pick someone new. And I think that I’d be good at it.”

Democrat Cynthia Drabek, who recently ran unsuccessfully for Texas House District 85, also filed to run. Both Drabek and Hawking said public education funding is a top priority for them.

I wasn’t sure there would be a Democratic candidate in this race, given the lightning-speed turnaround on it. Bill White scored 35.7% in 2010, so the odds of a Dem even making a runoff are pretty low. Drabek received 9,628 votes for 33.4% in HD85, which was 1,130 fewer votes and 0.2 percentage points less than Linda Chavez-Thompson in 2010. As for Kolkhort’s HD13, in case it opens up, White got 32.1% in 2010, and Michelle Petty was the high scorer in 2012 with 26.0%. Not a whole lot to work with there, but as I said for HD17 it’s not like there’s anything to lose by trying.

The privilege of voting

Nov 16th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

It’s not a right if you aren’t allowed to do it.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

A day before Texans go to the polls, an unusual group gathered for lunch at a Mexican restaurant not far from downtown: an unemployed African-American grandmother; a University of Houston student originally from Pennsylvania; a pregnant mother who had recently moved back to the area with her family; and a low-income white woman who struggled to make eye contact and kept her money in a pack strapped around her waist.

They had not met each other before, but they had one thing in common: Thanks to Texas’s strict voter ID law, they all faced massive hurdles in casting a vote. Over fish tacos and guacamole, they shared their stories—hesitantly at first, then with growing eagerness as they realized they weren’t alone in being victimized by their state.

Lindsay Gonzales, 36, has an out-of-state driver’s license, which isn’t accepted under the ID law. Despite trying for months, she has been unable to navigate an astonishing bureaucratic thicket in time to get a Texas license she can use to vote. “I’m still a little bit in shock,” said Gonzales, who is white, well-educated, and politically engaged. “Because of all those barriers, the side effect is that I don’t get to participate in the democratic process. That’s something I care deeply about and I’m not going to be able to do it.”

As Texas prepares for its first high-turnout election with the voter ID law in place, the state has scrambled to reassure residents that it’s being proactive in getting IDs to those who need them, and that few voters will ultimately be disenfranchised. But those claims are belied by continued reports of legitimate Texans who, despite often Herculean efforts, still lack the identification required to exercise their most fundamental democratic right.

There’s a depressingly long list of people who have been disenfranchised by Texas’ law at the end of the article. Not theoretical possibilities, real people who were not allowed to vote. There are more and more of these stories out there as well. I’d love for Greg Abbott and Rick Perry and the six Supreme Court justices who thought letting this election proceed with that law in place despite its documented effects to have to look each one of these people in the eye and explain to them why this was necessary. Because the law is working as intended. What happened to these people was a feature, not a bug.

But they could have gotten free election IDs, I hear you say. Maybe, if they knew about that under-publicized option. And if they were able to navigate the bureaucracy successfully and pay their poll tax at the end.

Every document Casper Pryor could think of that bore his name was folded in the back pocket of his jeans. But sitting on a curb Thursday, a can of Sprite in hand, Pryor wasn’t sure whether those papers and the hour-long bus ride he had taken to get to Holman Street would result in a crucial new piece of ID. An ID that would allow the 33-year-old Houston native to vote.

Election identification certificates were designed for the 600,000 to 750,000 voters who lack any of the six officially recognized forms of photo ID needed at the polls, according to estimates developed by the Texas secretary of state and the U.S. Department of Justice. Legislators created the EICs, which are free, in part to quell criticism that enforcing the state’s much-litigated ID law amounted to a poll tax that could disenfranchise low-income and minority voters.

But as of Thursday, only 371 EICs had been issued across Texas since June 2013. By comparison, Georgia issued 2,182 free voter ID cards during its first year enforcing a voter ID law in 2006, and Mississippi has issued 2,539 in the 10 months its new law has been in place. Both states accept more forms of photo identification at polls than Texas does, so fewer voters there would need to apply for election-specific IDs.

In Texas, some would-be voters are hitting roadblocks.

Pryor said he has been spending more than four hours each trip trying to obtain an EIC, and he’s been back and forth several times. Though the cards are free, there are transportation costs and fees for supporting documents.

“It turned into a full-time job,” he said. “Going here, going there, it’ll make you give up.”

[…]

Some voters decided to pursue a Texas state ID card instead of an EIC. The requirements are similar, but the state ID can be used for more purposes than elections.

Money factors in the decision.

Applying for a Texas state ID costs $16, and if an individual does not have a birth certificate, getting that costs another $22. For those who want an EIC, a birth certificate can be obtained for a discounted price of no more than $3.

Another difference: EICs do not require a background check, while a Texas state ID does. For low-income applicants concerned about unpaid traffic tickets, that can be enough to decide on an EIC, said Marianela Acuña Arreaza, the Texas coordinator of VoteRiders, a nonpartisan nonprofit helping eligible voters cast ballots and not engaged in the ongoing litigation.

“Voting is not a luxury item,” Acuña Arreaza said. “It should be something you should be able to do because you’re a citizen and you’re eligible.”

[…]

Abbie Kamin, through the Campaign Legal Center, has been working with people who want to vote at the polls, sometimes driving an hour out of the city to obtain a birth certificate and accompanying them for lengthy waits in DPS offices. The center’s executive director was an attorney for the plaintiffs in the voter ID case, but Kamin’s work is ground-level. Beyond the transportation hurdles and costs for some voters lacking ID, there has been confusion among agencies and individual clerks, she said.

“I’ve had another woman working with me who called the DPS three different times and gotten three different answers,” Kamin said.

During a federal court trial that concluded in Corpus Christi in September, the judge found that the DPS process for granting EICs lacked consistency.

When asked if any training had since been provided, DPS spokesman Vinger responded, “No.”

Training costs money, don’t you know. Greg Abbott wants to take the gas tax money that currently goes to DPS and use it for road building. That means DPS will have to compete with other budget items to get general fund money. What do you think are the odds that extra funds for EIC training would be included in that?

The good news is that Casper Pryor did eventually win the game of running the DPS gamut, and in the end he got his EIC, making him one of the lucky few to do so. One wonders what the reaction would be if a random sampling of voter ID supporters had to go through what he went through to get to do what they take for granted. To end this post on a positive note, here’s another story about people who worked a lot harder to be able to vote than you and I did.

April Fisher walked into a brightly lit, flag-adorned room at the Harris County Administration Building on Wednesday and, for the first time in her life, contemplated a ballot.

“I’ve never voted in my life,” the 30-year-old Louisiana native said with a shrug. “I don’t even understand politics.”

Fisher came to Houston five years ago after her father gambled away their family’s life savings. The choices she made here ended in addiction, prostitution and criminal convictions.

But on this day, with her life on the mend, Fisher found the name of the judge who heard her most recent prostitution charge, a woman she credits with helping get her life back on track. She tapped the voting machine’s selector dial. It felt good.

In a booth next to her was the kind of authority figure who had been an adversary in Fisher’s past life – a sheriff’s deputy.

“I was proud to stand next to that deputy and he didn’t put handcuffs on me,” she said.

Fisher walked out of the downtown building and into a balmy fall day minutes later.

“I feel like my voice was being heard,” she said, before lighting up a cigarette.

A precious right for many Texans, voting for Fisher and a group of about 15 women – recovering drug addicts, former sex workers and others – was about something more: finding their voice.

They were enrolled in (or have graduated from) the “We’ve Been There Done That,” a program run through the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, which seeks to rehabilitate women and help them avoid returning to their criminal past.

“These women have never been empowered, have been victims of sex abuse, of abuse, of imprisonment,” said Jennifer Herring, director of re-entry services for the Sheriff’s Office. “Now, for them to be able to seek for themselves a voice through this voting process, it’s liberating.”

Read the whole thing. No matter how you feel today about the election, I trust that story made you feel a little better.

Hegar officially resigns his Senate seat

Nov 15th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

As expected.

Glenn Hegar

State Sen. Glenn Hegar, the Katy Republican who will become state comptroller in January, notified Gov. Rick Perry on Friday that he will resign his Senate Seat as of Dec. 5, paving the way for the governor to call a special election.

Hegar won 58.4 percent of the vote on Election Day to succeed Comptroller Susan Combs. He was widely expected to resign from his seat early to allow for a special election to take place sooner, allowing his replacement to join the Legislature during next year’s legislative session. If not for his move to comptroller, Hegar’s Senate term would have lasted until 2016.

“I am extremely honored, humbled, and grateful to the citizens of Texas who have elected me as their next comptroller, and I look forward to serving the taxpayers of this great state,” Hegar wrote. “I extend my deep and profound gratitude to the constituents of Senate District 18 for allowing me to be their voice in the Texas Senate for the last 8 years.”

The possibility of a special election to replace Hegar has been the subject of speculation for more than a year, when it became clear Hegar planned to run for comptroller. That strategizing among those interested in replacing him intensified in March, when he won the Republican primary and became the immediate front-runner in the general election.

See here for the background. To no one’s surprise, Rick Perry has already called a special election to fill Hegar’s seat for December 6, since it just won’t do to leave a Republican seat open any longer than necessary. Did Perry also schedule a special election to replace Mike Villarreal in HD123? Don’t be silly. He’ll get to that when he’s good and ready.

Art Murillo

Nov 14th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Congratulations to Art Murillo, the first person of color elected to the Lone Star College Board of Trustees. Need I mention that it took a lawsuit for this to happen?

Art Murillo

Murillo, who is Latino, at one time might have seemed a long shot to win a seat on the Lone Star College board of trustees. But he was running in a newly drawn majority-Latino district, the result of a lawsuit that challenged the LSC’s “at-large” system of representation. On Tuesday, Murillo was elected the only Latino member of the nine-member board.

[…]

Lone Star College officials created the new district after a lawsuit alleged that the old election system – where all voters in the community college district could vote for each candidate – disenfranchised minorities because whites across the district would reject minority candidates.

The district currently has about 83,000 students enrolled in college credit courses.

Starting this year, that system is gone, and the college system isn’t alone in tackling the voting rights issue.

“As to the suburban areas, because of the white flight that this country experienced for half a century, those districts have been exceedingly Anglo for so long that at-large districts didn’t really commit a great deal of harm on minority citizens,” said Chad Dunn, who represented the group that sued Lone Star last year and specializes in litigation involving such systems.

“What is uniquely going on now, and about the last decade as the city center has redeveloped, the suburbs are becoming much more mixed-race,” Dunn said.

Latinos make up about 32 percent of people living in the Lone Star College district, which spans north Harris and Montgomery counties, according to the most recent census figures. African-Americans make up 15 percent.

Advocates argue that the new single-member districts that have a majority of minority voters will ensure they have a voice in college affairs.

“There’s not a lot of Hispanic leadership at all,” Murillo told another resident as they discussed Hispanic participation in local elections.

Two points to note here. One is that no matter what the Supreme Court may think there is still a lot of work to be done to ensure that minority communities have something resembling a proportionate amount of representation in government. Single member districts, for city councils and school boards and the like, are often the best, or at least the fastest, way to make this happen. It’s not a panacea, and some problems could be alleviated by higher rates of voter participation, but you can run into a chicken-and-egg problem there. It’s hard to convince someone to run for an office they don’t see a way to win. The plaintiffs in the LSC single-member litigation couldn’t do a proper comparison of how white and non-white candidates did in these elections in the past because there weren’t any non-white candidates running.

The other point is that those of us that would like to see more diverse representation in elected offices need to pay more attention to local races like this one. Your future legislators and Congressfolk and whatnot often get their start in places like the Lone Star College Board of Trustees; Harris County Clerk Chris Daniel is one example. The potential to change outcomes by increasing voter participation is great as well. Frankly, if Battleground Texas wants to regain some ground, and some credibility, between now and 2016 I’d strongly advise them to look around at the various municipal and school board elections that will happen in 2015, identify some targets and some candidates, and work to get them elected. Doing so would help keep the kind of voters they want to target engaged, it would help put some future candidates for other offices in place to start doing good and building a record, and it give them a chance to apply whatever lessons they learned from this election while maybe claiming a victory or three to build on for 2016. Honestly, the conservative movement figured this out thirty or forty year ago. Isn’t it time we catch up a bit?

Replacing Hegar

Nov 11th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Election season isn’t over yet.

Glenn Hegar

At least three Republican candidates – who hit the campaign trail for the then-hypothetical opening months ago – will duke it out to represent a rural 21-county Senate district that stretches from Fort Bend County to the outer edges of the Corpus Christi, San Antonio and Austin metropolitan areas.

Sen. Glenn Hegar, who has represented the heavily Republican district since 2007, won his race for comptroller on Tuesday. His resignation, which some sources say could come as early as Friday, will trigger a special election for the two years remaining on his term. If he resigns after Thursday, the vacancy would come within 60 days of a legislative session, forcing an expedited election timeline to give Hegar’s successor a chance to be seated near the beginning of the session, even if a runoff is needed.

Because of the quick turnaround, potential candidates started campaigning months ago to position themselves for a vacancy that did not technically exist until ballots were counted Tuesday night, causing some confusion among voters.

“Most of them were struggling with why there’s a race if myself or my opponents were not on the ballot,” said Lois Kolkhorst, a Brenham state representative who spent Thursday raising money in the district. “People were calling me with: ‘Why are you having a fundraiser after the election?’ ”

Kolkhorst and two Fort Bend businessmen, Gary Gates and Charles Gregory, are competing to succeed Hegar in a race that will likely carry a high price tag. Gates has lent his campaign $1 million to begin airing ads in July and candidates may have to invest heavily to turn out fatigued voters in a special election that takes place not only after Election Day but over the holidays. Turnout could be less than 10 percent.

That’s two special elections that will be needed, since Rep. Mike Villarreal resigned from HD123 to run for Mayor of San Antonio. He was hoping for a quick turnaround, perhaps an election in December, to get his successor in before too much happens in the Lege. Maybe he should have waited a week to resign, I don’t know. I wouldn’t put anything past Rick Perry to prioritize the needs of a Republican district and the Republican Party over Democrats, but I’d hope he’d at least take pity on the Secretary of State’s staff and schedule both special elections at the same time. We’ll see. Oh, and if Lois Kolkhorst winds up winning Hegar’s seat, there will then need to be another special election to replace her. The fun never ends. Texas Politics has more.

And the recriminations begin

Nov 10th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I’m going to do my best to stay out of this. Everyone quoted is someone I know and like, and if there’s one part of the political process I truly don’t care for, it’s the family fight. So I’m just going to offer a few observations and move on.

– The absentee ballot program was a success, and it definitely was an improvement over previous elections, but let’s keep some perspective. The difference in the total number of Democratic absentee votes between 2014 and 2010 is about 11,000 straight ticket votes, and about 17,000 total votes. That’s without taking into account whether these were new voters or the same old reliables that would have voted in person had they not received a mail ballot. I mentioned several times during early voting that some number of new mail voters were surely people changing behavior. It would be nice to know how many of these votes were by the usual crowd and how many represented a genuine new vote in this election. That data exists, and it’s what we should be talking about. There’s value to expanding the mail program even if it’s little more than a convenience for regular voters, but if that is the case then let’s treat it as such and not as a strategic advantage.

– It was great to see so many new voters registered, in Texas and especially in Harris County, but those elevated registration numbers did not lead to an accompanying boost in turnout, especially in Harris County. How many of those new registrants actually voted? Again, that data exists, and we need to know it. If they turned out at about the same rate as other voters, or if they didn’t, should inform how we approach this going forward.

– I have a draft canvass now, and I am working my way through it. One thing to note is that no Democrat carried HD144. Rep. Mary Ann Perez came closest, and ran two or more points ahead of the rest of the ticket. The good news, if you want to look at it that way, is that overall HD144 was slightly less Republican this year than it was in 2010. Dems can and should reclaim this seat in 2016. They need to start engaging voters now to do so, and they should plan to continue engaging voters after that to try to hold this seat in 2018. Maybe the redistricting litigation will change the calculus here going forward, but that shouldn’t change the basic lesson that we need to learn here.

– By the same token, Democrats carried HD149 up and down the ballot. Rep. Hubert Vo was the pace-setter, but even in a year like this it was a blue district. In HD134, Dan Patrick was apparently a little too scary for the voters there, as Leticia Van de Putte was the only Democrat to win it. Make of that what you will.

I’ll have more going forward, but this will do for now.

The Battleground effect in legislative races

Nov 7th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

10 comments

So here’s a crazy idea. Rather than judge Battleground Texas by our own beliefs about how things should have gone, what say we take a look at the actual numbers of a few races and see what they tell us? In particular, let’s look at the numbers in the Blue Star Project races, which were legislative elections in which BGTX engaged directly. There was SD10 and eight State House races; I’m going to throw in CD23 as well even though BGTX did not specifically get involved there. I’m going to compare the performance of the Democratic candidates with those of Bill White, since everyone is obsessing about the White numbers even though about 15% of his vote total came from Republicans, and with Lt. Gov. candidate Linda Chavez-Thompson, since I believe her totals are a more accurate reflection of what the base Democratic turnout was in 2010. Here’s what I’ve got:


Dist  Candidate   Votes   Pct   White   Pct     LCT   Pct   Needed
==================================================================
CD23    Gallego  55,436  47.7  55,762  45.6  47,950  40.2   57,902

SD10     Willis  80,806  44.7  76,920  44.6  66,783  38.8   95,485

023       Criss  14,716  45.4  19,224  50.1  15,866  41.8   17,703
043    Gonzalez  10,847  38.6  14,049  45.8  12,635  41.7   17,274
105      Motley  10,469  42.7  11,766  43.8   9,793  36.7   13,588
107     Donovan  13,803  45.0  14,878  46.3  11,936  37.5   16,880
108      Bailey  16,170  39.3  17,401  42.0  12,859  31.3   24,954
113     Whitley  12,044  40.6  13,483  44.8  11,575  38.7   17,639
117      Cortez  11,519  47.3  10,247  48.0   8,829  42.2   12,832
144       Perez   5,854  49.3   8,411  52.7   7,273  46.0    6,010

It’s a mixed bag. The best performances came from Libby Willis in SD10 and Phillip Cortez (one of two incumbents on BGTX’s list) in HD117. Both exceeded White’s totals and far surpassed Chavez-Thompson’s. This is partly a reflection of what happened in Tarrant and Bexar Counties, respectively. In Tarrant, not only did Wendy Davis beat Bill White’s numbers in her backyard, so too did Leticia Van de Putte and Sam Houston, with Mike Collier just behind. White and Van de Putte were the only ones to carry Bexar for the Dems, with VdP being the high scorer, but Davis came close to White’s number and downballot Dems improved by about 20,000 votes. Willis and Cortez both beat the spread, but not by enough.

Gallego, who again was not directly assisted by BGTX, and the four Dallas County candidates all fell short of White but exceeded, in some cases by a lot, Chavez-Thompson. As I said above, I think topping LCT’s totals represents an improvement in base turnout from 2010, and again that’s consistent with what we saw in Dallas overall, as White was the standard-bearer while the top four Dems all surpassed Chavez-Thompson. Gallego did about as well in Bexar as Ciro Rodriguez did in 2010, and there’s no one place where he did worse, though he could have used more turnout in Maverick County.

The other three results are just bad. Turncoat Dem Lozano carried Jim Wells and Kleberg counties even as all the statewide Dems won in Jim Wells and most of them carried Kleberg despite generally losing it in 2010. Davis didn’t win Kleberg, and she scored lower in Jim Wells than several other Dems. That may have been a contributing factor, but on the whole it was fairly marginal. Still, that needs to be understood more fully, and someone needs to come up with a strategy to keep Dems from crossing over for Lozano if we want to make that seat competitive again.

Criss had a tough assignment, as HD23 has been trending away as places like Friendswood have made Galveston County and that district more Republican. Unlike the other two Dem-held State Rep seats that were lost, HD23 isn’t going to flip to “lean Dem” in 2016. Turnout by both parties was down in HD23 from 2010, and it’s probably the case that White was a boost there four years ago. Better turnout could have gotten her closer, but Susan Criss was always going to have to persuade some Rs to support her to win. I will be very interested to see what the Legislative Council report on this one looks like when it comes out.

The loss by Mary Ann Perez was the worst of the bunch, partly because it looked like she was up in early voting and partly because Harris was alone among the five largest counties in not improving Dem turnout. You can ding BGTX or whoever you like as much as you want for the latter, but the candidate herself has to take some responsibility, too. Winning this seat back needs to be a priority in 2016, and making sure it stays won needs to be a bigger priority after that.

So like I said, a mixed bag. The 2010 numbers were pretty brutal overall in these districts, and where there were improvements it was encouraging, and offers hope for 2016. Where there wasn’t improvement was disappointing, and needs to be examined thoroughly to understand what happened. I’d give the project a final grade of C – there’s some promise going forward and some lessons to be learned, but while improvements are nice, results are necessary.

First impressions of the 2014 results

Nov 6th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

10 comments

My initial thoughts, for what they are worth.

– Let me begin by saying that for all the criticism I had of the UT/Texas Trib’s polling and the skepticism of Internet-sample methodology, they were fairly accurate in the end. In particular, the last YouGov result just about nailed it. I still think what they do is more alchemy than anything else, and their subsample results often look ridiculous, but however they did it, they got it right and they deserve credit for it.

– I’m sure we’re about to be deluged with critical stories about Battleground Texas and public doubts about their future viability – the Trib and the Observer are already on it – but I have to ask, given the way this election went nationally, why they are more deserving of scorn than anyone else. In particular, how did they do any worse than the DCCC, DSCC, and DGA? The DSCC’s fabled “Bannock Street Project”, which was supposed to save the Senate by increasing Democratic turnout in battleground states, was a spectacular dud. Democratic candidates for Governor lost in such deep red states as Illinois and Maryland. Hell, the chair of the DGA, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, who pooped on Wendy Davis’ campaign a few months ago, failed to get a majority of the votes in his own election. BGTX doesn’t have much to brag about today, and I have no doubt they could have done plenty of things better. But I know a lot of people – friends of mine – who worked their tails off for BGTX and the Davis campaign, and I will not demean the work they did. If you want to criticize them, go right ahead, but please be specific about your complaints. I’m not going to pay attention to any generalized rants.

– Davis didn’t come close to matching Bill White’s vote total, and no statewide Dem reached 40% of the vote. That’s the harsh truth, and there’s no sugarcoating it. The funny thing is, though, for all the talk about turnout being down, it wasn’t actually Democratic turnout that was down. Here’s a comparison of the vote totals for the Democrats running for the top four offices over the last four non-Presidential cycles:


                  2002       2006       2010       2014
=======================================================
Governor     1,819,798  1,310,337  2,106,395  1,832,254
Lt Gov       2,082,281  1,617,490  1,719,202  1,810,720
Atty Gen     1,841,359  1,599,069  1,655,859  1,769,943
Comptroller  1,476,976  1,585,362        N/A  1,739,308

Davis didn’t peel crossover votes away from Abbott the way White did from Rick Perry, but beyond that I don’t see a step back. If anything, it’s an inch or two forward, though of course that still leaves a thousand miles to go. Where turnout did decline was on the Republican side. Greg Abbott received about 360,000 fewer votes than he did in 2010. Given the whipping that Republicans were laying on Dems across the country, one might wonder how it is they didn’t do any better than they did here.

One thing I’m seeing, and I’ll have more to say about this tomorrow, is that some people seem to think that because Davis got about 265K fewer votes than Bill White that means that overall Democratic turnout was down by that amount. In a word, this is baloney. White drew the votes of some 300K people that otherwise voted Republican. Their presence in his tally was nice for him, and would have been critical in a different year, but they had nothing to do with Democratic turnout. I am at a loss for why people are making that claim, and why they are overlooking or ignoring the gains in the races just below the Governor’s race, where a coordinated turnout effort would have an effect. Like I said, more about this tomorrow.

– Harris County wasn’t any prettier than the state was, and here in Harris there were declines in the vote totals of both parties. I’ve been looking at the statewide results more closely to see where the gains and losses were, and my initial impression is that the other big counties did move forward in ways Harris did not. The mail program was a success, but it seems clear that it mostly shifted behavior. If there was a net gain, in terms of votes we wouldn’t have had at all without the mail program, it means that in person turnout efforts were that much less successful. If we’re going to be introspective, that’s the place to start.

– All that said, if I’m newly-elected Harris County DA Devon Anderson, I’d take a few minutes to be concerned about the fact that I have to be on the ballot again in 2016. Consider this: By my calculation, the average Republican judicial candidate who had a Democratic opponent received 359,759 votes. The average Dem judicial candidate got 297,311. Anderson received 354,098 while Kim Ogg got 311,094. To put it another way, Ogg got crossover votes, which stands both her and Anderson in contrast to Pat Lykos in 2008 and Mike Anderson in 2012. Frankly, if she’s up for it, I’d tell Kim Ogg to keep running and start fundraising now for 2016. Assuming the patterns from the last two Presidential years hold here, she’d have a real shot at it.

– Along the same lines, of the five legislative seats the Dems lost (three in the House, one each in Congress and the Senate), HDs 117 and 144 should flip back in 2016, and if I were Pete Gallego I’d keep running for CD23 as well. (If he doesn’t want to run any more, allow me to be the first to hop on the Mary González bandwagon.) If Susan Criss can’t win HD23, which had been trending red for some time, I doubt anyone can. As for SD10, it’s not up again till 2018, but for the record, Libby Willis basically hit the Bill White number, which suggests she drew a non-trivial number of crossovers. Someone ought to take another crack at that one next time around but bear in mind this was always going to be a tough hold. I strongly suspect that if Wendy Davis had decided to run for re-election instead that we’d still be mourning her defeat.

– One prize Dems did claim was knocking off longtime Bexar County DA Susan Reed. Republicans claimed a victory over DA Craig Watkins in Dallas, where he was his own worst enemy. I refer you to Grits for more on that.

– Other results of interest: You already know about the Denton fracking ban. The Katy and Lone Star College bond initiatives passed. Austin Council Member Council Member Mike Martinez and attorney Steve Adler are in a runoff for Mayor; other Council race results, the first single member district elections in Austin, are here. And finally, Old Town Tomball repealed its ban on alcohol sales. Pour one out, y’all.

– Finally, a word on the matter of the efficacy of campaign ads, in particular negative ads. Yesterday morning after we dropped off the kids at school, Tiffany mentioned to me that Olivia’s understanding of the Governor’s race was that if Abbott won, there would be more standardized tests, which did not please her. “He wants to test four-year-olds!” she said. “That’s just wack!” I will simply note that at no time this year did I ever discuss the Abbott and Davis pre-k plans with her, and leave it at that.

Denton fracking ban passes

Nov 6th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Let the freakout – or perhaps I should say “frack-out” – begin.

Nearly 59 percent of voters in Denton, which sits on the edge of gas-rich Barnett Shale, approved a measure banning hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — the method of oil and gas extraction that has led to a domestic energy boom.

Proponents called the measure a last-ditch effort to address noise and toxic fumes that spew from wells just beyond their backyards, after loopholes and previous zoning decisions rendered changes to the city’s drilling ordinance unenforceable.

“It means we don’t have to worry about what our kids are breathing at city playgrounds,” Cathy McMullen, a nurse and president of Frack Free Denton, a grassroots group that pushed the ban, said in a statement. “It means we don’t have to worry about our property value taking a nose dive because frackers set up shop 200 feet away.”

The ban’s passage will almost certainly trigger litigation, with energy companies and royalty owners arguing that state drilling regulations trump Denton’s and that the city was confiscating mineral rights, which have long been dominant in Texas law.

Several state lawmakers have promised to fight the ban in Austin.

[…]

The Denton measure does not technically prohibit drilling outright; it would apply only to fracking, which involves blasting apart rock with millions of gallons of chemical-laced water hauled in by trucks. But opponents of the ban say it would make gas beneath the city too difficult to profitably tap – amounting to a drilling ban.

Energy companies pumped big money into effort to defeat the ban. The Denton Record-Chronicle called it the most expensive campaign in the town’s history by far.

See here, here, and here for the background. And quicker than you can say “Tort reform!”, here comes the litigation.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Denton County district court, the Texas Oil and Gas Association called the ban unconstitutional. Because of current shale economics, the group says, the measure amounts to a ban on all drilling – denying mineral owners their property rights. TXOGA asked the court to declare the ordinance invalid and unenforceable, and said state law should supersede Denton’s.

“While home-rule cities like Denton may certainly regulate some aspects of exploration and drilling, TXOGA does not believe that they may enact ordinances that outlaw conduct, like hydraulic fracturing, that has been approved and regulated by state agencies,” Tom Phillips, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, said in a statement. Phillips is now a lawyer with the firm Baker Botts, which is representing the petroleum group in the dispute.

[…]

Texas law says the state intends its mineral resources to be “fully and effectively exploited,” but courts have said the power is not absolute. The Railroad Commission has jurisdiction over all oil and gas wells in the state, with authority to adopt “all necessary rules for governing and regulating persons and their operations.” Local governments have the right to impose reasonable health and safety restrictions, and the Legislature has granted most Texas cities, including Denton, the power to “regulate exploration and development of mineral interests.”

A key question is where fracking falls on that spectrum.

Legal experts say Texas courts tend to favor oil and gas interests. But they suggest Denton could make a compelling argument that a fracking ban would not wipe out all options to drill.

Any lawyers out there want to take a crack at that? I’m guessing they had this suit all written up and ready to go well ahead of time, just in case. The Lege will have their back regardless of the outcome in court, but I’m sure they’d like to have an injunction in hand. It was fun while it lasted.

One shorter term effect of this is that it may have helped Democratic turnout in Denton County. A comparison to 2010 for the top three offices:


Abbott         93,506
Davis          47,134

Perry          83,726
White          43,073


Patrick        92,290
Van de Putte   45,017

Dewhurst       92,074
C-Thompson     33,962


Paxton         93,466
Houston        43,778

Abbott         93,268
Radnofsky      33,953

Note how the R vote totals are basically flat, while the Dems are up about 10,000. Still a big win for the Rs, but this is the sort of thing I’m talking about when I say their turnout was down. Anyway, it was a small bit of sunshine on an otherwise dark and stormy night.

Results thread

Nov 4th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Here’s where I’ll be tracking results as they come in, which should be soon now. I’m in the studio at KRTK, the livestream URL is http://abc13.co/abc13CK+, and we should be kicking off soon. Harris County results are here. Get ready, it’s about to begin.

Update, 7:10 PM – Harris County numbers are up. Davis trails by about 22,000 votes, 52.49% to 46.39%. This is right in line with my Sunday projection. The margin for Dems downballot is mostly wider. A good showing today is needed.

Update, 8:15 PM – Still no E-Day totals in Harris. Libby Willis trails in SD10 – Tarrant votes are here. All the statewides have been called for the Rs, it’s a question of the margins.

Update, 9:25 PM – Hard to find much positive right now. Dems are on track to lose three seats in the Lege – HDs 23 (Eiland, retiring), 117 (Cortez), and 144 (Perez). The latter two should flip back in 2016, but still. Dems are doing better in Harris County on E-Day, but Davis was still behind in Harris by 18K votes, and she was leading the pack.

Update, 10 PM – It’s a wrap for me at KTRK, and I’m probably going to pack it in and head home and to bed. Needless to say, this has been a crappy night all around. One oddity on the state results is that Travis County as of this posting hasn’t reported anything but early votes. In the end, I doubt we’re going to see any improvement on the base vote total. It’s disappointing on many levels, not the least of which is that I don’t think there’s a big surge in Republican voting, either. It looks like a 2002 result all over again, frankly. If you want something that looks like good news, Dems did do better in the big counties than they did in 2010. Not that that’s a high bar to clear, of course. There’s still a lot of work to be done, that’s for sure. I’ll have my own thoughts later, after I get some rest.

Where I will be on Election Night

Nov 4th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

For those of you that may wonder what I look and sound like when I say all this stuff that I write about, tonight is your chance to find out. I will be in studio at KTRK, Channel 13 in Houston, from 7 to 10. I don’t know how much they’ll have me on camera, but I do know they’ll be streaming all night – go to http://abc13.co/abc13CK+ for the stream, which is called “Your Voice, Your Vote Live”. I don’t know how many other folks like me will be involved in this, but I do know that one of them is Murray Newman of the Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center blog, whom I look forward to meeting. Tune in and wonder no more why my face is ideal for blogging.

My normal blogging style is to draft a bunch of stuff as I see it and can get to it, then schedule daily posts from what I have drafted. Needless to say, that approach fails on Election Day. I’ll be posting here tonight, possibly into tomorrow, or I may defer some stuff till tomorrow morning. It will be a disruption of my usual routine, is what I’m saying.

Which leads me to this: As some of you know, I fractured my right wrist eleven days ago. It was a stupid accident involving some heavy boards that got the best of me. It could have been much worse – they could have landed on my feet – but I am in a cast for at least the next four or five weeks. I have some use of my right fingers and thumb, so I’m only modestly inconvenienced, but typing and using a mouse are harder than usual. Given all this, I may take it easy for a couple of days, with posts mostly being an emptying of my remaining queue or something I just couldn’t resist. I doubt I’ll take too much downtime – I expect I’ll get precinct data shortly, and you know I can’t resist that. But if things are slow here for the rest of this week or so, now you know why. Thanks.

Denton fracking ban update

Nov 4th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

One more look at what is surely the most contentious issue on the ballot anywhere in the state.

With Denton preparing to vote Tuesday on banning hydraulic fracturing within city limits, tension has mounted as rival groups work to undermine each other.

The election has turned into a flash point for a national debate on the oil and gas drilling boom. Towns in New York and Colorado have voted in similar bans. But this would be the first such prohibition in Texas, the home of the country’s energy industry, probably setting off a long legal fight if it passes.

Business owners speak in hushed tones about the ban for fear of alienating customers. Accusations are flying of misleading voters on everything from how hydraulic fracturing works to how to vote for the ban. Representatives from both sides say they have received threats of violence.

For residents, the melee of yard signs, highway billboards and, more recently, television advertisements, has become impossible to avoid.

“I don’t have a television. But when I try to watch something on YouTube, I have to sit through the fracking ads,” said Nick Webber, the owner of a T-shirt shop in downtown Denton. “I’m a little confused where it’s all coming from.”

Tension over fracking has been mounting in Denton for years.

The town, with a rapidly growing population of 123,000, sits atop the natural-gas-rich Barnett Shale. Over the past decade drilling has boomed and dimmed, as hydraulic fracturing has brought forth natural gas long thought undrillable. Denton is now estimated to contain 270 wells, some of which lie close to homes, a hospital and a city park.

Last year, controversy erupted when a Dallas oil and gas company began fracking some older wells in the middle of a new housing development. Residents began reporting respiratory problems blamed on the associated fumes. And the noise of heavy equipment blanketed the neighborhood.

Seven months earlier the city had enacted rules restricting drilling activity within 1,200 feet of homes. But the driller argued successfully in court it did not apply to existing wells.

Soon a core group of fracking opponents, including a staffer with the environmental group Earthworks and an associate philosophy professor at the University of North Texas, were organizing a petition. They collected 2,000 signatures, forcing the City Council to either ban fracking inside the city limits or put it to voters. In July, the council voted 5-2 for a referendum.

See here and here for the background. This is by far the most expensive election in Denton’s history, with ban opponents outspending advocates ten to one. It’s a cinch that this winds up in court if it passes, and you can be sure someone will introduce a bill in the Lege to stamp out this sort of vote in the future regardless of the outcome. That doesn’t seem to have discouraged ban proponents, however.

One more thing:

Long a small college town surrounded by farms, Denton is changing fast. As the University of North Texas has grown, a plethora of new shops and restaurants have sprung up to cater to a new class of young families, professionals and “creatives,” as they call themselves. Graduates who once headed to Austin or Dallas are now staying put.

The new residents have proved a fertile platform for the anti-fracking movement, residents from both sides say.

“The town’s definitely getting more liberal. The old codgers never would have allowed it,” said Dewayne Grissom, a 47-year-old Denton resident opposing the fracking ban.

Early voting is way up in Denton compared to 2010. That’s partly a function of population growth, but this race is fueling it as well. Denton is a Republican stronghold and one would normally assume this turnout boost benefits them, but in this case I think the picture is fuzzier. We’ll know more tonight.

Two in Tarrant to watch

Nov 4th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Tarrant County isn’t often an electoral battleground, but this time it is, at least in two legislative races.

Libby Willis

[HD94 Republican nominee Tony] Tinderholt’s race is one of two legislative contests in Tarrant County where Democrats are pinning their hopes on Republican voters soured by the most conservative elements of their party.

The second is a race to fill the Senate seat left open by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis. There, in a district dominated by Republicans until Davis’ election, Democrat Libby Willis faces Konni Burton, a grassroots activist from Colleyville who touts the rare endorsement of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

Like Tinderholt, who ousted Diane Patrick, an eight-year incumbent, in a primary upset, Burton sailed to GOP victory by questioning the conservative credentials of other Republicans. Now, in the general election, both candidates are under fire from their opponents for positions on abortion, gun rights and illegal immigration that Democrats say are out of sync with mainstream voters.

“I’m looking for those people who just don’t care about the partisan nonsense,” said Cole Ballweg, the Arlington businessman running against Tinderholt. “I’m looking for those people who’re more like me, who say, ‘What is really going to move the needle for my community, for my schools, for my kids?’ And there’s actually a lot of them out there.”

[…]

Ballweg acknowledged that it would take a “miracle” for a Democrat to carry Arlington’s staunchly Republican House District 94.

“I understand that so many of these people are still going to vote against me,” Ballweg said. “But you know what, they’re a lot more reasonable than a lot of people give them credit. They don’t want rifles in their streets; they don’t want angry, off-the-rails rhetoric about the border or anything else.”

The contest for the state Senate seat is closer. With advertising buys still rolling in, Willis and Burton have each spent over $1 million getting their message to Tarrant County voters since May, according to Texas Ethics Commission data.

Burton has raked in high-dollar donations from prominent conservative backers, including $100,000 from Midland oil and gas developer Tim Dunn and Texans for Lawsuit Reform, which has spent more than $300,000 on last-minute direct mail and television ads on her behalf.

Willis has received substantial sums from Democratic donors, including Houston trial lawyer Steve Mostyn, who has contributed a combined $850,000 to her campaign through his law firm and Back to Basics, the political action committee he funds. She has also received support from Planned Parenthood, the Democratic organizing group Battleground Texas and Annie’s List, which helps Democratic female candidates run for office.

But in her run for the high-profile swing district, Willis has also made inroads with groups otherwise supporting a slate of primarily Republican candidates, like the Texas Medical Association and the statewide law enforcement association known as CLEAT.

The former teacher and past president of the Fort Worth League of Neighborhood Associations has attempted to draw a sharp contrast with her opponent, billing herself as a coalition builder and Burton as a partisan.

“I have so many Republicans saying, ‘I am not a Tea Party person, I am not extreme, I am just not that far out there.’ And they are voting for me,” Willis said. “A lot of them are voting for a Democrat for the first time in their lives, and they are voting for me.”

I’ve written about the SD10 race before, both as a benchmark of success and an example of what else Battleground Texas is doing. I continue to believe that Libby Willis has at least as good a chance to hold this seat with Wendy Davis running for Governor as Davis would have with a mystery candidate for Governor. Early voting was up in Tarrant County, and one presumes these races as well as the Governor’s race were the driving forces behind that. As for the HD94 race, it would be nice to think that Republicans would be “soured by the most conservative elements of their party”, but one expects that if they were then Tinderholt would have lost in the primary to Rep. Diane Patrick, who had a solid reputation and was on Tom Craddick’s leadership team. I’ll hope for the best here, and I won’t be surprised if Cole Ballweg exceeds the partisan norm, but I’m not expecting more than that.

Don’t expect the Kathie Glass effect to be much

Nov 3rd, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

Seems like every four years we talk about the possible effect of third party candidates on various races. Usually, it’s in the context of legislative races, where some candidates have won with less than 50% in recent years and one could make a case that the presence of a (usually) Libertarian candidate might have had an effect on the outcome. The subject came up for the Governor’s race a little while back, and I’m here to tamp down on any irrational exuberance.

Hop on the bus, Gus. Or don’t. Your call.

Don’t forget 1990.

That was the year a third-party candidate made a potentially game-changing difference in the Texas governor’s race, drawing slightly more than the number of votes separating Democratic winner Ann Richards from Republican Clayton Williams.

And while third-party gubernatorial candidates did not participate in Friday’s debate between Greg Abbott and Wendy Davis, they could help decide who will be the next governor of Texas.

“Third-party candidates can mean a big difference in close elections,” said Allan Saxe, an associate political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. “Third parties can rarely win. Generally, [they] play a spoiler role.”

[…]

Observers say this year’s Nov. 4 general election could provide a number of close races where a third-party candidate might change the entire dynamics of a race.

“In these contests there exists the possibility that were one or more third-party candidates not on the ballot … the outcome of the election would [be] different,” said Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.

[…]

Political analysts say third-party candidates could make a difference in the governor’s race.

Abbott, the state’s attorney general and GOP nominee, squares off against Davis, a state senator from Fort Worth and Democratic nominee. Libertarian Kathie Glass and Green Party candidate Brandon Parmer are in the race as well.

If the race tightens up, Glass and Parmer combined could draw as little as 4 percent of the vote and impact the result.

“That could mean the difference in a very close election,” Saxe said.

After all, in 1990, Richards won by claiming 99,239 more votes than Williams, and Libertarian Jeff Daiell earned 129,128 votes.

“Overall, the principal impact of the Libertarian Party and Green Party candidates this fall will be to provide voters with a different perspective on how to address many of the key challenges facing the state today,” Jones said.

A key example, he said, is Glass, “who is far and away running the most visible and vibrant campaign of any third-party candidate in Texas.”

I will admit, I saw the Kathie Glass Bus on the side of the road as we were heading back from Austin on 290 a couple of weeks ago. I was tempted to take a picture of it, but I was driving at the time, and I didn’t think Tiffany would have appreciated me hauling out my cellphone at that moment. Maybe some other time. In any event, I will admit that as far as that goes, Glass’ campaign has been more visible than some other Libertarian campaigns of recent years.

Nonetheless, I’m going to play spoiler as well. Here’s a compilation of all third-party candidate performances in Texas gubernatorial races since 1990. See if you can spot the problem.


Year     Lib  Green  Other  Total  Win %
========================================
1990    3.32      0   0.30   3.62  48.19
1994    0.64      0      0   0.64  49.68
1998    0.55      0   0.02   0.57  49.72
2002    1.46   0.70   0.05   2.21  48.90
2006    0.60      0   0.01   0.61  49.69
2010    2.19   0.39   0.14   2.72  48.64

Notice how in none of these six elections how the combined Lib and Green (and write-in, which is what the Other above represents) total has reached four percent? In fact, outside of 1990, it’s never reached three percent? This could be the year that it happens – the Kathie Glass Bus is quite impressive, after all – but if you’re going to write this story, you ought to acknowledge the history. Don’t get our hopes up without justification.

It’s my opinion from looking at as many election results as I’ve seen over the years that the higher the profile the race, the lower the ceiling for third party candidates, our wacky 2006 Governor’s race excepted. Honestly, outside of the hardest of the hardcore political junkies and members of the third parties themselves, I doubt more than a handful of people even know who the L and G nominees are. With all due respect to Kathie Glass and her bus, the people that will be voting for her are basically the people that always vote Libertarian and the people that for whatever the reason didn’t like the nominee from the party that they tend to vote for no matter how much they protest their “independence”. Frankly, if the base party vote is reasonably close to even overall – which at this point I don’t think is likely, but I could be wrong – the place where an L and/or G candidate could affect the outcome is down ballot. I went through this exercise before, to show that one doesn’t need to get 50% of the vote to win most statewide races in Texas due to the presence of other candidates, and as you can see the higher totals for third party candidates tend to be in the lower profile races. I’m not saying that Kathie Glass and Brandon Parmer can’t have an effect on the outcome of the Governor’s race. I am saying that if I had to pick one race where there might be an effect, I’d probably pick Railroad Commissioner or Supreme Court justice. I promise to look at this again after the election.

Final 2014 EV thoughts

Nov 2nd, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Here’s the Chron story about how early voting went.

“Each (side) is emphasizing areas of comparative advantage, but the overall pattern seems to be unimpressive in terms of overall turnout,” said Jim Henson, who directs the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “I don’t see anything in the voting numbers as we have them so far to suggest a disruption in the normal pattern.”

Based on numbers kept by the secretary of state’s office, nearly 1.5 million people had voted early through Thursday in Texas’ 15 biggest counties, barely topping the same number at this point in 2010. The early voting turnout rate was down more than 7 percent.

“The numbers for early voting in this 2014 election cycle are comparable to what we saw in 2010,” said Alicia Pierce, a spokeswoman for the office, echoing not only Republicans but also independent experts who have been crunching the numbers on their own.

Polling stations in Harris County experienced a surge on Friday, the last day to cast a ballot in-person before Election Day on Nov. 4. Workers processed 51,628 voters – the highest daily number of the early-voting period.

But overall, early turnout in Harris County dropped 16 percent compared to the midterm count four years ago, from 444,648 to 375,247 this cycle.

In-person voters numbered 307,280 for the dozen days of early voting, compared to the final early number in 2010 – 392,536.

Still, more mail-in ballots were returned this cycle, 67,967 compared to 52,112 in 2010, which may suggest that efforts to get more people to vote using that method worked.

Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart said he expects a non-record-breaking turnout of about 300,000 voters on Tuesday. “Voters, they do their own thing,” he said, adding that state and national moods appear to influence turnouts.

The analysis of Friday’s batch of votes was that it was a good day for the Democrats, which brought the projected Dem share of the overall early vote in Harris County to 46.7%. That happens to be a very conducive number for some back-of-the-envelope math. With turnout so far at 375K, this puts Democrats down about 25K votes, 200K to 175K. That’s without taking into account the Greens and Libs, the extra mail ballots that will arrive by Tuesday, and undervotes, but it’s close enough for these purposes. If we accept Stan Stanart’s guess of 300K turnout for Tuesday, that means Dems need a win of 162,500 to 137,500 for a 50-50 county. That’s roughly a 54.2-45.8 spread for the Ds, or an improvement of 7.5 points over EV. In 2010, Dems improved by about 7 points from EV to E-Day (39% to 46%). So it’s doable, though obviously a bit of a stretch.

One thing to note from this is that if this projection is accurate, Dem turnout in Harris County will be up a smidge from 2010 – could be a slightly larger smidge if the projection underestimates the Dems, or it could be that there is no smidge if it’s an overestimate – while Republican turnout is down considerably. That shouldn’t be a big surprise – 2010 was fueled by a huge wave of previously Presidential-year-only Republican voters. I’ve said all along that while we ought to expect some of them to show up this year, it’s unlikely they all would. It stands to reason that a lack of these surge voters would have an effect. I suspect that this pattern will hold around the state, with perhaps some local variations here and there, like in Bexar County, but I have no data to verify this. What this means for final state totals remains to be seen. Let’s assume that the Rs have something like 2002 turnout, which is to say between 2.7 million and 2.8 million. If Dems can reach or edge past the Bill White line – say 2.1 or 2.2 million – that puts them at 43 or 44 percent, more or less. If that’s true for the whole ticket and not just one Bill White-like candidate, I’d count that as solid progress, if perhaps a bit short of my fonder hopes. It would also still be a double-digit loss, likely between 12 and 14 points. You can close a lot of the gap from 2010 and still have a lot more gap left to close. If however we’re looking at no more than an “up a smidge” situation statewide, so that Dems are still in the 1.8 million range, we’re looking at a 20-point loss. I’d be hard pressed to find anything positive about that regardless of what else might have happened.

None of this should be taken as gospel. I’m extrapolating from a limited data set. It would have been awesome to have seen some clear evidence of a Democratic surge, but I don’t. There is room to make up ground on Election Day, though, so keep at it till the final bell rings. Remember also that when BGTX first arrived, back when no Democrats were running for Governor, they were talking about a multi-year process, with a target date of 2020. Whatever does happen, we have to build on it. Move forward or get left behind.

Finally, a small point of disagreement with my friend PDiddie. If Susan Criss holds HD23, I see no way the Dems lose any seats in the Lege. The most likely outcomes range from -1 to +3 for the Dems, depending on HD23, those two Dallas districts, and HD43. There are Dem incumbents that would have to sweat it out in a year more like 2010, but there’s no evidence to suggest we have that kind of year.

The two Dallas districts to watch

Nov 2nd, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

There’s HD105:

Susan Motley

Hispanics make up 41 percent of Irving’s population — up from 31 percent in 2000 and 16 percent in 1990, when the white population topped 71 percent, according to figures from 2010, the latest available. White residents make up 31 percent of Irving, Asians 14 percent and blacks 12 percent.

The changing demographics have turned Irving into a battleground in the November election in a state race that could foreshadow future face-offs in a changing state. Sensing an opportunity to put a state House seat in the “win” column, Democrats are courting Hispanic residents; Republicans, who have held the seat since 2001, are also making a push among new residents.

The race for House District 105, which is mostly in Irving, pits Susan Motley, a Democrat and disability rights attorney, against Rodney Anderson, the former state representative who beat a longtime incumbent, Linda Harper-Brown, in the Republican primary.

Motley said changing demographics showed that the district needed a leader who could “appreciate this diversity rather than react negatively from fear or misunderstanding.” She is getting help from the Democratic organizing group Battleground Texas, which is working to register voters and get them to the polls in November.

“Truthfully, I have felt for a long time that this district has what it needs if people turn out to vote,” Motley said about Democrats’ chances in House District 105.

Anderson said he has been successful in winning over minorities, pointing to his one term representing a neighboring district that had a majority-minority population.

“The same message I have today of individual liberty and creating an economic environment resonated well then and continues to resonate now,” he said.

And there’s HD107:

District 107 in the Texas House was created to be a Republican district, and a Republican now holds it.

But the results in 2012 were so close — Kenneth Sheets, first elected two years earlier, won re-election by less than 1,000 votes out of 50,000 cast — that Democrat Carol Donovan hopes to take it away this year.

District 107 stretches through the homes of middle-class families in northeast Dallas, Garland and Mesquite into affluent neighborhoods surrounding White Rock Lake.

Donovan thinks it is turning blue.

“It’s a matter of overcoming the edge,” she said. “The district is evolving, and I think the district is a lot more even than the people who drew the lines anticipated.”

Sheets said his conservative views are attuned to the people of the district. Sheets was considered an ally of the tea party when he was first elected in 2010, but he said he has broadened his perspective.

“I think I’ve matured,” he said. “I got to the point of understanding the reality of where things are.

What this all basically boils down to is that Dallas County is 55% or more Democratic overall – no Republican has won a countywide race in Dallas since 2004 – but eight of the 14 State Rep districts were drawn to elect Republicans. Because of that, none of these are truly safe seats for the Rs – none gave Mitt Romney more than 59% in 2012. In a strong year for the Dems, these two districts and maybe one or two more could fall to them, and in a good year for the Rs they could all revert back. I don’t know what will happen this year, but I feel confident saying that there will be hotly contested races in these seats for at least as long as the current map is in place. It’s just a matter of math.

2014 final EV totals

Nov 1st, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Here they are, and here are the full 2010 EV totals. Yesterday was the busiest day, as is typical with early voting. I have some more general thoughts to express, but with the Halloween madness yesterday I never got to finish them. I’ll have that either tomorrow or Monday. In the meantime, happy Day of the Dead.

2014 Day 11 Early Vote totals

Oct 31st, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

But first, a little Republican angst.

The Republican Party of Bexar County has issued a series of desperate pleas to conservative voters, saying “the Democrats are beating us on base turnout,” but two of the Texas party’s biggest names converged on San Antonio to get any complacent GOP voters off their couches.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott rallied supporters on Wednesday at Alamo Café, echoing concerns of local GOP leaders that loyalists who usually vote early aren’t all doing so.

“It’s a risk when people feel you’re going to win. They feel ‘why bother?’ That’s why events like this are so important, to encourage people to vote,” Cornyn said.

“We noticed that our base is sagging a bit,” said Bexar County GOP Chairman Robert Stovall.

“For the first time, I hope Republicans are right,” quipped his Democratic counterpart, Manuel Medina.

Both parties are armed with overnight data from early voting that ends Friday. While Republicans are anxious about their turnout numbers, Democrats are buoyed by theirs.

I have no insight into Bexar County, and it’s often difficult to distinguish between truth and bluff in this kind of story, but I like the sound of this anyway. It is credible to me that Bexar could be overperforming thanks to the presence of Leticia Van de Putte, as Tarrant appears to be doing for Wendy Davis and Harris did in 2010 for Bill White. Be that as it may, I think we can take this at face value.

And then there’s this from the Quorum Report, via email from the Davis campaign:

As we’ve said from time to time at Buzz Central, if Texas is a battleground, Harris County is ground zero. Perhaps never before has that seemed so true. Conservative activists, including the local GOP’s new and old leadership, are said to be waging all-out war to try to keep Sen. Wendy Davis’ performance in Harris County from affecting their down ballot candidates. There has been much grumbling in recent weeks from local Republican judicial candidates who feel that not enough has been done to turn out the GOP vote.

Longtime conservative activist and donor Dr. Steve Hotze – a major financial contributor to Sen.Dan Patrick – recently sent out mailers and emails pleading for Christian conservatives to get out the vote.

In offering what he called a “Contract with Texas,” Hotze said “Republicans are in trouble in Harris County. For the first time in over two decades the Democrats have matched the Republicans in Early Ballots by Mail which Republicans historically have led by a 2 to 1 margin.”

Hotze went on to explain that he’s seen polling that shows Attorney General Greg Abbott running behind Sen. Davis by just 1 percent in Harris County. Some reliable sources tell QR they have seen similar polling.

“This adversely affects the down ballot races,” Hotze wrote. “Republican District Attorney Devon Anderson is in a dead heat with Democrat challenger Kim Ogg,” he said.

“The Republican judges are running neck in neck with the liberal Democrat judicial candidates. Obama’s Battleground Texashas registered over 1,000,000 new voters in Texas.”

And with that, here are your Day 11 EV totals, and here are the full 2010 EV totals. In this case, skepticism is warranted. The evidence we have is that Republicans have an eight or nine point lead, which is smaller than what they’re used to for off year elections, but still nothing to sneeze at. Whatever the polls say – the KHOU poll is the only Harris County-specific public data of which I am aware – the actual vote rosters tell us more. The good news, from the Dem perspective, is that we have more base voters left to motivate. The bad news is that there ain’t much time left to do that, and I’m not sure anyone knows why the numbers haven’t been higher. But hey, at least you know that we’re not the only ones that have been sweating.

Endorsement watch: Juvenile courts

Oct 31st, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I had thought we were at the end of the line for endorsements, but not quite yet.

Natalia Cokinos Oakes

314th Juvenile District Court: Natalia Oakes

Democratic candidate Natalia Oakes has dedicated her career to helping children, and voters should put that passion to use on the bench. Oakes, a graduate of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, has practiced in Harris County family courts for 14 years. Before becoming a lawyer, Oakes worked as a teacher, giving her a solid background for communicating with children and their parents in distress. She told the Chronicle editorial board that she is running for judge to “have the power to introduce new and innovative programs” to the juvenile courts. She would like to see more emphasis on tracking offenders to determine the effectiveness of different rehabilitation programs. Her goals are laudable and her background promising, but her opponent is the tipping point.

Republican incumbent Judge John F. Phillips has served in the 314th since 2002. Despite recognized capabilities, Phillips has earned a reputation for cronyism and heavy handedness. He has been noted for assigning former law partners and campaign contributors as court-appointed attorneys. Phillips also has been criticized for abusing his discretion in separating an abandoned 12-year-old rape victim from her child. We wanted to hear Phillips’ side, but he refused to meet with the editorial board.

Despite her lack of judicial experience, we think the 314th needs a change and that Natalia Oakes will be a capable new judge.

I should note that the Chron endorsed Cokinos Oakes in 2010 for the then-open 313th Juvenile Court. I don’t think she got any less experienced since then. Be that as it may, the Chronicle didn’t mention that the criticism they cite of the incumbent judge in this race comes courtesy of their own Lisa Falkenberg. Falkenberg gives us a reminder of Judge Phillips’ rap sheet.

In recent days, readers have contacted me, some of them apparently on their way to vote early, asking variations of the same question: “What was the name of that judge who took away Angela’s baby?”

By now, all you readers should know his name by heart. But as a frequent sufferer of name-recall syndrome myself, I don’t mind answering.

He is state district Judge John Phillips, a Republican elected to the 314th district court in 2002. After his Republican primary opponent was excluded from the ballot, apparently on a technicality, Phillips was left to face Democrat Natalia Oakes, a juvenile law attorney and former teacher.

In a recent Houston Bar Association poll, Oakes bested Phillips 400-348 – not a huge lead for Oakes but a significant shortcoming for Phillips, a Republican on the bench for more than a decade who holds an administrative position in juvenile courts.

Recently, I asked a reader who votes overwhelmingly Republican and often disagrees with my stances on social issues what kept her from voting straight ticket.

“Well, because there’s always a few,” she said with a laugh. “There’s just always a few.”

She listed Phillips among the few.

[…]

In 2008, I wrote about how the judge ordered two children, aged 1 and 2, from the home of their LaPorte grandparents, who had raised them since infancy, and placed with strangers in a foster home. In a hearing terminating the rights of the parents over drug abuse, Phillips refused to let the grandparents intervene, apparently because he deemed the couple, both in their 50s, too old.

Phillips said the boys would need guidance into their 20s and “the stark reality is there’s a very good chance” their grandparents “will be dead at that time.'”

More recently, a series of columns on 12-year-old rape victim “Angela” gained wide attention from readers. Angela, abandoned by both parents after she became pregnant, was placed in CPS custody. The girl, who had every reason to resent the life inside her, embraced pregnancy, decided on breastfeeding, and even bonded with a Rosharon relative of her foster mother who agreed to provide a loving, stable home for her and her baby.

But when Phillips got wind the Rosharon family was caring for the newborn, he demanded that child protective officials transfer the baby to a foster home in Montgomery County where Angela wouldn’t have access to her.

Phillips told Angela bluntly in court: “You and your baby are not going to be together.”

His reasons had nothing to do with the law. State law only allows children to be taken from parents if there’s evidence of abuse or neglect – neither of which was ever alleged against the young mother.

Phillips was ready to throw Angela away as damaged goods, and he might well have succeeded, if not for attorney Thuy Le, who fought to represent the girl and eventually prevailed in getting a new judge to reunite Angela and her baby.

He also likes to post juvenile crap on Facebook, and he didn’t like the Public Defenders Office, but there’s enough to question his fitness to be a judge without that. Cokinos Oakes did not send me Q&A responses this year but she did so in 2010, and you can see that here. I did get responses from Tracy Good, the Democrat running for the 313th Juvenile Court, and those are here. We’ll see if there is any Falkenberg Effect in this race.

2014 Day 10 Early Vote totals

Oct 30th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

EarlyVoting

Here they are, and here are the full 2010 EV totals. The debate about what the turnout numbers mean continues apace. You already know what I think about that, so let me introduce a different perspective. We’ve been talking about these numbers mostly in the context of 2010. I’ve been saying that’s at least somewhat misleading since so much of the early voting explosion that year came from Republicans. I thought it might be useful to look back at previous to see how Democrats in Harris County performed in them, since as I’ve been saying it’s as much about who turns out as it is how many of them there are. To that end, here are the actual absentee plus in-person early voting numbers for the Land Commissioner race for 2002, 2006, and 2010, taken from harrisvotes.com:


Year    Candidate     Mail    Early    Total   Pct   RvD
========================================================
2002    Patterson   22,114   79,879  101,993  56.1  58.0
2002      Bernsen   12,607   61,003   73,710  40.6  42.0
2002       Others      634    5,374    6,008   3.3

2006    Patterson   13,640   88,517  102,157  55.2  56.8
2006      Hathcox    7,945   69,703   77,648  42.0  43.2
2006       Others      477    4,629    5,106   2.8

2010    Patterson   36,216  221,145  257,361  59.2  60.3
2010        Uribe   16,450  152,832  169,288  39.0  39.7
2010       Others      733    7,098    7,831   1.8

“RvD” is the straight R versus D percentage. I have used the Railroad Commissioner race for similar purposes in the past; I had no specific reason for using the Land Commish race here, I figure they both recapitulate partisan participation reasonably well. Greg had the R/D number at 54.5/45.5 through Monday. However you feel about the numbers so far, they are better than what we have done in elections past. Does that mean they are as good as they could be? Is this where I thought we’d be as of today? No and no. But it is better than what we have done in past non-Presidential elections, assuming we don’t do any worse till the end of the week. We’ll see how it goes from here.

Endorsement watch: County civil courts

Oct 30th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I believe we are finally at the end of the endorsements line. Last to the table are thecounty civil courts, where in a slight change of pace the Democratic challengers were recommended in two out of three contested races:

Civil Court of Law No. 3: Gloria Cantu Minnick

A graduate of South Texas College of Law, Democratic candidate Gloria Cantu Minnick, 69, would bring not only trial experience but sorely needed management skills to this bench with a docket that has grown too long.

Minnick has served as assistant city attorney and senior assistant director for the Public Works and Engineering Department. Republican incumbent Judge Linda Storey has served on the bench since 2006. Also a graduate of South Texas College of Law, Storey, 46, told the Chronicle editorial board that she believed in the election process for judges.

In this case, voters need to vote for a change and support Minnick for this bench.

Civil Court of Law No. 4: Damon Crenshaw

Democratic candidate Damon Crenshaw, 55, is campaigning on the promise to make this court run more efficiently. A graduate of South Texas School of Law, Crenshaw has over 25 years of legal experience.

We agree that it’s time for a change. His opponent, Republican incumbent Judge Roberta Lloyd, received her law degree from Stetson University College of Law and an L.L.M. in taxation from the University of Miami. Her work in animal cruelty resulted in weekly appearances on the television show “Animal Cops-Houston” for several years. Lloyd, 59, has a reputation for being hard to work with on the bench. When you’re a judge, it’s not just about being right, but about how you manage your courtroom. Lloyd has served on this bench since 2004; it’s time for fresh ideas and a new energy.

As has been the norm, the Chron had some nice things to say about the Dem challenger they didn’t endorse, Scot Dollinger, whose Q&A you can see here. I don’t know how much these endorsements matter in the end, and I certainly didn’t agree with all of their choices, but kudos to the Chron for making the effort on all these races. There are a lot of them, and not a lot of sources for voters to learn about the candidates – the endorsements, the League of Women Voters Guide, the HBA Judicial Preference poll, and the various Q&As done by myself, Texpatriate, and Texas Leftist. I hope you feel you had enough information to make sound decisions.

Election 2014

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