Election 2020

Yep, still no voter fraud found

So says the official 2020 election audit.

Despite challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, there was neither widespread voter fraud nor other serious issues in Texas’ 2020 elections, according to an audit of four of Texas’ largest counties released Monday evening by Secretary of State John Scott’s office.

While the 359-page report did find some “irregularities,” it nonetheless reinforced what election experts and monitors — including Scott, the state’s chief election official — have routinely said: that the 2020 contest was not riddled with widespread fraud, and Texans should be confident that future elections will be similarly secure.

“When the Texas Election Code and local procedures are followed, Texas voters should have a very high level of confidence in the accuracy of the outcome of Texas elections,” the report stated. “When procedures are followed, results of the election are trustworthy. Indeed, in most cases, the audit found that the counties followed their procedures and clearly documented their activities.”

[…]

The report found that “many of the irregularities observed” in 2020 were likely caused by the “extraordinary challenges” posed by the pandemic and ensuing staffing shortages. And, auditors said, such problems are even less likely to occur in future contests because of legislative changes, including those in Senate Bill 1.

Of the four counties the report analyzed, the Harris County general election had the most issues, including improper chain of custody of mobile ballot boxes at 14 polling locations. Auditors also found thousands of discrepancies between electronic pollbook records and audit logs.

See here for a bit of background. No one who doesn’t have to is going to read the entire 359 page report, but you can get a high level summary at the beginning of it. I have two points to add. One comes from the Chron story, which addresses some of the items raised in the audit about Harris County:

Harris County did not properly handle certain electronic voting records during the 2020 election, according to an audit from the Texas secretary of state’s office that uncovered numerous administrative mishaps but no evidence of widespread voter fraud in four of the state’s largest counties.

In a report released Monday evening, the state elections office found that Harris County failed to properly document the “chain of custody” — a required step-by-step accounting of voting records — for thousands of ballots across at least 14 polling locations. The finding was among those mentioned by state elections officials last month in a letter to the Harris County elections administrator, delivered days before the November midterms.

The report outlined a number of slip-ups across the four audited counties, which included Republican-controlled Collin and Tarrant counties and Democratic-run Dallas and Harris counties. It concluded that Texas voters “should have a very high level of confidence in the accuracy of the outcome of Texas elections” when counties follow the state election code and their own local procedures.

“Each of the four counties has detailed procedures and detailed forms to document compliance with the code and ensure that only lawful ballots are cast and counted,” the report reads. “When procedures are followed, results of the election are trustworthy. Indeed, in most cases, the audit found that the counties followed their procedures and clearly documented their activities. In some cases, however, they did not.”

When counties did not properly follow state law and local procedures, “discrepancies and irregularities ranging from small to large ensued,” the report said.

State officials singled out Harris County for “very serious issues in the handling of electronic media,” finding that the county lacked records to explain the origin of 17 “mobile ballot boxes” — the pieces of hardware that store vote tallies and transmit the data to and from polling places. The report also identified disparities between electronic records from the polls and “tally audit logs” at numerous locations.

Since the 2020 election, Harris County has switched to a new system that stores voting records on vDrives — a type of USB thumb drive — with “procedures in place to document proper chain of custody … in the event a vDrive fails,” the report reads.

[…]

Harris County Elections Administrator Cliff Tatum has pledged a complete assessment of the issues that arose during the midterm while warning the county is in “dire need” of improvements to the way it conducts elections.

Last month, Tatum penned a letter to state officials seeking to address the audit’s preliminary findings, including the chain-of-custody problems.

Writing to Chad Ennis, director of the secretary of state’s forensic audit division, Tatum said the issue with the 14 locations cited in the report arose when votes were “stranded” on devices used at Harris County’s drive-thru voting and other locations.

To read the “stranded” results, Tatum wrote, county officials had to create 30 “replacement” mobile ballot boxes.

“The number of cast votes on those 30 MBBs align with the expected number from the voting sites,” Tatum wrote to Ennis. “This explains why there were more than 14 MBBs created to read the results and why those initial 14 were not read into the tabulator.”

The poll book disparities, meanwhile, were the result of voting machines being moved from one location to another during the election.

“While this may have been done to address long lines at any of the vote centers during the 2020 election, this is a practice that our office no longer follows,” said Tatum, who was appointed elections administrator in July.

We have the joy of being “randomly” audited again for this November’s election, so we’ll see what they have to complain about this time.

The other point I would raise, which was mentioned in passing in that Chron story, was that this audit was released on Monday night (the Trib story published at 8 PM) during Christmas week. I don’t know about you, but I think that if they had something juicy to report, they’d have dropped it at a time when people would be actually paying attention. This has all the hallmarks of a “nothing to see here” report.

Charges dropped against Hervis Rogers

Oct 24th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Good, but this whole thing was an enraging travesty and in no way makes things right.

Hervis Rogers

Voter fraud charges against Hervis Rogers, who garnered widespread attention for waiting hours in line to vote at a Houston polling location during the March 2020 presidential primary, have been dismissed.

Attorney General Ken Paxton ordered Rogers’ arrest in July 2021 on charges that he voted while on parole. Over a year later, after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reiterated that the attorney general doesn’t have the ability to unilaterally prosecute election crimes, a district court judge has dropped the two counts of illegal voting against Rogers.

“I am thankful that justice has been done,” Rogers said in a statement.

After serving time for a 1995 burglary conviction, Rogers had been out on parole since 2004. His parole ended in June 2020. In Texas, knowingly voting while on parole or probation is a second-degree felony, which could result in up to 20 years in prison. But Rogers said he wasn’t aware of his ineligibility, and advocates pointed to the fact that he had waited for six hours to vote — while working two jobs, including one that starts at 6 a.m. — as evidence of this.

Rogers is over 60 years old, so a conviction could have resulted in what amounted to a life sentence.

“It has been horrible to go through this, and I am so glad my case is over. I look forward to being able to get back to my life,” he added in the statement.

See here for the background. As a reminder, Hervis Rogers was initially jailed on a $100,000 bond – which is higher than what is often assessed on murder suspects – in Montgomery County. Not Harris County, where he voted, but Montgomery because Ken Paxton figured he’d have a better shot at conviction there. Literally everything about this was wrong, and it’s only because the Court of Criminal Appeals actually applied the state constitution that an even larger miscarriage of justice was avoided. Now if there were justice, Hervis Rogers would be able to sue not only the state of Texas but Ken Paxton personally for the needless suffering inflicted on him. None of that is going to happen, but the one thing we can do is vote Ken Paxton out of office, and never give him the chance to do this to someone else. The Chron has more.

Who audits the auditors?

Aug 4th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

A novel idea. Not sure it will get anywhere, but it does send a message.

Harris County Commissioners Court, by a 3-2 partisan vote, agreed to explore legal options, including a possible lawsuit, to challenge the results of a random drawing by the Texas Secretary of State’s Office that means another round of election scrutiny for Texas’ largest county.

“It ought to be the state of Texas that is audited,” said Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who proposed the lawsuit. “This place has gone back to the bad old days.”

Harris County learned last week it was one of two large counties chosen for an election audit by state officials, under new procedures lawmakers approved for election scrutiny. It is the second audit of Harris County, after another approved weeks following the 2020 general election.

[…]

Harris and Cameron counties were the two large ones chosen in a drawing from a bucket, the Secretary of State’s office announced; Eastland and Guadalupe counties were the two small counties selected.

Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee, however, questioned the authenticity of the drawing, saying the broadcast of the drawing “looks like a video out of a sketch comedy show.”

“The camera does not show the slips going into the bucket,” Menefee said, noting various aspects of the drawing that are not filmed. “They don’t even show the slips to the camera.”

See here for the background. Just as a reminder, while there have been issues in other elections in Harris County, the November 2020 election ran incredibly smoothly. And the SOS has already done an “audit” of that election, even if they never bothered to release a report on their “audit”.

My guess is that this doesn’t go anywhere, because I can’t see what grounds there are to sue. (Remember: I Am Not A Lawyer. There is an excellent chance that I am full of beans here.) One could argue that Harris County should have been exempted from this year’s drawing, as the law states that counties cannot be subjected to this audit in consecutive cycles. But the previous audit was not done under the auspices of that law, so the legal response to that would be some form of “tough luck”. Again, I don’t know what the actual attorneys who will be looking into the legal possibilities may find here, so take all this with an appropriate amount of skepticism. But if you were to bet me a dollar right now that 1) Harris County would file a suit as threatened, and 2) it would result in a temporary restraining order, I would take that bet.

If on the other hand the point of this is to denigrate the audit process, which was created in response to Big Lie mania, I’m fine with that. If the idea is to suggest that the state can’t be trusted to conduct a fair random drawing, let alone a fair audit process, that works for me. Judge Hidalgo spoke about the need to combat Big Lie hysteria, which is doing immense damage to the election process and a whole lot more, in the story. That’s a worthwhile mission. If it turns out there really is more to it than that, I’ll be happy to have been proven wrong.

Fraudit 2.0

Jul 29th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

6 comments

Here we go again.

Harris County will be one of four Texas counties to undergo an audit of its upcoming November election results by the Texas secretary of state’s office.

It will be the second election audit in two years for Harris County, though the first to be conducted under election law the state legislature passed in 2021.

Eastland, Cameron and Guadalupe counties were selected for the audit process, as well.

By state law, four counties are to be audited at random every two years, two with a population greater than 300,000 and two counties with smaller populations. There are 18 Texas counties with populations greater than 300,000, meaning the state’s large urban counties will face the most audits. Texas has 254 counties.

The audits are to be conducted after November elections in all even-numbered years, and they will look at elections in the four selected counties from the preceding two years. The counties selected will not have to pay for the audits.

On Twitter, Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee questioned the randomness of the selection process. In response, the secretary of state’s office tweeted a link to a video on Facebook that showed the process — the names of large counties and smaller counties are printed on individual labels, and then the four counties are drawn from a bucket. When an employee drops the labels of the large counties into the bucket, it does not happen on camera.

Menefee’s office put out a statement in which the county attorney called the latest audit a ‘waste of time.”

“Harris County will comply, as we’ve always done,’ Menefee said. “But this is a waste of time. Last year the state coincidentally launched an audit of the county’s 2020 election just hours after former President Trump called on the governor to do so. That audit has been consuming the resources of our Elections Administrator’s office at a time where they’ve had to hold a record number of elections. By the way, that audit has still not been completed.

“Now, the state has ‘randomly’ selected Harris County to be audited for the 2022 election,” the statement continues. “Voters should be asking themselves what purpose these audits serve beyond wasting taxpayer money. As has been shown time and again, our elections are secure. The entire premise of these audits—that there is widespread fraud in our elections—is false.”

[…]

In September 2021, the secretary of state’s office announced it had begun a “full and comprehensive forensic audit” of the 2020 election in four Texas counties, including Dallas, Harris and Tarrant — the state’s three largest counties, all of which voted for President Joe Biden. The audit also encompassed Collin County, the largest in Texas carried by former President Donald Trump.

State law establishing the new audit process specifies: “a county selected in the most recent audit cycle may not be selected in the current audit cycle.” Though Harris County’s 2020 election results currently are being examined under a “forensic audit” by the state, the county still is eligible for a new audit in the current cycle because they are separate audit processes, according to Texas Secretary of State spokesperson Sam Taylor. He confirmed Harris County will not be eligible for an audit in the following election cycle.

See here for all my previous blogging on this topic. The video in question can be found here; it was posted by someone at the SOS office in response to a snarky tweet by Christian Menefee. There was a preliminary result from that first “audit” posted in January of 2021 – I can say I’m not aware of any followup stories about that. This is a bullshit law passed to satisfy the Big Lie, and it’s on the list of laws that have got to go when Dems get a turn.

(There’s also an unofficial “audit” of 2020 primary ballots going on in Tarrant County. I can’t even read that story, I start seeing red two sentences in.)

Ken Paxton cannot be trusted to prosecute anyone

Feb 9th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Scary story:

.
From Statesman columnist @bgrumet: “@TXAG Ken Paxton is using the powers of his office to treat a good-faith mishap as a crime, after coming under political pressure from his own base to file charges.”

— Austin Statesman (@statesman) 9:30 AM – 6 February 2022

The article is paywalled, but I got to see a Google doc copy of it. This happened to Rob Icsezen, the host of the H-Town Progressive podcast and a Democratic appointee of the Early Voting Ballot Board and Signature Verification Committee for the 2020 election. I will summarize what happened:

– A Republican poll watcher showed up to observe what the EVBB and SVC were doing. Existing law said poll watchers were allowed at the former, but said nothing about the latter. Icsezen interpreted this to mean that they weren’t allowed to observe the SVC, checked his interpretation with the Harris County Attorney, which approved his decision, and turned the poll watcher away.

– The poll watcher complained to the Harris County GOP, who called the Secretary of State, who called Icsezen and said he was wrong, the poll watcher needed to be allowed in to observe the SVC. Icsezen did so. According to the story, this all took place within a few hours, and according to other members of both groups who the author spoke to, it was no big deal at the time.

– An investigator with the AG’s Election Integrity Unit spoke to Icsezen in December of 2020, and apparently concluded that this was basically a misunderstanding of an unclear law, and did not warrant further action.

– The Harris County GOP reacted angrily to this and sent a letter to Ken Paxton demanding he take action or else “we have no confidence that the Attorney General will uphold any of our election laws”.

– So Paxton, ever the coward, convened a grand jury in Montgomery County – not Harris, where this alleged “crime” took place, but the very friendly confines of Montgomery County – and presented his case. Which, despite this being Montgomery County, and despite it being entirely his show, declined to indict Icsezen on whatever charges Paxton had dreamed up.

– Note that Paxton had previously tried to indict Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir on similarly flimsy charges in 2020, but a grand jury in Williamson County – again, not where the alleged “crime” took place – declined to indict.

– The only reason we know any of this is because Paxton put out a whiny press release complaining about his inability to get a Montgomery County grand jury to give him what he wanted.

So yeah, this is the guy who wants unlimited power to prosecute “election fraud” – which, evidence would suggest he’s not very good at – and is now sending out the howler monkeys against the Court of Criminal Appeals in order to get his way. Doesn’t exactly fill you with pride and confidence in our justice system, does it?

Another look at the Aguirre/Hotze debacle

Dec 29th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Man, do I ever want this to be the end of Steven Hotze as a political force.

A well-funded far-right group—that made inroads with Stop The Steal organizations, paid a former police captain more than $200,000 to hunt ballots, and became entangled in a roadside stickup—was making war plans for Election Day 2020 months ahead of time, documents reveal.

The fringe group, the Liberty Center for God and Country (LCGC), led a lucrative fundraising blitz in the run-up to the election and quietly networked with now-notorious election denialists. Their work came to light in October of that year when former Houston Police captain Mark Aguirre allegedly rammed his SUV into a man’s truck, forced the man onto the ground at gunpoint, and accused him of transporting 750,000 fraudulent ballots. Aguirre’s claims were baseless—his victim was an innocent air conditioner technician—and no widespread voter fraud has been found in the 2020 election. Aguirre was indicted this week for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

The criminal charges outed the LCGC, which had quietly moved hundreds of thousands of dollars in the name of preventing voter fraud in the months before the election, launching a website and fundraisers in the months before Nov. 3.

In the fall of 2020, as Donald Trump trailed Joe Biden in the polls, Republican activists sought ways to sow doubt in the event of a possible Trump loss. Aguirre and LCGC were among them.

Aguirre’s description of himself as a “retired” police captain (he’d actually been fired for a disastrous raid) was the least of the fundraiser’s lies. Although the fundraiser shed little light on Aguirre’s “team,” the fundraiser was launched one day after Aguirre signed an affidavit in a lawsuit accusing Houston-area Democrats of widespread voter fraud.

The lawsuit, filed by Republican activist Steven Hotze, accused Texas Democrats of a plot to defraud voters, in part by offering early voting and more voting locations. Some of its claims rested on supposed evidence collected by Aguirre and a former FBI agent who, like Aguirre, later became a private investigator.

“Based on interviews, review of documents, and other information, I have identified the individuals in charge of the ballot harvesting scheme,” Aguirre wrote. Aguirre’s involvement with Hotze went deeper than the lawsuit suggested. In late August, according to business records, Hotze formed the LCGC. The group’s earliest web presence called on Trump to designate three days “for national repentance, fasting, and prayer.”

[…]

In order to crack down on alleged fraud pre-election, the LCGC allegedly hired Aguirre to investigate people it suspected of running fake ballot rings. According to charging documents, Aguirre admitted to surveilling the home of air-conditioning technician David Lopez-Zuniga, on the suspicion that the Houston man was running a scheme to force children to sign 750,000 fraudulent ballots. Aguirre allegedly rammed Lopez-Zuniga’s car off the road, forced him onto the ground at gunpoint, and knelt on his back before an actual police officer was able to intervene. The day after the incident, the LCGC sent $211,400 to Aguirre’s bank account.

The LCGC was pulling in big money, its fundraisers suggest. In addition to Aguirre’s GoFundMe, which earned at least $2,600, the group operated its own GoFundMe, which raised nearly $70,000 from mid-October to mid-December.

The LCGC also registered as a nonprofit—a status that would be useful when networking with a burgeoning movement of voter fraud hoaxers.

See here, here, and here for a bit of background; there’s more if you go looking for the bogus and universally losing lawsuits Hotze filed in 2020. The Washington Post did a deep dive on this about a year ago, and I’m glad to see others are continuing that quest. The possible key to ending this little piece of madness is the lawsuit filed by AC repairman David Lopez, which has survived a motion to dismiss and will surely provide a lot more evidence of wrongdoings as it proceeds. All I want for Christmas for the next 20 years or so is for a verdict to come down that absolutely bankrupts Steven Hotze. Link via Daily Kos.

So we have a fraudit

Sep 25th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

What a load of crap.

The Texas secretary of state’s office announced late Thursday that it has begun a “full forensic audit” of the 2020 general election in four Texas counties: Collin, Dallas, Harris and Tarrant. But the statement from that agency did not explain what prompted the move.

There has been no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Texas in 2020.

Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for the office, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. No elections officials in the four counties immediately responded for comment.

The announcement came hours after Republican former President Donald Trump requested Gov. Greg Abbott add an election audit bill to this year’s third special session. While Trump lost his reelection bid, he did win in Texas.

It was unclear if his request was related to the announcement from the secretary of state’s office. But Taylor’s press release said the agency has “already begun the process in Texas’ two largest Democrat counties and two largest Republican counties—Dallas, Harris, Tarrant, and Collin.” While Tarrant has long been a Republican stronghold, Democratic President Joe Biden narrowly beat Trump there, according to the county’s election results.

Former Secretary of State Ruth Ruggero Hughs, who oversaw the 2020 elections, resigned when the Texas Senate refused to confirm her appointment. A deputy for Hughs called the 2020 election “smooth and secure” earlier this year.

Who knows what any of this even means, or what safeguards are in place to ensure integrity and transparency. I’d say that this was a rogue official going off on their own, but I think we all know that when Donald Trump tells a weak leader like Greg Abbott to do something, Abbott will comply.

In the meantime, county officials have responded, for the most part appropriately.

Harris County leaders on Friday blasted the Texas secretary of state’s decision to conduct a comprehensive “forensic audit” of the 2020 election in four counties, including Harris, as a political ploy to appease conspiracy theorists and former President Donald Trump.

County Judge Lina Hidalgo accused Gov. Greg Abbott of trying to curry favor with the former president, who on Thursday called for an audit of the Texas results, despite comfortably carrying the state in his unsuccessful bid for re-election. She likened the effort to audits in Arizona and Pennsylvania, which have failed to find major errors in vote tallying.

There is no evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities in Harris County’s 2020 election, where a record 1.7 million voters participated.

“This does not deserve to be treated as a serious matter or serious audit,” Hidalgo said. “It is an irresponsible political trick. It is a sham. It is a cavalier and dangerous assault on voters and democracy.”

Precisely who ordered the audits of election results for Harris, Dallas, Collin and Tarrant counties, as well as what they would entail, remains a mystery. The Secretary of State’s Office distributed a news release Thursday evening, though the secretary of state post has been vacant since May and spokesman Sam Taylor did not respond to a request for comment.

I’d forgotten that we don’t actually have a Secretary of State right now. I guess that “audit” must have gotten started on its own. Probably a computer glitch somewhere.

County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria said she was surprised by the secretary of state’s announcement, noting she had spoken with that office’s staff hours earlier about an unrelated matter. Longoria said no state agency or department has provided her with any information about how the audit of Harris County’s election results will be conducted.

After the 2020 contest, Longoria said her office conducted a partial manual review of mail ballots and electronic records from voting machines. Eleven months later, Longoria said she has turned her attention toward preparing for future elections.

“I’m now being blindsided about an audit that we have no information on and no direction on,” Longoria said. “My job is protect the voters… not just open up the books to whoever has a new conspiracy of the day, and let you run rampant with confidential election records.”

County Attorney Christian Menefee said the Texas audit “is clearly being done in bad faith” since it was announced just hours after Trump requested it. All three Harris County officials said they will comply with the law and any potential rulings from judges, but would otherwise not take the audit effort seriously.

“The goal of this is to intimidate our election workers and the folks who volunteer in elections, to undermine our confidence in democracy and to pander to … a gentleman who lost an election 11 months ago,” Menefee said. “We’re going to continue to push back where appropriate.”

Commissioners Court is divided over party lines on the audit. The two Democratic commissioners, Adrian Garcia and Rodney Ellis, said they agreed with Hidalgo’s criticism. Republican Precinct 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey said despite county elections officials’ assurances that the 2020 contest was conducted securely, he does not know if that is accurate.

“I think there’s enough questions there,” Ramsey said. “Obviously, you need to go back and look at the numbers. Just because there hasn’t been anything (found) at this point, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. That’s why you do an audit.”

OK, I’m back on the “redistrict that guy into oblivion” train. Harris County deserves way better than that.

Not just our county officials, either.

“The conspiracy theorists who want to come up with all these ways or reasons why this election wasn’t right — they might very well find something else [to doubt],” said Republican Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley. “It’s time to move on.”

Whitley and officials in Harris also said they have not been told what the audits entail or what prompted them. They said they learned about them from a late Thursday press release sent by a spokesperson in the secretary of state’s office. Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee said an audit can have many forms, but Harris County elections administrator Isabel Longoria said her office hadn’t heard any details of what the state’s plans are as of noon Friday. Longoria said the county has already confirmed the results of the elections several times.

“If people want to hear it again and again and again and again, that nothing’s wrong — great,” she said. “But at what point are you going to be willing to hear the truth, that nothing was wrong with the November 2020 elections?”

[…]

Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, a Democrat, echoed Hidalgo’s remarks.

“This is a weak Governor openly and shamelessly taking his orders from a disgraced former President. Governor Abbott is wasting taxpayer funds to trample on Texans’ freedom to vote, all in order to appease his puppeteer,” Jenkins said over text message.

Jenkins said in an interview that Dallas County will not resist the audit for now — but if the state asks for more than what the county thinks is suitable under the election code, he could see challenging it in court.

Collin County had no comment at the time. Courage, y’all.

I’m sorry, I don’t have anything coherent to say about this. It’s bullshit all the way down, and I have a hard time taking its premise seriously enough to engage with it. But I will say this much, these guys have amazing timing.

On Friday afternoon, the leaders of the unorthodox 2020 election audit in Arizona announced the results of their monthslong, Trump ally–sponsored hunt for voter fraud in Maricopa County, which Joe Biden won by fewer than 11,000 votes out of millions cast.

The timing of the release hints at the significance of the audit’s findings. For months, Donald Trump has been billing the investigation as the thing that will provide definitive proof of his victory in Arizona. If the audit was going to show that the election was stolen from Trump by Democratic goons in cactus-covered antifa ski masks, why release it late on a Friday afternoon at a time usually reserved for dumps of information people want to go uncovered?

A leaked report on Thursday evening offered an answer. The ballyhooed and controversially conducted hand count of nearly 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots still showed Biden defeating Trump, and though the margin changed by 360 votes it was actually Biden whose margin of victory grew from 45,109 to 45,469.

“This is yet the latest in a string of defeats for Donald Trump saying the election was rigged and fraudulent,” longtime Republican election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg said in a press call with the elections group States United. “[This] was their best attempt. This was an audit in which they absolutely cooked the procedures, they took funding from sources that should delegitimatize the findings automatically. This was Donald Trump’s best chance to prove his allegations of elections being rigged and fraudulent and they failed.”

It turns out that not even a partisan-funded and -conducted recount using procedures out of a Pee Wee Herman film could change the outcome. “The Cyber Ninjas couldn’t do the thing they were on the hook to do,” said cochairman of States United Norm Eisen.

I look forward to a similar result in Texas. Daily Kos and NPR have more.

Precinct analysis: Congress, part 2

Sep 21st, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Introduction
Congressional districts
State Rep districts
Commissioners Court/JP precincts
Comparing 2012 and 2016
Statewide judicial
Other jurisdictions
Appellate courts, Part 1
Appellate courts, Part 2
Judicial averages
Other cities
District Attorney
County Attorney
Sheriff
Tax Assessor
County Clerk
HCDE
Fort Bend, part 1
Fort Bend, part 2
Fort Bend, part 3
Brazoria County
Harris County State Senate comparisons
State Senate districts 2020
State Senate district comparisons
State House districts 2020, part 1
State House districts 2020, part 2
Median districts
State House district changes by demography
State House district changes by county
SBOE
Congress, part 1

I didn’t want to leave the Congressional district analysis without looking at some downballot races, since I mentioned them in the first part. To keep this simple, I’m just going to compare 2020 to 2012, to give a bookends look at things. I’ve got the Senate race (there was no Senate race in 2016, another reason to skip that year), the Railroad Commissioner race, and the Supreme Court race with Nathan Hecht.


Dist   Hegar   Cornyn  Hegar% Cornyn%
=====================================
01    79,626  217,942  26.30%  71.90%
02   157,925  180,504  45.50%  52.00%
03   188,092  224,921  44.50%  53.20%
04    79,672  256,262  23.20%  74.70%
05   101,483  173,929  36.00%  61.70%
06   155,022  178,305  45.30%  52.10%
07   154,670  152,741  49.20%  48.60%
08   100,868  275,150  26.20%  71.50%
09   168,796   54,801  73.50%  23.90%
10   191,097  215,665  45.90%  51.80%
11    54,619  232,946  18.60%  79.20%
12   129,679  228,676  35.20%  62.00%
13    50,271  217,949  18.30%  79.40%
14   117,954  185,119  38.00%  59.60%
15   110,141  111,211  48.10%  48.60%
16   148,484   73,923  63.10%  31.40%
17   127,560  174,677  41.00%  56.20%
18   178,680   60,111  72.60%  24.40%
19    65,163  194,783  24.40%  73.00%
20   163,219   99,791  60.10%  36.80%
21   203,090  242,567  44.50%  53.10%
22   188,906  214,386  45.80%  52.00%
23   135,518  150,254  46.10%  51.10%
24   165,218  171,828  47.80%  49.70%
25   165,657  222,422  41.70%  56.00%
26   168,527  256,618  38.60%  58.70%
27    98,760  169,539  35.90%  61.70%
28   118,063  107,547  50.60%  46.10%
29    99,415   51,044  64.00%  32.80%
30   203,821   53,551  77.00%  20.20%
31   178,949  206,577  45.20%  52.20%
32   170,654  165,157  49.60%  48.00%
33   111,620   41,936  70.40%  26.50%
34   101,691   93,313  50.60%  46.50%
35   175,861   87,121  64.50%  32.00%
36    78,544  218,377  25.90%  71.90%


Dist   Casta   Wright  Casta% Wright%
=====================================
01    75,893  217,287  25.20%  72.20%
02   153,630  176,484  44.90%  51.60%
03   181,303  220,004  43.70%  53.00%
04    76,281  254,688  22.50%  75.00%
05   100,275  171,307  35.80%  61.20%
06   151,372  176,517  44.60%  52.00%
07   149,853  149,114  48.50%  48.20%
08    97,062  271,212  25.60%  71.40%
09   168,747   51,862  74.10%  22.80%
10   184,189  211,020  44.90%  51.40%
11    53,303  230,719  18.30%  79.10%
12   123,767  227,786  33.90%  62.50%
13    47,748  215,948  17.60%  79.50%
14   114,873  182,101  37.40%  59.40%
15   113,540  103,715  50.50%  46.10%
16   144,436   75,345  62.30%  32.50%
17   121,338  171,677  39.70%  56.20%
18   177,020   57,783  72.60%  23.70%
19    62,123  192,844  23.60%  73.20%
20   165,617   93,296  61.40%  34.60%
21   197,266  234,785  43.90%  52.30%
22   184,521  209,495  45.50%  51.60%
23   136,789  144,156  47.10%  49.60%
24   160,511  167,885  47.10%  49.20%
25   157,323  218,711  40.30%  56.00%
26   160,007  251,763  37.30%  58.70%
27    97,797  165,135  36.00%  60.80%
28   121,898  100,306  52.90%  43.60%
29   102,354   46,954  66.30%  30.40%
30   204,615   50,268  77.60%  19.10%
31   169,256  203,981  43.40%  52.30%
32   168,807  160,201  49.60%  47.10%
33   111,727   40,264  71.10%  25.60%
34   105,427   86,391  53.30%  43.70%
35   173,994   82,414  64.70%  30.60%
36    76,511  216,585  25.40%  72.00%


Dist Meachum    HechtMeachum%  Hecht%
=====================================
01    79,995  215,240  26.60%  71.50%
02   154,787  179,887  45.20%  52.50%
03   185,076  220,662  44.60%  53.10%
04    79,667  253,119  23.50%  74.50%
05   101,813  172,186  36.40%  61.50%
06   155,372  175,793  45.80%  51.80%
07   149,348  154,058  48.20%  49.70%
08    99,434  272,277  26.20%  71.60%
09   170,611   52,213  75.00%  22.90%
10   188,253  212,284  45.80%  51.60%
11    56,146  228,708  19.30%  78.50%
12   129,478  225,206  35.50%  61.80%
13    51,303  214,434  18.90%  78.90%
14   118,324  181,521  38.50%  59.10%
15   115,046  103,787  51.20%  46.20%
16   149,828   73,267  64.20%  31.40%
17   126,952  170,378  41.50%  55.70%
18   179,178   58,684  73.50%  24.10%
19    66,333  190,784  25.20%  72.30%
20   166,733   93,546  62.00%  34.80%
21   200,216  237,189  44.50%  52.80%
22   188,187  210,138  46.30%  51.70%
23   138,391  143,522  47.70%  49.50%
24   164,386  168,747  48.10%  49.40%
25   162,591  218,370  41.60%  55.80%
26   168,621  251,426  39.10%  58.30%
27   100,675  164,273  37.10%  60.50%
28   122,263   99,666  53.50%  43.60%
29   101,662   48,349  66.00%  31.40%
30   207,327   50,760  78.50%  19.20%
31   172,531  198,717  45.00%  51.80%
32   169,325  163,993  49.60%  48.10%
33   112,876   40,077  71.80%  25.50%
34   104,142   84,361  53.80%  43.50%
35   177,097   82,098  66.00%  30.60%
36    78,170  216,153  26.00%  71.90%

	
Dist  Sadler     Cruz Sadler%   Cruz%
=====================================
01    76,441  169,490  30.55%  67.74%
02    84,949  155,605  34.35%  62.92%
03    88,929  168,511  33.52%  63.52%
04    69,154  174,833  27.60%  69.79%
05    73,712  130,916  35.14%  62.41%
06   100,573  143,297  40.12%  57.16%
07    89,471  141,393  37.73%  59.63%
08    55,146  190,627  21.88%  75.64%
09   140,231   40,235  76.35%  21.91%
10   103,526  154,293  38.76%  57.76%
11    45,258  175,607  19.93%  77.32%
12    77,255  162,670  31.22%  65.74%
13    43,022  175,896  19.12%  78.17%
14    97,493  142,172  39.77%  58.00%
15    79,486   62,277  54.55%  42.74%
16    91,289   56,636  59.66%  37.02%
17    82,118  130,507  37.31%  59.30%
18   145,099   45,871  74.37%  23.51%
19    52,070  155,195  24.37%  72.65%
20   106,970   73,209  57.47%  39.33%
21   115,768  181,094  37.32%  58.38%
22    90,475  157,006  35.74%  62.02%
23    86,229   98,379  45.28%  51.66%
24    90,672  147,419  36.88%  59.97%
25   101,059  155,304  37.79%  58.07%
26    77,304  173,933  29.66%  66.74%
27    81,169  125,913  38.11%  59.12%
28    90,481   68,096  55.14%  41.50%
29    71,504   38,959  63.27%  34.47%
30   168,805   44,782  77.58%  20.58%
31    89,486  138,886  37.46%  58.13%
32   103,610  141,469  41.03%  56.03%
33    81,568   33,956  68.96%  28.71%
34    79,622   60,126  55.23%  41.71%
35   101,470   56,450  61.37%  34.14%
36    63,070  168,072  26.66%  71.04%


Dist   Henry    Cradd  Henry%  Cradd%
=====================================
01    67,992  170,189  27.73%  69.41%	
02    78,359  155,155  32.30%  63.95%	
03    80,078  167,247  31.02%  64.80%	
04    64,908  170,969  26.53%  69.87%	
05    69,401  129,245  33.75%  62.86%	
06    96,386  141,220  39.03%  57.18%	
07    80,266  143,409  34.60%  61.81%	
08    51,716  188,005  20.83%  75.74%	
09   138,893   39,120  76.19%  21.46%	
10    94,282  153,321  36.00%  58.54%	
11    44,310  171,250  19.77%  76.42%	
12    72,582  160,255  29.85%  65.90%	
13    42,402  171,310  19.15%  77.36%	
14    96,221  137,169  39.91%  56.89%	
15    81,120   56,697  56.51%  39.50%	
16    90,256   49,563  60.67%  33.31%	
17    77,899  126,329  36.20%  58.70%	
18   142,749   44,416  73.97%  23.01%	
19    50,735  150,643  24.17%  71.76%	
20   102,998   72,019  56.19%  39.29%	
21   103,442  181,345  34.03%  59.66%	
22    85,869  155,271  34.42%  62.24%	
23    85,204   92,976  45.63%  49.79%	
24    83,119  146,534  34.52%  60.85%	
25    92,074  153,051  35.16%  58.44%	
26    71,177  172,026  27.82%  67.24%	
27    79,313  120,235  38.16%  57.84%	
28    94,545   59,311  58.53%  36.72%	
29    72,681   35,059  65.14%  31.42%	
30   166,852   43,206  77.43%  20.05%	
31    82,045  136,810  35.10%  58.52%	
32    92,896  143,313  37.69%  58.15%	
33    81,885   30,941  69.96%  26.43%	
34    82,924   50,769  58.78%  35.99%	
35    97,431   55,398  59.79%  34.00%	
36    62,309  161,751  26.88%  69.79%


Dist   Petty    Hecht  Petty%  Hecht%
=====================================
01    71,467  163,306  29.37%  67.11%
02    84,472  147,576  35.05%  61.23%
03    85,368  161,072  33.16%  62.56%
04    68,551  163,313  28.26%  67.31%
05    72,559  123,012  35.59%  60.34%
06   101,437  133,905  41.29%  54.51%
07    86,596  135,562  37.63%  58.90%
08    55,495  181,582  22.47%  73.53%
09   141,509   36,555  77.91%  20.13%
10   100,998  146,370  38.76%  56.17%
11    47,657  163,669  21.49%  73.81%
12    76,959  153,820  31.79%  63.53%
13    46,099  162,448  21.01%  74.02%
14   100,566  131,348  41.86%  54.67%
15    83,009   53,962  58.27%  37.88%
16    93,997   46,517  63.26%  31.31%
17    82,692  120,206  38.64%  56.16%
18   145,329   41,564  75.56%  21.61%
19    54,458  143,426  26.12%  68.80%
20   109,712   66,441  59.93%  36.29%
21   112,633  172,657  37.12%  56.90%
22    91,252  149,320  36.71%  60.06%
23    90,554   87,003  48.74%  46.83%
24    89,019  139,910  37.09%  58.29%
25    98,663  145,549  37.88%  55.87%
26    76,953  165,377  30.12%  64.73%
27    83,222  114,299  40.30%  55.36%
28    97,850   55,633  60.91%  34.63%
29    74,382   33,124  66.97%  29.82%
30   169,799   39,877  78.96%  18.54%
31    89,084  128,420  38.24%  55.13%
32    97,997  137,060  39.92%  55.84%
33    84,095   28,859  72.01%  24.71%
34    85,950   47,645  61.27%  33.96%
35   102,646   51,225  63.03%  31.46%
36    66,497  154,956  28.85%  67.24%

There are two things that jump out at me when I look over these numbers. The first actually has to do with the statewide totals. Joe Biden cut the deficit at the Presidential level nearly in half from 2012 – where Barack Obama trailed Mitt Romney by 1.26 million votes, Biden trailed Trump by 631K. The gains were not as dramatic in the Senate and RRC races, but there was progress. Ted Cruz beat Paul Sadler by 1.246 million votes, while John Cornyn beat MJ Hegar by 1.074 million; for RRC, Christi Craddock topped Dale Henry by 1.279 million and Jim Wright bested Chrysta Castaneda by 1.039 million. Not nearly as much progress, but we’re going in the right direction. At the judicial level, however, that progress wasn’t there. Nathan Hecht, then running for Supreme Court Place 6, won in 2012 by 908K votes, and he won in 2020 by 934K. That’s a little misleading, because in the only other contested statewide judicial race in 2012, Sharon Keller beat Keith Hampton for CCA by 1.094 million votes, and five out of the seven Dems running in 2020 did better than that. Still, the point remains, the judicial races were our weakest spot. If we really want to turn Texas blue, we will need more of an investment in these races as well.

One explanation for this is that Dem statewide judicial candidates didn’t do as well in at least some of the trending-blue places. Hegar and Castaneda both carried CD07, but only two of the Dem judicial candidates did, Staci Williams and Tina Clinton. All of them carried CD32, but none of them by more than two points, while Biden took it by ten; to be fair, Hegar won it by less than two, and Castaneda had the best performance with a 2.6 point margin. Maybe these folks were motivated by Trump more than anything else, and they didn’t see the judicial races in those terms. I have noted before that Dem judicial candidates did better in CD07 in 2018 than in 2020, so maybe the higher turnout included more less-likely Republicans than one might have expected. Or maybe these folks are in the process of becoming Democratic, but aren’t all the way there yet. Just something to think about.

On the flip side of that, while Hegar underperformed in the three closer-than-expected Latino Democratic districts CD15, CD28, and CD34 – Cornyn actually carried CD15 by a smidge – everyone else did better, and indeed outperformed Biden in those districts. The judicial candidates all carried CDs 28 and 34 by at least six points, with most in the 8-9 range and a couple topping ten, and all but two carried CD15 by a wider margin that Biden’s 1.9 points, with them in the three-to-five range. Still a disconcerting step back from 2012 and 2016, but at least for CDs 28 and 34 it’s still a reasonably comfortable margin. Maye this is the mirror image of the results in CDs 07 and 32, where the Presidential race was the main motivator and people were more likely to fall back on old patterns elsewhere. As with CDs 07 and 32, we’ll have to see where those trends go from here.

After however many entries in this series, I don’t have a whole lot more to say. We’ll be getting new maps soon, and we’ll have a better idea of what the immediate future looks like. I think the last two decades has shown us that there’s only so far out in the future that redistricting will be predictive in such a dynamic and growing state as Texas, but we have seen the winds shift more than once, so let’s not get too comfortable with any one idea. Whatever we get in this session is not etched in stone, and we still have some hope for federal legislation. For now, this is what we’re up against.

Precinct analysis: Congress, part 1

Sep 14th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

In addition to the SBOE data, we finally have 2020 election results for the Congressional districts as well. With the redistricting special session about to start, let’s look at where things were in the last election.


Dist   Biden    Trump  Biden%  Trump%
=====================================
01    83,221  218,689   27.2%   71.5%
02   170,430  174,980   48.6%   49.9%
03   209,859  214,359   48.6%   49.6%
04    84,582  258,314   24.3%   74.3%
05   107,494  172,395   37.9%   60.8%
06   164,746  175,101   47.8%   50.8%
07   170,060  143,176   53.6%   45.1%
08   109,291  274,224   28.1%   70.5%
09   178,908   54,944   75.7%   23.2%
10   203,937  210,734   48.4%   50.0%
11    58,585  235,797   19.7%   79.1%
12   140,683  224,490   37.9%   60.4%
13    54,001  219,885   19.4%   79.1%
14   124,630  185,961   39.5%   59.0%
15   119,785  115,317   50.4%   48.5%
16   160,809   77,473   66.4%   32.0%
17   137,632  172,338   43.5%   54.5%
18   189,823   57,669   75.7%   23.0%
19    71,238  195,512   26.3%   72.2%
20   177,167   96,672   63.7%   34.7%
21   220,439  232,935   47.8%   50.5%
22   206,114  210,011   48.8%   49.7%
23   146,619  151,914   48.5%   50.2%
24   180,609  161,671   51.9%   46.5%
25   177,801  216,143   44.3%   53.9%
26   185,956  248,196   42.1%   56.2%
27   104,511  170,800   37.4%   61.1%
28   125,628  115,109   51.6%   47.2%
29   106,229   52,937   65.9%   32.9%
30   212,373   50,270   79.8%   18.9%
31   191,113  202,934   47.4%   50.3%
32   187,919  151,944   54.4%   44.0%
33   117,340   41,209   73.0%   25.6%
34   106,837   98,533   51.5%   47.5%
35   188,138   84,796   67.6%   30.5%
36    82,872  221,600   26.9%   71.9%

Joe Biden carried 14 of the 36 Congressional districts, the 13 that Democratic candidates won plus CD24. He came close in a lot of others – within two points in CDs 02, 03, 10, 22, and 23, and within five in CDs 06, 21, and 31 – but the Congressional map gets the award for most effecting gerrymandering, as the Presidential results most closely matched the number of districts won.

Generally speaking, Biden did a little worse than Beto in 2018, which isn’t a big surprise given that Beto lost by two and a half points while Biden lost by five and a half. Among the competitive districts, Biden topped Beto in CDs 03 (48.6 to 47.9), 07 (53.6 to 53.3), and 24 (51.9 to 51.6), and fell short elsewhere. He lost the most ground compared to Beto in the Latino districts, which is a subject we have covered in much detail. I only focused on the closer districts in my 2018 analysis, but you can see the full 2018 data here. Biden’s numbers are far more comparable to Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 – I’ll get into that in more detail in a subsequent post.

As we have also seen elsewhere, Biden’s underperformance in the Latino districts – specifically, CDs 15, 28, and 34 – was generally not replicated by other candidates down the ballot. Again, I’ll get to this in more detail later, but with the exception of John Cornyn nipping MJ Hegar in CD15, Democrats other than Biden generally carried those districts by five to ten points, still closer than in 2016 but not as dire looking as they were at the top. Interestingly, where Biden really overperformed compared to the rest of the Democratic ticket was with the judicial races – Republicans carried all but one of the statewide judicial races in CD07, for example. We discussed that way back when in the earlier analyses, but it’s been awhile so this is a reminder. That’s also not too surprising given the wider spread in the judicial races than the Presidential race, and it’s also a place where one can be optimistic (we still have room to grow!) or pessimistic (we’re farther away than we thought!) as one sees fit.

I don’t have a lot more to say here that I haven’t already said in one or more ways before. The main thing to think about is that redistricting is necessarily different for the Congressional map simply because there will be two more districts. (We should think about adding legislative districts, especially Senate districts, but that’s a whole ‘nother thing.) I have to assume that Republicans will try to give themselves two more districts, one way or another, but I suppose it’s possible they could just seek to hold serve, if going for the gusto means cutting it too close in too many places. I figure we’ll see a starter map pretty soon, and from there it will be a matter of what alternate realities get proposed and by whom. For sure, the future plaintiffs in redistricting litigation will have their own maps to show off.

For comparison, as I did in other posts, here are the Congressional numbers from 2016 and 2012:


Dist Clinton    TrumpClinton%  Trump%
=====================================
1     66,389  189,596  25.09%  71.67%
2    119,659  145,530  42.75%  52.00%
3    129,384  174,561  39.90%  53.83%
4     60,799  210,448  21.63%  74.86%
5     79,759  145,846  34.18%  62.50%
6    115,272  148,945  41.62%  53.78%
7    124,722  121,204  48.16%  46.81%
8     70,520  214,567  23.64%  71.93%
9    151,559   34,447  79.14%  17.99%
10   135,967  164,817  42.82%  51.90%
11    47,470  193,619  19.01%  77.55%
12    92,549  177,939  32.47%  62.43%
13    40,237  190,779  16.78%  79.54%
14   101,228  153,191  38.29%  57.95%
15   104,454   73,689  56.21%  39.66%
16   130,784   52,334  67.21%  26.89%
17    96,155  139,411  38.43%  55.72%
18   157,117   41,011  76.22%  19.90%
19    53,512  165,280  23.31%  71.99%
20   132,453   74,479  60.21%  33.86%
21   152,515  188,277  42.05%  51.91%
22   135,525  159,717  43.91%  51.75%
23   115,133  107,058  49.38%  45.92%
24   122,878  140,129  44.28%  50.50%
25   125,947  172,462  39.94%  54.69%
26   109,530  194,032  34.01%  60.25%
27    85,589  140,787  36.36%  59.81%
28   109,973   72,479  57.81%  38.10%
29    95,027   34,011  70.95%  25.39%
30   174,528   40,333  79.08%  18.27%
31   117,181  153,823  40.07%  52.60%
32   134,895  129,701  48.44%  46.58%
33    94,513   30,787  72.78%  23.71%
34   101,704   64,716  59.07%  37.59%
35   128,482   61,139  63.59%  30.26%
36    64,217  183,144  25.13%  71.68%

Dist   Obama   Romney  Obama% Romney%
=====================================
01    69,857  181,833  27.47%  71.49%
02    88,751  157,094  35.55%  62.93%
03    93,290  175,383  34.13%  64.16%
04    63,521  189,455  24.79%  73.95%
05    73,085  137,239  34.35%  64.49%
06   103,444  146,985  40.72%  57.87%
07    92,499  143,631  38.57%  59.89%
08    55,271  195,735  21.74%  76.97%
09   145,332   39,392  78.01%  21.15%
10   104,839  159,714  38.77%  59.06%
11    45,081  182,403  19.55%  79.10%
12    79,147  166,992  31.65%  66.77%
13    42,518  184,090  18.51%  80.16%
14    97,824  147,151  39.44%  59.32%
15    86,940   62,883  57.35%  41.48%
16   100,993   54,315  64.03%  34.44%
17    84,243  134,521  37.76%  60.29%
18   150,129   44,991  76.11%  22.81%
19    54,451  160,060  25.02%  73.55%
20   110,663   74,540  58.77%  39.59%
21   119,220  188,240  37.85%  59.76%
22    93,582  158,452  36.68%  62.11%
23    94,386   99,654  47.99%  50.67%
24    94,634  150,547  37.98%  60.42%
25   102,433  162,278  37.80%  59.89%
26    80,828  177,941  30.70%  67.59%
27    83,156  131,800  38.15%  60.46%
28   101,843   65,372  60.21%  38.65%
29    75,720   37,909  65.89%  32.99%
30   175,637   43,333  79.61%  19.64%
31    92,842  144,634  38.11%  59.36%
32   106,563  146,420  41.46%  56.97%
33    86,686   32,641  71.93%  27.09%
34    90,885   57,303  60.71%  38.28%
35   105,550   58,007  62.94%  34.59%
36    61,766  175,850  25.66%  73.05%

Looking at the 2016 numbers, you can begin to see the outlines of future competitiveness. That’s more a function of Trump’s weak showing in the familiar places than anything else, but Democrats got their numbers up enough to make it a reality. Looking back at 2012 and you’re reminded again of just how far we’ve come. Maybe we’ll reset to that kind of position in 2022, I don’t know, but that’s a little harder to imagine when you remember that Mitt Romney won the state by ten more points than Trump did. We’ll be going down that rabbit hole soon enough. As always, let me know what you think.

Precinct analysis: SBOE

Sep 7th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Hey, guess what? The 2020 election data is finally on the Texas Redistricting page for Congress and the State Board of Education. It had been there for awhile for the State House and State Senate, which is why I was able to do those most recent Precinct Analysis piece. Now I can fill in the missing pieces, and I will start here with the State Board of Education, which has a current composition of nine Republicans and six Democrats following the Dem flip in SBOE5. Here’s what the 2020 results looked like for these districts:


Dist   Biden    Trump  Biden%  Trump%
=====================================
01   288,864  245,645   53.3%   45.3%
02   259,587  281,363   47.4%   51.4%
03   361,827  238,999   59.4%   39.2%
04   388,518  117,290   75.9%   22.9%
05   554,766  475,249   52.9%   45.3%
06   391,913  371,101   50.6%   47.9%
07   351,218  509,642   40.2%   58.4%
08   307,826  526,425   36.3%   62.2%
09   196,720  577,419   25.1%   73.7%
10   440,594  445,355   48.7%   49.3%
11   383,185  472,594   44.1%   54.3%
12   469,730  429,676   51.3%   47.0%
13   401,190  128,910   74.7%   24.0%
14   310,738  570,422   34.7%   63.7%
15   150,843  498,932   22.9%   75.6%

Before we dive into the numbers, you’re probably wondering where these districts are. I know I don’t have a mental map of the SBOE like I do for the legislative districts. Here is the SBOE statewide map, and the District Viewer, which you can zoom in on to the street level. That will be your best friend for when the new maps are coming out.

So the numbers. As you can see, Joe Biden carried seven of the fifteen districts, falling just short in district 10 for a majority but carrying Republican-held districts 6 and 12. The bad news is that he did not carry district 2, which is a Democratic district held by Ruben Cortez, who was not on the ballot after winning re-election in 2018 by seven points. District 2 has been purple through the decade but it was on the blue side of purple before 2020. Beto carried SBOE2 in 2018, but only by 4.5 points; Greg Abbott won it by a wider margin, with Glenn Hegar and George P Bush also carrying it. Based on this I think Cortez would have held it had it been on the ballot last year, but I feel confident they’ll make a stronger push for it next year.

Here’s my look at the 2018 results for these districts, for which Beto won nine districts, carrying SBOE2 and 10 where Biden fell short. As you know, District 5 has been on my radar since 2016 when Hillary Clinton carried it, and it came through as I expected. District 10 was the longest-shot of the potential takeovers, with districts 12 and 6 being in between. If we went into the 2022 elections with the same districts, I’d feel like Democratic SBOE candidates would win between five and seven districts (remember, everyone is on the ballot in the first post-redistricting year), with 2 and 12 being the main variables. I see 6 and 10 as tougher nuts to crack, with 10 having more Republican turf in it, and 6 starting from a redder place and thus just taking longer to get where I think it would be going.

Obviously, all of this will be affected by redistricting, and not only is there a greater degree of freedom for the GOP given the small number of districts, there’s been little to no attention paid to SBOE districts. The SBOE map was never part of any voting rights litigation in the 2011 cycle. I have no idea how much attention it will get this time, but as SBOE5 was one of the few Democratic pickups from 2020, I have to think that people will care a little more about it, on both sides.

As we know, Biden tended to run ahead of the rest of the Democratic ticket. It’s pretty straightforward here, in that the rest of the ticket carried five districts, with everyone winning SBOE5 but falling short in 2, 6, 10, and 12. Consistent with what we have seen in the House and Senate districts, Biden’s number in SBOE2 was about the same as everyone else’s, which you can interpret optimistically (it didn’t get any worse!) or pessimistically (Republicans overall improved, it wasn’t just Trump!) as you see fit.

For comparison, here are the numbers from 2016 and 2012:


Dist Clinton    TrumpClinton%  Trump%
=====================================
01   255,909  169,214   57.4%   37.9%
02   234,172  204,262   51.4%   44.9%
03   282,715  163,940   60.2%   34.9%
04   333,156   76,478   78.7%   18.1%
05   377,928  376,417   47.0%   46.8%
06   286,931  301,142   46.3%   48.6%
07   255,474  407,386   37.1%   59.2%
08   205,760  416,239   31.5%   63.7%
09   148,687  486,392   22.7%   74.1%
10   287,936  346,670   42.5%   51.2%
11   257,515  397,155   37.3%   57.6%
12   315,973  356,576   44.4%   50.1%
13   324,952  102,622   73.5%   23.2%
14   195,965  453,354   28.8%   66.5%
15   114,553  426,441   20.3%   75.5%

Dist   Obama   Romney  Obama% Romney%
=====================================
01   213,132  161,807   56.1%   42.6%
02   209,020  187,147   52.1%   46.7%
03   247,020  149,659   61.4%   37.2%
04   311,236   84,036   78.0%   21.1%
05   294,887  375,942   42.9%   54.7%
06   215,839  332,415   38.8%   59.7%
07   215,952  390,808   35.2%   63.6%
08   160,372  398,664   28.3%   70.3%
09   156,833  449,301   25.6%   73.3%
10   235,591  331,022   40.5%   57.0%
11   210,974  396,329   34.2%   64.3%
12   242,306  373,920   38.7%   59.7%
13   314,630  110,615   73.3%   25.8%
14   163,020  413,181   27.9%   70.6%
15   116,797  413,942   21.7%   76.9%

As noted, Hillary Clinton carried six districts, while Barack Obama carried five. The thing that always interests me is the shift over time, and you can see how dramatic it was in the districts that we’ve been talking about. Mitt Romney won districts 5, 6, 10, and 12 by double digits, with 6 and 12 being 20-point wins for him. Again, we have seen this in the previous posts, these districts are anchored in the big urban and suburban districts that have trended hard blue recently, this is just another way of looking at it. I like having the different views, you can always pick up some nuances when you have different angles.

I’m working on the Congressional data next. As always, let me know what you think.

Sure, let’s have a fraudit here in Texas

Jul 24th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

What could possibly go wrong?

Unfair to clowns, honestly

Republican House members are seeking a forensic audit of the November election results, but only in Texas’ largest counties that mostly went for Democrat Joe Biden.

Legislation filed by Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, requires the state’s Republican leadership to appoint an “independent third party” to carry out the audit. Among the bill’s 15 GOP co-authors are Deer Park Rep. Briscoe Cain, who chairs the House Elections Committee, and Cypress Rep. Tom Oliverson, vice chairman of the House Republican Caucus.

“Texans want to know more about the claims of voter fraud and deserve to have confidence in their elections,” Toth said in a statement about House Bill 241. “Voters want to know that their legal vote counts and matters.”

The legislation will likely go nowhere in the 30-day special session, since Democrats’ walkout stopped the GOP-led House from conducting any business. But the push shows how, despite no evidence of widespread fraud and in a state Donald Trump carried, some Republicans are still raising questions about the 2020 election results six months after Biden took office.

[…]

Rep. Chris Turner, who chairs the Texas House Democratic Caucus, said Tuesday that the legislation sounds like “it’s all based on the lie that there’s widespread voter fraud and Donald Trump really won the election.”

“I don’t know if these folks are aware of it, Trump actually did carry Texas,” said Turner, D-Grand Prairie. “So I’m not sure what they’re trying to find in their audit.”

The same thing they’ve been looking for from the beginning, which is strategies, methods, and justifications for delegitimizing Democratic votes and voters, especially non-white votes and voters. The tell is in the way the size of the counties that are in scope for this is defined: Counties with at least 415,000 people, which as noted are the top 13 counties by population in Texas. Why stop there, and why such a weird population cutoff number? Well, if you take the next 13 counties, 11 of them were carried by Trump. If you go down to the next 13 on the list, which gets you to all counties with at least 100,000 people (a much nicer, rounder number than 415,000), all 13 were won by Trump. It’s just that simple – maximize the scrutiny on Democratic counties and find ways to make them look suspicious, while minimizing it on Republican counties. It’s genius, in its malicious way. And by the way, this isn’t just my inference. It’s what Steve Toth has explicitly said.

Now some of these counties not-top-13 counties were close – Jefferson and Nueces were just barely won by Trump – and some others are (as we have seen) clearly trending Democratic, like Brazos and Brazoria. But still, they were won by Trump and thus are not of interest to anti-democrats like Toth and Cain. Ken Paxton, who knows a thing or two about making egregiously false claims about the 2020 election, has signed on to this farce as well. Does anyone think Greg Abbott will resist? Hope he’s distracted by some other shiny object, or that someone reminds him of how these audits have caused tons of election equipment to be decertified as a result of being mauled by the incompetent frauditors. As with everything else at this point, if they want to do it and a quorum exists, there’s precious little Dems can do to stop them.

The Virus And The Vote

Jul 20th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

As you may recall, there were a lot of concerns going into the 2020 election about the potential for things to go horribly wrong. Books were written about the weak points in our bizarre and super-distributed system for running and certifying elections. The pandemic, and the chaos that resulted from how it was bungled by the Trump administration, jacked those worries up even higher.

And yet, with all that ambient anxiety, thousands of brand-new poll workers, ramped up absentee voting, and so many more alterations to old processes, everything went quite smoothly. Results were timely, no “Iowa Democratic caucus”-style screwups, and as we well know, vanishingly few instances of chicanery and lawbreaking. How did we pull it off? This report, from the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, provides some answers. It’s long, so let me just quote from the Introduction:

The 2020 U.S. election was both a miracle and a tragedy. It was a miracle in that election administrators, facing unprecedented challenges from a pandemic, were able to pull off a safe, secure, and professional election in which a record number of Americans turned out to vote. It was also a tragedy, though, because, despite these heroic efforts, lies about vote fraud and the performance of the system have cemented a perception among tens of millions of Americans that the election was “rigged.” This manufactured distrust has deeply damaged our democracy; the path to repairing it is not at all clear.

The Capitol Insurrection of 6 January 2021 will forever constitute the image of the 2020 election and the distrust that accompanied it. Despite the heroism and success we detail below, more than a hundred members of Congress voted to question and overturn the results in one or more states.

The enduring images of the 2020 election should have been very different. During the primary elections early in the year, the picture looked bleak, as poll-worker and polling-place shortages caused long lines of frustrated voters to risk their lives, while thousands of absentee ballots were rejected in places that had little experience with large-scale voting by mail. In the general election, however, an army of new poll workers, wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) and often administering the voting behind Lucite barriers, staffed polling places. Absentee voting also set records, as rates of canceled mail ballots were dramatically lower than before the pandemic.

How did the country pull off a successful election under pandemic circumstances? What changes to the election infrastructure were necessary to accomplish this task? How can we reconcile this measurable success with convictions, strongly held by a sizeable share of the electorate, that the election was rigged? These are the questions this article seeks to answer. Given the unfounded, partisan criticism that the election was “rigged” and “disastrous,” it is difficult in hindsight to reimagine what a true electoral disaster would have looked like and how close the United States came to experiencing one. The primary-season meltdowns in several states painted an ominous picture of institutional collapse threatening the general election. In several respects, the election system benefited from the timing of the pandemic, coming as it did in the middle of the presidential-primary season but hitting hardest just as Joseph Biden wrapped up the Democratic Party’s nomination. The baptism by fire in the primaries provided necessary lessons in how to solve pandemic-related problems so that both mail and polling-place voting could work properly come November.

A little light reading for you as we wait for our Democratic legislators to try to persuade a couple of recalcitrant Senators in Washington to get off their asses and take action to protect future elections and democracy in general. Found on Twitter.

Precinct analysis: State House district changes by county

Jul 6th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

One more look at how state house districts have changed over the decade. For this exercise, I’m going to look at some key counties and the State Rep districts within them.

Bexar:


Dist  12-16R  12-16D  16-20R  16-20D  12-20R  12-20D Dem net
============================================================
122   -1,304  10,628  12,204  21,091  10,900  31,719  20,819
121   -4,020   6,534   6,059  15,078   2,039  21,612  19,573
116     -583   6,014   3,546  10,281   2,963  16,295  13,332
117    4,532   8,828  14,927  22,921  19,459  31,749  12,290
123   -1,427   5,225   3,742   9,272   2,315  14,497  12,182
124      330   5,077   5,877  11,756   6,207  16,833  10,626
125   -1,081   4,378   4,753   9,350   3,672  13,728  10,056
120     -184     863   4,503  10,856   4,319  11,719   7,400
119    1,062   3,428   6,041  10,507   7,103  13,935   6,832
118    1,391   3,719   6,633   7,790   8,024  11,509   3,485

Bexar County doesn’t get the props it deserves for contributing to the Democratic cause. Each of its ten districts became more Democratic in each of the two Presidential cycles. Where Bexar had gone 51.56% to 47.04% in 2012 for Obama, it went 58.20% to 40.05% for Biden. Obama had a net 23K votes in Bexar, while it was +140K votes for Biden. The two districts that shifted the most heavily towards Dems are the two Republican districts (HD117 went Republican in 2014, then flipped back in 2016), with Biden carrying HD121 as Beto had done in 2018, and HD122 coming into focus as a potential long-term pickup (modulo redistricting, of course). Both HDs 121 and 122 were over 60% for Romney, with HD122 at almost 68% for him. Both can and surely will be shored up in the next round of mapmaking, but the long term trends don’t look good for the Republicans holding them both.

Tarrant:


Dist  12-16R  12-16D  16-20R  16-20D  12-20R  12-20D Dem net
============================================================
092   -1,102   3,986   4,166  13,144   3,064  17,130  14,066
094   -3,344   2,238   2,655  10,231    -689  12,469  13,158
096      821   4,468   6,527  15,522   7,348  19,990  12,642
098     -489   6,891   8,798  13,948   8,309  20,839  12,530
097   -3,267   3,654   6,147  11,472   2,880  15,126  12,246
101     -734   3,487   4,523   9,808   3,789  13,295   9,506
093    2,751   5,180   9,984  15,697  12,735  20,877   8,142
091      401   2,489   5,437   8,897   5,838  11,386   5,548
090     -180   2,391   3,170   5,496   2,990   7,887   4,897
095     -613  -2,745   2,727   7,752   2,114   5,007   2,893
099    2,757   3,282   9,686  11,208  12,443  14,490   2,047

I know everyone sees Tarrant County as a disappointment in 2020. Beto broke through in 2018, we had a bunch of close districts to target, and the Republicans held them all even as Biden also carried Tarrant. The point here is that Democrats made progress in every district, in each cycle (the dip in predominantly Black and heavily Democratic HD95 in 2016 notwithstanding). That includes the strong Republican districts (HDs 91, 98, and 99), the strong D districts (HDs 90, 95, and 101), and the five swing districts. Tarrant will be another challenge for Republicans in redistricting because like in Harris they have mostly lost their deep red reserves. HD98 went from being a 75% Romney district to a 62% Trump district last year. They can spread things out a bit, but remember what happened in Dallas County in the 2010s when they got too aggressive. I’m not saying that’s what will happen in Tarrant, but you can see where the numbers are.

Collin:


Dist  12-16R  12-16D  16-20R  16-20D  12-20R  12-20D Dem net
============================================================
067   -3,022   8,595   6,135  19,411   3,113  28,006  24,893
066   -4,911   8,517   4,001  14,432    -910  22,949  23,859
089    1,038   6,667   9,980  17,338  11,018  24,005  12,987
033    4,656   8,268  18,234  20,233  22,890  28,501   5,611
070    7,648   8,675  21,284  25,686  28,932  34,361   5,429

Denton:


Dist  12-16R  12-16D  16-20R  16-20D  12-20R  12-20D Dem net
============================================================
065   -1,378   6,440   6,048  16,110   4,670  22,550  17,880
106    8,757  11,138  21,190  29,280  29,947  40,418  10,471
064    3,003   6,205   8,257  15,136  11,260  21,341  10,081
063    2,642   6,129  16,382  17,279  19,024  23,408   4,384

I’m grouping these two together because they have a lot in common. Both shifted hugely Democratic over the decade, in each case across all their districts. Both contain a district that was added to their county in the 2011 redistricting. HDs 33 (72-26 for Romney in 2012, 60-38 for Trump in 2020) and 106 (68-31 for Romney in 2012, 54-45 for Trump in 2020) were supposed to be super-red, but didn’t stay that way. I might have thought that the southernmost districts in each county – i.e., the ones closest to Dallas and Tarrant – would be the bluest, but that is not quite the case. HD65 is in southeast Denton, where it is almost entirely adjacent to HD115, but HD63 is the reddest district in Denton (61-37 Trump) and it is the other district on Denton’s south border, though it aligns almost perfectly with HD98, the reddest district in Tarrant. HD64 is the next most Dem district in Denton, and it’s in the northwest quadrant, catty-corner to HD65. I have to assume this is a function of development more than who its closest neighbors are; I’m sure someone who knows Denton better than I can comment on that.

In Collin, HDs 66 and 67 are on the southern end of that county, but so is HD89, where it abuts Rockwall County more than it does Dallas. HD70 is north of 67 and 89, and HD33 (which contains all of Rockwall County) is the outer edge of the county to the west, north, and east, dipping down into Rockwall from there. Both counties continue their massive growth, and I expect them to have at least one more district in them next decade. Republicans have more room to slosh voters around, but as above, the trends are not in their favor.

There are of course other counties that are growing a lot and not in a way that favors Republicans. Here are two more of them.

Williamson:


Dist  12-16R  12-16D  16-20R  16-20D  12-20R  12-20D Dem net
============================================================
136       52  10,901   7,842  22,330   7,894  33,231  25,337
052    2,422   8,335  11,479  22,872  13,901  31,207  17,306
020    7,373   2,895  20,820  14,926  28,193  17,821 -10,372

Fort Bend:


Dist  12-16R  12-16D  16-20R  16-20D  12-20R  12-20D Dem net
============================================================
026   -4,573   9,082   7,327  13,556   2,754  22,638  19,884
028    4,053  14,090  19,260  24,010  23,313  38,100  14,787
027     -461   4,708   6,324  13,724   5,863  18,432  12,569
085    2,908   5,495  10,258  10,161  13,166  15,656   2,490

HD20 also includes Milam and Burnet counties, and I suspect that’s where most of the Republican growth is. HD85 also includes Jackson and Wharton counties. The previous version of HD52 had flipped Dem in 2008, the first such incursion into the formerly all-red suburbs, before flipping back in 2010, but neither it (55-42 for Romney) nor the newcomer HD136 (55-41 Romney) were ever all that red. There were some maps drawn in the 2011 redistricting process (not by Republicans, of course) that carved HD26 out as a heavily Asian swing district (it went 63-36 for Romney as drawn), but it just needed time for the “swing” part to happen. Of the various targets from 2018 and 2020, it’s one that I feel got away, and I wish I understood that better.

Brazoria:


Dist  12-16R  12-16D  16-20R  16-20D  12-20R  12-20D Dem net
============================================================
029      496   8,084  10,828  15,387  11,324  23,471  12,147
025    1,759     215   8,293   3,874  10,052   4,089  -5,963

Galveston:


Dist  12-16R  12-16D  16-20R  16-20D  12-20R  12-20D Dem net
============================================================
024    2,403   3,959  13,045   8,928  15,448  12,887  -2,561
023    3,847     346  11,123   7,296  14,970   7,642  -7,328

Montgomery:


Dist  12-16R  12-16D  16-20R  16-20D  12-20R  12-20D Dem net
============================================================
015   -1,563   7,905  13,226  15,512  11,663  23,417  11,754
016    7,437   2,437  16,088   7,160  23,525   9,597 -13,928
003    7,758   1,807  17,456   8,286  25,214  10,093 -15,121

We’ve looked at these counties before, this is just a more fine-grained approach. Note that HD03 includes all of Waller County, HD25 includes all of Matagorda County, and HD23 includes all of Chambers County. HD23 was already Republican in 2012 when Craig Eiland still held it (Romney carried it 54.6 to 44.2) and while it has gotten more so since then (Trump won it 57.5 to 41.0), that has mostly been fueled by the Republican growth in Chambers. I did a quick calculation on the data from the Galveston County election results page, and Biden carried the Galveston part of HD23 by a slim margin, 29,019 to 28,896. (Republican rep Mayes Middleton won that part of the district 29,497 to 27,632, so this tracks.) The rest of Galveston, the northern part that’s all Houston suburb, is much more Republican, but like with these other two counties one can see a path forward from here. What to do about the likes of Chambers County, that’s another question.

HD29 in Brazoria should have been a target in 2018 but the Dem who won the primary dropped out of the race, and there was no traction that I could see there in 2020. I expect that district to get a little redder, but the same story as elsewhere applies in that the geographic trends are a force that won’t be stopped by boundary lines. As for Montgomery, there are your signs of progress right there. HD15 is still very red, but as I’ve said before, the first goal is to bend the curve, and we’re on the right track there. HD15 is basically the Woodlands and Shenandoah, just north of HD150, while HD03 wraps around it and HD16 is the north end of the county.

Lubbock:


Dist  12-16R  12-16D  16-20R  16-20D  12-20R  12-20D Dem net
============================================================
084     -474     873   4,124   6,975   3,650   7,848   4,198
083    3,359     242  12,224   5,141  15,583   5,383 -10,200

Smith:


Dist  12-16R  12-16D  16-20R  16-20D  12-20R  12-20D Dem net
============================================================
006       67     938   6,922   6,208   6,989   7,146     157
005    4,565  -1,293   9,646   2,832  14,211   1,539 -12,672

These two districts, on opposite ends of the state, may seem odd to be paired together, but they have a couple of things in common. Both contain one district that is entirely within its borders (HD06 in Smith, HD84 in Lubbock) and one district that contains the rest of their population plus several smaller neighboring counties (HD05 also contains Wood and Rains counties, while HD83 contains six other counties). Both have a city that is the bulk of of its population (the city of Lubbock has over 90% of the population of Lubbock County, while a bit less than half of Smith County is in the city of Tyler). And both provide a bit of evidence for my oft-stated thesis that these smaller cities in Texas, which are often in otherwise fairly rural and very Republican areas, provide the same kind of growth opportunity for Democrats that the bigger cities have provided.

Both HDs 06 and 84 were less red than Smith and Lubbock counties overall: Smith County was 69-30 for Trump, HD06 was 68-32 for Matt Schaefer; Lubbock County was 65-33 for Trump, and HD84 was 61-39 for John Frullo. I didn’t go into the precinct details to calculate the Trump/Biden numbers in those districts, but given everything we’ve seen I’d say we could add another point or two into the Dem column for each. HD84 shows a clear Democratic trend while HD06 is more of a mixed bag, but it’s still a slight net positive over the decade and a damn sight better than HD05. HD06 is not close to being competitive while HD84 is on the far outer fringes, but that’s not the main point. It’s the potential for Democratic growth, for which we will need every little contribution we can get, that I want to shout from the rooftops. The big cities and big growing suburbs are our top tier, but we’d be fools to ignore the places like Lubbock and Tyler.

Precinct analysis: State House district changes by demography

Jun 28th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

I return once again to doing cycle-over-cycle comparisons in vote turnout, in this case for State House districts. There are a lot of them, and I’m not going to do them all but I am going to do enough of them that I will split this into two parts. Part One, this post, will group districts by demographic groups. Part Two, to come later, will be to group them by counties of interest.

First up, just to ease ourselves in, are the four big urban districts that are Anglo, wealthy, highly college-educated, and swung hard towards the Democrats since 2012:


Dist  12-16R  12-16D  16-20R  16-20D  12-20R  12-20D Dem net
============================================================
134  -10,943  15,312   6,540  17,771  -4,403  33,083  37,486
047   -2,005  14,218  13,145  27,678  11,140  41,896  30,756
108   -5,942  12,553   8,628  17,929   2,686  30,482  27,796
121   -4,020   6,534   6,059  15,078   2,039  21,612  19,573

As discussed before, the columns represent the difference in vote total for the given period and party, so “1216” means 2012 to 2016, “1620” means 2016 to 2020, and “1220” means 2012 to 2020. Each column has a D or an R in it, so “1216R” means the difference between 2016 Donald Trump and 2012 Mitt Romney for the Presidential table, and so forth. In each case, I subtract the earlier year’s total from the later year’s total, so the “-9,951” for SD114 in the “1216R” column means that Donald Trump got 9,951 fewer votes in 2016 in SD14 than Mitt Romney got, and the “56,887” for SD14 in the “1216D” column means that Hillary Clinton got 56,887 more votes than Barack Obama got. “Dem net” at the end just subtracts the “1220R” total from the “1220D” total, which is the total number of votes that Biden netted over Obama. Got it? Good.

Despite the large swings, only the top two are now Dem-held. HD108 managed to remain in the hands of Rep. Morgan Meyer despite being carried by statewide Dems all the way down the ballot, while HD121 still remains somewhat Republican-leaning. I don’t know what magic Republicans have in mind for redistricting, but their hold on these voters is slipping away rapidly. I can’t emphasize enough that Mitt Romney got 60% of the vote in HD134 in 2012, and look at where it is now.

I’ve written plenty about these districts, and I could have included more of them in this table. Most of those you will see later. There’s not much to add except to say that this particular demographic shift has been a huge driver in the overall blue-ing of Texas, and especially of its most populated areas. I don’t know what the future holds, but I don’t see that changing in the near term.

When I mentioned that this post was a look at the districts by demographic groups, I assume your first thought was that I’d take a closer look at Latino districts. Well, here you go:


Dist  12-16R  12-16D  16-20R  16-20D  12-20R  12-20D Dem net
============================================================
051      425  10,783   4,422  19,073   4,847  29,856  25,009
102   -4,430   5,333   2,511  10,832  -1,919  16,165  18,084
148   -1,481   8,555   5,598  10,113   4,117  18,668  14,551
107   -3,023   4,566     718   7,532  -2,305  12,098  14,403
103      -96   7,314   3,535  10,357   3,439  17,671  14,232
116     -583   6,014   3,546  10,281   2,963  16,295  13,332
117    4,532   8,828  14,927  22,921  19,459  31,749  12,290
105   -2,249   4,377   2,900   8,547     651  12,924  12,273
078   -1,129   6,723   6,731   9,618   5,602  16,341  10,739
124      330   5,077   5,877  11,756   6,207  16,833  10,626
125   -1,081   4,378   4,753   9,350   3,672  13,728  10,056
079     -453   7,038   4,976   6,495   4,523  13,533   9,010
075    1,734  11,011   9,747   8,599  11,481  19,610   8,129
104     -777   3,881   2,743   6,042   1,966   9,923   7,957
077   -1,530   5,080   3,539   3,936   2,009   9,016   7,007
119    1,062   3,428   6,041  10,507   7,103  13,935   6,832
145   -1,306   5,575   5,291   5,038   3,985  10,613   6,628
090     -180   2,391   3,170   5,496   2,990   7,887   4,897
118    1,391   3,719   6,633   7,790   8,024  11,509   3,485
076     -260   5,039   3,826   1,635   3,566   6,674   3,108
140     -733   4,433   4,140   1,810   3,407   6,243   2,836
144   -1,051   3,577   4,044   1,480   2,993   5,057   2,064
041    1,664   6,820   8,617   5,201  10,281  12,021   1,740
143   -1,038   3,244   4,483   1,446   3,445   4,690   1,245
022   -1,261  -2,280   1,510   2,254     249     -26    -275
034      620     799   6,012   3,759   6,632   4,558  -2,074
038    1,533   4,706   9,344   2,945  10,877   7,651  -3,226
040    2,384   3,753   8,981   3,433  11,365   7,186  -4,179
037      969   3,764   7,324      36   8,293   3,800  -4,493
036    1,482   5,527   9,847    -480  11,329   5,047  -6,282
039    2,071   3,256   8,411     836  10,482   4,092  -6,390
035    2,007   2,358   8,961   2,163  10,968   4,521  -6,447
042      882   2,195   7,908    -323   8,790   1,872  -6,918
043    2,532     162   8,001   1,059  10,533   1,221  -9,312
080    1,959   1,789   9,567     127  11,526   1,916  -9,610
074    1,127   2,708   9,454  -2,185  10,581     523 -10,058
031    3,017  -1,816  13,479    -412  16,496  -2,228 -18,724

A couple of notes here. Defining “Latino district” is subjective, and I make no claim that my way is optimal. What you see above is almost all of the districts that are represented by a Latino member, plus HD80, which despite being majority Latino is still represented by Democrat Tracy King. I skipped HDs 49 (Gina Hinojosa) and 50 (Celia Israel) because the’re much more Anglo than Latino. HDs 102, 105, and 107 were held by non-Latino Republicans before being flipped by Democrats in 2016 and 2018. HD43 is held by the one Latino Republican in the House, JM Lozano, who won originally as a Democrat in 2008 and then changed parties after the 2010 election. HDs 79 and 90 were held by Anglo Democrats in 2012; Lon Burnam was primaried out by Rep. Ramon Romero in 2014, and Joe Pickett resigned following the 2018 election due to health challenges.

There’s a lot of data here, and I’ll try to keep this manageable. All the districts that showed a net gain for Dems over both elections are in Bexar, Dallas, El Paso, Harris, Travis (HD51), and Tarrant (HD90), plus HD41 in Hidalgo County. In Bexar, Dallas, and Tarrant, there were net gains in each cycle. In El Paso, there were big gains in 2016 and more modest gains in 2020, with the exception of HD75, which had a slight gain for Republicans in 2020. HD75 is the easternmost and thus most rural of the El Paso districts. It also still voted 66.5% to 31.9% for Biden in 2020, just for some perspective.

In Harris, all five districts gained in 2016, but only HD148 also gained in 2020. HD145 came close to breaking even, while HDs 140, 143, and 144 all moved towards Republicans; we saw this when we looked at the Harris County Senate districts and talked about SD06. This is the first of several places where I will shrug my shoulders and say “we’ll see what happens in 2022”. Honestly, I don’t know what to expect. We’ve discussed this topic numerous times, and as there are forces moving urban and college-educated voters towards Democrats, the same forces are moving rural and non-college voters towards Republicans. The biggest of those forces is Donald Trump, whose presence on the ballot helped Republicans in 2016 and 2020 but whose absence hurt them in 2018. We just don’t know yet what 2022 will bring.

Of the districts that had net Republican gains, HD22 is in Jefferson County (basically, it’s Beaumont; Dade Phelan’s HD21 has the rest of JeffCo plus Orange County) and HD34 is in Nueces County. Jefferson County has been slowly losing population over time, and I think that was a big driver of what happened with HD22. It’s also much more Black than Latino, and thus maybe is a better fit with the next data set, but it has long been represented by Rep. Joe Deshtotel, and this is the decision I made. Nueces County also has the Republican-held HD32 in it, and it showed a net Democratic gain of 1,576 votes over the two cycles, with most of that in 2016 but still a small Dem net in 2020. Its Latino voting age population is about 46%, nearly identical to its Anglo VAP. HD34 was one of the tighter districts even before 2020, and I figure it’s on the target list for Republicans in redistricting.

Most of the other districts are in Cameron, Hidalgo, and Webb counties, and while 2020 was a better year for Republicans in all of them, I don’t think that will necessarily be the case in 2022, a belief driven in part by the incumbency theory and in part by my own wishfulness. That said, as noted before the shifts were more muted downballot, with Trump outperforming other Republicans in those districts. I had my doubts about the durability of Democratic gains in 2016 because of the disparity between the Hillary numbers and the rest of the numbers, and I think it’s fair to have those same doubts here. We do know how it went in 2018, but as before Trump is not on the ballot in 2022. Which force is stronger? Have the underlying conditions changed? I don’t know and neither does anyone else at this time.

HDs 31, 74, and 80 are all cobbled out of smaller counties, and I have much less hope for them, but who knows what the combined effects of the freeze and the Abbott Wall will have. The main thing I took away from analyzing this data is that there was already a Republican shift in 31 and 74 in 2016 with a near miss in 80, though they all rebounded in a Democratic direction in 2018. How much of this was caused by new voters, and how much by swapping allegiances, those are big questions to ponder.

Let’s move on. These are the predominantly Black districts:


Dist  12-16R  12-16D  16-20R  16-20D  12-20R  12-20D Dem net
============================================================
046     -331   7,462   4,363  20,080   4,032  27,542  23,510
027     -461   4,708   6,324  13,724   5,863  18,432  12,569
147   -1,282   3,575   4,571   9,831   3,289  13,406  10,117
109     -914    -500   1,853  11,161     939  10,661   9,722
111   -1,449  -1,155   1,627   8,981     178   7,826   7,648
120     -184     863   4,503  10,856   4,319  11,719   7,400
100     -840    -537   2,107   7,799   1,267   7,262   5,995
142      294   2,093   4,685   8,804   4,979  10,897   5,918
131     -642   2,681   4,289   6,642   3,647   9,323   5,676
146   -1,653    -923   2,438   6,798     785   5,875   5,090
139   -1,290   1,216   4,826   6,786   3,536   8,002   4,466
095     -613  -2,745   2,727   7,752   2,114   5,007   2,893
141      218    -721   2,594   4,405   2,812   3,684     872
110     -101  -3,010   1,820   3,362   1,719     352  -1,367

HD27 is in Fort Bend, HD46 is in Travis (it’s also much more Latino than Black but has long been represented by a Black legislator, with Dawnna Dukes preceding Sheryl Cole; it is the inverse of HD22 in that way), HD95 is in Tarrant, and HD120 is in Bexar. HD101 in Tarrant County has a higher Black percentage of its population than either HDs 46 or 120, but it’s held by the Anglo Dem Chris Turner, so I skipped it. All the rest are in Harris and Dallas. The range of outcomes here is fascinating. I think what we see in the 2016 results, at least in some of these districts, is a bit of a letdown in enthusiasm from Obama to Clinton, with perhaps a bit of the campaign to dampen turnout among Black Democrats finding some success. Some districts in Harris County like HD141 have had pretty modest growth in population and voter registration as well. I don’t know what the story may have been in HD110, but if one of my Dallas readers would like to offer a few words, I’d be interested in hearing them.

There was some evidence around the country of Trump making modest gains with Black voters, mostly Black men, in 2020. I do see a case for that here, because even as Dems had net gains in 2020 – significant gains, in some of these districts – their share of the total new turnout is smaller than you’d otherwise expect. For example, HD131 voted 80.6% to 18.5% for Biden, but only 60.8% of the extra voters in 2020 voted for Biden. HD131 had voted 84.1% to 13.3% for Hillary in 2016, meaning that Trump cut almost ten points off of his deficit from 2016. This is your reminder that a shift in vote share towards one party is not the same as a shift in total votes towards one party. We’ve had this conversation about Democrats making percentage point gains in some heavily Republican areas while still falling farther behind, and this is that same conversation from the other side.

Finally, here are the four districts represented by Asian American legislators:


Dist  12-16R  12-16D  16-20R  16-20D  12-20R  12-20D Dem net
============================================================
026   -4,573   9,082   7,327  13,556   2,754  22,638  19,884
112   -2,140   4,427   5,086  10,634   2,946  15,061  12,115
137     -848   2,147   2,435   4,099   1,587   6,246   4,659
149   -2,592   3,504   8,134   4,645   5,542   8,149   2,607

This grouping is even more tenuous than the Latino districts, mostly because there’s no such thing as a plurality Asian district. Indeed, only HDs 26 and 149, which are the two most Asian districts in the state, are in the top five; HDs 66, 28, and 67 are the next three in line. They will all be covered in the next post in this series. HD137 is mostly Latino and HD112 is mostly Anglo. Like I said, these are the decisions I made. HD26 is in Fort Bend and was won in 2020 by Republican Jacey Jetton, after years of being held by Rick Miller. It was carried by Biden in 2020 and as you can see it has moved pretty heavily Democratic, but it was still Republican enough to be held by them in an open seat race. HD112 is in Dallas and is held by Angie Chen Button, and like HD108 it was otherwise Democratic in 2020. Good luck with redistricting, that’s all I can say. The other two are in Harris County, with HD137 being held by Gene Wu since 2012. It was 63-34 for Obama in 2012 and 67-31 for Biden in 2020. The most curious case for me is HD149, which as you can see followed a pattern similar to the Latino districts in Harris County; I noted this before when I did the Harris County numbers way back when. I’m not quite sure what to make of those totals, but they don’t keep me awake at night. As with the rest, we’ll see what 2022 has in store for us.

Next time, a closer look at some counties of interest. Let me know what you think.

Precinct analysis: The median districts

Jun 14th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

This is a straightforward post, with a simple answer to an important question. We know that Joe Biden carried 74 State House districts and 15 State Senate districts. How much better did he need to do to get a majority in each chamber? Daily Kos calls this the “median district”. In this context, that means the data for the 76th-most Democratic House district, and the 16th-most Democratic Senate district. The idea is to see how far off the Dems were from being able to win those districts and thus claim a majority in each chamber.

We’ll start with the State House. The table below gives the data for the median district in each of the last three Presidential elections for the Presidential race, the Senate race (2012 and 2020 only), and the Railroad Commissioner race:


Year    Dist      Dem      GOP   Tot D
======================================
2012   HD138   39.29%   59.16%      54
2016    HD54   43.58%   50.50%      65
2020    HD54   48.85%   48.98%      74
				
2012    HD97   38.35%   58.88%      54
2020    HD92   46.04%   51.12%      68

2012    HD97   36.16%   59.58%      54
2016    HD66   37.77%   54.46%      56
2020    HD31   46.52%   50.55%      68

In 2012, the 76th-most Democratic district was HD138, in which Barack Obama received 39.29% of the vote to Mitt Romney’s 59.16%. This is a polite way of saying that the 2011 gerrymander was super effective, and the Democrats weren’t within hailing distance of winning half the chamber. The last column shows the total number of districts carried by the Democratic Presidential candidate. In 2012, this closely mirrored the total number of seats that the Dems actually won, which was 55. One Democratic-held seat was carried by Romney – HD23, the Galveston-based district won that year (and for the final time, as he declined to run again) by Craig Eiland. As you may recall from previous analyses, that district has trended away from the Dems ever since – in 2016, it was won 56-41 by Trump, and in 2020 it was 57-41 for Trump. Obama carried zero Republican-won seats – the closest he came was a 52-47 loss in HD43, another district that has moved farther away from Dems over the decade. He came within six points in three Dallas districts that Democrats now hold – HDs 113, 107, and 105. Like I said, an extremely effective gerrymander. Also a consistent one, as Paul Sadler and Dale Henry won the same districts Obama did, no more and no less.

Until it wasn’t, of course. The cracks began to show in 2016, when Hillary Clinton carried 65 districts, though Dems still only won 55 of them overall. HD23 fell to the Republicans in 2014, but Dems earned their first flip of the decade (*) by taking HD107, which as noted above was one of the closer misses in 2012. The nine GOP-won districts that Hillary Clinton carried were HDs 113, 105, 115, 102, 112, 114, 138, 134, and 108. Seven of those are now Democratic districts, with six flipping in 2018 and one (HD134) flipping in 2020.

Note how Clinton ran ahead of other Dems as well. Perennial candidate Grady Yarbrough picked up only HD105, and that by a 45.9 to 44.6 margin (there was a lot of third-party voting in that extremely unappealing race), and it was the same at the judicial level. You may recall this is why I was more guarded in my optimism about 2018 initially – I had some doubts about what the Clinton/GOP voters would do their next time out.

We know how that turned out, and we know how Biden did, as well as how MJ Hegar and Chrysta Castaneda did in 2020. Look at how the median district shifted over time. In 2012, the 76th district was more Republican than the Presidential race was, at each level. In 2016, the median district looked a lot like the Presidential race, and to be honest a lot like the RRC race as well; Wayne Christian defeated Grady Yarbrough 53.1 to 38.4, a bit closer than the median but not far off. In 2020, at all levels, the median district was closer than the statewide race was. Republicans outperformed their baseline in the House, and they needed to because by this point their vaunted gerrymander had completely failed them. I have to think this is something they’re giving serious thought to for this time around.

Here’s the same data for the State Senate districts:


Year    Dist      Dem      GOP   Tot D
======================================
2012    SD08   36.60%   61.67%      11
2016    SD09   41.75%   53.09%      12
2020    SD09   48.30%   50.00%      15

2012    SD08   35.94%   61.05%      11
2020    SD09   45.40%   51.70%      13

2012    SD08   33.34%   62.19%      11
2016    SD08   36.19%   55.94%      11
2020    SD09   44.60%   51.60%      13

It’s a similar pattern as above. In 2012, Mitt Romney carried SD10, which Wendy Davis won in a hard-fought race. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried SD16 by a 49.9 to 45.3 margin, and just missed in SD10, losing it 47.9 to 47.3; she also came within a point of SD17. The median district was a little friendlier to the GOP in 2016, but in 2020 as with the House it was closer than the corresponding statewide race. Again, the once-solid gerrymander buckled at the knees, aided in large part by the suburban shift. Dems also managed to hold onto all of the red-shifting Latino districts, while Biden dropped two of them in the House.

What does any of this mean going forward? I have no idea. I’m seeing map proposals for Congress that are pretty brutal, but who knows what we’ll get in 2022, and who knows how population growth and the shifts in suburban and (mostly rural) Latino areas will affect things. Texas is a more challenging state than the likes of Wisconsin or Michigan to control over an entire decade precisely because it changes so much in that time. Republicans will have some opportunities for gain in 2022, but they also have a lot of vulnerabilities, and their best defense may be to just try to shore up everything they now have. The choices they make, based to some degree on their level of risk tolerance, will be fascinating to see.

Precinct analysis: State House districts 2020, part 2

Jun 7th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Today’s post is going to be an analysis of the State House districts from the perspective of the US Senate and Railroad Commissioner races. We have already observed in other contexts how Joe Biden outran the rest of the Democratic ticket, and we will see that here as well. But it’s a little more nuanced than that, because of the Latino vote and the Trump shift, which we have characterized as being mostly about Trump. The Texas Signal boiled down one piece of research on that as follows:

In an interview with Texas Signal, the Executive Director of Cambio Texas, Abel Prado, walked us through some of the big takeaways from their post-election report. One of his first points from the report was that many of the voters who came out in the Rio Grande Valley were specifically Donald Trump voters, and not necessarily Republican voters.

Many of Trump’s traits, including his brashness, a self-styled Hollywood pedigree, his experience as a businessman, and his billionaire status, resonated with many voters in the Rio Grande Valley. “The increase in Republican vote share were Donald Trump votes, not conservative votes, and there’s a difference,” said Prado.

Hold that thought, we’ll get to it in a bit. I’m going to present the data here in the same order as I did in the previous post, with the results from the Senate race (MJ Hegar versus John Cornyn) and the RRC race (Chrysta Castaneda versus Jim Wright) grouped together. We will start with the Republican districts that Biden carried:


Dist    Hegar   Cornyn   Hegar%  Cornyn%
========================================
026    40,478   43,650    47.1%    50.8%
066    42,688   42,768    48.9%    49.0%
067    47,484   46,775    49.2%    48.5%
096    42,210   44,471    47.5%    50.0%
108    50,639   49,689    49.4%    48.5%
112    34,800   32,591    50.2%    47.0%
121    44,062   49,365    46.0%    51.2%
132    48,460   50,865    47.5%    49.8%
134    61,018   48,629    54.7%    43.6%
138    31,508   31,993    48.3%    49.1%

Dist    Casta   Wright   Casta%  Wright%
========================================
026    39,238   42,818    46.5%    50.8%
066    41,139   41,650    48.1%    48.7%
067    45,970   45,494    48.6%    48.1%
096    41,135   44,103    46.7%    50.1%
108    49,347   48,118    48.8%    47.6%
112    34,635   31,768    50.3%    46.2%
121    43,992   46,975    46.6%    49.8%
132    47,483   49,947    47.0%    49.4%
134    57,940   47,504    53.2%    43.6%
138    30,796   31,201    47.9%    48.6%

You don’t need to review the previous post to see that Hegar and Castaneda fell short of the standard Biden set. ~~Still, they carried 70 House districts, three more than were won by the Dems, and came within a point of two more~~. What we see here is the same thing we saw when we looked at these races in Harris County, which is not only that Joe Biden got more votes than these two Democrats, but John Cornyn and Jim Wright outperformed Donald Trump. These are your crossover voters, and the big question going into 2022 is what potential exists to swing them again, and in which races. Dems still fell short statewide in 2020 even with all those voters, but the hill is less steep with them than without them.

UPDATE: Correction – Hegar and Castaneda carried 68 House districts, one more than the total won by Dems. They carried GOP-won HDs 67, 108, and 112 and lost Dem-won HDs 31 and 74, for a net increase of one. I managed to confuse myself with the math by basing the calculation on that table above. They were still within a point of two other districts as shown above.

Here are the near-miss and reach districts for Biden:


Dist    Hegar   Cornyn   Hegar%  Cornyn%
========================================
014    27,435   35,269    42.2%    54.3%
028    54,571   65,387    44.6%    53.4%
029    43,327   52,292    44.2%    53.4%
054    34,462   36,551    47.1%    49.9%
064    39,350   47,395    43.8%    52.8%
092    36,564   40,601    46.0%    51.1%
093    37,934   44,925    44.4%    52.6%
094    34,826   39,970    45.3%    52.0%
097    42,210   44,471    47.4%    50.0%
122    51,835   72,452    40.9%    57.1%
126    33,618   39,298    44.9%    52.5%
133    38,149   51,111    41.9%    56.2%

032    29,613   38,322    43.5%    53.4%
070    48,246   77,306    37.5%    60.1%
084    22,626   35,019    37.8%    58.5%
085    32,212   43,653    41.5%    56.3%
089    40,761   57,531    40.5%    57.1%
106    53,674   73,313    41.2%    56.3%
129    35,924   48,318    41.5%    55.8%
150    39,872   56,019    40.5%    56.9%

Dist    Casta   Wright   Casta%  Wright%
========================================
014    25,863   34,522    40.7%    54.3%
028    53,363   64,123    44.3%    53.2%
029    42,256   51,097    43.7%    52.9%
054    33,036   36,749    45.4%    50.5%
064    37,396   46,264    42.5%    52.6%
092    35,180   40,269    44.8%    51.3%
093    36,501   44,700    43.2%    52.9%
094    33,630   39,603    44.3%    52.1%
097    35,954   44,647    43.0%    53.4%
122    51,488   69,624    41.2%    55.7%
126    32,979   38,409    44.6%    52.0%
133    36,456   50,069    40.9%    56.2%

032    28,939   36,856    42.2%    53.7%
070    46,349   75,914    36.6%    60.0%
084    21,625   34,530    36.8%    58.8%
085    31,967   42,990    41.6%    55.9%
089    39,378   56,345    39.8%    56.9%
106    50,925   71,782    39.9%    56.3%
129    35,326   46,707    41.5%    54.8%
150    38,995   55,111    40.0%    56.6%

Not a whole lot to say here. The near-misses look farther away, and the reaches look out of reach. It’s important to remember that a lot of these districts weren’t on anyone’s radar going into 2016, and that the trend has been heavily favorable to the Democrats. We certainly hope those trends continue, but even if they do that doesn’t mean the district in question is on the verge of being competitive.

Here are the districts that Trump won or came close it. For this, I’m going to reprint the Biden/Trump numbers, to make it easier to illustrate the point I want to make.


Dist    Hegar   Cornyn   Hegar%  Cornyn%
========================================
031    23,609   28,980    43.5%    53.4%
074    22,397   25,232    45.5%    51.2%

034    27,567   26,236    49.8%    47.4%
035    22,735   18,926    52.7%    43.8%
080    25,339   19,960    54.1%    42.6%

038    28,050   20,464    56.2%    41.0%
041    29,594   24,797    52.8%    44.3%
117    49,759   40,386    53.6%    43.5%
118    31,726   25,841    53.5%    43.6%
144    16,246   14,108    51.8%    45.0%

Dist    Casta   Wright   Casta%  Wright%
========================================
031    24,700   26,837    46.5%    50.5%
074    22,942   23,836    47.4%    49.2%

034    27,816   24,985    51.0%    45.8%
035    23,684   17,094    56.2%    40.5%
080    25,945   18,750    56.2%    40.6%

038    29,097   18,502    59.2%    37.7%
041    30,611   22,881    55.5%    41.5%
117    49,871   38,567    54.2%    41.9%
118    32,568   24,454    55.2%    41.5%
144    16,851   13,251    54.1%    42.6%

Dist    Biden    Trump   Biden%   Trump%
========================================
031    25,315   33,101    42.9%    56.1%
074    23,478   27,319    45.6%    53.1%

034    29,226   26,606    51.7%    47.0%
035    24,991   21,049    53.8%    45.3%
080    26,251   22,543    53.3%    45.8%

038    29,116   21,573    56.8%    42.1%
041    31,956   25,187    55.5%    43.7%
117    53,983   39,495    56.8%    41.6%
118    34,228   25,848    56.2%    42.4%
144    17,365   14,599    53.6%    45.0%

We don’t see the same pattern here that we did before. In these districts, Trump is outrunning Cornyn and Wright. Biden is still outperforming Hegar and Castaneda, but not by as much. That makes HDs 31 and 74 closer, especially for Castaneda. This suggests two things to me. One is that as was claimed in that Texas Signal story, there really was more of a Trump effect than a Republican shift. It also appears that Castaneda benefitted from her Latina surname; one could also argue that Cornyn got some incumbent benefit as well. The main point is that the story of these districts is a little more nuanced than some of the discourse would have you believe. Doesn’t mean there aren’t issues for Dems to confront, just that it’s not a one-dimensional situation.

Finally, here are the districts that the Dems picked up in the 2016 and 2018 cycles.


Dist    Hegar   Cornyn   Hegar%  Cornyn%
========================================
045    57,413   54,996    49.5%    47.4%
047    69,906   66,452    50.2%    47.7%
052    51,448   45,369    51.6%    45.5%
065    40,789   38,039    50.3%    46.7%
102    37,879   29,970    54.5%    43.1%
105    31,769   24,477    54.8%    42.2%
107    34,360   26,248    55.1%    42.1%
113    36,185   31,239    52.2%    45.0%
114    42,291   36,918    52.3%    45.6%
115    39,307   31,859    53.8%    43.6%
135    37,050   36,728    48.9%    48.4%
136    55,420   44,710    53.8%    43.4%

Dist    Casta   Wright   Casta%  Wright%
========================================
045    54,943   53,725    48.2%    47.1%
047    66,419   64,426    48.7%    47.3%
052    48,688   44,402    49.7%    45.3%
065    39,040   36,949    49.2%    46.6%
102    37,549   28,844    54.5%    41.9%
105    31,723   23,639    55.2%    41.1%
107    34,364   25,234    55.5%    40.8%
113    36,116   30,540    52.4%    44.3%
114    42,043   35,411    52.6%    44.3%
115    38,704   30,803    53.5%    42.6%
135    36,487   35,845    48.6%    47.8%
136    52,576   43,535    52.0%    43.0%

Even with the erosion of support from the top of the ticket, Dems still held these districts at the Senate and RRC level. The gain were maintained. I know what the narrative for 2020 was, but it’s hard for me to see that as anything but a rousing success.

Precinct analysis: State House districts 2020, part 1

Jun 1st, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

Joe Biden carried 74 State House districts in 2020. That’s seven more than were won by Democratic candidates, but two fewer than Beto in 2018. Eight districts won by Biden were held by Republican incumbents, and there were two that were flipped one way or the other:


Dist    Biden    Trump   Biden%   Trump%
========================================
026    45,192   42,349    50.9%    47.7%
066    47,844   39,729    53.7%    44.6%
067    52,872   43,876    53.6%    44.5%
096    44,828   43,538    50.0%    48.6%
108    57,513   43,250    56.2%    42.3%
112    37,369   31,167    53.6%    44.7%
121    49,034   46,430    50.6%    47.9%
132    51,737   50,223    50.0%    48.5%
134    67,814   42,523    60.6%    38.0%
138    34,079   31,171    51.5%    47.1%

For comparison, here’s the analysis from 2018. The one Republican-held district that Beto won but Biden didn’t is HD64, which I’ll get to next. Biden won HD96, which Beto did not win. I have no idea how Morgan Meyer held on in HD108 with that strong a wind blowing against him, but you have to tip your cap. You also have to wonder how much longer he can do this – yes, I know, redistricting is coming, but Dallas is getting close to being Travis County at this point, and you just have to wonder how many seats winnable by Republicans there are if current trends continue. Note that Sarah Davis faced nearly the same conditions in 2020 as she had in 2018, except for having a stronger opponent. Meyer had the same opponent (Joanna Cattanach) as in 2018, and she raised good money, but he managed to win anyway.

I still don’t feel like we have a good understanding of why there were so many Biden/Republican voters. There’s been a lot done to try to explain why Republicans did better with Latino voters in 2020, while everyone is more or less taking it for granted that the stampede of former Republicans who are now voting Democratic is just part of the landscape. I look at these numbers and I am reminded of the same kind of splits we saw in 2016, when there were tons of people who voted for Hillary Clinton but then mostly voted Republican otherwise. I was skeptical of the optimism we had (at least initially) for CDs 07 and 32 and other districts because of those gaps, and then 2018 came along and erased those concerns. So what do we make of this? A last gasp of anti-Trump energy from people who still think of themselves (and vote like) Republicans, or a leading indicator of more to come in 2022? I wish I knew, and I wish there were people actively trying to find out. Note that doesn’t necessarily bring us closer to winning statewide, as Beto had a smaller margin than Biden did, but it does meant that the battle for the Legislature and Congress will continue to be heated, even with new maps.

Next up are the near misses, and the farther-out-but-still-within-sight districts that I had been keeping an eye on following 2018. Most of these are familiar:


Dist    Biden    Trump   Biden%   Trump%
========================================
014    30,188   33,690    45.9%    51.3%
028    60,101   63,906    47.8%    50.8%
029    45,951   51,494    46.5%    52.1%
054    35,995   36,093    48.9%    49.0%
064    42,908   46,093    47.2%    50.7%
092    39,262   39,386    49.0%    49.2%
093    40,679   43,897    47.3%    51.0%
094    37,375   38,724    48.3%    50.1%
097    41,007   42,494    48.2%    50.0%
122    57,972   68,621    45.2%    53.5%
126    36,031   38,651    47.6%    51.1%
133    43,263   47,038    47.3%    51.4%

032    31,699   38,011    44.7%    53.6%
070    53,870   75,198    40.9%    57.1%
084    24,928   34,575    41.1%    57.1%
085    34,743   43,818    43.6%    55.0%
089    45,410   55,914    44.0%    54.1%
106    59,024   70,752    44.8%    53.7%
129    38,941   47,389    44.4%    54.0%
150    42,933   55,261    43.1%    55.5%

Generally speaking, Beto did better in these districts than Biden did, which is consistent with Beto scoring higher overall, but not everywhere. Biden outpaced him in some more urban areas, like HDs 133, 122, and the aforementioned HD96. Usually where Beto did better it wasn’t by much, less than a point or so, but with bigger differences in less urban areas like HDs 14, 32, and 84. It may be that there was less-than-expected Republican turnout in 2018, so it’s hard to extrapolate to 2022, but it’s important to remember that the trend from 2016 is strongly Democratic in all of these places. And it’s happening in places you haven’t been paying attention to as well. HD70 may not look competitive, and I didn’t include it in the 2018 analysis (Beto got 40.4% there compared to 58.8% for Cruz), but in 2016 it was carried by Trump by a 61.6 to 32.2 margin. This district in northern Collin County used to be a landslide for Republicans, and now it’s on the long-range sensors for Democrats, in the same way that HDs 126 and 133 and 150 are.

Not everything is rainbows and puppies. There were two districts that Beto won and Biden lost. You can probably guess what kind of districts they were. Here they are, along with the other close and longer-term-something-to-think-about districts.


Dist    Biden    Trump   Biden%   Trump%
========================================
031    25,315   33,101    42.9%    56.1%
074    23,478   27,319    45.6%    53.1%

034    29,226   26,606    51.7%    47.0%
035    24,991   21,049    53.8%    45.3%
080    26,251   22,543    53.3%    45.8%

038    29,116   21,573    56.8%    42.1%
041    31,956   25,187    55.5%    43.7%
117    53,983   39,495    56.8%    41.6%
118    34,228   25,848    56.2%    42.4%
144    17,365   14,599    53.6%    45.0%

If you’ve been wondering why Reps like Ryan Guillen and Eddie Morales were voting for permitless carry and the bills to restrict cities’ ability to reduce police funding, that right there is the likely answer. Guillen has been around forever and likely was pretty safe even with that Trump surge, but Morales was defending an open seat. I don’t want to think about how much more obnoxious the media narrative of the 2020 election in Texas would have been had the Republicans flipped this one.

The three “near miss” districts, HDs 34, 35, and 80, look worrisome and will no doubt give the Republicans some ideas about what the 2022 map should look like, but keep two things in mind: One, as you will see in the next post, this was more of a Trump thing than anything else. Republicans did not do nearly as well farther down on the ballot. And two, nine of the Democratic “near miss” districts were closer than the 4.7 point margin in HD34. If the current map were to stay in place, we’d have more targets than they would.

The five longer-range districts don’t concern me much, especially the two Bexar County districts, where Biden had a higher percentage than Clinton in each and a bigger margin in HD117 (Clinton carried HD118 by a 55.1-40.0 margin). They were both closer than they were in 2018, but the overall trend in Bexar County is bluer.

Finally, here are the seats that the Democrats picked up in either 2016 (HD107) or 1028:


Dist    Biden    Trump   Biden%   Trump%
========================================
045    61,435   53,123    52.6%    45.5%
047    76,336   61,983    54.1%    43.9%
052    55,056   44,664    53.9%    43.7%
065    44,884   36,126    54.5%    43.9%
102    41,123   27,279    59.1%    39.2%
105    33,634   23,879    57.6%    40.9%
107    36,691   24,880    58.6%    39.8%
113    38,175   30,600    54.8%    43.9%
114    47,215   32,340    58.5%    40.1%
115    42,618   29,510    58.1%    40.3%
135    39,657   36,114    51.6%    47.0%
136    59,654   43,190    56.6%    40.9%

As we know, the narrative from the 2020 election is that Democrats went big trying to take over the State House and win a bunch of Congressional seats, but failed to do any of that and so the year was a big success for the Republicans. I don’t dispute the basic premise, but I feel like it’s only part of the story. Democrats did regain that State Senate seat they lost in the 2019 special election debacle, they won a State Board of Education seat for the first time in my memory, they won more appellate court benches, and they completed the flip of Fort Bend County. None of that gained much notice. More to the point, the Republicans had big plans to win back what they had lost in 2018, the year that they claimed was a huge fluke driven by Betomania and anti-Trump fervor. Yet they failed to retake CDs 07 and 32, and they only took back one of the 12 State House seats they had lost, which was balanced out by their loss of HD134, but somehow that’s never mentioned. They spent a ton of money on these races, Dave Carney was predicting they would gains seats overall, and they had expressed confidence in their ability to hold SD19. They not only failed broadly on all this, but Biden did better overall in the seats Beto carried in 2018, as the new Dem incumbents mostly cruised. Sometimes I wonder what the story would have been if Dems had won only six or seven seats in 2018, then picked up the others last year. Would we still think of 2020 as a failure that way? I have no idea.

So this is how things looked from a Presidential perspective. As we know, Biden ran ahead of the other Democrats on the statewide ballot, so you may be wondering how this looked from that viewpoint. The next entry in this series will be the State House districts for the Senate and Railroad Commissioner races. Tune in next time for the exciting followup to this very special episode.

Precinct analysis: State Senate district comparisons

May 24th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

6 comments

Let me start with some Twitter:

.
A lot of press has focused on Democratic losses among Hispanics, but important to look at the other side of the coin too (especially given that, uh, Biden won?). But R losses among whites amounted to far more votes, since they are a larger share of the electorate.

— G. Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) 1:10 PM – 14 May 2021

.
Rs managed to find a marginally winning message with Latinos last year. It may have been Trump-specific, maybe not, but “Ds are socialists and we’ll give you jobs” only pushed Trump to 36% of the vote anyhow. They will have to adjust their message for a new generation.

— G. Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) 1:21 PM – 14 May 2021

There’s more to the thread, but those are the bits I wanted to highlight. It’s true, as noted in the previous post, that Dems lost some ground in the Latino districts in 2020. You’ll see that here in a minute. But it’s also very much true that they gained a lot of votes elsewhere, in the more white districts. Some of those are the ones that flipped in 2018 or might have flipped in 2020 had they been on the ballot. Some were in places where Dems were already strong. Some were in districts that actually look to be competitive now, having not been so even four years ago. Why don’t I just show you the data?


Dist   1216R   1216D    1620R   1620D   1220R     1220D	Dem net
===============================================================
14    -9,951  56,887   26,677  97,954   16,726  154,841  138,115
08    -7,593  38,270   32,030  82,158   24,437  120,428   95,991
16   -22,137  35,202   21,611  58,302     -526   93,504   94,030
17   -19,619  38,114   34,892  56,566   15,273   94,680   79,407
25     3,422  37,037   65,613  95,402   69,035  132,439   63,404
07    -6,676  33,604   42,494  60,489   35,818   94,093   58,275
15    -6,708  27,545   28,163  48,882   21,455   76,427   54,972
10    -8,347  13,076   23,099  54,113   14,752   67,189   52,437
26    -2,174  20,179   20,009  44,154   17,835   64,333   46,498
09       -60  17,910   24,193  48,973   24,133   66,883   42,750
12    13,859  30,860   59,095  84,527   72,954  115,387   42,433
23    -3,003   3,751   13,010  43,679   10,007   47,430   37,423
29    -1,674  34,889   29,559  30,398   27,885   65,287   37,402
05    14,069  25,990   54,548  74,087   68,617  100,077   31,460
11     1,957  20,541   46,098  46,384   48,055   66,925   18,870
06    -4,554  20,223   21,712  13,637   17,158   33,860   16,702
13    -2,928      72   16,907  30,419   13,979   30,491   16,512
19    10,638  16,958   45,127  42,821   55,765   59,779    4,014
02    11,532  10,026   35,894  38,391   47,426   48,417      991

These are the districts where Dems gained over the course of these three elections. Lots of Republican turf in there, including the two D flips from 2018 and the two districts that both Biden and Beto carried but didn’t flip in 2018 (SDs 08 and 17), but the big gainer is that Democratic stronghold of SD14, where demography plus population growth plus a heavy duty turnout game led to a vast gain. Really, we Dems don’t appreciate Travis County enough. SD15, my district, has a nice showing as well, while SD26 is there to remind us that not all Latino districts went the way of the Valley.

We have the two 2018 flip districts, SDs 16, now practically a D powerhouse, and 10, which didn’t shift quite as much but was the most Dem-leaning Romney district from 2012 – you may recall, Wendy Davis won re-election there despite it going only 45% for Obama – and we have the two Biden-won Republican in 08 – who knew this one would shift so radically left – and 17. We’ve discussed SD07 before, and how it’s now teetering on swing status and won’t be of much use to the Republicans when they try to shore themselves up, but look at SD25, a district that has moved strongly left despite encompassing Comal County, the I-35 version of Montgomery. Look at the shifts in SD12, which is still not competitive but also not as big a GOP stronghold, and SD05, which has moved along with Williamson County. The key takeaway here is that more of the Senate is going to have to be centered on the Houston-San Antonio-D/FW triangle, and that part of the state is much more Democratic than it was a decade ago. This is the big problem Republicans have to solve.

Dems have some room to improve as well. I discussed SD13 in the Harris County reviews, and I believe there’s untapped potential in this district. It’s 80% Democratic to begin with, so improvements in turnout and voter registration are going to pay off in a big way. SD23 was more like 13 in 2016, but acquitted itself nicely in 2020. I suspect there are a lot of voters here who will need more contact and engagement in 2022. I know there were votes left on the table in 2018, and we need to be conscious of that.

Finally, there are three other Latino districts besides SD26 in this list. We’ve discussed SD06 before, which had a big uptick in Democrats while seeing fewer Republicans in 2016, then saw more Republicans turn out in 2020. In the end, the Dem percentage was basically the same in 2020 as in 2012, with a larger net margin, but the trend needs watching. SD19, which Dems took back in 2020 after that embarrassing special election loss, had a similar pattern as with SD06 except with a smaller net Republican gain in 2020. This district has a lot of border turf, which trended red in 2020, but it also has a good chunk of Bexar County, which got bluer and likely mitigated the overall shift. I feel like this district is more likely to drift in a Republican direction than SD06 is, but that will depend to some extent on how it’s redrawn. SD29, anchored in El Paso, had the same big Dem shift in 2016, then saw roughly equivalent gains by both parties in 2020. I think it’s more likely to get bluer over time, and there’s always room for Dem growth in El Paso, though as with SDs 13 and 23, it will require engagement.

Overall, these 19 districts represent a net gain of over 900K votes for Dems. Joe Biden collected about 600K more votes than 2012 Obama did, so there’s votes going the other way as well. Here are those districts:


Dist   1216R   1216D    1620R   1620D   1220R     1220D	Dem net
===============================================================
18    15,109  19,337   58,614  49,787   73,723   69,124  -4,599
04    10,564  14,667   54,680  39,023   65,244   53,690 -11,554
24    11,125   7,102   51,143  42,472   62,268   49,574 -12,694
21     9,828  13,573   43,738  26,297   53,566   39,870 -13,696
20     7,675  17,839   42,214  18,130   49,889   35,969 -13,920
22    17,969   6,092   48,183  37,910   66,152   44,002 -22,150
27     7,486  15,779   37,504   6,942   44,990   22,721 -22,269
28     6,727  -2,691   33,163  17,453   39,890   14,762 -25,128
31     6,956   3,954   36,050  10,696   43,006   14,650 -28,356
01    11,123  -6,966   34,452  17,623   45,575   10,657 -34,918
30    30,275   7,133   75,839  47,839  106,114   54,972 -51,142
03    20,610  -6,936   48,423  14,385   69,033    7,449 -61,584

Here’s the current Senate map, to remind you of where these districts are. SDs 22 and 24 have the most turf inside the big population triangle, while SD04 has most of its people there. SD22 currently includes Johnson and Ellis Counties, and it’s not too hard to imagine them beginning to trend blue over the next decade, while SD24 includes Bell and Coryell, which also have that potential.

I’m actually a little surprised to see that SDs 04 and 18 got a little bluer in 2016, before snapping back in 2020. I’ll have to take a closer look at them, on a county by county basis, to see what the big factors were. Fort Bend is going our way, and I have hope that we can make progress in Montgomery, and that’s going to be a big key to this decade.

The big Republican gainers, as noted in the last post, are mostly in East Texas and West Texas/the Panhandle, with SD03 including the north part of Montgomery. The main question will be how much of these districts will have to include the faster-growing parts of the state. That’s a calculation that won’t be very friendly to the incumbents, one way or another.

Finally, there are the three Latino districts, SDs 20, 21, and 27. All three followed the same pattern of a Dem gain in 2016 followed by a bigger Republican gain in 2020. SD27 remained solidly Democratic, while 20 and 21 are much closer to swing status though as noted in the previous post the incumbents all ran comfortably ahead of the pack. Republicans could certainly try to make a district more amenable to them out of this part of the state. How that would affect their other priorities, and how much of what we saw in 2020 continues past that year are the big questions. All other Dems carried these three districts as well, more or less at the same level as Biden. The good news for the Republicans then is that the new voters that Trump brought in were there for more than just him.

As you can see, there are fewer districts in which Dems lost ground, and the total number of votes they ceded is about a third of what they picked up elsewhere. You can see how G. Elliott Morris’ tweet thread applies here. As was the case with the State House and Congress, the Republican gerrymander of the State Senate in 2011 was very effective, until it wasn’t. It’s the same story here as it is for the other chambers, which is how do they assess the risk of a strategy that aims to gain them seats versus one that just aims to hold on to what they’ve got.

Next up will be a look at the State House district results from 2020. When the 2020 data for Congress and the SBOE finally show up, I’ll do the same for them as well. Let me know what you think.

Precinct analysis: State Senate districts 2020

May 17th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

5 comments

Hey, look, we now have some 2020 district data. I found it all on the new Texas Legislative Council redistricting landing page. As of last week, when I went digging, only the State Senate and State House have 2020 data, so I’m going to spend a little time with them.

The 2020 State Senate election results by district are here. The first thing you need to know is that Joe Biden carried 15 of the 31 Senate districts. Here they are, in descending order of Biden’s percentage:


Dist    Biden    Trump   Biden%   Trump%
========================================
23    237,533   52,415    80.9%    17.8%
13    208,895   46,896    80.8%    18.1%
14    347,953  132,727    70.8%    27.0%
29    180,899   87,022    66.5%    32.0%
26    191,570   92,307    66.4%    32.0%
06    123,709   61,089    66.1%    32.6%
15    208,552  110,485    64.5%    34.1%
27    125,040   90,758    57.3%    41.6%
16    210,107  159,233    56.0%    42.5%
19    176,256  149,924    53.3%    45.3%
21    155,987  132,733    53.2%    45.3%
10    199,896  170,688    53.1%    45.4%
20    143,598  128,363    52.2%    46.6%
17    212,242  193,514    51.6%    47.0%
08    231,252  211,190    51.3%    46.9%

For the record, Beto carried the same fifteen districts in 2018. I’ll do a separate post on comparisons with other years, but I figured that was a thought many of you might have, so let’s address it here.

Only Biden carried the two Republican districts, SD08 and SD17. The range for other Democrats in SD08 was 46.4% (Chrysta Castaneda) to 48.1% (Elizabeth Frizell), and in SD17 from 46.5% (Gisela Triana) to 49.0% (Tina Clinton). Every Democrat got over 50% in each of the 13 Dem-held districts. This is consistent with what we’ve seen in Harris and Fort Bend Counties, where Biden outperformed the rest of the ticket by three or four points. For what it’s worth, we saw a very similar pattern in 2016, when Hillary Clinton ran ahead of other Dems, in some cases by quite a bit more. I’m thinking specifically of CDs 07 and 32, but there are other examples. My big question all throughout the 2018 cycle was whether those voters who voted for Clinton but otherwise generally voted Republican downballot would be inclined to vote for more Democrats that year, and judging by the results I’d say the answer was mostly Yes. We’ll have to see what happens this time around.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the lower-than-expected percentages in the Latino districts. SD20 is Chuy Hinojosa, and he won re-election by a 58.5% to 48.5% margin. SD21 is Judith Zaffirini, and she cruised 60.1% to 39.9%, while our old friend Eddie Lucio took SD27 64.8% to 35.2%. You may recall that in an earlier post on the Latino vote in 2020, one factor put forward for Trump’s better-than-expected performance was incumbency. As you can see, these incumbent Dems all ran comfortably ahead of Joe Biden. Now take a look at SD19, where Roland Gutierrez knocked out incumbent Pete Flores with a seemingly unimpressive 49.9% to 46.7% score. However much stock you put in the overall hypothesis, I’d say Flores’ incumbency helped him here. Not enough, thankfully. As for the two urban districts, SDs 06, 26, and 29, I’ve discussed SD06 before, so I’ll skip it. SD26 is basically on par with 2016, while SD29 slipped a bit from then but improved by a little bit over 2012. Again, I’ll get into more detail in a subsequent post.

Where Democrats really improved is in the whiter urban and suburban districts. SD14 was always a Democratic stronghold, but it really punched above its weight in 2020. No Republican district generated as many votes for Trump as SD14 did for Biden, and only one Republican district had a wider margin for Trump. We Dems maybe don’t appreciate Travis County as much as we should. I’ve discussed SD15 and how it went from a solid Dem district to a powerhouse in 2020. Look at SD16, which was a Dem takeover in 2018, and marvel at how Mitt Romney won it in 2012 with 57% of the vote. This is the kind of voting behavior shift that should have Republicans worried, and as you’ll see there’s more where that came from. Similar story at a lesser scale in SD10, which Trump carried in 2016 by a fraction of a point.

And then we have the two Republican districts that Biden carried. Both were battlegrounds in 2018, and I think the closeness of the race in SD08 was a genuine surprise to a lot of people, myself included. That’s a district that has shifted enormously, but it’s got more company than you might think. To understand that better, let’s look at the districts that Trump won, as above sorted by the percentage that Biden got.


Dist    Biden    Trump   Biden%   Trump%
========================================
09    161,000  166,632    48.3%    50.0%
25    256,178  302,919    45.1%    53.3%
07    188,150  232,201    44.1%    54.5%
05    199,253  250,002    43.4%    54.5%
12    211,292  270,287    43.2%    55.2%
11    161,818  232,156    40.4%    58.0%
02    138,917  208,774    39.4%    59.2%
18    161,933  271,898    36.8%    61.9%
22    128,415  253,102    33.2%    65.4%
04    142,522  281,331    33.2%    65.5%
24    126,340  257,861    32.3%    65.9%
30    121,646  329,601    26.5%    71.9%
01     92,593  265,715    25.5%    73.3%
28     76,925  222,872    25.3%    73.3%
03     77,364  294,559    20.6%    78.4%
31     59,684  229,768    20.3%    78.2%

Biden came within less than six thousand votes of taking a 16th Senate district, which would have been a majority. SD09 was Beto’s nearest miss for a sixteenth as well, though he came a little closer. The top five here for Biden are the same for Beto, with SDs 05 and 07 flipped; indeed, all of these districts are more or less sorted in the same way for both years.

I will have more numbers in the next post to show just how much movement there’s been, but in the meantime feel free to look at the 2012 district results and see for yourself just how uncompetitive these district used to be. The 2011 Senate map gerrymander was extremely effective, until all of a sudden it wasn’t. The Republicans will have some challenges ahead of them this fall.

There is of course some spare capacity for the Republicans to use, but it’s not as simple as it looks. Here’s the current map, to illustrate. None of SDs 01, 28, or 31 is anywhere near a Democratic stronghold. SDs 03 and 30 do border on Dem areas, and of course those other three districts can be sliced and diced to siphon off some Dem support, but it’s not quite that simple. For one thing, shifting the center of gravity in these districts from their rural centers towards the urban and suburban parts of the state means that their rural constituents – the Republican base – get less attention and power. They also increase the risk of a primary challenge from an opponent in a higher population area. I think playing defense will be a more urgent priority for the Republicans – they may try to carve out a more amenable South Texas district to capitalize on the Latino shift, but it’s not clear how persistent that will be, and there are still Voting Rights Act protections in place to guard against that, however tenuously – but maybe they could take a shot at Sen. Powell in SD10. As with the Congressional map, it’s a question of their risk tolerance as well as their appetite for gain. We’ll know in a few months.

Why North Texas?

Apr 5th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

15 comments

The Trib reprints a WaPo story about a cluster of Capitol insurrectionists in the Dallas suburbs, and it’s something.

Hope for Trump’s return is fervent in Frisco and across the northern Dallas suburbs, an area of rapid growth and rapidly increasing diversity. Nineteen local residents have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to federal authorities, one of the largest numbers in any place in the country.

Many of the rioters came from the “mainstream of society,” according to the FBI’s Dallas field office, including three real estate agents, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, an oilman and an actor who once appeared on the popular television show “Friday Night Lights.” They were driven by a “salad bowl of grievances,” the FBI said, including anger over the presidential election, white-supremacist ideology and the discredited extremist ideology QAnon, which holds that Trump will save the world from a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles.

Their groundless claims are being fed by conservative politicians and from the pulpits of large, powerful evangelical churches with teachings that verge on white nationalism, both motivated by fear that they are losing a largely white, conservative enclave that views these changes with suspicion.

More arrests are coming, and North Texas remains a focus for investigators who expect to charge as many as 400 people from across the country in the attack on the Capitol.

[…]

Over the past two decades, Collin County, north of Dallas, more than doubled its population to 1 million, according to census data, with newcomers drawn by the mild weather, good schools, low taxes and the arrival of several big employers and new corporate headquarters, including Toyota, Liberty Mutual and the Dallas Cowboys. The rapid expansion created an air of Disney World built on the clay soil of the Texas plains, one Frisco consultant noted, where everything is new and planned. The median household income is $97,000, well above the U.S. median of $69,000.

But this utopia on the Dallas North Tollway has its fissures, which have deepened in the last year, with debate over pandemic restrictions, the country’s racial reckoning and the divisive 2020 presidential election that pitted neighbor against neighbor and continues to divide. Unlike many other suburban counties in the country that helped sway the election for Biden, Collin County stayed red, with 51% voting for Trump and 46% for Biden.

The county’s rapid growth has increased its diversity — with the Latino and Asian American populations growing, and the white population in decline — causing tensions, some residents say. In 2017, Plano Mayor Harry LaRosiliere was challenged by an opponent who promised to “keep Plano suburban,” which LaRosiliere, who is Black, said was a “dog whistle” for residents wanting to keep the town white and affluent. LaRosiliere won the four-way nonpartisan race with 52% of the votes, but his “keep Plano suburban” opponent won 42%. This year, Plano City Coucil member Shelby Williams came under fire when he said in a post-riot blog post that “things could be much worse . . . People in many parts of the Muslim world are still slaughtering one another today.”

Frisco Realtor Hava Johnston said some residents feel the area has become “too diverse.”

“They created this perfect little bubble of the way they wanted things … now we’ve got true diversity, and those Christian nationalists are afraid of losing their power,” said Johnston, a Democratic activist and one of the internet sleuths who helped unmask local residents who participated in the Capitol riots. “These are the very people who would do things like have Trump parades every weekend and take a private jet to a riot.”

There’s a lot here, and I’ll get to one specific criticism in a moment, but I personally object to the “Collin County stayed red” line, not because it’s untrue but because it really misstate what has happened in Collin County this past decade. I mean:

2012 – Romney 65.0%, Obama 33.5%
2016 – Trump 55.6%, Clinton 38.9%
2020 – Trump 51.4%, Biden 47.0%

You can say “Collin County stayed red”, as if it were some act of defiance against the prevailing political winds, but come on. Collin County shifted a net 27 points in the Democrats’ direction, at least at the Presidential level, since 2012. That’s a seismic change, and very much in line with what was happening nationally. Collin County didn’t quite make it to blue county status in 2020, but boy howdy has it come a long way.

D Magazine had other complaints, starting with the charge that non-Texan authors who parachute in for this kind of analysis often fail to understand what’s actually happening and miss details that make locals scratch their heads. I have some sympathy with this, though I do think there’s some value in getting an outside perspective sometimes. Honestly, my main beef with this article was more along the lines of “oh God, are we still doing entire stories on the feelings of Trump voters? Make it stop already.” I guess the question of why there were so many insurrectionists from this part of the world is an interesting one, but please give me many more articles about the newly activated and energized Democrats of Collin County to balance it out, thanks. In the meantime, please feel free to blow a raspberry at that blonde realtor from Frisco who may well be the poster child for this whole story.

Another report on the South Texas vote in 2020

Mar 30th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

9 comments

Some interesting stuff in here.

Cambio Texas, a progressive organization whose mission is to increase voter turnout and elect leaders that reflect the community, has released a post-election report that relies on extensive interviews with elected officials, campaign workers, consultants, and most importantly, voters in the Rio Grande Valley.

In an interview with Texas Signal, the Executive Director of Cambio Texas, Abel Prado, walked us through some of the big takeaways from their post-election report. One of his first points from the report was that many of the voters who came out in the Rio Grande Valley were specifically Donald Trump voters, and not necessarily Republican voters.

Many of Trump’s traits, including his brashness, a self-styled Hollywood pedigree, his experience as a businessman, and his billionaire status, resonated with many voters in the Rio Grande Valley. “The increase in Republican vote share were Donald Trump votes, not conservative votes, and there’s a difference,” said Prado. With the caveat that Trump is a unique figure, there are still plenty of lessons the Democratic party should take from 2020.

The first is that Republicans up and down the ballot were highly effective in using local vendors. “Every single Republican candidate that was on the ballot purchased locally,” said Prado. Many Democratic campaigns abide by a well-intentioned edict to use union printers. The closest union printer to the Rio Grande Valley is in San Antonio.

Local printers worked with many Republican campaigns, including Monica de la Cruz, who came within three points of defeating incumbent Rep. Gonzalez. The report from Cambio Texas highlights the goodwill that the Republican Party of Hidalgo County fostered with several local vendors, which had no Democratic counterpart.

Prado even recounted a story from an interview with a vendor in the Rio Grande Valley, a proud Democrat and a Biden voter, who nevertheless reveled in the “Trump trains” that county Republican parties put on during the weekends. The liberal vendor was able to set up shop next to the vocal Trump supporters and sold merchandise like Trump flags..

The report also pinpoints where “investment in the Valley” went awry. According to Prado, that “investment” included parachuting national campaign operatives into the Rio Grande Valley, where they had no attachment to the local community. When there was high spending in the Rio Grande Valley, it often went towards outside groups or PACs. For Prado, that investment “depriv[ed] a lot of local vendors to earn a slice of that through their services and local input.”

Though many post-election autopsies around Texas have focused on the lack of in-person campaigning from Democratic candidates due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Cambio Texas conducted a survey of Trump voters to distill where they received the bulk of their messaging. A majority of those Trump voters were actually reached by television and radio. Less than 14 percent of the Trump voters received a home visit from a canvasser from the campaign.

The report also notes that Republicans in the Rio Grande Valley invested heavily in texting. About 38 percent of Trump voters surveyed received a text message from the Trump campaign or an organization supporting the Trump campaign.

The whole report is here and it’s not very long, so give it a read. The bit about “investment” and purchasing locally resonated with me, and I hope will spark some discussion within the party. It’s not a consideration I had seen before, but it makes a lot of sense. The main takeaway for me is that there are a lot of dimensions to this issue, and anyone who says they have the one sure trick to solve the problem is almost certainly overstating things.

The Trb also had a long piece on the same question, spurred in part by the Filemon Vela retirement, and its broader and contains a lot of quotes from various political types, but didn’t make me feel like I learned anything. Still a good perspective, and a clear indicator that the 2022 and likely 2024 campaigns in South Texas and the Valley will be very different from the ones we have been used to seeing, so go read it as well.

At this point we’ve seen numerous analyses of the 2020 election, from the TDP to David Beard to Evan Scrimshaw (more here) and now these two. The big challenge is trying to extrapolate from limited data – in some sense, just from the 2020 election – and in the (so far) absence of the main factor that caused all of the disruption in 2020. Which is all a fancy way of saying what are things going to be like without Donald Trump on the scene, if indeed he remains mostly off camera like he is now? I’ll tell you: Nobody knows, and we’re all guessing. We’ll know a little bit more in a year, and more than that in a year and a half, but until then – and remember, we don’t know what our districts or our candidates will look like next year yet – it’s all up in the air. Look at the data, keep an open mind, and pay attention to what’s happening now.

Precinct analysis: State Senate comparisons

Mar 29th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

No, I had not planned to do any more of these, at least not until we got the statewide numbers. But then I got an email from Marc Campos on behalf of Sen. Carol Alvarado, who had seen the earlier comparison posts and wanted to know if I had those numbers for SD06. I didn’t at the time, but I do now thanks to getting the full jurisdiction data, so I went back and filled in the blanks. And so here we are.


Dist   Romney    Obama Johnson  Stein
=====================================
SD04   44,973   12,531     502    165
SD06   43,852   89,584   1,004    537
SD07  196,017   93,774   2,844    816
SD11   67,586   29,561   1,106    366
SD13   26,894  144,882   1,041    524
SD15   88,851  131,838   2,198    933
SD17  109,529   79,412   2,265    737
SD18    7,161    3,804      97     25

Dist    Trump  Clinton Johnson  Stein
=====================================
SD04   45,530   17,091   2,123    376
SD06   39,310  109,820   3,666  1,770
SD07  189,451  127,414  10,887  2,632
SD11   63,827   37,409   3,537    918
SD13   24,061  143,864   3,046  1,787
SD15   82,163  159,360   8,511  2,389
SD17   91,838  105,496   7,455  1,764
SD18    8,780    6,017     476    119

Dist    Trump    Biden     Lib    Grn
=====================================
SD04   55,426   25,561     936    145
SD06   61,089  123,708   1,577    770
SD07  232,201  188,150   4,746  1,216
SD11   77,325   51,561   1,605    389
SD13   38,198  166,939   1,474    753
SD15  110,485  208,552   3,444  1,045
SD17  110,788  140,986   2,706    720
SD18   15,118   12,735     331     91

Dist   Romney    Obama Johnson  Stein
=====================================
SD04   77.31%   21.54%   0.86%  0.28%
SD06   32.49%   66.37%   0.74%  0.40%
SD07   66.80%   31.96%   0.97%  0.28%
SD11   68.53%   29.97%   1.12%  0.37%
SD13   15.52%   83.58%   0.60%  0.30%
SD15   39.70%   58.90%   0.98%  0.42%
SD17   57.06%   41.37%   1.18%  0.38%
SD18   64.59%   34.31%   0.87%  0.23%

Dist    Trump  Clinton Johnson  Stein
=====================================
SD04   69.92%   26.25%   3.26%  0.58%
SD06   25.43%   71.05%   2.37%  1.15%
SD07   57.34%   38.57%   3.30%  0.80%
SD11   60.39%   35.39%   3.35%  0.87%
SD13   13.93%   83.27%   1.76%  1.03%
SD15   32.55%   63.13%   3.37%  0.95%
SD17   44.46%   51.07%   3.61%  0.85%
SD18   57.04%   39.09%   3.09%  0.77%

Dist    Trump    Biden     Lib    Grn
=====================================
SD04   67.54%   31.15%   1.14%  0.18%
SD06   32.64%   66.10%   0.84%  0.41%
SD07   54.47%   44.13%   1.11%  0.29%
SD11   59.08%   39.40%   1.23%  0.30%
SD13   18.42%   80.51%   0.71%  0.36%
SD15   34.15%   64.46%   1.06%  0.32%
SD17   43.41%   55.25%   1.06%  0.28%
SD18   53.47%   45.04%   1.17%  0.32%

I’ve limited the comparisons to the Presidential numbers from 2012 through 2020, which you see above, and the Senate numbers for 2012 and 2020, which I’ll present next. There wasn’t much difference between the Senate numbers and the RRC numbers, so I made this a little easier on myself. There’s nothing in this data that we haven’t seen and talked about before, but it’s worth taking a minute and reviewing it all again.

If we look at SD06, which is a heavily Latino district, you can see the increase in support for Trump from 2016 to 2020, which has been the story everyone has been talking about. I think it’s instructive to include the 2012 numbers, because the net change over the eight year period is basically zero from a percentage perspective – Obama carried SD06 by a 66-32 margin, while Biden carried it 66-33 – the vote gap increased by over 16K in the Dems’ favor. It’s true that Biden won SD06 by fewer votes than Hillary Clinton did, and that Trump closed the gap from 2016 by eight thousand votes, but the overall trend for this period is one that I find as a Democrat to be satisfactory. The overall direction is what I want, even if it’s not as fast as I’d like it to be. What happens next is the argument we’re all having, and there’s data to support either position. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

The flip side of that is what happened in SD07, Dan Patrick’s former district and one of the redder places in the state in 2012. Here, the trend is unmistakably in one direction. Mitt Romney’s SD07 was as Republican as SD06 was Democratic. Hillary Clinton shaved 41K off of the Dem deficit in 2016, and Joe Biden shrunk it by another 18K. In 2020, SD07 was only a ten-point GOP district. It would not be crazy to view it as a swing district, at least at the Presidential level, in 2024. I don’t know what the Republican redistricting plan is, but they’re not going to have a lot of spare capacity to borrow from in SD07. Just take a look at SD17 – which includes a lot of turf outside Harris County – to see why this make them a little nervous.

Finally, a few words about a couple of districts I don’t usually think about in these analyses, SD13 and SD15. The total number of votes in SD13 didn’t increase very much from 2012 to 2020 – indeed, it’s the one place I see where both Trump and Clinton got fewer votes than their counterparts in 2012 – and that is something I’d like to understand better. (For what it’s worth, Borris Miles got about 40K votes in Fort Bend in 2020, while Rodney Ellis got 32K in 2012. That’s a slightly higher growth rate than in Harris, but still kind of slow compared to other districts.) Trump 2020 snipped a couple of percentage points off Romney’s deficit, from down 68 to down 62, but that’s still a net 10K votes for Dems. As for SD15, it’s an example of a strong Democratic district that really stepped it up over the past eight years, performing in that way much like a lot of formerly dark red areas. Biden gained 55K net votes over Obama, as SD15 went from a 19 point Dem district to a 30 point Dem district. We’re going to need more like this around the state as we go forward.


Dist     Cruz   Sadler   MyersCollins
=====================================
SD04   44,387   12,129     849    408
SD06   45,066   84,671   1,701  1,364
SD07  194,269   90,258   4,579  2,116
SD11   66,327   28,875   1,736    779
SD13   27,839  139,516   1,866  1,357
SD15   88,594  127,006   3,709  2,178
SD17  107,576   76,803   3,396  1,801
SD18    7,135    3,637     175     78

Dist   Cornyn    Hegar     Lib    Grn
=====================================
SD04   56,085   23,380   1,405    393
SD06   59,310  115,620   3,609  2,257
SD07  237,216  173,948   7,682  2,796
SD11   77,887   47,787   2,508    854
SD13   39,386  157,671   3,502  2,149
SD15  114,616  195,264   6,065  2,657
SD17  118,460  128,628   3,892  1,603
SD18   15,268   11,859     554    180

Dist     Cruz   Sadler   MyersCollins
=====================================
SD04   76.30%   20.85%   1.46%  0.70%
SD06   33.39%   62.73%   1.26%  1.01%
SD07   66.20%   30.76%   1.56%  0.72%
SD11   67.26%   29.28%   1.76%  0.79%
SD13   16.06%   80.49%   1.08%  0.78%
SD15   39.58%   56.74%   1.66%  0.97%
SD17   56.05%   40.01%   1.77%  0.94%
SD18   64.35%   32.80%   1.58%  0.70%

Dist	Cornyn   Hegar     Lib    Grn
=====================================
SD04   69.02%   28.77%   1.73%  0.48%
SD06   32.80%   63.95%   2.00%  1.25%
SD07   55.64%   40.80%   1.80%  0.66%
SD11   60.36%   37.03%   1.94%  0.66%
SD13   19.43%   77.78%   1.73%  1.06%
SD15   35.43%   60.35%   1.87%  0.82%
SD17   46.42%   50.40%   1.53%  0.63%
SD18   54.80%   42.56%   1.99%  0.65%

The Senate numbers don’t tell us a whole lot that we didn’t already know, but do note that MJ Hegar slightly increased the percentage point gap in SD06, where it had shrunk by a point for Biden. That may be more a reflection of Paul Sadler’s candidacy than anything else, but I wanted to point it out. Hegar’s overall numbers are lesser than Biden’s, as we knew, but the same trends exist in the districts. If you never had the 2016 data for the Presidential race and only knew how things changed from 2012 to 2020 as you do with the Senate races, I wonder how people’s perceptions would differ.

This time I really mean it when I say that’s all she wrote. When we have the full numbers from the Texas Legislative Council I’ll have more to say, and then the real fun will begin when redistricting gets underway. (And by “fun” I mean “existential horror”, but you get the idea.) Let me know what you think.

January 2021 campaign finance reports: Congress

Mar 11th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Should have done this a long time ago, just to close the books on the 2020 election cycle, but for a variety of reasons I didn’t. With the forthcoming special election in CD06, I now have a reason to care about the April finance reports for Congress, so I may as well cross this off the list. The October 2020 finance reports can be found here, and you can get the links to all the earlier posts from there.

MJ Hegar – Senate

Lizzie Fletcher – CD07
Colin Allred – CD32

Hank Gilbert – CD01
Sima Ladjevardian – CD02
Lulu Seikaly – CD03
Stephen Daniel – CD06
Elizabeth Hernandez – CD08
Mike Siegel – CD10
Adrienne Bell – CD14
Rick Kennedy – CD17
Wendy Davis – CD21
Sri Kulkarni – CD22
Gina Ortiz Jones – CD23
Candace Valenzuela – CD24
Julie Oliver – CD25
Carol Ianuzzi – CD26
Donna Imam – CD31


Dist  Name             Raised      Spent    Loans    On Hand
============================================================
Sen   Hegar        29,597,569 29,558,486        0     86,564

07    Fletcher      6,405,639  6,386,609        0     61,096
32    Allred        5,777,600  5,721,622        0    159,422  

01    Gilbert         968,154    734,410   50,000    233,744
02    Ladjevardian  3,894,082  3,886,672   50,000      7,410
03    Seikaly       1,654,380  1,654,038    3,000        341
06    Daniel          681,820    678,976        0      2,833
08    Hernandez        17,407     15,160        0      1,985
10    Siegel        2,942,987  2,898,827  127,835     47,651
14    Bell            248,995    245,174        0      8,920
17    Kennedy         216,825    218,253        0          0
21    Davis        10,428,476 10,366,864  257,967     61,611
22    Kulkarni      5,781,704  5,772,741        0     36,731
23    Jones         6,918,062  7,005,280        0      4,300
24    Valenzuela    4,945,025  4,933,058        0     11,967
25    Oliver        2,228,218  2,214,190    2,644     14,027
26    Ianuzzi         121,500    121,500   44,361          0
31    Imam          1,242,218  1,242,218        0          0

I’m not going to spend too much time on this since all these races are over and we know what happened, but a few observations:

– I don’t know what Hank Gilbert has planned for that $233K he has left over, but I hope he intends to do something with it. We’re going to need some dough in a lot of races next year.

– I’d like to see an autopsy done on how all this money was spent. It was a weird year, and a lot of money that would have been spent on field wound up going to other uses, so maybe it will be hard to draw meaningful conclusions, but still. I have no doubt that some candidates spent their money better than others, and that some candidates had much higher overhead costs than others. We should get a better picture of what happened here.

– I say that because I think the 2020s are much more likely to have multiple competitive races throughout the decade, in a way that we didn’t in the 2010s. If so, we’re going to see a much higher baseline of campaign contributions overall than what we were used to. So again, let’s have some confidence that our candidates and their campaigns are spending it well.

– MJ Hegar got off to a slower start than Beto did in raising money for her Senate campaign, but almost $30 million is real money, enough to run a credible statewide race. We’re going to need that kind of money for at least a couple of our statewide candidates next year.

– The 2022 Congressional campaign is going to be much more compressed than the last few have been, since we won’t know until this fall what the districts look like, and that’s without taking any litigation into account. Who even knows when we’ll begin to see potential candidates make themselves known?

That’s about all I have. I’ll check the Q1 2021 reports to see who’s raised what for the May 1 CD06 special, and we’ll see what if anything is interesting after that.

Precinct analysis: Brazoria County

Mar 8th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Once more around the block, this time in Brazoria County. Let’s just dive in:


Dist    Trump    Biden     Lib     Grn
======================================
CD14   44,480   19,715     823     160
CD22   45,953   42,513   1,037     257
				
HD25   38,939   16,277     727     132
HD29   51,494   45,951   1,133     285
				
CC1    19,383    8,439     407      72
CC2    22,456   17,024     494     106
CC3    24,355   12,614     496     102
CC4    24,239   24,151     463     137

Dist   Cornyn    Hegar     Lib     Grn
======================================
CD14   43,874   18,748   1,440     357
CD22   46,831   40,011   1,579     522
				
HD25   38,413   15,432   1,251     314
HD29   52,292   43,327   1,768     565
				
CC1    19,080    7,985     687     182
CC2    22,849   15,885     742     209
CC3    24,398   11,802     736     228
CC4    24,378   23,087     854     260

Dist   Wright    Casta     Lib     Grn
======================================
CD14   43,325   18,349   1,620     508
CD22   45,672   39,005   1,980     989
				
HD25   37,900   15,098   1,435     434
HD29   51,097   42,256   2,165   1,063
				
CC1    18,727    7,834     791     253
CC2    22,351   15,535     885     399
CC3    23,844   11,430     927     394
CC4    24,075   22,555     997     451

Dist    Trump    Biden     Lib     Grn
======================================
CD14   68.24%   30.25%   1.26%   0.25%
CD22   51.20%   47.36%   1.16%   0.29%
				
HD25   69.44%   29.03%   1.30%   0.24%
HD29   52.09%   46.48%   1.15%   0.29%
				
CC1    68.49%   29.82%   1.44%   0.25%
CC2    56.03%   42.48%   1.23%   0.26%
CC3    64.83%   33.58%   1.32%   0.27%
CC4    49.48%   49.30%   0.95%   0.28%

Dist   Cornyn    Hegar     Lib     Grn
======================================
CD14   68.11%   29.10%   2.24%   0.55%
CD22   52.65%   44.98%   1.78%   0.59%
				
HD25   69.33%   27.85%   2.26%   0.57%
HD29   53.39%   44.23%   1.80%   0.58%
				
CC1    68.30%   28.59%   2.46%   0.65%
CC2    57.58%   40.03%   1.87%   0.53%
CC3    65.65%   31.76%   1.98%   0.61%
CC4    50.18%   47.52%   1.76%   0.54%

Dist   Wright    Casta     Lib     Grn
======================================
CD14   67.91%   28.76%   2.54%   0.80%
CD22   52.11%   44.50%   2.26%   1.13%
				
HD25   69.08%   27.52%   2.62%   0.79%
HD29   52.91%   43.75%   2.24%   1.10%
				
CC1    67.84%   28.38%   2.87%   0.92%
CC2    57.06%   39.66%   2.26%   1.02%
CC3    65.16%   31.23%   2.53%   1.08%
CC4    50.07%   46.91%   2.07%   0.94%

As an extra point of comparison, here are the numbers from the four district races:


Weber     45,245  70.76%
Bell      18,700  29.24%

Nehls     44,332  50.51%
Kulkarni  38,962  44.39%
LeBlanc    4,477   5.10%

Vasut     38,936  71.38%
Henry     15,613  28.62%

Thompson  54,594  56.69%
Boldt     41,712  43.31%

Not really a whole lot to remark upon. Brazoria County has slowly shifted blue since 2012, but not by that much. There’s still a lot of work to be done there, and in the short term the most likely place where any effect would be felt is in the appellate courts. HD29 was a dark horse swing district following the 2018 election, but as you can see Rep. Ed Thompson punches above his weight, so it’s going to take more than some demography to seriously challenge him, and that’s assuming the Republicans don’t touch up his district a bit later on this year. I have no idea what Congressional districts will have a piece of Brazoria County going forward, but I’d bet that at least at the beginning they’re all some shade of red.

The main opportunity for Dems here is at the local level, where Commissioners Court Precinct 4 is pretty close to even. None of the county offices – Commissioners Court, Constable, Justice of the Peace – were challenged in 2020, so there’s the starting point to improve things on the ground and begin construction on a bench. That may change with redistricting as well, of course, but county elections can see change happen quickly under the right circumstances. My wish for Brazoria County is for there to be more activity at this level, starting next year.

Here’s the TDP 2020 after action report

Feb 24th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Reasonably informative, though nothing here that I found terribly surprising.

Texas Democrats have come to the conclusion that they fell short of their expectations in the 2020 election largely because Republicans beat them in the battle to turn out voters, according to a newly released party report.

The Texas Democratic Party laid the blame in part on their inability to campaign in person, particularly by knocking on doors, during an unusual election cycle dominated by the coronavirus pandemic.

The party also said its voter turnout system was inefficient. It contacted reliably Democratic voters too often and failed to reach enough “turnout targets” — people who were inclined to support Democrats, but weren’t as certain to actually show up at the polls.

“Despite record turnout, our collective [get out the vote] turnout operation failed to activate voters to the same extent Republicans were able to,” according to the “2020 Retrospective” report, which was authored by Hudson Cavanagh, the party’s director of data science, and was first obtained by The Washington Post and The Dallas Morning News.

Texas Democrats did manage to register and turn out voters in record numbers in 2020, but Republicans likewise beat expectations — enough to erase any gains made by Democrats and stave off what some hoped would be a “blue wave.”

[…]

The report described the party’s voter targeting efforts as “inefficient,” saying it didn’t have reliable contact information for some of its highest priority targets.

“The pandemic prevented us from getting the most out of our most powerful competitive advantage: our volunteers,” the document said. “We struggled to reach voters for whom we did not have phone numbers, who were disproportionately young, folks of color.”

But Texas Democrats pushed back on the idea that they lost ground with Latino voters — particularly in counties in the Rio Grande Valley, which Biden carried by 15 points after Clinton won them by 39 in 2016.

Texas Democrats conceded that Latino voters in parts of the state did move toward then-President Donald Trump, but said those same voters continued to support other Democrats down the ballot.

In addition, Texas Democrats contend that data suggesting a massive shift toward Republicans among Latino voters is more accurately explained by increased turnout among Republican Latinos.

“Roughly two-thirds of Latinos continue to support Democrats, but Republicans Latino voters turned out at a higher rate than Democratic Latino voters in the 2020 cycle, relative to expectations,” the report found.

Despite an underwhelming performance in 2020, Texas Democrats continued to paint an ambitious picture of a “sustainably blue” state over the next 10 years.

The party concluded that with “sufficient investment and ambition,” Democrats can register 100,000 to 150,000 more voters than Republicans per cycle and flip Texas blue by 2024.

See here and here for the background, and here for a copy of the report. They answered a couple of my questions, but most of the rest were outside their scope. Overall, I found the report a little frustrating to read – the graphs were quite technical, but there wasn’t much explanation for how the numbers were calculated. I don’t have any cause to quarrel with any of the data, but I don’t feel like I understand it enough to explain it to someone who hasn’t read the report.

I don’t want to sound too grumpy. I appreciate that the TDP did this at all, and made the results public. The big picture is clear, and the basic causes for what happened in 2020 were also easily comprehensible. I’d note that in addition to dampening turnout, the lack of in-person campaigning also helped erode the Dems’ voter registration edge, with Republicans doing a lot of catching up in the last three months of the campaign. I’ve said before that the lack of traditional campaigning is a one-time event, and while it had bad effects in 2020 it still gave the Dems the chance to try new things, and it also showed them the need to bolster their data collection and management. If that can be turned into improved performance in 2022, it will at least not have been wasted.

The report paints a pretty optimistic picture for the Dems’ trajectory over the next couple of election cycles, which the Republicans deride and which I feel a bit wary about. The GOP’s ability to boost their own turnout, their continued and increasing advantage in rural Texas, the uncertainty of the forthcoming Biden midterm election, the growth of lies and propaganda as campaign strategy, these are all things I worry about. Again, much of this was outside the scope of the project, but I do wonder if a report written by outsiders would have come to similar conclusions. I don’t want to be a downer, but I also don’t want to be naive.

Like I said, I’m glad they did this. It’s a good idea, and it should be done after every election, because the landscape is constantly evolving and we have to keep up with it. I hope that it inspires action and not just a sense of “okay, now that’s over with”. What did you think?

Precinct analysis: Fort Bend County, part 3

Feb 17th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

We wrap up our look at Fort Bend County with a look at the three executive offices that were on the ballot – County Attorney, Sheriff, and Tax Assessor.


Dist   Rogers   Lawson Rogers% Lawson%
======================================
CD09   15,023   50,782  22.83%  77.17%
CD22  145,087  127,054  53.31%  46.69%
				
HD26   43,626   39,504  52.48%  47.52%
HD27   24,389   56,616  30.11%  69.89%
HD28   66,099   54,828  54.66%  45.34%
HD85   26,625   26,552  50.07%  49.93%
				
CC1    37,971   37,058  50.61%  49.39%
CC2    17,680   50,002  26.12%  73.88%
CC3    62,634   44,214  58.62%  41.38%
CC4    41,822   46,562  47.32%  52.68%


Dist    Nehls    Fagan  Nehls%  Fagan%
======================================
CD09   14,833   51,165  22.47%  77.53%
CD22  146,932  128,505  53.35%  46.65%
				
HD26   44,560   39,723  52.87%  47.13%
HD27   24,035   57,421  29.51%  70.49%
HD28   66,891   55,267  54.76%  45.24%
HD85   26,899   26,911  49.99%  50.01%
				
CC1    38,247   37,720  50.35%  49.65%
CC2    17,442   50,439  25.69%  74.31%
CC3    63,111   44,910  58.42%  41.58%
CC4    42,964   46,599  47.97%  52.03%


Dist Pressler   Turner  Press% Turner%
======================================
CD09   15,165   50,611  23.06%  76.94%
CD22  147,338  124,999  54.10%  45.90%
				
HD26   44,460   38,767  53.42%  46.58%
HD27   24,799   56,167  30.63%  69.37%
HD28   66,903   54,081  55.30%  44.70%
HD85   26,904   26,301  50.57%  49.43%
				
CC1    38,516   36,606  51.27%  48.73%
CC2    17,829   49,779  26.37%  73.63%
CC3    63,433   43,533  59.30%  40.70%
CC4    42,722   45,692  48.32%  51.68%

The most remarkable thing about these three races is the consistency. There’s less than a point of variance in the three races, in whichever district you look. That was not the case in Harris County, where Sheriff Ed Gonzalez ran well ahead of the pack, and where we often see a fairly wide range of results at the countywide level. Bridgette Smith-Lawson and Eric Fagan had identical percentages overall – there were about 3500 more votes cast in the Sheriff’s race, but the marginal voters broke for each candidate exactly as the overlapping voters had – and they both finished about 0.7 points ahead of Carmen Turner. I’ve often said that blowout races are boring to analyze because they don’t offer much insight into anything, but sometimes the same is true for close races. A few more people voted for James Pressler than for Steve Rogers, but not in a way that demonstrated any strengths or weaknesses on the part of anyone involved. Just one of those things, and it ultimately meant nothing as far as the outcome was concerned.

I’ve mentioned Commissioners Court Precinct 1 a few times, and here I should note that incumbent Commissioner Vincent Morales won with 52.30% of the vote, ahead of the other Republicans here indeed every other Republican in Fort Bend. Judicial candidate Maggie Jaramillo was next best in that district, with 52.17% of the vote. Another piece of evidence for the relative advantage that Latino Republicans had, in this election at least, and perhaps a cautionary tale for the 2024 campaign by Democrats to unseat Morales and cement a 4-1 membership on the Court. Morales’ incumbency and his appeal to independent/soft Dem Latino voters will make it that much harder to oust him. If the plan is to endanger him via the redistricting process, my advice is to add in a bit of buffer, because he will likely overperform the baseline.

That’s it for Fort Bend. I’ll try to work on Brazoria County next. Let me know what you think.

Precinct analysis: Fort Bend County, part 2

Feb 15th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

This post is going to focus on the judicial races in Fort Bend County. There are a lot of them – seven statewide, four appellate, five district and county – and I don’t want to split them into multiple posts because there’s not enough to say about them, nor do I want to present you with a wall of numbers that will make your eyes glaze over. So, I’m going to do a bit of analysis up top, then put all the number beneath the fold for those who want a closer look or to fact-check me. I’ll have one more post about the Fort Bend county races, and then maybe I’ll take a crack at Brazoria County, which will be even more manual labor than these posts were.

The point of interest at the statewide level is in the vote differentials between the three races that included a Libertarian candidate and the four races that did not. Just eyeballing the totals and bearing in mind that there’s some variance in each group, the Republican candidate got an increase of a bit more than half of the Libertarian vote total in each district, while the Democrats were more or less around the same level. That comports with the general thesis that Libertarians tend to take votes away from Republicans more than Democrats, though the effect here was pretty small. It’s also a small sample, and every county has its own characteristics, so don’t go drawing broad conclusions. For what it’s worth, there wasn’t anything here to contradict that piece of conventional wisdom.

For the appellate court races, the thing I have obsessed over is the incredibly small margin in the election for Chief Justice of the 14th Court of Appeals, which Jane Robinson lost by 1500 votes, or 0.06 percentage points. We saw in Harris County that she trailed the two victorious Democrats, Veronica Rivas-Molloy and Amparo Guerra, who were part of a trend in Harris County where Latino candidates generally out-performed the rest of the ticket. That wasn’t quite the case in Fort Bend. Robinson again trailed Rivas-Molloy by a little – in overall vote total, Robinson trailed Rivas-Molloy by about two thousand votes, while Republican Tracy Christopher did an equivalent amount better than Russell Lloyd. But unlike in Harris, Robinson outperformed Guerra, by about a thousand votes, and Guerra barely beat out Tamika Craft, who was farther behind the pack in Harris County. I don’t have a good explanation for that, it looks to me just like a weird result that has no obvious cause or correlation to what we saw elsewhere. It’s also the case, as we discussed in part one of the Fort Bend results, that if Dems had done a better job retaining voters downballot, none of this would matter all that much.

Finally, in the district court races (there were four of them, plus one county court), the results that grabbed my attention were in a couple of contests that appeared one after the other. Republican Maggie Jaramillo, running for the 400th District Court, was the closest member of Team GOP to win, as she lost to Tameika Carter by ten thousand votes. In the next race, for the 434th District Court, Republican Jim Shoemake lost to Christian Becerra by twenty-two thousand votes. This was the difference between a three-point loss for Jaramillo, and a six-and-a-half point loss for Shoemake. Jaramillo was the top performing Republican candidate in any race in Fort Bend, while Becerra was sixth best among Dems, trailing Joe Biden, three statewide judicial candidates, and Sheriff Eric Fagan. You may have noticed that they’re both Latinos, though the effect appears to have been a bit greater for the Republican Jaramillo. Becerra was the only Dem besides Biden to carry Commissioners Court Precinct 1, though that may not have been strictly a Latino candidate phenomenon – Elizabeth Frizell had the next highest percentage, with Veronica Rivas-Molloy and Tina Clinton close behind. (Amy Clark Meachum and Staci Williams, both in three-candidate races, came closer to carrying CC1 than any other candidates, but their percentage of the vote was lower.) Again, no broad conclusions here, just an observation.

Click on for the race data, and remember I had to piece this together by hand, so my numbers may be a little off from the official state totals when those come out. County races are next. Let me know what you think.

(more…)

Paxton the puppet

Feb 3rd, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

This is just pathetic.

Best mugshot ever

The long-shot lawsuit from Texas, which sought to invalidate the results in four swing states, was not drafted by Republican attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, but by Donald Trump’s own lawyers, revealed a new report.

The extensive New York Times report examined Mr Trump’s attempted coup to subvert the 2020 elections and the “77 democracy-bending days” when the former president propagated the voters fraud theory.

The efforts by Mr Trump’s campaign to help prevent alleged voters fraud were red-flagged by several Republican attorneys general and their senior staff lawyers, the report said.

Republican leaders were also concerned about Mr Trump’s problem in facing the reality of an electoral defeat.

The report revealed that Mr Paxton, who is said to have filed the Texas lawsuit, hired Lawrence Joseph as a special outside counsel through an “unusual contract” on 7 December.

Mr Joseph had earlier intervened in a US court to support Mr Trump’s efforts to block the release of his income-tax returns.

“The same day [7 Dec] the contract was signed, Mr Paxton filed his complaint with the Supreme Court. Mr Joseph was listed as a special counsel, but the brief did not disclose that it had been written by outside parties,” said the report.

Mr Paxton, however, was not the first choice for Trump’s team to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in swing states as he had criminal investigations going on against him.

An appeal was also made to Louisiana’s attorney general, Jeffrey M Landry, but he had declined.

“For every lawyer on Mr Trump’s team who quietly pulled back, there was one ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason,” the report said.

Which do you think is more embarrassing, that Paxton turned in someone else’s homework, or that Trump’s team didn’t want to go with Paxton initially because they were afraid his legal entanglements might make them look bad? No wonder no one in the Lege wants to talk about him.

Precinct analysis: Fort Bend County, part 1

Feb 1st, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I’ve finally run out of Harris County races from 2020 to analyze, so let’s move over to Fort Bend County. I’ve said before that while Fort Bend provides downloadable Excel files on their county elections page, they format these results in a way that makes it harder for me to do the same analysis I do with Harris County. Basically, Harris County puts all the results on one worksheet, with the totals for every candidate given in each precinct. For district races, that means a blank in the results when the precinct in question is not in that district, but the cell for that district is there. That makes it super easy for me to use Excel functions to add up the vote totals for, say, the Presidential candidates in the precincts where, say, the HD134 voters are. I can do practically every race in a matter of an hour or two, and indeed I spend more time formatting the blog posts than I do the calculations.

Fort Bend, on the other hand, separates each race into its own worksheet, which is fine in and of itself, except that for district races they only include the precincts for that race on the worksheet in question. That completely nullifies the formulas I use for Harris County, and when I went and looked to see how I did it in 2016, I saw that I manually added the relevant cells for each of the countywide races, an approach that is inelegant, labor intensive, and prone to error. But it was the best I could do, so I did it again that way here. I can tell you that my results are not fully accurate, and I know this because the subtotals don’t add up correctly, but they’re close enough to suffice. The one exception is for the County Commissioner precincts, which are fully grouped together in Fort Bend – each precinct number is four digits, with the first digit being a one, two, three, or four, and that first digit is the Commissioner precinct. So those at least are easy to add up correctly. The rest is messy, but I did the best I could. When the official state reports come out in March and they’re off from mine, you’ll know why.

Anyway. That’s a lot of minutia, so let’s get to the numbers.


Dist    Trump    Biden    Lib    Grn
====================================
CD09   15,527   52,998    414    292
CD22  142,191  142,554  2,614    799
				
HD26   42,389   45,097    743    283
HD27   24,191   59,921    576    296
HD28   65,043   61,103  1,212    313
HD85   26,661   29,016    503    197
				
CC1    37,765   40,253    699    261
CC2    18,054   52,525    441    307
CC3    61,437   49,976  1,120    247
CC4    40,460   52,798    768    276

Dist   Trump%   Biden%   Lib%   Grn%
====================================
CD09   22.43%   76.55%  0.60%  0.42%
CD22   49.34%   49.47%  0.91%  0.28%
				
HD26   47.89%   50.95%  0.84%  0.32%
HD27   28.47%   70.51%  0.68%  0.35%
HD28   50.95%   47.86%  0.95%  0.25%
HD85   47.29%   51.47%  0.89%  0.35%
				
CC1    47.82%   50.97%  0.89%  0.33%
CC2    25.31%   73.64%  0.62%  0.43%
CC3    54.48%   44.31%  0.99%  0.22%
CC4    42.90%   55.99%  0.81%  0.29%


Dist   Cornyn    Hegar    Lib    Grn
====================================
CD09   15,345   49,730  1,082    639
CD22  145,632  129,254  4,277  1,473
				
HD26   43,650   40,478  1,264    506
HD27   24,695   55,984  1,308    672
HD28   66,532   55,483  1,859    580
HD85   26,653   26,678    949    355
				
CC1    38,088   37,124  1,318    447
CC2    17,948   49,130  1,123    626
CC3    63,061   45,045  1,614    489
CC4    41,877   47,685  1,304    550

Dist  Cornyn%   Hegar%   Lib%   Grn%
====================================
CD09   22.97%   74.45%  1.62%  0.96%
CD22   51.89%   46.06%  1.52%  0.52%
				
HD26   50.82%   47.12%  1.47%  0.59%
HD27   29.88%   67.73%  1.58%  0.81%
HD28   53.46%   44.58%  1.49%  0.47%
HD85   48.78%   48.83%  1.74%  0.65%
				
CC1    49.48%   48.23%  1.71%  0.58%
CC2    26.08%   71.38%  1.63%  0.91%
CC3    57.22%   40.87%  1.46%  0.44%
CC4    45.81%   52.16%  1.43%  0.60%

Dist   Wright    Casta    Lib    Grn
====================================
CD09   14,727   50,118    923    769
CD22  142,842  125,932  4,794  2,479
				
HD26   42,848   39,268  1,367    860
HD27   23,874   55,827  1,267    850
HD28   65,253   54,232  2,115  1,011
HD85   26,165   26,418    968    521
				
CC1    37,302   36,877  1,341    640
CC2    17,328   49,299    984    776
CC3    61,909   43,760  1,924    863
CC4    41,027   46,114  1,468    969

Dist  Wright%   Casta%   Lib%	Grn%
====================================
CD09   22.13%   75.32%  1.39%  1.16%
CD22   51.75%   45.62%  1.74%  0.90%
				
HD26   50.80%   46.56%  1.62%  1.02%
HD27   29.18%   68.23%  1.55%  1.04%
HD28   53.22%   44.23%  1.72%  0.82%
HD85   48.39%   48.86%  1.79%  0.96%
				
CC1    48.98%   48.42%  1.76%  0.84%
CC2    25.34%   72.09%  1.44%  1.13%
CC3    57.08%   40.35%  1.77%  0.80%
CC4    45.80%   51.48%  1.64%  1.08%

The first number to consider is not about any of the districts. It’s simply this: John Cornyn received 3K more votes in Fort Bend County than Donald Trump did, but MJ Hegar got over 16K fewer votes than Joe Biden. Jim Wright got about as many votes as Trump did, but Chrysta Castaneda got 19K fewer votes than Biden. That trend continued in the district races as well. Troy Nehls got 2K more votes than Trump did in CD22, while Sri Kulkarni got 19K fewer votes. Jacey Jetton got a thousand more votes than Trump did in HD26, while Sarah DeMerchant got 4,500 fewer votes than Biden did. Biden clearly got a few Republican crossover votes, but by far the difference between his performance and everyone else’s on the ballot was that there was a significant number of people who voted for Joe Biden and then didn’t vote in other races. That was just not so on the Republican side.

I don’t have a single explanation for this. It’s a near reverse of what happened in Harris County in 2004, when George Bush clearly got some Democratic crossovers, but by and large there were a lot of Bush-only voters, while the folks who showed up for John Kerry generally stuck around and voted for the other Dems. I don’t think what happened here in Fort Bend is a function of straight ticket voting, or its removal in this case, because there’s a world of difference between someone who picks and chooses what races to vote in and someone who votes for President and then goes home – I just don’t believe that latter person would have selected the “straight Democratic” choice if it had been there. In 2004, my theory was that Bush was a brand name candidate who drew out more casual voters who didn’t really care about the other races, while Kerry voters were more hardcore. I don’t buy that here because if anything I would have expected the Trump voters to be more likely to be one and done. It’s a mystery to me, but it’s one that state and Fort Bend Democrats need to try to figure out. At the very least, we could have won HD26, and we could have elected Jane Robinson to the 14th Court of Appeals if we’d done a better job downballot here.

One other possibility I will mention: Sri Kulkarni wrote an article in the Texas Signal that analyzed his loss and cited a large disinformation campaign against him that contributed to his defeat. That may be a reason why the Libertarian candidate did as well as he did in that race. I don’t doubt Kulkarni’s account of his own race, but I hesitate to fully accept this explanation. Dems had a larger dropoff of the vote in CD09 as well – about 3K fewer votes for Hegar and Castaneda, less than 1K fewer for Cornyn and Wright – and the dropoff in CD22 was pretty consistent for other Dems as well, though Kulkarni did generally worse. It may have moved the needle somewhat against him, but it doesn’t explain what happened with other Dems. Again, someone with more time and resources available to them – the TDP, in particular – should do a deeper dive on this. I do believe that disinformation was an issue for Dems last year, and will be an increasing problem going forward, and we need to get our arms around that. I just believe there were other causes as well, and we need to understand those, too.

One more thing: Kulkarni ran a lot closer to the Biden standard in Harris County than he did in Fort Bend. Biden and Trump were virtually tied in CD22 in Harris County, with the vote going 21,912 for Trump to 21,720 for Biden; Nehls defeated Kulkarni 20,953 to 19,743 in Harris. That’s the kind of result that one can easily attribute to Biden crossovers, and doesn’t raise any flags about the level of undervoting. I haven’t looked at Brazoria County yet, but my point here is just that Fort Bend County was very different in its behavior than Harris County was. And again, for the Nth time, we need to understand why. That is the point I’m trying to sledgehammer home.

Moving on, HD28 was a steeper hill to climb than perhaps we thought it would be. Eliz Markowitz got about 1,500 fewer votes than MJ Hegar did, and about 300 fewer than Castanada, while Gary Gates outperformed both Jim Wright and John Cornyn. It should be noted that while Dems in general lost HD28 by 20 points or so in 2016, Markowitz and other Dems were losing it by ten or eleven points in 2020. In total vote terms, a gap of 16-18K votes in 2016 was reduced to 12-13K votes in 2020. The shift is real, and even if it didn’t net us any extra seats, it’s still there.

The other way that shift manifested was in the County Commissioner precincts. In 2016, Republicans won three of the four precincts, with two-term Democrat Richard Morrison in Precinct 1 finally getting unseated after he had won against badly tainted opponents in previous years. There was a lot of movement in the Dem direction in Precinct 4, however, and that came to fruition in 2018 when Ken DeMerchant (yes, Sarah’s husband) flipped that seat. As you can see, there was no retreat in CC4 in 2020, and it probably wouldn’t take too much tinkering to make Precinct 1 a fifty-fifty or better proposition for Dems. It didn’t happen in either county this year, but in 2024, aided by demography and maybe a bit of gerrymandering, both Harris and Fort Bend counties can have 4-1 Democratic majorities on their Commissioners Courts.

I do have totals for the other Fort Bend races, though they’re not dramatically different from what you see here. I will put them together in a future post just to have it on the record. As always, let me know what you think.

Precinct analysis: HCDE

Jan 25th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

There are three HCDE At Large positions, which are elected countywide. Two were on the ballot this year, to run against Republicans who had won those seats in 2014. (The other At Large position was elected in 2018.) These are the last countywide elections on the ballot, so they’re way at the bottom – other county positions, like Commissioner and JP and Constable come next, then municipal/school board/MUD, if any. There are no money in these races. People don’t know much about them, and tend to vote on party lines. I say all this to say that there ought not to be that much variance in these races. And yet, as you will see from the two HCDE At Large races we had, there was some.


Dist	Wolfe	Davis   Wolfe%  Davis%
======================================
CD02  175,106  157,537  52.64%  47.36%
CD07  146,573  152,854  48.95%  51.05%
CD08   25,370   15,298  62.38%  37.62%
CD09   36,041  121,236  22.92%  77.08%
CD10  100,960   60,861  62.39%  37.61%
CD18   56,070  182,708  23.48%  76.52%
CD22   21,105   20,600  50.61%  49.39%
CD29   46,743  104,044  31.00%  69.00%
CD36   81,230   49,211  62.27%  37.73%
				
SBOE4 100,609  341,191  22.77%  77.23%
SBOE6 374,142  356,723  51.19%  48.81%
SBOE8 214,447  166,436  56.30%  43.70%
				
SD04   54,897   23,241  70.26%  29.74%
SD06   54,521  120,734  31.11%  68.89%
SD07  231,012  175,107  56.88%  43.12%
SD11   75,587   47,839  61.24%  38.76%
SD13   35,736  161,092  18.16%  81.84%
SD15  109,068  197,941  35.53%  64.47%
SD17  113,430  126,454  47.29%  52.71%
SD18   14,947   11,944  55.58%  44.42%
				
HD126  38,074   34,059  52.78%  47.22%
HD127  53,126   35,952  59.64%  40.36%
HD128  47,466   22,448  67.89%  32.11%
HD129  46,738   35,812  56.62%  43.38%
HD130  69,090   32,953  67.71%  32.29%
HD131   9,532   45,049  17.46%  82.54%
HD132  49,533   49,013  50.26%  49.74%
HD133  48,999   36,952  57.01%  42.99%
HD134  46,177   58,556  44.09%  55.91%
HD135  35,508   37,663  48.53%  51.47%
HD137   9,978   21,062  32.15%  67.85%
HD138  30,859   31,585  49.42%  50.58%
HD139  14,830   45,543  24.56%  75.44%
HD140   8,732   22,411  28.04%  71.96%
HD141   6,588   36,582  15.26%  84.74%
HD142  13,241   42,323  23.83%  76.17%
HD143  11,319   24,910  31.24%  68.76%
HD144  13,293   17,049  43.81%  56.19%
HD145  14,250   27,573  34.07%  65.93%
HD146  10,685   43,855  19.59%  80.41%
HD147  14,345   53,881  21.03%  78.97%
HD148  21,042   37,730  35.80%  64.20%
HD149  20,950   31,202  40.17%  59.83%
HD150  54,842   40,186  57.71%  42.29%
				
CC1    87,740  284,053  23.60%  76.40%
CC2   146,425  148,116  49.71%  50.29%
CC3   220,829  213,731  50.82%  49.18%
CC4   234,204  218,452  51.74%  48.26%
				
JP1    87,700  167,753  34.33%  65.67%
JP2    32,838   50,056  39.61%  60.39%
JP3    50,303   69,274  42.07%  57.93%
JP4   229,535  188,368  54.93%  45.07%
JP5   197,764  218,253  47.54%  52.46%
JP6     7,567   27,643  21.49%  78.51%
JP7    17,310  101,368  14.59%  85.41%
JP8    66,181   41,637  61.38%  38.62%

Dist  Sumners    BrownSumners%  Brown%
======================================
CD02  178,239  153,781  53.68%  46.32%
CD07  149,276  149,677  49.93%  50.07%
CD08   25,684   14,930  63.24%  36.76%
CD09   37,140  119,868  23.65%  76.35%
CD10  102,002   59,509  63.15%  36.85%
CD18   58,363  179,885  24.50%  75.50%
CD22   21,470   20,157  51.58%  48.42%
CD29   48,719  101,542  32.42%  67.58%
CD36   82,330   47,970  63.18%  36.82%
				
SBOE4 104,920  335,772  23.81%  76.19%
SBOE6 380,664  348,912  52.18%  47.82%
SBOE8 217,639  162,636  57.23%  42.77%
				
SD04   55,470   22,553  71.09%  28.91%
SD06   56,723  117,949  32.47%  67.53%
SD07  234,209  171,238  57.77%  42.23%
SD11   76,651   46,635  62.17%  37.83%
SD13   36,983  159,472  18.83%  81.17%
SD15  112,316  193,986  36.67%  63.33%
SD17  115,691  123,829  48.30%  51.70%
SD18   15,180   11,660  56.56%  43.44%
				
HD126  38,802   33,248  53.85%  46.15%
HD127  53,889   35,026  60.61%  39.39%
HD128  47,977   21,854  68.70%  31.30%
HD129  47,448   34,995  57.55%  42.45%
HD130  69,768   32,168  68.44%  31.56%
HD131   9,953   44,558  18.26%  81.74%
HD132  50,241   48,064  51.11%  48.89%
HD133  49,739   36,091  57.95%  42.05%
HD134  47,419   57,143  45.35%  54.65%
HD135  36,083   36,890  49.45%  50.55%
HD137  10,151   20,831  32.76%  67.24%
HD138  31,484   30,891  50.48%  49.52%
HD139  15,396   44,842  25.56%  74.44%
HD140   9,181   21,845  29.59%  70.41%
HD141   7,029   36,060  16.31%  83.69%
HD142  13,760   41,694  24.81%  75.19%
HD143  11,837   24,277  32.78%  67.22%
HD144  13,736   16,529  45.39%  54.61%
HD145  14,723   26,947  35.33%  64.67%
HD146  11,056   43,390  20.31%  79.69%
HD147  14,922   53,129  21.93%  78.07%
HD148  21,679   36,894  37.01%  62.99%
HD149  21,361   30,695  41.03%  58.97%
HD150  55,588   39,258  58.61%  41.39%
				
CC1    91,042  279,998  24.54%  75.46%
CC2   149,445  144,410  50.86%  49.14%
CC3   224,188  209,572  51.68%  48.32%
CC4   238,548  213,342  52.79%  47.21%
				
JP1    90,547  164,215  35.54%  64.46%
JP2    33,772   48,840  40.88%  59.12%
JP3    51,467   67,910  43.11%  56.89%
JP4   233,006  184,205  55.85%  44.15%
JP5   201,206  214,079  48.45%  51.55%
JP6     7,975   27,140  22.71%  77.29%
JP7    18,116  100,374  15.29%  84.71%
JP8    67,134   40,559  62.34%  37.66%

As noted above, there are no 2016 races to compare to, so this is what we have. And what we have is Erica Davis doing a bit better against Bob Wolfe (no, not Michael Wolfe, he ran for a JP slot and lost in the primary) than David Brown did against Don Sumners. Davis got 864K votes, putting her in the upper echelon of Dems, while Brown got 847K, more in the middle. (Sumners got 14K more votes than Wolfe; there were 3K more undervotes in that race.) That translated to two points in the percentages – Davis won 55.6 to 44.4, while Brown won 54.6 to 45.4. Davis’ performance is reflected in the districts – she carried HD138 and CC2, and came close in HD132. Brown was fine, it’s just that Davis did better.

So the question is why? There are two obvious possibilities. One is that Sumners was a more familiar name – he had won the seat in 2014, and was elected Tax Assessor in 2010, so this was the third time in recent years he had been on a countywide ballot. (Sumners had also been Treasurer in the 90s, but no one is going to remember that.) Maybe that familiarity got him a few votes. The other possibility is that Davis was the only female candidate among the four, and she drew some extra votes because of that. There’s no way to know, and a sample size of one is far too small to draw any conclusions scientifically. The point here is just what I said up front – even in these similar races, there can be and will be some variance in the voting. Stuff like this is why I find these trips through the numbers so fascinating. You just never know what you’ll find.

That’s it for my tour of Harris County in the 2020 elections. I have the Fort Bend County data from their election results page, and while they are kind enough to provide a full Excel canvass, they do it in a weird way that forces me to do these calculations all over again. I’m working on it and will have a report or two from Fort Bend shortly. I hope you enjoyed this series.

Precinct analysis: County Clerk 2020 and 2018

Jan 19th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

We weren’t supposed to have a County Clerk race on the ballot in 2020, but we did following the health-related resignation of Diane Trautman in May. That gave us a battle of Stan Stanart, former County Clerk whom Trautman had deposed in 2018, and Teneshia Hudspeth, former chief elections person under Stanart. Hudspeth won easily, and though her 835K total votes were on the lower end for Democratic countywide candidates, her 53.76% of the vote was pretty close to Trautman’s 54.60% from two years before. The 2018 election was a non-Presidential year, with record turnout for such a contest, and the 2018 Clerk race also featured a Libertarian candidate, so comparisons are a bit tricky. My advice is to look at Hudspeth’s percentages compared to Trautman’s. Here’s the 2020 race:


Dist  Stanart Hudspeth Stanart% Hudspeth%
=========================================
CD02  181,707  151,509   54.53%    45.47%
CD07  153,335  147,437   50.98%    49.02%
CD08   26,037   14,710   63.90%    36.10%
CD09   37,941  119,087   24.16%    75.84%
CD10  103,442   58,506   63.87%    36.13%
CD18   60,497  178,172   25.35%    74.65%
CD22   22,018   19,747   52.72%    47.28%
CD29   50,483   99,634   33.63%    66.37%
CD36   83,484   47,160   63.90%    36.10%
				
SBOE4 108,536  332,265   24.62%    75.38%
SBOE6 389,609  343,285   53.16%    46.84%
SBOE8 220,799  160,413   57.92%    42.08%
				
SD04   56,013   22,252   71.57%    28.43%
SD06   58,816  115,690   33.70%    66.30%
SD07  237,989  168,687   58.52%    41.48%
SD11   77,992   45,722   63.04%    36.96%
SD13   38,148  158,482   19.40%    80.60%
SD15  115,748  191,422   37.68%    62.32%
SD17  118,870  122,163   49.32%    50.68%
SD18   15,368   11,547   57.10%    42.90%
				
HD126  39,346   32,856   54.49%    45.51%
HD127  54,464   34,684   61.09%    38.91%
HD128  48,497   21,457   69.33%    30.67%
HD129  48,407   34,399   58.46%    41.54%
HD130  70,686   31,495   69.18%    30.82%
HD131  10,184   44,299   18.69%    81.31%
HD132  51,079   47,460   51.84%    48.16%
HD133  51,079   35,518   58.98%    41.02%
HD134  49,424   56,156   46.81%    53.19%
HD135  36,914   36,293   50.42%    49.58%
HD137  10,430   20,635   33.57%    66.43%
HD138  32,119   30,383   51.39%    48.61%
HD139  15,914   44,364   26.40%    73.60%
HD140   9,567   21,385   30.91%    69.09%
HD141   7,122   35,961   16.53%    83.47%
HD142  14,114   41,357   25.44%    74.56%
HD143  12,295   23,775   34.09%    65.91%
HD144  13,990   16,257   46.25%    53.75%
HD145  15,404   26,341   36.90%    63.10%
HD146  11,411   43,173   20.91%    79.09%
HD147  15,494   52,686   22.73%    77.27%
HD148  22,919   35,897   38.97%    61.03%
HD149  21,718   30,328   41.73%    58.27%
HD150  56,366   38,803   59.23%    40.77%
				
CC1    94,155  277,561   25.33%    74.67%
CC2   152,576  141,645   51.86%    48.14%
CC3   229,070  206,538   52.59%    47.41%
CC4   243,143  210,221   53.63%    46.37%
				
JP1    94,708  161,313   36.99%    63.01%
JP2    34,728   47,948   42.00%    58.00%
JP3    52,202   67,235   43.71%    56.29%
JP4   236,302  181,977   56.49%    43.51%
JP5   205,591  211,174   49.33%    50.67%
JP6     8,522   26,546   24.30%    75.70%
JP7    18,695   99,939   15.76%    84.24%
JP8    68,196   39,833   63.13%    36.87%

Nothing we haven’t seen before by this point. It’s possible Stanart did a little better than expected because of name recognition, but who can tell. The 2018 analysis was part of a package deal. Here’s the County Clerk’s race on its own:


Dist  Stanart Trautman  Gomez  Under Stanart%   Traut%  Gomez%
==============================================================
CD02  135,427  116,744  6,717  6,221   52.31%   45.09%   2.59%
CD07  116,383  116,488  5,648  6,706   48.79%   48.84%   2.37%
CD08   17,784   10,221    679    520   62.00%   35.63%   2.37%
CD09   23,329   93,625  2,504  2,376   19.53%   78.37%   2.10%
CD10   71,172   39,707  2,623  1,970   62.71%   34.98%   2.31%
CD18   39,159  138,311  4,892  4,087   21.47%   75.84%   2.68%
CD22   15,265   15,184    857    711   48.76%   48.50%   2.74%
CD29   30,313   82,449  3,916  2,627   25.98%   70.66%   3.36%
CD36   60,467   35,918  2,452  2,036   61.18%   36.34%   2.48%

SBOE6 287,300  269,837 14,477 15,045   50.26%   47.21%   2.53%

HD126  29,277   24,586  1,293  1,074   53.08%   44.58%   2.34%
HD127  41,017   25,198  1,634  1,260   60.45%   37.14%   2.41%
HD128  34,735   15,876  1,142    915   67.12%   30.68%   2.21%
HD129  35,567   26,799  1,739  1,582   55.48%   41.80%   2.71%
HD130  51,064   22,942  1,722  1,365   67.43%   30.30%   2.27%
HD131   6,110   34,855    864    717   14.61%   83.33%   2.07%
HD132  32,579   32,090  1,680  1,023   49.10%   48.37%   2.53%
HD133  40,721   28,089  1,552  2,192   57.87%   39.92%   2.21%
HD134  37,977   47,211  2,090  3,692   43.51%   54.09%   2.39%
HD135  26,584   27,712  1,379  1,033   47.75%   49.77%   2.48%
HD137   7,257   16,167    678    552   30.11%   67.08%   2.81%
HD138  23,336   23,515  1,257  1,100   48.51%   48.88%   2.61%
HD139  10,545   35,238  1,128    961   22.48%   75.12%   2.40%
HD140   5,269   17,569    722    490   22.36%   74.57%   3.06%
HD141   3,921   26,852    622    438   12.49%   85.53%   1.98%
HD142   8,579   30,125    850    662   21.69%   76.16%   2.15%
HD143   7,405   20,178    952    699   25.95%   70.71%   3.34%
HD144   8,949   13,629    786    450   38.30%   58.33%   3.36%
HD145   9,596   21,809  1,226    834   29.41%   66.84%   3.76%
HD146   8,082   34,044    931  1,065   18.77%   79.07%   2.16%
HD147  10,013   42,972  1,576  1,316   18.35%   78.76%   2.89%
HD148  15,587   29,671  1,907  1,695   33.05%   62.91%   4.04%
HD149  14,042   23,985    859    785   36.11%   61.68%   2.21%
HD150  41,087   27,535  1,699  1,354   58.43%   39.16%   2.42%

CC1    61,603  218,965  6,875  6,563   21.43%   76.18%   2.39%
CC2   105,901  114,124  6,772  5,028   46.69%   50.32%   2.99%
CC3   164,601  157,515  7,843  8,035   49.89%   47.74%   2.38%
CC4   177,194  158,043  8,798  7,628   51.50%   45.94%   2.56%

I included undervotes in the county candidates’ analyses in 2018 because I was trying to analyze the effects of straight ticket voting as well. As I said, if you compare just the Democratic candidates’ percentages, you see that Hudspeth and Trautman had fairly similar performances, with the drops we have noted before in some of the Latino districts. Trautman knocked it out of the park in HD134, which was more Republican in 2018. Hudspeth had among the higher scores this year in HDs 131 and 141. I fully expect she’ll build on her performance in 2022, when she will be the incumbent running for re-election, though as always the first question is what will the national atmosphere look like.

Precinct analysis: Presidential results by Congressional district

Jan 18th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

From Daily Kos Elections, the breakdown of how Presidential voting went in each of Texas’ 36 Congressional districts:

Two districts did in fact flip on the presidential level: Trump lost the 24th District in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs while recapturing the 23rd District along the border with Mexico. Biden, however, made major gains in a number of other suburban districts and nearly won no fewer than seven of them. Trump, meanwhile, surged in many heavily Latino areas and likewise came close to capturing three, but except for the 24th, every Trump seat is in GOP hands and every Biden seat is represented by Democrats. The 24th, which includes the suburbs north of Dallas and Fort Worth, is a good place to start because it saw one of the largest shifts between 2016 and 2020. The district began the decade as heavily Republican turf—it backed Mitt Romney 60-38—but Trump carried it by a substantially smaller 51-44 margin four years later.

Biden continued the trend and racked up a 52-46 win this time, but the area remained just red enough downballot to allow Republican Beth Van Duyne to manage a 49-47 victory in an expensive open-seat race against Democrat Candace Valenzuela.

Biden fell just short of winning seven other historically red suburban seats: the 2nd, 3rd, 6th, 10th, 21st, 22nd, and 31st, where Trump’s margins ranged from just one to three points and where the swings from 2016 ranged from seven points in the 22nd all the way to 13 points in the 3rd, the biggest shift in the state. However, as in the 24th, Biden’s surge did not come with sufficient coattails, as Republicans ran well ahead of Trump in all of these seats. (You can check out our guide for more information about each district.)

Two seats that Democrats flipped in 2018 and stayed blue last year also saw large improvements for Biden. The 7th District in west Houston, parts of which were once represented by none other than George H.W. Bush from 1967 to 1971, had swung from 60-39 Romney to 48-47 Clinton, and Biden carried it 54-45 in 2020. Democratic Rep. Lizzie Fletcher won by a smaller 51-47 spread against Wesley Hunt, who was one of the House GOP’s best fundraisers. The 32nd District in the Dallas area, likewise, had gone from 57-41 Romney to 49-47 Clinton. This time, Biden took it 54-44 as Democratic Rep. Colin Allred prevailed 52-46.

Biden’s major gains in the suburbs, though, came at the same time that Trump made serious inroads in predominantly Latino areas on or near the southern border with Mexico. That rightward shift may have cost Team Blue the chance to flip the open 23rd District, which stretches from San Antonio west to the outskirts of the El Paso area.

A full breakdown by county and district is here, and a comparison of percentages from 2016 and 2020 is here. CD23 went from being a Romney district to a Clinton district to a Trump district, though in all cases it was close. The red flags are in CDs 15, 28, and 34. In CD15, incumbent Vicente Gonzalez won by only three points, in a district Biden carried by one point, a huge drop from Clinton’s 57-40 win in 2016. Everyone’s least favorite Democrat Henry Cuellar had an easy 19-point win, but Biden only carried CD28 by four points, down from Clinton’s 20-point margin. It’s not crazy to think that Jessica Cisneros could have lost that race, though of course we’ll never know. This wasn’t the scenario I had in mind when I griped that CD28 was not a “safe” district, but it does clearly illustrate what I meant. And Filemon Vela, now a DNC Vice Chair, also had a relatively easy 55-42 win, but in a district Biden carried 52-48 after Clinton had carried it 59-38. Not great, Bob.

We don’t have the full downballot results – we’ll probably get them in March from the Texas Legislative Council – but the Harris County experience suggests there will be some variance, and that other Dems may do a little better in those districts. How much of this was Trump-specific and how much is long-term is of course the big question. The Georgia Senate runoffs, coupled with the 2018 results, suggest that having Trump on the ballot was better for Republicans than not having him on the ballot. On the other hand, 2022 will be a Democratic midterm year, and the last couple of them did not go well. On the other other hand, Trump is leaving office in complete disgrace and with approval levels now in the low 30s thanks to the armed insurrection at the Capitol, and for all the damage he did to the economy and the COVID mitigation effort, Biden is in a position to make big progress in short order. It’s just too early to say what any of this means, but suffice it to say that both Ds and Rs have challenges and opportunities ahead of them.

There are some very early third-party efforts at drawing new Congressional districts – see here and here for a couple I’ve come across. We still need the actual Census numbers, and as I’ve said before, the Republicans will have to make decisions about how much risk they want to expose themselves to. The way these maps are drawn suggests to me that “pack” rather than “crack” could be the strategy, but again this is all very early. There is also the possibility that the Democratic Congress can push through voting rights reform that includes how redistricting can be done, though the clock and potentially the Supreme Court will be factors. And if there’s one thing we should have learned over the last 20 years, it’s that due to Texas’ rapid growth, the districts you draw at the beginning of the decade may look quite a bit different by the end of the decade. We’re at the very start of a ten-year journey. A lot is going to happen, and the farther out we get the harder it is to see the possibilities.

SCOTUS rejects TDP petition on vote by mail

Jan 18th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Back to the lower court, I think.

The U.S. Supreme Court turned away a Democratic bid to force universal vote-by-mail in Texas, leaving intact a state law that lets people cast no-excuse absentee ballots only if they are 65 or older.

The Texas Democratic Party and its allies argued unsuccessfully that the law violates the Constitution’s 26th Amendment, which says the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of age.”

Voting by mail became a sharply partisan issue amid President Donald Trump’s unsupported contentions that the practice led to widespread fraud in the November election. Texas’s Republican governor and attorney general urged the Supreme Court to reject the Democratic appeal.

A divided federal appeals court in September rejected the 26th Amendment claim, saying the Texas law didn’t make it more difficult for anyone to vote. The panel left open the possibility the law could be challenged as a violation of the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

The Supreme Court also rejected Texas Democrats in June, when the justices refused to reinstate a trial judge’s order that would have let any voter request an absentee ballot to avoid the risk of contracting Covid-19. That order, which was blocked by the appeals court, was designed to govern the 2020 election and might have boosted Democrats’ prospects.

See here for the last update, which was a petition for review of the Fifth Circuit ruling that kept intact the existing law on vote by mail in Texas as the original lawsuit that claimed the existing law violated the 26th Amendment is litigated. If I understand this correctly, the original case needs to be re-argued, with guidance from that Fifth Circuit ruling, and then once there is a ruling on the merits, we’ll go through the appeals process again. Or maybe not, if Congress and President Biden can pass a new Voting Rights Act that would allow for this nationally. I don’t see that particular provision in there now, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t or wouldn’t be there. Anyway, it’s kind of a non-starter now, since the effort was to make that happen in 2020, but it’s never too late to make it easier to vote. Just don’t expect anything to happen in the short term, outside of what Congress may do. Reuters has more.

Precinct analysis: Tax Assessor 2020 and 2016

Jan 13th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Tax Assessor Ann Harris Bennett is the third incumbent from 2016 running for re-election. Like Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, she improved her performance pretty significantly from four years ago. Unlike either Gonzalez or DA Kim Ogg, she came off a close race – she was actually trailing after early voting, and did just well enough on Election Day to pull out a eight thousand vote victory. In 2020, she won by ten points, with a Libertarian candidate also in the mix. Here’s how 2020 looked for Bennett:


Dist    Daniel  Bennett     Lib Daniel%Bennett%   Lib%
======================================================
CD02   174,454  151,148  11,516  51.15%  44.32%  3.38%
CD07   148,007  146,906   9,535  47.97%  47.62%  3.09%
CD08    24,960   14,786   1,419  59.88%  35.47%  3.40%
CD09    35,972  117,815   4,676  22.43%  73.47%  2.92%
CD10    98,983   58,837   5,631  59.77%  35.53%  3.40%
CD18    57,057  175,920   8,077  23.44%  72.28%  3.32%
CD22    20,650   19,913   1,660  48.18%  46.46%  3.87%
CD29    46,205  101,024   4,961  30.09%  65.80%  3.23%
CD36    79,503   48,053   4,570  59.41%  35.91%  3.42%
						
SBOE4  100,919  330,636  13,852  22.66%  74.23%  3.11%
SBOE6  374,836  342,677  24,239  50.53%  46.20%  3.27%
SBOE8  210,036  161,090  13,954  54.54%  41.83%  3.62%
						
SD04    53,982   22,540   2,570  68.25%  28.50%  3.25%
SD06    53,863  117,046   5,997  30.45%  66.16%  3.39%
SD07   227,833  169,249  13,705  55.46%  41.20%  3.34%
SD11    74,156   46,328   4,608  59.28%  37.04%  3.68%
SD13    36,043  156,250   5,976  18.18%  78.81%  3.01%
SD15   110,239  189,765  10,747  35.48%  61.07%  3.46%
SD17   115,088  121,733   7,376  47.13%  49.85%  3.02%
SD18    14,587   11,494   1,066  53.73%  42.34%  3.93%
						
HD126   37,713   32,939   2,327  51.68%  45.13%  3.19%
HD127   52,360   34,525   3,193  58.13%  38.33%  3.54%
HD128   46,291   22,223   2,192  65.47%  31.43%  3.10%
HD129   46,005   34,465   3,291  54.92%  41.15%  3.93%
HD130   67,940   31,860   3,420  65.82%  30.87%  3.31%
HD131    9,557   43,780   1,586  17.40%  79.71%  2.89%
HD132   48,284   47,303   3,782  48.59%  47.60%  3.81%
HD133   49,924   35,385   2,408  56.91%  40.34%  2.75%
HD134   48,604   55,747   2,949  45.30%  51.95%  2.75%
HD135   34,905   36,408   2,567  47.25%  49.28%  3.47%
HD137    9,845   20,352   1,178  31.38%  64.87%  3.75%
HD138   30,750   30,377   2,169  48.58%  47.99%  3.43%
HD139   14,994   44,096   1,832  24.61%  72.38%  3.01%
HD140    8,661   21,724   1,000  27.60%  69.22%  3.19%
HD141    6,617   35,561   1,217  15.25%  81.95%  2.80%
HD142   13,268   41,110   1,631  23.69%  73.40%  2.91%
HD143   11,211   24,369   1,121  30.55%  66.40%  3.05%
HD144   12,895   16,646   1,072  42.12%  54.38%  3.50%
HD145   14,110   26,467   1,630  33.43%  62.71%  3.86%
HD146   10,878   42,506   1,661  19.76%  77.22%  3.02%
HD147   14,762   51,621   2,518  21.42%  74.92%  3.65%
HD148   21,733   35,555   2,479  36.36%  59.49%  4.15%
HD149   20,767   30,361   1,522  39.44%  57.67%  2.89%
HD150   53,716   39,022   3,300  55.93%  40.63%  3.44%
						
CC1     89,315  274,496  11,676  23.79%  73.10%  3.11%
CC2    143,799  143,691  10,434  48.27%  48.23%  3.50%
CC3    220,064  206,206  14,217  49.96%  46.81%  3.23%
CC4    232,613  210,012  15,718  50.75%  45.82%  3.43%
						
JP1     90,963  160,043   8,734  35.02%  61.62%  3.36%
JP2     32,249   48,712   2,804  38.50%  58.15%  3.35%
JP3     49,382   67,843   3,512  40.90%  56.19%  2.91%
JP4    226,115  182,066  14,185  53.54%  43.11%  3.36%
JP5    196,782  210,577  13,981  46.70%  49.98%  3.32%
JP6      7,542   26,611   1,383  21.22%  74.88%  3.89%
JP7     17,840   98,244   3,456  14.92%  82.19%  2.89%
JP8     64,918   40,309   3,990  59.44%  36.91%  3.65%

Bennett’s 834K vote total was the lowest among the non-judicial countywide candidates, and only ahead of five judicial candidates. Thanks in part to the 52K votes that the Libertarian candidate received, however, she led challenger and former District Clerk Chris Daniel by over 148K votes, which is one of the bigger margins. If you want to examine the belief that Libertarian candidates mostly take votes away from Republicans, look at some of the district totals, especially HDs like 132, 135, and 138. We can’t know for sure how Daniel might have done in a two-person race, but it seems reasonable to me to say he’d have improved at least somewhat. Bennett did about as well as you’d expect someone who got 53% of the vote would do. If the final score would have been closer in a two-person race, it’s not because she’d have received fewer votes or gotten a lower percentage.

Here’s the 2016 comparison, in which Bennett knocked off incumbent Mike Sullivan. She trailed by about five thousand votes when the totals were first displayed on Election Night, with Sullivan having slight leads in both mail ballots and in person early votes – yes, that’s right, Republicans used to try to compete on mail ballots – but got nearly 52% of the Election Day vote, which was a big enough part of the vote to push her over the top.


Dist  Sullivan  Bennett  Sullivan%  Bennett%
============================================
CD02   168,936  105,778     61.50%    38.50%
CD07   147,165  106,727     57.96%    42.04%
CD09    29,855  103,511     22.39%    77.61%
CD10    83,213   34,795     70.51%    29.49%
CD18    53,558  148,586     26.49%    73.51%
CD29    41,555   88,942     31.84%    68.16%
				
SBOE6  357,083  249,953     58.82%    41.18%
				
HD126   37,003   24,186     60.47%    39.53%
HD127   50,028   23,460     68.08%    31.92%
HD128   42,659   16,238     72.43%    27.57%
HD129   44,072   24,777     64.01%    35.99%
HD130   60,429   20,277     74.88%    25.12%
HD131    8,121   37,906     17.64%    82.36%
HD132   39,094   29,321     57.14%    42.86%
HD133   50,116   25,241     66.50%    33.50%
HD134   49,352   39,410     55.60%    44.40%
HD135   33,528   26,112     56.22%    43.78%
HD137    9,664   17,099     36.11%    63.89%
HD138   28,827   22,096     56.61%    43.39%
HD139   13,707   38,266     26.37%    73.63%
HD140    7,556   19,790     27.63%    72.37%
HD141    5,934   32,109     15.60%    84.40%
HD142   11,599   33,182     25.90%    74.10%
HD143   10,372   22,294     31.75%    68.25%
HD144   11,810   15,188     43.74%    56.26%
HD145   12,669   21,519     37.06%    62.94%
HD146   11,323   36,903     23.48%    76.52%
HD147   14,119   43,254     24.61%    75.39%
HD148   20,434   26,999     43.08%    56.92%
HD149   16,639   26,389     38.67%    61.33%
HD150   50,472   25,358     66.56%    33.44%
				
CC1     82,916  231,040     26.41%    73.59%
CC2    134,067  117,084     53.38%    46.62%
CC3    202,128  149,943     57.41%    42.59%
CC4    220,415  149,294     59.62%    40.38%

Again, there’s nothing here we haven’t seen before, but as Mike Sullivan nearly hung on, you can see what an almost-successful Republican looked like in 2016. Note the margins he had in CDs 02 and 07, and the various now-competitive State Rep districts. I mean, Sullivan won HD134 by eleven points. He won CC4 by almost 20 points, and CC3 by fifteen. We don’t live in that world now.

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