I don’t even know what to say. This is a filthy result, one that can’t be repaired until 2020. I don’t know what happened, but it was a race we should not have lost. I don’t think one ugly loss invalidates everything else that’s been going on, but it sure is a turd in the punch bowl, and the reaction to it is going to be brutal. Now Dems are going to have to flip a Republican-held Senate seat just to stay even. Just terrible.
UPDATE: Something that occurred to me after I went to bed was that it was unusual for this runoff to be held on a Tuesday, as runoffs are almost always on Saturdays. The effect of having this on a Tuesday is that there were no weekend days for voting – early voting for this was Monday to Friday last week. It’s still a disgrace that Gallego lost, but if you wanted to engineer an election for low turnout, this is how you would do it.
Avenatti and Moore, keep stating the Democrats can’t keep playing nice if they want to win. I am of the same belief.
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I don’t know, Kuff…. The peoples of SDistrict 19 had a week of early voting available AND yesterday…and still didn’t elect the Democrat ? Maybe the result is due to Democratic voter apathy and not because there were Possible impediments in place that Possibly prevented them from getting to a voting station. 45-50,000 votes in an area this large of an area is an embarrassment. Heck, when Uresti won in 2012, 206,000 ballots were cast.
Getting folks the option of voting on six different days and only one in four exercising their right is just pitiful, regardless of who won.
The election schedule fix was in and Gallego was a flawed candidate but still should have won. The GOP scheduled the election when they did because there’s a chance they could lose 2 senate seats and possibly 3 if the Dems pulled an inside straight in Nov. Hard for folks in San Antone and across the district to get excited about a guy who didn’t campaign hard and spends half of his time in Austin.
Roland would have beaten Flores and will beat him in 2020.
Gallego was a flawed candidate. Too much apathy in the Democratic party. Republicans are reacting strongly to the blue wave / beto uprising in Texas.
“The election schedule fix was in and Gallego was a flawed candidate but still should have won.”
Huh ? Still should have won ? There is no such thing. You can’t win if your opponent receives more votes than you…. unless we’re talking about popular vote and the Electoral College system.
And an election fix ? How is that ? Did registered Republicans get ten days to vote but the Democrats only got six ? Where there some barring of the door by election officials that prevented Dems from voting ?
The GOP played politics with the scheduling of the election to their advantage and it worked. It’s a different race if the runoff coincided with the midterm election in November. It’s still a 60-40 seat and as bad of a campaign Gallego ran, he could have found 3k more votes in Bexar if he tried. He ran a bad race and Flores ran a good race. Flores better enjoy his one term, he’ll be gone in 2020.
It seems like the Republicans tried harder for this district. They pulled out all the stops. The Democrats just ran an ad saying people “know” Gallego and assumed they wouldn’t fall for Republican ads. The Democrats need to get a lot more aggressive.
That’s not one in four, it’s one in 20.
Joel, what I meant was one in four voted this time around, comparing the turnout yesterday to the turnout in 2012 (50k vs 200k).
Maybe now we can ALL agree on standardized voting dates in Texas. This really ought to be one of those rare, non partisan things everyone can agree on. Of course, school districts and other local taxing authorities will still oppose that, because, hey, low voter turnout is good when you want to push through something most people don’t actually want.