Initial thoughts about the election

And now for some reactions and analysis…

– The polls were garbage. Oy vey. Not just here, though they were definitely off here, underestimating Trump and the Republicans after doing the same to Beto and the Dems in 2018. This time, after all that national soul-searching following the 2016 state-level misfires (the national polling was fairly accurate overall in 2016), we got this flaming mess. Not my problem to solve, but I wonder how much of this is the known issue of “differential response” writ large. We know that in some circumstances, like when there’s been a big news event, one candidate’s supporters, or members of one party in general, may be more or less likely to answer the phone and respond to a pollster. It may be that just as a matter of course now, Republicans are less likely to respond to polls, in a bigger way than previously thought, and that had a disproportionate effect on the numbers. I’m just guessing here, but if that’s the case then perhaps the web panel approach to polling needs to be used more often. For what it’s worth, the UT/Texas Tribune and UH Hobby School polls from October, both of which had Trump up 50-45, used web panels. Maybe that’s a fluke, maybe they had a better likely voter model going in, maybe they were onto something that the others weren’t, I don’t know. But they came the closest, so they get the glory. As for the rest, thanks for nothing.

– Along those same lines, pollsters who did deeper dive polls on Latino voters, such as Univision and Latino Decisions, really need to question their methods and figure out how they went so mind-bogglingly wrong. I get that what we had, at least to some extent, appears to have been lower-propensity Latino voters turning out at surprisingly high levels for Trump, but damn, this is your job. You need to be on top of that.

– The old adage about “Texas isn’t a red state, it’s a non-voting state” can be safely buried for now. We had record-breaking turnout, over 11 million votes cast when we’d never surpassed nine million before, and yet Trump still won by six points while other statewide Republicans were winning by nine to eleven points. To be sure, that’s closer than 2016 was, but at this rate we’ll need to have thirty million people voting for Dems to catch up, and I feel confident saying that ain’t gonna happen anytime soon. The lesson here is that there are low-propensity Republican voters, too, and they are capable of showing up when they are persuaded. We saw that happen in 2018, and we saw it again this year.

I admit I bought into the hype, and put too much faith into the idea that the non-voters would be more consistently Democratic than Republican. To be fair, I think that was the case in 2018, as Democrats made huge gains relative to past off years. It’s certainly been the case in Harris County that increases in voter registration have led to significant increases in Democratic votes – I’ll get to this in more detail later in the post, but this can be pretty easily quantified, and it’s why Dems have been dominating the countywide races with increasing ease. It’s where those gains came from that seems to have been a difference-maker.

I don’t want to sell short what was accomplished here. Joe Biden got over 1.3 million more votes than Hillary Clinton; Trump improved on his total by about 1.15 million. Chrysta Castaneda got 1.36 million more votes than Grady Yarbrough. The statewide judicial candidates got between 3,378,163 and 3,608,634 votes in 2016; in 2020, the range was 4,762,188 to 4,899,270 votes. If you want to be particularly gruesome, Biden got 3.3 million more votes than Wendy Davis did for Governor in 2014. Granted, Trump outdid Greg Abbott by just over 3 million votes, but still. A lot more people now have voted for a Democrat in Texas than at any other point in history. Even as we pick through the wreckage, that’s worth keeping in mind.

So how do we close that remaining gap of 700K to one million voters statewide? One, we should remember that off year elections are far more volatile from a turnout perspective, and we need to do everything we can to make these new folks habitual voters while we continue to register and recruit new voters. Two, having dynamic statewide candidates, who can learn the lessons of these past elections while applying them to the environment they’re in, would help. And three, maybe we need to give another look to the reviled old “persuasion” strategy, and see how we can do a better job of peeling away some of the other guy’s voters. Easier said than done, but then that’s why I’m a blogger and not a campaign professional.

– By the way, if anyone asks you who the current all-time vote leader in Texas is, the answer as of 2020 is Supreme Court Justice Jane Bland, who tipped the scales at 6,002,233 votes. No one else topped six million. She was helped by not having a third-party opponent in the race; the Libertarians in three other races got between 254L and 283K votes.

– I take no position on the question about whether the Republicans’ continued use of traditional door-to-door campaigning during the pandemic, which the Democrats largely eschewed out of a sense of safety for their campaign workers and as a statement of living their values, was a factor in this election. The academic research on various methods of increasing turnout and persuading swing voters is mixed, and does not suggest that one method (such as door-knocking) is clearly superior to others (such as phone-banking). Winning teams always point to their methods and strategies as the reason why they won and the other team lost. I’m not saying this couldn’t have made a difference, or that it didn’t make a difference. It may have, and I have no way to disprove the assertion. I’m just saying that it’s anecdotal data, and I consider it to be such.

– Also, too: I saw people again cursing Beto’s name for not running for Senate this year. All I can say is that anyone who thinks Beto would have done better than Biden is not thinking clearly. He probably would have exceeded MJ Hegar, but there’s a lot of room between that and winning. With all the money that was spent in Texas this year, I do not buy the argument that having Beto on the ticket would have moved the needle for Dems.

– Speaking of money, hoo boy. I hope this isn’t the end of our candidates being able to raise enough of it. We’re going to need plenty in 2022.

– How much of an effect did the lack of straight ticket voting have? Far as I can tell, very little. In Harris County, there were 1,633,557 votes cast in the Presidential race. Way down at the bottom of the ballot, in the two At Large HCDE races, there were 1,551,731 and 1,548,760 votes. In other words, about 95% of the people who voted in the Presidential race also voted in these two HCDE races.

Now, if you look at the various judicial races, you will see that Democratic judicial candidates generally got 60-80K fewer votes than Biden, while most Republican judicial candidates (though not all) exceeded Trump’s total. Some of that was just crossover voting, which we knew was happening, but some of it may have been a greater propensity by Dems to skip some number of downballot races. It’s hard to say how much is each. For what it’s worth, 12 out of 15 Dem judicial candidates (district and county courts) who had a Republican opponent had fewer votes than MJ Hegar, who had 848K to Biden’s 911K, while 8 out of those 15 Republican opponents did better than John Cornyn’s 717K votes; Trump got 699K, and all but two of those Republicans did better than that, while no one came close to Biden.

So did the absence of straight ticket voting mean more crossovers in general? I will remind you, as I have done before, there’s always a range of outcomes in the judicial races, so there has always been some amount of crossover voting, just usually not that much. Why did MJ Hegar get so many fewer votes than Joe Biden did? Some of it was more voting for third party candidates – there were 22K votes for the Libertarian and Green Presidential candidates, and 42K such votes in the Senate race – some of it was the 26K fewer votes cast in the Senate race (about 98.5% of all Presidential voters also voted for a Senate candidate), and some of it was the 18K people who voted for Cornyn but not Trump. Make of that what you will.

– While I’m thinking about it, let me update that range-of-results table I just linked to:


2004 
Rep 524K to 545K
Dem 460K to 482K

2008
Rep 526K to 564K
Dem 533K to 585K

2012
Rep 550K to 580K
Dem 555K to 581K

2016
Rep 580K to 621K
Dem 643K to 684K

2020
Rep 690K to 740K
Dem 812K to 865K

So congratulations to Republicans, who have boosted their base vote by almost 200K since 2004, while Dems have increased theirs by over 380K. Five points was as close as any Republican got.

– Despite their successful defense of their Congressional and legislative seats, Republicans still face some tricky decisions in redistricting. Look at it this way – in an election year that clearly wasn’t as good for Dems as 2018 was, they still managed to hold onto all but one of the seats they won that year. The same map that gave Republicans 95 House members was only good for 83 this year, and it wouldn’t have taken much to knock that number down by a half dozen or so. Morgan Meyer and Angie Chen Button may have survived, but Dallas County is a problem for the GOP. Harris County has three safe Republican districts – HDs 127, 128, and 130 – four that are still pretty safe but have gotten a lot less so over the decade – HDs 126, 129, 133, and 150 – and two on the knife’s edge, HDs 132 and 138. That may have been hard to see from the vantage point of 2011, but the broad outlines of it were there, and as I have noted before, HDs 132 and 135 were already trending Dem in 2012, with both being a little bluer than they were in 2008 despite 2012 being a slightly lesser year for Dems overall. Who’s going to need protection, and whose seat may wind up on a target list a couple of cycles later because you didn’t understand the demographics correctly? In Congress, Dan Crenshaw won by a comfortable 14 points…in a district Ted Poe won by 24 points in 2016, and 32 points in 2012. How do you shore him up? Splitting pieces of Travis County into four Republican districts was a great idea, until it threatened the re-election of three of those Republicans. Who even knows how many Congressional seats we’ll have, given the chaotic nature of the Census?

Oh, and here in Harris County, I’m sure the Democratic majority on Commissioners Court will bolster Adrian Garcia in CC2, as the Republicans did for Jack Morman in 2010. The bigger question is do they go after their new colleague Tom Ramsey, or do they just not help him out and hope nature takes its course? That’ll be fun to watch.

I think that’s it for now. I’m sure more things will occur to me as we go. When I get a draft canvass, I’ll start doing the usual slicing and dicing.

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8 Responses to Initial thoughts about the election

  1. blank says:

    My comments:

    -Tarrant is no longer the bellwether. It’s probably Denton.

    -Speaking of Tarrant, because Republicans swept the swing seats, they are likely going to dummymander it to protect their incumbents in the State House, like they did to Dallas in 2011 and to Bexar the decade before that. My guess is that Tarrant will present the greatest opportunity to pick up State House seats throughout the decade. I suspect that some of them were secretly rooting for at least 1 of their colleagues to lose.

    -In the Congressional seats, there will likely be 3 new districts. One of them will be used as a Democratic vote sink in Travis to shore up their incumbents. Then, CDs 7 and 32 will be converted to Democratic vote sinks. My guess is that Democrats will start with 14 seats and target CD 23 throughout the decade. Also, CD 23 will have to survive lawsuits. All of this also assumes that HR 1 is not passed.

    -I haven’t really looked at the State Senate.

    -They should make SBOE 5 a Democratic vote sink to shore up SBOE 10. But, will they do that? Dunno.

  2. Flypusher says:

    Now I’ve never participated in a poll, so perhaps this is a naive question, but how do polls based on issues rather than candidates stack up accuracy-wise? I can see the “shy voter” phenomenon when you have a polarizing candidate, and trolling the poll takers also seems to be a thing, but how many people could resist giving you their real opinion if you ask them how they’d change the immigration system? Or what’s wrong with healthcare access? Probably the data crunching is harder, but seems to me it would be worth it for the sake of accuracy.

  3. Thomas says:

    My basic theory on turnout in this election is that, with so much closed and people out of work due to the pandemic, a lot of the “usual” excuses for not voting simply didn’t apply. Will be interesting to see what turnout looks like going forward.

  4. Mainstream says:

    My two cents:

    Republican judicial candidates did not get crossover votes from Democrats. There is a set of never-Trumpers in the GOP who stuck with Cornyn and down-ballot GOP candidates, but voted Biden or Libertarian.

    I agree with Blank that CD 7 will be turned into a strong D district, perhaps shoring up McCaul or Crenshaw, although the latter did fine. I would not be surprised to see Montrose, Heights end up in CD 7.

    The demographic, population pull in Harris County will be to the NW. Most D state house districts will be scrambling to find enough voters to meet one person, one vote standards. So I think HD 132 and 138 can be easily shored up for Republicans.

    The strong Hispanic vote for Republicans may be cultural. The growing evangelical Latino churches may be flipping over to the GOP.

  5. C.L. says:

    I’ve spent plenty of time down in the Valley. My impression is the legal Latinos are not all that happy with the illegal Latinos crossing the river as, (1) if they stay in the area, they depress wages for the folks who went through proper channels to get here, (2) more illegals equals more law enforcement (state and federal) presence in the area, and no one wants that (Note: McAllen is amuck with blacked out Federal SUVs everywhere), (3) by leaving their trash in the countryside, breaking into homes for food and water, robbing folks, etc., they give the legal Latinos a bad name (guilty by heritage/place of origin, so to speak), (4) some associated drug trafficking, and (5) etc. etc. etc. The GOP has been promoting a hard line on illegal immigration for years, while the Dems have had a hakuna matata/anyone, anything goes approach. No shocker, to me anyway, that we saw a heavy GOP vote in Starr Cty and/or up/down the Rio Grande.

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  7. asmith says:

    Dems need to do better with rural voters of all stripes. Seemed to have done better with urban latinos. Allred and Fletcher were re-elected but I wouldn’t count on them getting vote sinks. Pure guess but GOP may crack their seats and draw “new” minority majority districts.

    The Trump low propensity vote probably kept us from winning CD24, CD10, CD21, CD22. Not sure what happened in CD23 other than Gonzalez overperforming throughout the district.

    There were at least 7-8 house seats in the Lege races that ended up 51-49 or less so field ops could have made the difference there.

    Fascinated to see how the GOP redraws DFW, Harris, and Williamson. Meyer and Button need R votes so they can’t draw too many GOP seats in Dallas.

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