Obviously. And yes, even in recent elections.
The coronavirus pandemic is expected to drive millions of Americans to vote by mail this year, a shift that data suggest is underway even in Texas, where only some voters are allowed to cast mail ballots.
Texas’ Republican leaders this year have fought efforts to expand mail balloting or have questioned its integrity, with some echoing President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that mail ballots are a source of rampant fraud.
And yet, historically, mail ballots in Harris County clearly have favored Republicans, a Houston Chronicle analysis of election data shows.
Though the GOP presidential candidate narrowly lost Harris County in 2008 and 2012, for example, the Republican ticket won three quarters of the 300 voting precincts in which the most mail ballots were cast in both elections.
That trend held even in 2016, when Trump lost the county badly but still won two-thirds of the 100 voting precincts in which the most mail ballots were cast.
What most drives the partisan skew in mail ballots, University of Houston political scientist Jeronimo Cortina said, is Texas’ status as one of the few states to require voters younger than 65 to have an excuse to cast a ballot by mail.
“The constituency of the Republican Party tends to be older,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that Republicans are more likely to vote by mail just because they’re Republicans, but maybe because being Republican is correlated with other demographics that make you more likely to vote by mail, in comparison to Democrats.”
(This story was from the first week of early voting. It’s been sitting in my drafts because there’s been such a crazy amount of news, and you know how it goes. I’m trying to publish all of these election-related drafts I have before Tuesday. You’ve been warned.)
I have no idea why the Chron went with this clunky “on a precinct basis” analysis. I guarantee you, when the next Democrat wins a statewide race, the Republican will have won far more counties than the Democrat. Those counties will almost all be far smaller than the Dem-won counties, and so on balance the Dem will win more votes. Why make this more complicated than it needs to be?
I mean, in the 2018 election, there were more Republican straight ticket votes cast by mail than there were Democratic straight-ticket votes. Democrats dominated that category for both phases of in person voting, but the mail universe leaned Republican. Greg Abbott won the mail vote, but lost the county overall. John Culberson, Mike Schofield, Gary Elkins, losers all, won the mail ballot race. Dems did win the 2016 mail vote, but if you scroll through the individual races, the Republican candidates – those who won and those who lost – did a little better with mail voters than they did overall.
It’s not that long ago that mail ballots were utterly dominated by Republicans. They put money into it, and they reaped the reward. It was then-HCDP Chair Lane Lewis who piloted a program to get mail ballot applications to eligible Democratic voters and then push them to use them, which grew into a big success for Dems here and became a model for the state party. It’s not rocket science, the Dems didn’t do anything revolutionary, they just put sufficient resources into a plan and executed it.
And this cannot be stressed enough: Republicans completely exempted mail ballots from their odious and racist voter ID law, which they rammed through in 2011, because they knew full well that voting by mail benefited them. This was part of the litigation against the voter ID law, because the over-65 population was (and still is) so much whiter than the state as a whole. The reason Republicans are melting down over mail ballots and screaming “fraud!” every time the subject comes up isn’t because this is some long-held belief of theirs. It’s because voting by mail is no longer their private playground. The Democrats have gotten good at it, and that is something they cannot abide. If there’s one thing that’s clear from all this, it’s that the Republicans will hurt their own voters if they believe the action they’re taking hurts Democratic voters more. That’s what this is all about.
