Election 2022

From the inbox:

Houston Leaders Call on Channel 11 To Retract Discredited Report On 2022 Election Paper Shortages

Two New Investigations Debunk Central Claims Presented to the Public by KHOU; Deeply Flawed and Misleading Report Used As Basis by Gov. Abbott and Election Deniers to Call for New Harris County Election, Continues to be Used as Justification for Anti-Democratic State Bills Targeting Harris County

Today, New Economy for Working Houston and Greater Houston LULAC Council called for Houston CBS affiliate KHOU to immediately retract an analysis it aired on Jan.30 implying that 121 voting locations in Harris County ran out of paper on election day last year. The request comes as two separate and independent investigations by the Houston Chronicle and Houston Public Media found that while there were technical glitches on election day, there is no evidence voters were systematically disenfranchised nor that any issues were significant enough to change the outcome of any contested race.

A day after KHOU’s report aired, Governor Abbott used the KHOU report to raise the possibility of calling a new election. Local State Sen. Paul Bettencourt has exploited the story to imply malfeasance. Making matters worse, the analysis has been exploited by partisan elected officials to justify dangerous bills, including SB 823, SB 1750, SB 1039, and SB 1993, which are now poised to pass the state legislature. These bills create a way for partisan state officials to strip Harris County residents of its authority to have local officials conduct elections and will criminalize the routine work of public servants in Houston, creating a culture of fear and making the process of running elections – already a complicated process in the state’s largest county – even harder.

The request for KHOU to retract its now discredited analysis is being made in a letter addressed to News Director Liz Roldan.

Key facts driving the request include the following:

It is not true that 121 locations ran out of paper in Harris County, as KHOU’s story implies. The Chronicle and Houston Public Media investigations both independently found only 20 polling places ran out of paper “some for only 15 minutes and others for up to three hours.”

KHOU’s report left out vital context about the differences between the 2018 and 2022 elections in its comparison of turnout at voting locations. Between those years, the County moved to countywide voting (a large percentage of voters do not vote at their home precinct), a key fact omitted in its analysis.

KHOU failed to prove in its reporting that election day glitches systematically hindered voting and affected the outcome of the elections. Despite a major marketing campaign to find disenfranchised voters by political operatives, to this day, there have not been any voters able to testify under oath that they could not cast their vote.

KHOU’s own political experts have distanced themselves from the analysis. According to KHOU analyst and Rice University political science professor Bob Stein, “I know I work for Channel 11, so it’s going to be a hard thing to say…but they didn’t ask the obvious question: did it impede voting?”

About New Economy for Working Houston

New Economy for Working Houston (NEW Houston) is a non-profit organization that brings together the power of grassroots organizing and public policy innovation to win a just economy for Gulf Coast working families. We seek to build an inclusive regional economy where workers and neighborhoods thrive, and where people of color, immigrants, women, and low-income residents have an equal voice and share equally in regional prosperity.

See here for some background, and here for a copy of the letter, signed by Hany Khalil, Executive Director of the Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation, and Chair of New Economy for Working Houston (NEW Houston), and by Dr. Sergio Lira, President, Greater Houston LULAC Council 4967. You can learn more about NEW Houston here; I’ve gotten a few emails from them, mostly about the bad election bills that have been moving through the Lege. There’s not much besides mission statements on the website now, but we’ll see where they go from here. I don’t expect much from this effort – news organizations usually need a pretty big shove to retract a story – but it’s worth the effort to try.

The sore loser election contest lawsuits have been delayed

May 8th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

This obituary of local Republican activist and professional election denier/vote suppressor Alan Vera was far too kind to him – Votebeat did a better job of accurately capturing his “achievements” – but it did contain one useful piece of information, which I will note here so that when the question comes up later we’ll know the answer.

Vera was also a key witness in the upcoming trial to decide an election contest challenge brought by GOP judicial candidate Erin Lunceford, who lost her race against incumbent 189th District Judge Tamika Craft by 2,743 votes.

Lunceford’s legal team was relying on Vera to explain several types of alleged voting irregularities and asked for an extension on the trial date because of Vera’s death. Judge David Peeples said the trial would likely be postponed from mid-June to early August.

Guess they need time to find someone who can make shit up with as much flair. Anyway, it was in one of the parts of the Chron stories that I didn’t quote from in these posts that said the trial was expected to start in mid-June. Now it will be in August, barring any further delays. You would be forgiven if you had missed this update, as no normal person would bother reading a story like this, but I did and now you benefit from that sacrifice. You’re welcome.

Precinct analysis: State Senate and SBOE 2022

Apr 25th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

PREVIOUSLY:
State House 2022
A comparison with 2012
Congress 2022

As with Congress there won’t be much to see here. The fewer the districts, the more precise the redistricting can be. Here’s the State Senate:


Dist  Abbott   Abb%     Beto  Beto%
===================================
19    96,050  43.8%  119,728  54.6%
20    78,929  44.9%   94,682  53.8% 
21    88,609  40.5%  126,105  57.7%
27    87,773  49.0%   88,970  49.6%

02   168,600  59.2%  112,075  39.4%
07   172,986  60.0%  111,308  38.6%
08   195,298  58.3%  134,859  40.3%
09   161,729  57.4%  115,562  41.0%
11   164,256  58.7%  111,345  39.8%
12   205,220  58.4%  141,603  40.3%
25   237,836  60.0%  152,508  38.5%

SD27 is the former Eddie Lucio district, and Dems just barely hung on to it last year. Freshman Sen. Morgan LaMantia will be on the ballot again next year, and obviously I hope that being the incumbent plus it being a Presidential year will help her out. I’m sure Republicans will put a lot of money into it anyway. The other Dem districts don’t particularly worry me, but we will of course look for any trends.

Not much to say about the Republican-held districts. Angela Paxton, out there opposing any exceptions to Texas’ forced birth laws, and she’ll be on the 2024 ballot as well. It sure would be nice to put a lot of money into making that a campaign issue, if only to see what if any traction there is to be had with it. Her SD08 and all of the others are in that pile of “districts that moved at least somewhat in a blue direction last decade”, and if there are to be any potential flips on this part of the ledger we’ll need that to continue.

Onto the SBOE:


Dist  Abbott   Abb%     Beto  Beto%
===================================
01   205,022  44.6%  246,944  53.7%
03   218,370  44.7%  263,062  53.8%

02   206,855  51.6%  188,418  47.0%
06   351,539  57.1%  254,937  41.4%
07   348,281  59.8%  225,552  38.8%
08   284,992  59.2%   89,318  39.3%
12   402,314  59.9%  260,723  38.8%

SBOE2, which had been on a knife’s edge last decade, is now Republican-held, meaning the Dems are back to having five seats. It seems that the new map made the now-Dem SBOE5 a lot bluer at least partly at SBOE3’s expense, as it had been a 65%-plus district before. Again, I’m not worried about either of those two, but as above we’ll keep an eye on them. I don’t know when we’ll get a crack at SBOE2 again – unlike in the Senate, the process to determine who gets the two-year term and who gets the four-year term in the SBOE doesn’t draw much coverage. Given the size of these districts, unless the state itself turns blue I don’t see any other competitive races on the horizon. I’d love to be proven wrong, but these districts have a lot of slack in them. For all that SBOE6 shifted last decade, it stayed red in the end. It’s now been reset to 2012 levels, and at this point the best case scenario looks like a repeat of that cycle. Again, I’ll be happy to be too pessimistic about that.

There were fewer voting sites with paper issues than we thought

Apr 21st, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

That’s my takeaway from this.

On Election Day last year, an unusual problem occurred around 6 p.m. — the polling place at El Lago City Hall ran out of paper ballots.

Republican presiding judge Chris Russo, the election worker running the polling location in the far southeast corner of Harris County, said he had been calling the county elections office’s hotline for more than three hours to request more paper. Russo said he told the 40 or so voters waiting in line that they had a few options.

“If you stay in line, you will vote today,” he recounted telling them. “But if you think you can make it to another polling location that has ballot paper and you think that is a better use of your time, you are free to do so.”

When the county finally delivered more paper at 9 p.m., only a handful of people remained and were able to vote.

El Lago was one of about 20 polling locations in Harris County that ran out of paper on Election Day, according to a Houston Chronicle review of county data and interviews with dozens of poll workers. That is a tiny fraction of the 782 polling places across the sprawling county that day.

Now, the ballot shortages in Harris County are placing local election officials at the center of a legal showdown and a raging political debate in Austin as the GOP-controlled Legislature is trying to move urgently to strip local officials of the power to oversee elections. County election officials also face scrutiny from lawsuits filed by 22 local Republican candidates who lost and a separate suit by Houston furniture mogul Jim McIngvale. One of the lawsuits, involving a Texas House race was dismissed by Speaker Dade Phelan in January.

A Houston Chronicle examination of election data found that while there were problems and technical glitches, there remains no evidence voters were systematically disenfranchised. Nor is there evidence the Election Day issues prompted people not to vote in numbers great enough to change the outcome of any of the races being contested.

Nonetheless, without all the facts being known, bills filed in Austin this year could make it easier for the state to order new elections, strip the county’s oversight and authority to conduct elections. They would also add criminal penalties for running out of ballot paper, create a team of state marshals to investigate election code violations and file criminal charges, and abolish the county Elections Administrators office.

The remaining lawsuits filed by 21 local Republican candidates include one from Republican Alexandra del Moral Mealer, whose bid to oust incumbent County Judge Lina Hidalgo fell short by more than 18,000 votes. These candidates are asking judges to overturn the results and order new elections. Most of those candidates lost their races by 12,000 to 29,000 votes, according to official county results.

The argument made in most of those lawsuits is that Election Day problems, including ballot paper shortages and technical issues that delayed the opening of some polls, resulted in polling locations turning away thousands of voters whose ballots could have changed the outcome of those races.

It is impossible to know if or how many people at El Lago City Hall, let alone countywide, did not vote because of paper shortages or other technical or equipment malfunctions.

Harris County uses a countywide voting system, meaning voters could cast ballots at any of 782 polling locations on Election Day instead of being restricted to their home precincts. Voters turned away from one location could go to another polling place, typically about a mile away.

To win, the plaintiffs would need to prove that voting irregularities affected the election results.

That could prove a high bar to clear.

Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, said the challenge will be proving that people intended to vote but could not.

“If they ended up voting, it’s clear that it wasn’t so onerous that they weren’t able to effectively overcome it,” he said.

Twenty locations is quite a bit fewer than what I had previously seen in mostly Chron stories. It’s also a lot lower than the 121 locations claimed to have had problems by a KHOU story that I missed, which according to this companion story is the basis for a lot of bullshit claims and bad bills. What continues to be missing from all of these articles are the names and stories of people who were actually unable to vote as the result of any paper shortages. Which is still the only thing that matters as far as the contested elections go.

Go read both stories, they’re well reported and quite informative. The first one does a good job of showing where voting slowed down or stopped as a result of paper outages; in all cases, there were just more people showing up at that location than there had been paper to begin with. That kind of missed guess about Election Day turnout is a tale as old as time, and had we still been using the old non-paper machines, no one would have noticed. This story has been blown so far out of proportion it’s hard to even recognize it. See reporter Jen Rice’s Twitter thread for more.

UPDATE: While I don’t think this bill to ban county voting centers on Election Day will get through the House, it must be noted that if it does and there are problems of any kind on Election Day that affects the ability to vote, the people at the affected locations will be well and truly screwed. It’s paranoid bullshit all the way down.

Precinct analysis: Congress 2022

Apr 4th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

PREVIOUSLY:
State House 2022
A comparison with 2012

This will be short and bland, as there ain’t many competitive Congressional districts by any metric.


Dist  Abbott   Abb%    Beto   Beto%
===================================
28    79,478  46.4%   88,550  51.7%
34    57,793  42.7%   75,741  55.9%

15    81,095  52.4%   71,649  46.3%
23   116,353  54.4%   94,259  44.1%

03   163,075  59.1%  108,840  39.5%
12   143,586  59.9%   92,478  38.6%
22   144,862  59.5%   95,274  39.1% 
24   172,837  57.5%  123,159  41.0%

I could do a similar comparison to 2012, but that won’t tell us much. We already know that the swing seat list at that time was the then-Dem held CD23, and that was about it. CD23 flipped red in 2014 and managed to stay there, while CDs 07 and 32 went blue in 2018 and are now a much darker blue, to help make their formerly swingy neighbors more reliably red. This is what redistricting is all about.

Not a whole lot to say here. Republican interest in CD34 is already starting to wane, and I suspect we’re all going to be stuck with Henry Cuellar for the foreseeable future. Whatever one may say about Jessica Cisneros and any future efforts to oust Cuellar in a primary, the narrative that his district is “dark blue”, which wasn’t the case in 2020 or 2022, will hopefully die. I do think a better Dem than Cuellar can hold that district, but anyone who claims that basically any Dem could do so is at best kidding themselves. Let’s please put some more thought into this if we try again next year, that’s all I’m saying.

The best Dem pickup chance, at least on paper, is the seat that redistricting helped take away in CD15. Maybe CD23 becomes interesting again if the Republicans fully indulge in their fury against Rep. Tony Gonzales, or maybe like Cuellar and CD28 there exists room for someone more orthodox to hold the seat. On the one hand, Republican primary voters are not known for making rational, calculated choices. On the other hand, that is still a ten-point margin. You pay your money and you take your chances.

I continue to believe that the best target will end up being CD24 again, but that will likely take a couple of cycles. Maybe CDs 03 and 22 can join it, if we pray hard enough to the Demography Gods. I dunno. I will of course keep an eye on this, and I am somehow still a cockeyed optimist in these matters, but for now my forecast is that the Congressional landscape is boring. I hope to be wrong about that sooner rather than later.

Precinct analysis: Looking back at the 2012 landscape

Mar 27th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

PREVIOUSLY: State House 2022

We’ve had our first look at the way the new State House districts performed, and while we can expect the 2024 election to be a little different, it’s clear at this time that there aren’t many swing seats out there, even with a fairly expansive definition of “swing”. That’s by design, of course, and it’s clear Republicans have gotten pretty good at doing what they do. But I think we all recall feeling similar emotions following the 2012 election, and while it took awhile, we did see some massive changes in how districts were perceived over time. So let’s wind the clock back a decade and see what the landscape looked like at first. We’ll start with the Republican seats as of this time in 2013, using the same “under 55%” and “55-60%” standards as before.


Dist  Romney   Rom%    Obama Obama%
===================================
023   31,282  54.6%   25,365  44.2%
043   25,017  52.0%   22,554  46.9%
052   30,763  54.7%   23,849  42.4%
054   25,343  52.9%   21,909  45.7%
102   29,198  53.0%   24,958  45.3%
105   23,228  52.1%   20,710  46.5%
107   27,185  51.8%   24,593  46.9%
113   27,095  52.5%   23,891  46.3%

Dist  Romney   Rom%    Obama Obama%
===================================
032   28,992  56.9%   21,104  41.4%
045   35,298  55.2%   26,757  41.8%
047   50,843  58.0%   34,440  39.3%
065   31,456  57.5%   22,334  40.8%
096   36,190  58.6%   24,838  40.2%
097   39,614  59.6%   25,881  38.9%
108   40,564  59.0%   27,031  39.3%
112   28,221  55.0%   22,308  43.5%
114   35,795  55.2%   28,182  43.5%
115   30,275  55.4%   23,556  43.1%
132   31,432  58.9%   21,214  39.8%
134   46,926  56.4%   34,731  41.7%
135   32,078  58.8%   21,732  39.8%
136   35,296  55.1%   26,423  41.2%
138   27,489  59.2%   18,256  39.3%

Ironically, the first two districts listed here are ones that quickly disappeared from the “competitive” rankings. Both HDs 23 and 43 trended red over the decade, and neither has had a serious Democratic challenge since 2014. (HD23 was won, for the last time, by Democrat Craig Eiland in 2012; HD43 became Republican after the 2010 election when its incumbent switched parties.) Most of the other districts in both tables above are now Democratic, with HD132 being Dem for one cycle after being flipped in 2018 and flipped back in 2020. HD107 was the first Dem takeover, in 2016, while HD134 turned blue in 2020. All the rest came over in 2018.

It should be noted that as of the 2012 election, there were only 55 Democrat-held districts. Three went red in the 2014 debacle, with two of those (HDs 117 and 144) plus HD107 flipping back in 2016. Dems have 64 seats now, and could with a bit of optimism get to the 67 that they had after the 2018 wave. After that, you’re relying on either a steady march of favorable demographic progress, or another shakeup in the national landscape that makes formerly unfriendly turf more amenable. Which is indeed what happened last decade – in the previous decade, it was more the march of demography – but past performance does not guarantee future results. The Republicans have made some gains in formerly dark blue turf, too, as they had in 2010 when they managed to finally win in historically Democratic rural areas. You can’t say from here which way or how far the wheel will spin.

In the end, there were 22 “competitive” seats by our metric as of 2013. Fourteen of them were won after then at least once by a Democrat, with thirteen of them net for Team Blue. I have 34 such seats in 2023. I’d say that’s a combination of Texas being modestly bluer overall – remember that Mitt Romney took 57% in 2012 while Donald Trump took 52% in 2020; Greg Abbott got 59% in 2014 and 54% in 2022 – with Republicans having to spread themselves a little thinner in order to hold as many of these seats as a result. We’ll just have to wait and see how it all ends up.

On the other side of the ledger, the “swing” Dem-held seats of a decade’s hence:


Dist  Romney   Rom%    Obama Obama%
===================================
034   19,974  44.2%   24,668  54.6%
078   19,013  44.0%   23,432  54.3%
117   20,036  46.7%   22,234  51.8%
144   11,606  47.9%   12,308  50.8% 

Dist  Romney   Rom%    Obama Obama%
===================================
041   14,906  42.3%   19,935  56.5%
048   32,025  39.5%   46,031  56.8%
050   22,906  38.8%   34,110  57.8%
074   16,738  41.5%   22,955  56.9%
118   17,824  43.3%   22,719  55.2%
125   19,004  39.5%   28,374  59.0%
148   16,296  41.1%   22,449  56.6% 
149   18,183  41.8%   24,839  57.1%

Not nearly as many as there are now, and basically none of them became more competitive over the course of the 2010s. HDs 117 and 144 did flip in 2014 but returned to the fold the following election. A couple of these districts, specifically HDs 34 and 74, are legitimately competitive now, at least by the statewide numbers, and of course HD118 was drawn to be considerably redder and is now Republican-held but tenuously so. While it’s on the Dem target list now, I expect it will be on the Republicans’ target list in two years.

I have a total of 19 competitive-by-this-metric seats as of now, but as noted I only expect a couple of them to truly behave that way. Dems will have more “real” targets, up until such time as they begin winning them. But maybe some of those South Texas seats will begin to drift away and we’ll be having a very different conversation in, say, 2026. Again, we’ll just have to see how it plays out. For now, it’s clear that there are more “competitive” seats in 2023 than there were in 2013. We’ll check back later to see how or if that changes.

Precinct analysis: State House 2022

Mar 20th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

We have data.

Texas Democrats and Republicans are beginning to gear up for a presidential election cycle in which opportunities to flip seats for Congress and the Legislature appear limited.

It’s a natural outcome after Republicans redrew legislative and congressional district boundaries in 2021 to shore up their majorities for the next decade, stamping out most districts that had turned competitive by the end of the last decade. Most of the remaining competitive territory was in South Texas, which is predominantly Hispanic, and where the GOP poured almost all their resources in 2022 — to mixed results.

On paper, there are few obvious pickup opportunities based on an analysis of the governor’s race results in each district. Among U.S. House seats, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke did not carry any districts that are currently held by a representative from the other party. The same was true in the Texas Senate. And among state House districts, Abbott and O’Rourke each won only one that is currently controlled by the opposing party.

The statewide election results often provide a helpful guide of how a district is trending given that they often represent the highest-turnout contest in a district.

The size of the battlefield in 2024 could depend on the top of the ticket, which will be the presidential race. President Joe Biden is expected to run for reelection, and the Republican frontrunner to challenge him is former President Donald Trump, whose 2016 and 2020 runs yielded some of the closest presidential races in Texas in recent history. His closest competitor for the nomination is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has not launched a campaign yet but is widely expected to jump in.

There are other factors for the down-ballot contests that remain to be seen.

Even though Abbott signed off on redistricting in 2021, the lines could still change for the 2024 election. Various groups are suing over the maps, alleging things like intentional discrimination and efforts to dilute voters of color, and they are currently awaiting a trial in federal court in El Paso. On the line in the case are boundaries for seats such as a San Antonio state House seat currently held by GOP Rep. John Lujan; that seat is a top battleground in the Texas House.

My initial view of the new map, which looked at the past elections of the decade, is here, and an index of my look at the results from the 2020 election under the old maps is here. I’ll look at the other types of results in future posts, but today we focus on the State House. The 2022 data for the new map is here.

The gist of this story is that the Republican redistricting was very effective and that there aren’t many competitive districts, which means we’re headed for some boring elections, much as we had in the first couple of cycles last decade. That’s slightly less true for the State House than it is for the other entities, and I think the 2024 environment will at least differ enough from last year to produce some variance.

I’m presenting the districts of interest in two groups. One is the competitive Dem-held districts, the other is the same for Republicans. I’ve sorted them further into districts where Abbott or Beto took less than 55%, and districts where they won between 55 and 60 percent. With all that said, here we go. First up are the closer districts currently held by Dems.


Dist  Abbott   Abb%    Beto   Beto%
===================================
022   17,170  44.5%   20,822  54.0%
034   18,285  47.0%   20,128  51.7%
070   27,581  45.9%   31,749  52.8%
074   18,915  48.7%   19,218  49.5%
080   20,611  51.9%   18,249  46.0%

035    9,867  39.9%   14,517  58.7%
036   10,835  39.0%   16,525  59.4%
039   12,056  40.0%   17,686  58.7%
041   17,364  43.5%   22,125  55.5%
045   26,119  38.9%   39,783  59.2%
076   20,148  39.8%   29,705  58.6%
078   21,133  41.4%   29,140  57.0%
092   14,217  40.2%   20,680  58.4%
105   13,086  42.1%   17,515  56.4% 
113   17,848  41.2%   24,854  57.4%
115   22,605  42.1%   30,334  56.5%
135   16,443  40.0%   24,121  58.6%
144   11,566  43.3%   14,683  55.0%
148   15,451  41.2%   21,460  57.2%

As the story notes, the Republicans somehow failed to field a challenger to Rep. Tracy King in HD80, an oversight I expect they’ll fix in 2024. They made the same mistake in 2010 with then-Rep. Allan Ritter in HD21, but Ritter, an old school conservative rural Dem, rectified their error by switching parties. King, whose district is considerably bluer than Ritter’s was, seems unlikely to follow suit; among other things, he’s been pushing to raise the age to buy automatic weapons from 18 to 21, which puts him at odds with Republican orthodoxy. Never say never, and if the district continues a trend towards the red King could be amenable to such overtures, but for now I don’t see that happening.

For the others, HD70 is a newly-drawn Dem district, and I’d expect it to get bluer over time. HD74, which Rep. Eddie Morales won by 11 despite its closeness at the statewide level, was modestly blue based on 2020 results and should be more so in 2024, though if that isn’t true then expect a bigger fight later on. HD34 was purple-ish before redistricting, and as with HD74 I think it will be bluer next year, but again keep an eye on it. The one district that I think will become more vulnerable over time is HD22, in Jefferson County, which has a declining population and much like Galveston County in the 2000s and 2010s a reddish trend over the past decade. I’d like to see some effort made to shore it up, but I don’t know enough about the local conditions to know how feasible that is. Feel free to chime in if you do.

None of the other districts concern me. The Latino districts, I’d like to see what they look like in 2024. They’re all actually pretty spot on to the 2020 numbers, which given the overall lackluster Dem showing in many areas is moderately encouraging. The rest of them are in overall strong Dem areas, and I don’t expect any reversion of past trends.

Now for the Republican-held seats that Dems might like to target:


Dist  Abbott   Abb%    Beto   Beto%
===================================
037   20,551  51.1%   19,202  47.7%
052   41,813  52.5%   36,500  45.8%
063   35,831  54.8%   28,630  43.8%
094   34,479  54.7%   27,557  43.8%
108   46,796  52.6%   41,022  46.1%
112   35,245  50.6%   33,467  48.0%
118   25,172  48.5%   25,952  50.0%
121   40,300  51.1%   37,368  47.4%
122   47,856  54.7%   38,491  44.0%
133   33,195  54.4%   26,971  44.2%
138   31,077  54.1%   25,464  44.3%

014   27,936  56.9%   20,207  41.1%
020   48,367  56.5%   35,743  41.8%
025   31,545  59.3%   20,785  39.1%
026   36,266  57.7%   25,683  40.8%
028   38,940  58.1%   27,061  40.4%
029   33,393  58.8%   22,579  39.7%
054   23,763  59.7%   15,463  38.8%
055   28,125  58.4%   19,322  40.1%
057   37,715  58.1%   26,311  40.5%
061   39,753  56.1%   30,211  42.7%
065   41,487  56.9%   30,451  41.7%
066   41,464  56.9%   30,421  41.8%
067   38,127  56.3%   28,647  42.3%
089   38,701  57.5%   27,643  41.1%
093   34,136  57.6%   24,310  41.0%
096   35,260  55.2%   27,877  43.6%
097   36,059  55.2%   28,336  43.4%
099   31,869  58.6%   21,719  39.9%
106   41,639  58.3%   28,875  40.5%
126   35,835  59.4%   23,627  39.1%
127   39,102  58.5%   26,791  40.1%
129   37,118  56.8%   27,144  41.5%
132   35,079  57.0%   25,603  41.6%
150   33,857  58.3%   23,303  40.1%

I think it’s fair to say that the failure to win back HD118 was a big disappointment last year. I’ll use a stronger word if we get the same result in 2024. HD37 remains the subject of litigation – if there’s anything on the agenda to address it in this legislative session, I am not aware of it at this time. It had a slight Democratic tilt in 2020 and will clearly be a top target next year. As will HDs 112 and 121, with 108 and 52 a notch below them, though 108 is starting to feel a bit like a white whale to me. All things being equal, Dems should be in position to make a small gain in the House next year, with some potential to do better than that, and given everything we’ve seen since the dawn of time, the potential to do a bit worse as well.

The farther-out districts are mostly those we had identified as targets following the 2018 election, with a few adjustments for the new map. They’re all in counties and regions that had been trending Democratic. For the most part, I expect that to continue, but that doesn’t have to be monotonic, nor does it have to be at a fast enough pace to make any of these places actually primed to flip. I’ve said before that the way Tarrant County was sliced up it gives me “Dallas County 2012” vibes, but whether than means that a bunch of districts eventually flip or they all hold on if by increasingly tight margins remains to be seen. We’ll know more after 2024.

In theory, there won’t be many truly competitive districts in 2024, like there weren’t last year. The national environment, plus the higher turnout context, plus whatever yet-unknown factors may be in play will surely affect that, by some amount. I’d like to see an optimistic view for next year and get as many strong candidates in as many of these districts as possible, but that’s far easier said than done. This is not that different than how things looked after the 2012 elections, and we know how things went from there. Doesn’t mean anything will go any particular way or on any timetable, it’s just a reminder that there’s only so much we can know right now. I’ll have some thoughts about the other district types going forward. Let me know what you think.

You still have time to donate to the Democratic judges’ legal fund

Mar 2nd, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Just a reminder:

Here @JudgeGenesis Draper. She is 1 of 17 elected Harris County Dem. judges sued to undo ‘22 election. Judges can’t take pro bono help to defend selves. Can’t let Mattress Mack undo election wins. Clubs In Action raising legal $ for judges. Please help. https://mailchi.mp/3860a20fae8b/we-need-your-help?e=cf7bb2b770&fbclid=IwAR3bf6Pdu4mhPHiTnPDtpzT361sMx5VyDAxSnUXy7qM7EbTLGfZabSUiT4w

— Clubs in Action PAC (@CIAHTX) 8:32 PM – 27 February 2023

See here for the background. That link takes you here, and while the in-person fundraiser mentioned there is now over, the Donate link remains. But due to a change in state law, you only have until March 8 to make a contribution. That’s a new statutory deadline for all judicial fundraising – it used to be the case that judges who were involved in lawsuits could continue past that deadline, but the law was changed in the last session, so here we are. Please give a few bucks if you can and help them all out. Thanks!

The furniture guy files a lawsuit

Feb 15th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

6 comments

Spare me.

Houston furniture magnate Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale has filed a lawsuit against the Harris County Elections Administrator’s office accusing it of refusing to turn over public records related to the November 2022 election, adding to an array of GOP litigation aimed at the county’s elections process.

According to the petition filed Monday night, Wayne Dolcefino, a media consultant and former TV journalist, submitted multiple requests for public information on behalf of the Gallery Furniture owner, who was a major donor supporting Republican candidates including County Judge Lina Hidalgo’s opponent Alexandra del Moral Mealer.

In response to each of the requests for public information, the elections office responded by seeking an opinion from the Texas Attorney General’s office allowing it to withhold the information due to ongoing litigation, the lawsuit states.

The petition also acknowledges the county has provided some of the requested documents.

In a statement Tuesday, Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee’s office said: “The requests for these documents were handled the same as any other requests for documents related to ongoing litigation against the county. We’re evaluating the lawsuit and will let the courts sort it out.”

The Harris County Elections Administrator’s Office also issued a statement, saying it readily has responded to requests that do not require documents subject to the litigation, and has sought an opinion from the attorney general’s office on those that do.

“According to the Public Information Act, the attorney general’s office has 45 working days from the day after the request to respond. As of today, the office has not received an opinion on how to proceed with these particular public information requests. Any suggestion that the Harris County Elections Administrator’s Office lacks transparency is false,” it said.

The lawsuit is an example of why the Texas Legislature should repeal the “litigation exception” provision in state law that offers public offices an option to withhold records during litigation, said Bill Aleshire, an Austin attorney who works with the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.

“There is no justification for denying the public information about a controversy just because it involves litigation,” Aleshire said. “In fact, when something controversial enough happens to be the subject of a lawsuit, that is exactly when the public most needs to know what the record shows. Yet, the way the (Texas Public Information Act) is written, no one — except those involved in the underlying lawsuit — can get access to the public information.”

The “litigation exception” typically is upheld by courts, so McIngvale’s lawsuit is unlikely to produce the requested records, he said.

However, state law does not prevent the county from providing the records, but rather gives the county discretion to decide.

“It does not make the records ‘confidential’ (where it would be illegal to disclose the information); it just means the government is not required to disclose the information,” Aleshire said. “But they could if they are willing to do so.”

So if I understand this correctly, the Elections Office could provide these documents on demand, but legally they don’t have to until they get an opinion on it from the AG’s office. That may be a bad feature of the law as it now exists, but it is the law and a district court is highly unlikely to deviate from the normal course of behavior. Which makes this entire spectacle little more than a plea for attention and a waste of everyone’s time. Have I got that right? The Press has more.

You can help Democrats being sued by election losers

Feb 13th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

7 comments

From the inbox, sent to me by former HD133 candidate Sandra Moore:

Below is a list of the judges and electeds being sued by the Republicans. These are nuisance suits but the Judges and Lina have had to hire attorneys to represent them against the claims. Marilyn and Tenesha have pro bono attorneys but the others are not allowed to be represented pro bono due to conflicts of interest. The judge hearing the case is in San Antonio which complicates matters re time to get there and back for hearings. The travel time alone for the attorneys will be in the thousands when ZOOM meetings are not allowed! The average attorney charges $500 per hour. The fee can’t be lowered due to “appearance of impropriety” issues. The judges listed as well as Lina have little in their campaign coffers. That’s how it is for the judges. One judge whose race is being challenged, David Fleisher, lives in 133. This is the state house district in which I ran back in 2018 and 2020.

I was on several endorsements interviews with some of these judges through a different organization. This is how I learned how little was in their campaign accounts. The Republicans picked the judges with some of the smallest accounts.

It is believed that the purpose of these suits is to drag out the cases, have judges dip into personal resources, and be exhausted financially and emotionally by the time of their next race.

The Harris County Democratic Party is NOT doing anything to assist the 22 electeds. If even one is bounced, Abbott could appoint a replacement for those in the criminal courts. Judges are being sued “in their individual capacity.” That is why each person named in a suit has to retain their own attorney.

CLUBS IN ACTION is trying to raise 95K to donate to them. The maximum that a judge can receive from a PAC is $5000, so that is the goal for each judge and for Lina. We all know that Lina received very little in campaign contributions, especially compared to Mealer.

During the election CIA knocked on 300,000 doors. WHD knocked on about 1500. We worked hard to make this happen. No one wants all this hard work to go to waste. So, if you are willing to make a donation to CIA that would be great.

I was invited to this meeting because of the effort to create and carry out block walking events.

If you decide to make a contribution a check can be sent to:

CLUBS IN ACTION
2504 Rusk St. #110
Houston, TX 77003.

CIA plans to hold a fundraiser, hopefully on Feb 19. But I will send out word when I learn more. There is a deadline of MARCH 8 to raise funds!!

[…]

1 Cause No. 2023-00964; Alexandra Mealer v. Lina Hidalgo. Alexander Mealer is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Hidalgo is represented by Neal Manne.

2 Cause No. 2023-00925; Michelle Fraga v. Judge Christine Weems. Michelle Fraga is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Weems is represented by John Raley.

3 Cause No. 2023-00924; Elizabeth Buss v. Judge David Fleischer. Elizabeth Buss is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Fleischer is represented by John Raley.

4 Cause No. 2023-00841; Tami Pierce v. Judge DaSean Jones. Tami Pierce is representing herself with co-counsel, Paul Simpson. Judge Jones is represented by Oliver Brown.

5 Cause No. 2022-79328; Erin Lunceford v. Judge Tami Craft. Erin Lunceford is represented by Andy Taylor. Judge Craft is represented by Steve Kherker.

6 Cause No. 2023-00927; Bruce Bain v. Judge Corey Sepolio. Bruce Bain is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Sepolio is represented by John Raley.

7 Cause No. 2023-00932; Chris Daniel v. Marilyn Burgess. Chris Daniel is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Clerk Burgess is represented by Neal Manne.

8 Cause No. 2023-00930; Mark Goldberg v. Judge Erika Ramirez. Mark Goldberg is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Ramirez is represented by John Staley.

9 Cause No. 2023-00934; Brian Staley v. Judge Monica Singh. Brian Staley is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Singh is represented by Anthony Drumheller.

10 Cause No. 2023-00936; Mark Montgomery v. Judge Kelley Andrews. Mark Montgomery is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Andrews is represented by John Raley.

11 Cause No. 2023-00937; Matthew Dexter v. Judge Genesis Draper. Matthew Dexter is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Draper is represented by John Raley.

12 Cause No. 2023-00952; Nile Copeland v. Judge Latosha Lewis Payne. Nile Copeland is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Payne is represented by John Raley.

13 Cause No. 2023-00958; Rory Olsen v. Judge Jason Cox. Rory Olsen is represented by Jared Woodfill. Judge Cox is represented by Cris Feldman.

14 Cause No. 2023-00955; James Lombardino v. Judge Audrie Lawton-Evans. James Lombardino is represented by Jared Woodfill. Judge Lawton-Evans is represented by Anthony Drumheller.

15 Cause No. 2023-01202; Stan Stanart v. Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth. Stan Stanart is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Clerk Hudspeth is represented by Neal Manne.

16 Cause No. 2023-01066; Dan Simons v. Judge Sedrick Walker. Dan Simons is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Walker is represented by John Raley.

17 Cause No. 2023-301111; Will Archer v. Judge James Horwitz. Will Archer is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Horwitz is represented by John Raley.

18 Cause No. 2023-01103; Kyle Scott v. Carla Wyatt. Kyle Scott is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Ms. Wyatt is represented by Neal Manne.

19 Cause No. 2023-01076; Aaron Adams v. Judge LaShawn Williams. Aaron Adams is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Williams is represented by Anthony Drumheller.

20 Cause No. 2023-01067; Dan Spjut v. Judge Juanita Jackson. Dan Spjut is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Jackson is represented by John Raley.

21 Cause No. 2023-01052; Sartaj Bal v. Judge Toria Finch. Sartaj Bal is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Finch is represented by Anthony Drumheller.

I will pass along information about the fundraiser when I have it. You can also contribute to any candidate you like directly – just google them or find their campaign Facebook page to get to a suitable Donate link for them. It’s deeply annoying that we have to do this – as a reminder, these cases are stinking piles of nothing and the losers pursuing them damn well know it – but it’s where we are. Let’s make it a little less hard for these Dems who clearly and correctly won their races.

Even the Republicans know their election contests are losers

Feb 8th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

This Chron story is about Dan Patrick telling a group of local Republicans that the 2022 election should be re-done in Harris County, because he has nothing better to say or do with his time. His claims, which the story notes he does not try to verify, aren’t worth the effort to copy and paste, but this tidbit caught my eye:

Without citing any examples of disenfranchised voters, the petition asks the court to declare the elections office made mistakes substantial enough to affect the outcome of the election.

According to Mealer’s petition, “there is no dispute that there were several dozens of polling locations who at some point in the day, ran out of paper and turned voters away.”

Tatum has maintained that while paper supplies ran low at some locations, the county has not been able to confirm whether any voters were turned away as a result.

Republican judicial candidate Erin Lunceford filed an election contest lawsuit in December after losing Harris County’s 189th judicial district court race to Democrat Tamika Craft.

In an email obtained by Craft’s attorneys and posted on the Harris County District Clerk’s website, Harris County Republican Party Chair Cindy Siegel gave candidates the party’s estimate of disenfranchised voters. Siegel’s email was sent on Jan 3, three days before the deadline to file election contest lawsuits.

“Based upon information to date we believe there were approximately 2,600 or more estimated voters turned away due to running out of ballot paper or machines not working for a period of time,” Siegel wrote.

It’s unclear whether that estimate would be enough to flip even the narrowest margins, as in Lunceford’s race, which Craft won by 2,743 votes out of more than 1 million ballots cast, or 0.26 percent of the vote.

The margins are far wider in some other races candidates are contesting. District Clerk candidate Chris Daniel lost by 25,640 votes, while County Clerk candidate Stan Stanart lost by 34,448 votes.

The election contests will be heard by Judge David Peeples of Bexar County. A trial date has not been set yet.

Emphasis mine, and see here for the previous entry. Note that as yet, not a single person has been identified as someone who showed up at a voting center on Election Day, was actually unable to cast a ballot while there because of paper issues, left before the problem was resolved, was unable to go to any of the 750 other voting locations in the county, and ultimately did not cast a ballot. Maybe such people exist and Republicans have been successful at keeping them all quiet until the lawsuits are heard, who can say. At this point, three months out, they seem as plausible as Bigfoot sightings, but let’s take Cindy Siegel at her word and assume the existence of 2600 actual people who were actually unable to cast a ballot on Election Day.

And if we do assume that statement to be a fact, then it is still the case that every single one of those Republican losers are still losers, with most of them still losing by more than a full percentage point, which is well above the standard for recounts that the loser doesn’t have to pay for. And that assumes that literally every one of those 2600 non-voters would have voted for the Republican candidate. Which would be so outlandishly unlikely as to appear to be its own conspiracy. I know that the Republicans are claiming that these problems took place at mostly Republican locations – another claim that is dubious at best and seemingly contradicted by news reporting on Election Day – but even the most partisan locations aren’t unanimous. In all likelihood, these votes would more or less split fifty-fifty, as a microcosm of the larger election, but let’s go ahead and assume the “friendly turf” claim as well. Suppose these votes split 80-20 for the Republicans, which would be plausible for an exclusive sample of such locations. That would mean that the Republicans netted about 1600 votes, which I need not point out is even farther away from closing the gap. If the margin is 60-40, the net gain is about 500 votes. Even under the most ludicrously generous assumptions, the math just plain doesn’t work.

And whatever else you may think about Dan Patrick, he’s not an idiot. He knows this. He also knows that his audience doesn’t care, and he knows that if he keeps repeating the lie, some people who don’t pay close attention will just think that the election was a mess and we don’t really know who won and maybe these “election integrity” laws that the Republicans keep passing have some merit. Winning takes many forms, after all. The Trib, which reported Patrick’s remarks but didn’t fact check them, and Campos, who called the Trib story “lazyarse reporting”, have more.

Precinct analysis: The different kinds of courts

Jan 30th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

PREVIOUSLY
Beto versus Abbott
Beto versus the spread
Hidalgo versus Mealer
Better statewide races
Not as good statewide races
County executive offices
Houston/not Houston

I’ve spent a lot of time and space on this blog talking about judicial races and trying to make sense of their numbers. As we’ve discussed, there is consistently a three-to-four point range between the top-scoring Democratic judicial candidate and the lowest-scoring one. That range is consistent across years, across baseline Democratic performance levels, across different types of judicial races. I’ve looked but never found patterns that I think satisfactorily and consistently explain the variations.

This was an interesting year for multiple reasons – the first non-Presidential election since the huge shift towards Democrats in 2018, the first time these judicial incumbents were running for re-election, tons of money being spent by Republicans and their backers to smear Criminal Court judges, the high-profile County Judge race that was closely tied to that same campaign spending, the first non-Presidential year with no straight-ticket voting, coming in a year with the extra-long ballot and so on. There were a lot of contradictory polls and a lot of dubious conventional wisdom, including questionable pronouncements about voters getting worn out before they reached the end of the ballot, and how that would be bad for Democrats.

In the end, the results largely defied negative pronouncements about Democrats’ chances. I turn as always to the numbers to see what they tell us. One way that I decided to approach this was to look at the different type of judicial races on the ballot, to see if there was anything interesting there. Turns out there was:


Court         R Avg    D Avg    R pct   D pct
=============================================
Appeals     520,019  549,533   48.62%  51.38%
Dist Civil  518,475  545,206   48.74%  51.26%
Dist Crim   520,900  542,986   48.96%  51.04%
Family      508,801  546,195   48.23%  51.77%
C Civil     515,292  545,092   48.60%  51.40%
C Crim      522,321  534,175   49.44%  50.56%
C Probate   511,900  540,619   48.64%  51.36%

You may have noticed that the ballot is arranged in a particular order. At a high level, it’s federal races, then state races, then county races, then city and other local entities if applicable. In this context, after the statewide offices and the legislative offices (including the SBOE), there are the judicial races. They start with the appellate courts, the 1st and 14th for those of us in Harris County, then the District Courts in numerical order, which means that Criminal District Courts and Civil District Courts are mixed together. Last in line for the state courts are the Family Courts, also in numerical order. After the last Family Court race is the County Judge, the top race in the county, and then the County Civil courts, the County Criminal courts, and finally the County Probate courts. (I am not taking the Justice of the Peace courts into consideration here, as they are not countywide and you only have one of them on your ballot.)

That’s the order displayed in the table above, so each line represents a group that came entirely after the group above it. I took the average number of votes each party’s candidates got in these races – I omitted the one Appellate Court race that had a third candidate in it so that we’d have a cleaner comparison – and the average vote percentage for each group, which you see in the table.

Breaking it down this way revealed three things to me that I might not have noticed otherwise. One is that the many millions of dollars spent by the Mealer/Mattress Mack cohort did have some effect, specifically in the criminal court races, with that effect being slightly larger in the county courts than in the district courts. Republican criminal court candidates, at both the district and county levels, actually got more votes on average than their civil court counterparts, while the Democrats in those races got fewer votes than their civil court colleagues. It’s not clear to me why the gap was greater in the county (which is to say, misdemeanor) courts; the anti-Democratic advertising wasn’t at all subtle about who was responsible for whatever outrage they were fulminating about. To the extent that it did work, the voters seemed to understand the difference between “criminal courts” and “not criminal courts”. If anyone on the Republican side thought that the other Democratic judges might become collateral damage, there’s no evidence to support that.

Two, the Family Court judges were the stars of the 2022 elections for the Democrats. The gap is the greatest between them and their Republican challengers, and they got the most votes in the aggregate of any non-appellate group. They may have drawn some support from people who otherwise voted Republican, or they got more people who might have been skipping other judicial races to push their buttons. Again, I don’t know exactly why. Just eyeballing the 2018 results – I may go back and do these calculations for that year, just as a point of comparison – I think the Dems that year did better overall than in other races, though they had about the same range of results. One thought I’ve had about this is that the Family Courts were kind of a mess before the Dem sweep of 2018 – there were some stories that made it into the papers about happenings in the Family Courts, and of course there was then-Family Court Judge Lisa Millard ruling against the city of Houston giving health insurance benefits to same-sex spouses of city employees even after DOMA had been ruled unconstitutional by SCOTUS. Maybe there’s a general impression among (at least some) voters that Republicans can’t be trusted on Family Court benches, in the way that Republicans tried to push than message about Dems on Criminal Court benches. I’m just guessing – the evidence is minimal, there aren’t that many of these races, the gap isn’t that much – but it’s what I’ve got.

And three, there’s no evidence to support the hypothesis that I have seen too many times that “ballot fatigue” disproportionately hurts Democratic candidates. Democratic Probate Court judges, all the way at the bottom of the ballot, did basically as well as their counterparts in appellate and civil court races. The dropoff in votes cast for each party from appellate to probate, and from county civil to probate, is about the same; the dropoff from district civil to probate favors the Dems. If anyone thought that eliminating straight ticket voting would give Republicans more of a chance to win these farther downballot races because Dems would lose interest or get tired or whatever, they were wrong. I made this point till I was sick of having to make it back in 2018 and again in 2020. I will never not be mad about all of the lazy, uninformed, and frankly kind of racist assumptions that went into that hypothesis.

Let me close with a visual reminder of all this. The table above is the average vote and percentage for the different types of judicial races. The chart below is the vote percentage for both parties in each of those races individually.

The Y-axis is the percentages. The X-axis is where they are on the ballot, so on the left we start with the appellate races, then go through the district and family courts, then into the county civil, criminal, and finally probate courts. You can see the four races that Dems lost, one district criminal court and three county criminal courts.

And as you can see, while there is that dip in percentage that we have discussed for the county criminal courts, it bounces right back for the probate courts. There’s no overall downward trend. Many millions of dollars in advertising was able to move the needle a bit in a handful of races, but that’s it.

I still have a couple more of these posts to work through. As always, please let me know what you think.

Precinct analysis: Inside and out of the city

Jan 17th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Most years we don’t get the data to differentiate between votes cast by residents of Houston and votes cast by Harris County non-Houston residents. There needs to be a citywide referendum of the ballot in order to get at this data. Fortunately, we had that this year, so we can take a look at how the races of interest shaped up. The usual caveat applies here, which is that this data is not exact. There are multiple precincts that are partially in Houston and partially not in Houston. Many of them have a tiny number of Houston-specific votes in them, with a much larger contingent of non-Houston votes. Counting these as Houston precincts means you wind up with a lot more total votes in Houston than were cast in the referenda elections, and gives you a distorted picture of the candidate percentages. I filter out precincts with ten or fewer votes cast in the Houston proposition elections, which is arbitrary and still yields more total votes than in the prop races themselves, but it’s close enough for these purposes. So with all that preamble, here’s the data:


Candidates    Houston   Not Hou    Hou%    Not%
===============================================
Beto          317,736   277,917  63.43%  46.22%
Abbott        175,533   314,728  35.04%  52.34%

Collier       312,803   273,337  62.81%  45.64%
Patrick       171,319   312,803  34.40%  51.84%

Garza         312,022   272,513  62.83%  45.61%
Paxton        170,642   309,499  34.36%  51.80%

Dudding       294,958   255,993  59.69%  43.03%
Hegar         185,671   324,329  37.58%  54.52%

Kleberg       296,878   257,563  60.34%  43.45%
Buckingham    184,006   323,967  37.41%  54.65%

Hays          308,304   269,169  62.61%  45.36%
Miller        184,139   324,228  37.39%  54.64%

Warford       290,364   251,323  59.02%  42.41%
Christian     181,355   319,465  36.86%  53.91%

To be clear about what this data shows, Beto won the city of Houston by a margin of 317,736 to 175,533, or 63.43% to 35.04%, while Greg Abbott carried the non-Houston parts of the county 314,728 to 277,917. This is about 493K ballots cast for those two candidates, which doesn’t count third party and write-in candidates or undervotes; I didn’t tally them all up but we’d be at around 510K total ballots defined as being “Houston”. In actuality, there were 486K total ballots cast, including undervotes, in the city prop races. Like I said, this is plenty good enough for these purposes.

As noted, I don’t have a whole lot of data for this from previous elections, but what I do have can be found in these posts:

2008
2012
2018

There were city propositions in 2010, for red light cameras and ReNew Houston, but I didn’t do the same city-versus-not-city comparisons that year, almost certainly because 2010 was such a miserable year and I just didn’t want to spend any more time thinking about it than I had to.

Looking back at those earlier years, Beto fell short of the top performers in Houston, which in 2008 and 2012 was Adrian Garcia and which in 2018 was himself, but he did better in non-Houston Harris County. That’s consistent with what I’ve said before about how Democrats have overall grown their vote in the former strong Republican areas, while falling short on turnout – this year, at least – in the strong Democratic areas. Note how even the lowest scorers this year exceeded Obama’s performance in non-Houston by three or four points in 2008 and four or five points in 2012, while doing about as well in Houston. As I’ve said, Harris County is more Democratic now. This is another way of illustrating that.

Here’s the same breakdown for the countywide races:


Candidates    Houston   Not Hou    Hou%    Not%
===============================================
Hidalgo       294,968   257,935  59.79%  43.39%
Mealer        198,286   336,434  40.19%  56.59%

Burgess       290,267   255,860  60.14%  43.81%
Daniel        192,368   328,119  39.86%  56.19%

Hudspeth      293,030   256,624  60.84%  44.00%
Stanart       188,573   326,633  39.16%  56.00%

Wyatt         293,352   256,862  60.86%  44.00%
Scott         188,623   326,849  39.14%  56.00%

No third party candidates here, just a write-in who got a handful of votes for County Judge, so the percentages mostly add up to 100. More or less the same story here, with the distinction between Houston and not-Houston being smaller than in prior years. There won’t be any citywide propositions in 2024, not if we have them this coming November, but I’ll try to use the precinct data I have here to analyze that election. In what should be a stronger Democratic year, I’ll be very interested to see how things change. As always, let me know if you have any questions.

HD135 election contest dismissed

Jan 12th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

From the inbox:

This week, Speaker of the Texas House Dade Phelan dismissed the election contest filed by Mike May, the candidate who lost to Representative Jon Rosenthal in the 2022 election for house district 135. The case was dismissed because May failed to timely pay the security of costs required by Texas law.

“This quick dismissal shows these election contests are largely about political posturing and undermining our democratic processes,” said Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee. “I thank Speaker Phelan and Representative Morgan Meyer for upholding the law and ensuring the will of the voters stands.”

Under Texas law, the Texas House of Representatives presided over this contest because it was filed by a candidate for that body. Unfortunately, more than 20 other election contests are still pending in Harris County—most of those races had greater vote margins than May’s. Those cases are expected to proceed over the next few months.

See here for the background. This one was particularly unserious, and the resolution shows how weak it was. Here’s County Attorney Menefee’s Twitter post, with a copy of the letter to May from Speaker Phelan:

NEW: Speaker Phelan dismissed losing House candidate Mike May’s election contest against @Jon_RosenthalTX because he didn’t pay the required fees.

This quick dismissal shows these election contests are largely about political posturing and undermining our democratic processes.

— Christian D. Menefee (@CDMenefee) 1:38 PM – 11 January 2023

My post about the HD135 election contest ran on December 3, so it was filed at least one day before then. The deadline for paying the required fee – I have no idea how much, but if there was even a sliver of a chance this was for real, this guy would have had no trouble getting some fat cat to pay for it as needed – was December 9. Maybe he could have gotten an extension if he’d asked and had some reason for it, but practically speaking this thing has been dead for a month.

This has no effect on the other challenges filed by other losing losers, as legislative contests are heard in the House while these others will be argued in a courtroom. They aren’t any more valid, they’re just in a different venue. From the County Attorney’s press release, they may take awhile to be resolved. I will of course keep an eye on them. The Trib, whose story published after I drafted this and which mostly recapitulates what I’ve got here, has more.

Dade Phelan easily re-elected Speaker

Jan 11th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

No drama, as expected.

Rep. Dade Phelan

Texas House of Representatives members on Tuesday voted 145-3 to elect state Rep. Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, to a second term as speaker — the most powerful position in the lower chamber.

He defeated state Rep. Tony Tinderholt, R-Arlington, who was nominated by ultraconservative members who feel Phelan is unreasonably accommodating of Democrats in the chamber. Tinderholt cast a ballot for himself, as did two Republican members who nominated him, Nate Schatzline of Tarrant County and Bryan Slaton of Royce City.

[…]

Phelan guided the House through the 2021 legislative sessions, which some observers called “the most conservative” in state history. Lawmakers passed new laws banning almost all abortions and allowing permitless carry of handguns.

But conservative grassroots activists said the House had not gone far enough on conservative priorities like banning gender-affirming care for transgender children and have often butted heads with Phelan. Critics attacked him for appointing Democrats to leadership positions in the chamber, following a long-held chamber tradition to appoint members of the minority party as committee chairs. Phelan has not budged on the issue, indicating he once again plans to allow some Democratic chairs and arguing that the Texas House operates better on a bipartisan basis and eschewing the divisiveness seen in Washington, D.C.

See here for the background. The two main differences between Speaker Phelan and Speaker Tinderholt is that Tony Tinderholt is an asshole, and Dade Phelan will appoint some Democratic committee chairs. In terms of outcomes, the Lege is still going to pass brutal right-wing legislation, with no real limit on their id beyond their own capacities for shame and empathy. I suppose there’s a chance that Speaker Phelan might help bottle up a particularly noxious bill that some Republican members would rather not have to vote on, but I wouldn’t expect much. This is where we are.

Precinct analysis: County executive offices

Jan 9th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

PREVIOUSLY
Beto versus Abbott
Beto versus the spread
Hidalgo versus Mealer
Better statewide races
Not as good statewide races

County races appear towards the bottom of the ballot, after all of the federal and state races. With the exception of County Judge, which is the first county office to appear, the other county races come after any county judicial elections, which we know in a non-presidential year is another two dozen, on top of all of the state judicial races you’ve just slogged through. In addition, unlike Presidential years when higher profile county offices like Sheriff and County Attorney and Tax Assessor appear (District Attorney is a state office), the ones on this ballot are low profile and mostly clerical in nature. You’d think this would be a recipe for a lot of indifference, but you’d be wrong.

District Clerk


Dist   Daniel  Burgess
======================
HD126  37,324   21,321
HD127  40,530   24,529
HD128  32,461   12,922
HD129  38,729   24,583
HD130  46,537   18,686
HD131   6,206   24,390
HD132  36,431   23,448
HD133  36,406   22,666
HD134  34,947   43,974
HD135  17,150   22,829
HD137   8,475   12,264
HD138  33,169   22,469
HD139  12,722   30,247
HD140   6,030   12,441
HD141   4,753   20,212
HD142   9,326   24,514
HD143   8,856   14,935
HD144  12,051   13,606
HD145  14,698   29,537
HD146   9,455   31,723
HD147  10,255   35,167
HD148  16,522   19,677
HD149  12,365   18,661
HD150  35,089   21,326
						
CC1    76,230  193,216
CC2    99,401  100,543
CC3   227,842  132,864
CC4   117,014  119,504
						
JP1    69,316  114,700
JP2    22,682   28,410
JP3    36,215   40,683
JP4   175,012  119,960
JP5   149,310  134,380
JP6     5,571   16,529
JP7    12,934   64,034
JP8    49,447   27,431

Dist  Daniel% Burgess%
======================
HD126  63.64%   36.36%
HD127  62.30%   37.70%
HD128  71.53%   28.47%
HD129  61.17%   38.83%
HD130  71.35%   28.65%
HD131  20.28%   79.72%
HD132  60.84%   39.16%
HD133  61.63%   38.37%
HD134  44.28%   55.72%
HD135  42.90%   57.10%
HD137  40.87%   59.13%
HD138  59.62%   40.38%
HD139  29.61%   70.39%
HD140  32.65%   67.35%
HD141  19.04%   80.96%
HD142  27.56%   72.44%
HD143  37.22%   62.78%
HD144  46.97%   53.03%
HD145  33.23%   66.77%
HD146  22.96%   77.04%
HD147  22.58%   77.42%
HD148  45.64%   54.36%
HD149  39.85%   60.15%
HD150  62.20%   37.80%
		
CC1    28.29%   71.71%
CC2    49.71%   50.29%
CC3    63.17%   36.83%
CC4    49.47%   50.53%
		
JP1    37.67%   62.33%
JP2    44.39%   55.61%
JP3    47.09%   52.91%
JP4    59.33%   40.67%
JP5    52.63%   47.37%
JP6    25.21%   74.79%
JP7    16.80%   83.20%
JP8    64.32%   35.68%

County Clerk


Dist  Stanart Hudspeth
======================
HD126  37,148   21,466
HD127  40,320   24,703
HD128  32,499   12,847
HD129  38,545   24,668
HD130  46,489   18,687
HD131   6,108   24,414
HD132  36,340   23,537
HD133  35,551   23,419
HD134  33,450   45,266
HD135  17,148   22,783
HD137   8,351   12,378
HD138  32,881   22,695
HD139  12,541   30,343
HD140   6,042   12,353
HD141   4,662   20,252
HD142   9,132   24,642
HD143   8,824   14,858
HD144  12,065   13,483
HD145  14,403   29,681
HD146   9,172   31,975
HD147   9,910   35,410
HD148  16,397   19,705
HD149  12,239   18,708
HD150  34,989   21,381
						
CC1    73,858  195,066
CC2    99,209  100,166
CC3   226,675  133,751
CC4   115,464  120,671
						
JP1    67,346  116,157
JP2    22,622   28,241
JP3    35,962   40,821
JP4   174,354  120,349
JP5   147,642  135,687
JP6     5,490   16,504
JP7    12,417   64,481
JP8    49,373   27,414

Dist Stanart%Hudspeth%
======================
HD126  63.38%   36.62%
HD127  62.01%   37.99%
HD128  71.67%   28.33%
HD129  60.98%   39.02%
HD130  71.33%   28.67%
HD131  20.01%   79.99%
HD132  60.69%   39.31%
HD133  60.29%   39.71%
HD134  42.49%   57.51%
HD135  42.94%   57.06%
HD137  40.29%   59.71%
HD138  59.16%   40.84%
HD139  29.24%   70.76%
HD140  32.85%   67.15%
HD141  18.71%   81.29%
HD142  27.04%   72.96%
HD143  37.26%   62.74%
HD144  47.22%   52.78%
HD145  32.67%   67.33%
HD146  22.29%   77.71%
HD147  21.87%   78.13%
HD148  45.42%   54.58%
HD149  39.55%   60.45%
HD150  62.07%   37.93%
		
CC1    27.46%   72.54%
CC2    49.76%   50.24%
CC3    62.89%   37.11%
CC4    48.90%   51.10%
		
JP1    36.70%   63.30%
JP2    44.48%   55.52%
JP3    46.84%   53.16%
JP4    59.16%   40.84%
JP5    52.11%   47.89%
JP6    24.96%   75.04%
JP7    16.15%   83.85%
JP8    64.30%   35.70%

County Treasurer


Dist    Scott    Wyatt
======================
HD126  37,264   21,436
HD127  40,378   24,663
HD128  32,433   12,955
HD129  38,523   24,788
HD130  46,578   18,647
HD131   6,062   24,496
HD132  36,413   23,479
HD133  35,705   23,303
HD134  33,479   45,200
HD135  17,156   22,790
HD137   8,369   12,377
HD138  32,829   22,780
HD139  12,576   30,341
HD140   5,929   12,518
HD141   4,682   20,256
HD142   9,167   24,621
HD143   8,706   15,000
HD144  11,924   13,703
HD145  14,410   29,702
HD146   9,159   31,995
HD147  10,015   35,364
HD148  16,333   19,766
HD149  12,214   18,772
HD150  35,168   21,262
						
CC1    74,077  194,887
CC2    98,597  101,176
CC3   227,110  133,538
CC4   115,688  120,613
						
JP1    67,326  116,212
JP2    22,460   28,561
JP3    35,972   40,808
JP4   174,785  120,166
JP5   147,814  135,680
JP6     5,410   16,643
JP7    12,496   64,441
JP8    49,209   27,703

Dist   Scott%   Wyatt%
======================
HD126  63.48%   36.52%
HD127  62.08%   37.92%
HD128  71.46%   28.54%
HD129  60.85%   39.15%
HD130  71.41%   28.59%
HD131  19.84%   80.16%
HD132  60.80%   39.20%
HD133  60.51%   39.49%
HD134  42.55%   57.45%
HD135  42.95%   57.05%
HD137  40.34%   59.66%
HD138  59.04%   40.96%
HD139  29.30%   70.70%
HD140  32.14%   67.86%
HD141  18.77%   81.23%
HD142  27.13%   72.87%
HD143  36.72%   63.28%
HD144  46.53%   53.47%
HD145  32.67%   67.33%
HD146  22.26%   77.74%
HD147  22.07%   77.93%
HD148  45.25%   54.75%
HD149  39.42%   60.58%
HD150  62.32%   37.68%
		
CC1    27.54%   72.46%
CC2    49.35%   50.65%
CC3    62.97%   37.03%
CC4    48.96%   51.04%
		
JP1    36.68%   63.32%
JP2    44.02%   55.98%
JP3    46.85%   53.15%
JP4    59.26%   40.74%
JP5    52.14%   47.86%
JP6    24.53%   75.47%
JP7    16.24%   83.76%
JP8    63.98%   36.02%

Despite appearing so much lower on the ballot, the per-district vote totals in these races are about the same for the two major parties. They’re lower overall because there are no third party candidates in these races, and that lack of mostly Libertarians does seem to be better for the Republicans than the Democrats. Not enough to swing any individual district – only the two swing Commissioners Court precincts are that close to begin with, and the Dems prevailed in all three races here anyway.

The simple fact is that despite the lack of straight-ticket voting, and the often-complained-about length of the ballot, people voted to the bottom of it anyway. There were more people who skipped these races than did so for Railroad Commissioner, the last of the statewide executive offices, but not that much more. About 40K people on average skipped these three races, compared with a bit less than 23K for RRC. That looks like a significant difference, but it’s still less than four percent of the total turnout. Putting it another way, more than 96% of the people who cast a ballot in November of 2022 cast a ballot in these three races.

That is slightly less than it was in 2018, the last year of straight ticket voting, when nearly 97% of the people who voted cast ballots in these races, plus the two countywide HCDE races; to put it another way, the undervote rate in these races was generally between 2.5 and 3 percent. Some people will skip races that are not of interest to them, I will absolutely stipulate to that. I’m just saying it’s not as much as you might think.

Two more things: One is that the undervote rate was higher in judicial races. I’ll go into more detail on those in subsequent posts, but even there it topped out at about five percent. I’m here to tell you, because I’ve looked at this before, the undervote rate in City Council races is much higher than that, and that’s a much shorter ballot. The other thing, and this may be my favorite bit of data from this election, is that there were about 800 more votes in the Treasurer race than there were in the County Clerk race, which was immediately before the Treasurer’s race on the ballot. Carla Wyatt, the Treasurer-elect, won more than 60% of those 800+ extra votes. Why did those eight hundred and some people vote in the Treasurer’s race but not the County Clerk’s race? I have no idea. But they did, and finding little oddities like that always delights me. I hope it at least amuses you. Let me know if you have any questions.

A walk through four districts, part 2: Now with pictures

Jan 7th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

In yesterday’s post I described my weird idea to take a stroll into four Congressional districts, something I decided I could do after taking a close look at the new map in Houston. On Wednesday, a bit more than a year after I first conceived of this silly idea, I finally did it. Here’s a little photo essay of my journey.

I started out as noted at the Leonel Castillo Community Center, on Quitman at South, just east of I-45.

This was in CD29, but I wasn’t going to be there for long. I intentionally started at a point near the boundary with CD18 – this walk was going to be long enough, I didn’t need to make it any longer. As I walked over the Quitman bridge, at some point I passed from CD29 into CD18. Where exactly that line is I have no idea – I have joked before about the crazy way that CD35 is drawn between Austin and San Antonio, and that you can cross into other Congressional districts by changing lanes on I-35 – but it’s there somewhere. We’ll discuss this a bit more later, as it’s a bit more relevant when there are houses and businesses there along the border. Here it’s just traffic.

West of I-45 on Quitman and I am unquestionably in CD18. The White Oak hike and bike trail beckoned me to the south.

As I passed Houston Avenue and Quitman became White Oak, I had a choice to make. As you saw on my Google map, my walking path was along White Oak. But the sidewalk isn’t consistent, there’s a lot of cars whooshing past, and the hike and bike trail will get me where I want to go as well. What would you choose?

The choice was easy for me, though I should note that the path to the left that led down to the trail wasn’t paved all the way and I had to step carefully to avoid getting all muddy. But it was worth it.

I didn’t even notice that heron as I was taking the picture. I only saw him later as I was putting this all together. Going this way gave me another excuse to walk across the new trail extension. The view of downtown from where the extension meets the MKT trail, especially on a gorgeous morning like Wednesday was, just can’t be beat.

Don’t ever let anyone trash Houston’s aesthetics. The MKT trail put me back on White Oak the street, and soon enough I reached Heights Boulevard, which is where CD18 ends and CD07 begins. But unlike the CD29/CD18 boundary along I-45, the exact location of that invisible line matters. As in, my belief was that the east side of Heights was still in CD18 while the west side was in CD07. I know these things have to exist somewhere but that will always be weird to me.

Yale Street, to my immediate right and visible as I crossed over the bayou again just south of I-10, is fully inside CD07. I started on the CD18 side of Heights but crossed to the CD07 side a bit before I reached I-10. When I reached Washington Avenue, I was at the southern border of CD18 and was going to be fully in CD07 for most of the rest of the trip.

I have to say, the sidewalks along this stretch of Washington Avenue were atrocious, especially after having been on the hike and bike trails as well as on Heights. Broken and occasionally missing, with utility poles right in the middle of a much narrower space – I could have only done this as a fully able-bodied person. I may do a separate post on that, but go see it for yourself if you can. One corollary to this is that I could have both shortened my walk and dodged fewer obstacles if I had taken a slightly different path. West of Shepherd, CD38 was only a few blocks to the south. I could have turned down Sandman, for example, and been in CD38 just before Shepherd and Durham merge together at Feagan.

But I stayed the course, and soon enough I had reached the traffic circle at Westcott.

That was the view from the west side of the circle, on what I believe was Arnot, though I didn’t see a street sign. It’s in CD38, whatever it was. Again, the boundary was likely somewhere in the middle of the road, in this case Westcott. Maybe if state law required that the state pay to create and install signs at every district border, we’d get slightly less goofy districts. Be that as it may, this is the end.

I’ll have a brief wrapup and a suggestion for further pedestrian research if you’re interested. Let me know what you thought of this little tour.

Additional Losing Candidates File Election Contests in Harris County

Jan 7th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

5 comments

That’s the subject of the following email I got in my inbox yesterday, and I can’t do any better than that for a post title.

Additional Losing Candidates File Election Contests in Harris County

Houston, Texas – Today, several losing Republican candidates filed election contests to void the more than 1 million votes cast in Harris County’s November 2022 election. Thus far, the Harris County Attorney’s Office has identified filings by (and we expect more filings to be made today):

Mark Montgomery, former candidate for Harris County Criminal Court at Law No. 6 (lost to Judge Kelley Andrews)

Matthew Dexter, former candidate for Harris County Criminal Court at Law No. 12 (lost to Judge Genesis Draper)

Brian Staley, former candidate for Harris County Civil County Court at Law No. 4. (lost to Judge Manpreet Monica Singh)

Mark Goldberg, former candidate for Harris County Criminal Court at Law No. 8 (lost to Judge Erika Ramirez)

Bruce Bain, former candidate for the 269th District Court (lost to Judge Cory Sepolio)

Michelle Fraga, former candidate for the 281st District Court (lost to Judge Christine Weems)

Elizabeth Buss, former candidate for the Harris County Criminal Court at Law No. 5 (lost to Judge David Fleischer)

Chris Daniel, former candidate for Harris County District Clerk (lost to Marilyn Burgess)

These filings are in addition to previously announced contests by:

Erin Lunceford, former candidate for the 189^th District Court (lost to Judge Tamika Craft)

Tami Pierce, former candidate for the 180th District Court (lost to Judge DaSean Jones)

Alexandra Mealer, former candidate for Harris County Judge (lost to Judge Lina Hidalgo)

Mike May, former candidate for State Representative District 135 (lost to Representative Jon Rosenthal)

Below is the statement from the County Attorney released this morning:

“This is a shameful attempt by a group of losing candidates who couldn’t win the hearts and minds of Harris County voters and are now throwing nonsensical legal theories at the wall to see what sticks. Each of them should be deeply embarrassed and these claims should not be taken seriously by the public,” said Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee. “These losing candidates are finally laying bare what we all know to be true – for them, it’s not about improving elections or making sure our elections are secure, it’s about playing games with our democratic systems and refusing to accept the will of the voters.”

The contests being filed request that the more than one million votes cast in Harris County be voided and the county hold another election for the races being challenged (e.g., Harris County Judge, 189^th District Court, 180^th District Court, etc.).

“These election contests are frivolous attempts to overturn the votes of more than a million residents in the third largest county in the country. The county will now have to spend substantial resources handling these contests, time that could instead be spent serving the people of Harris County,” added County Attorney Menefee. “Voters have moved on. Public servants have moved on. These losing candidates should move on too.”

See here and here for the background. The judge in the Lunceford contest was assigned on December 13, I don’t know what has happened since then. I do know that at least one more loser has filed a loser’s contest, but I don’t care to give any of this any more validity. You can read the Chron story here and their explainer about election contests here. I think the Trib story contains the most relevant bit of information:

The Election Day problems were unlikely to have been substantial enough to swing the results of the Harris County judge’s race, according to Bob Stein, a political science professor at Rice University.

Nearly 70% of voters cast their ballots during the early voting period, but Mealer only cites issues on Election Day itself.

“I’m extremely doubtful that there is a legitimate legal challenge here,” Stein said. “It’s not like voters were told they couldn’t vote or that they had to go home. They were discouraged because the lines were long, or because they were told they’d have to wait.”

Those challenges do not amount to voter suppression, Stein said, but merely suggest that Harris County should operate fewer, better-resourced polling locations.

To make its case, Mealer’s legal team will have to find evidence that more than 18,000 voters were unable to cast ballots on Election Day, and that all of those voters planned to vote for Mealer, Stein said.

And every voter who might have been discouraged by issues at one location could have gone to another one, which would have been at most a couple of minutes away by car. Even at the highest end of the estimate of locations that had issues, more than 90% of them did not. We have multiple locations at which anyone can vote precisely as a hedge against problems at any one specific location. In the old days, when you had to vote at your precinct location, you really were screwed. Now you can just go somewhere else. Even in the case of the loser who lost to DaSean Jones by 449 votes, it’s extremely hard to imagine there could have been enough people who encountered problems and could not vote anywhere else and would have voted for the loser to make a difference. This is all bullshit and should be seen as such. Campos and the Texas Signal have more.

A walk through four districts, part 1

Jan 6th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

As you know, I draft stuff before I publish it. Sometimes, things I draft that aren’t particularly time-sensitive can get lost in the shuffle when there’s a lot of news of interest. Those things may get taken from the pile during slower times, like the holidays. Sometimes I start something then don’t finish it. Once in awhile, a newer story comes along that directly relates to such a post and I go back to it. Sometimes, I finally get around to finishing what I started.

This is one of those times. After the Lege finally finished off redistricting in late 2021, I was taking a close look at the Congressional map – specifically, I had zoomed in on Houston near where I lived, and I realized that I could probably take a walk that would have me passing through four different districts. This Chron story was the inspiration for that.

The Texas Legislature on Monday put the finishing touches on a redistricting proposal that has major implications for millions of people who live in and around Houston. Here is a summary of how Harris County’s nine Congressional districts are changing for 2022.

You can go back and read the story, I’m not that interested in the details at this point. What I was interested in was seeing how easy it is to pass from one district to another, which all of us are likely doing any day we get out of the house, without realizing it. Let me start by showing the area I had zoomed in on:

From there, I used Google maps to sketch out a route for my walk:

According to Google maps, I’d get from the beginning in CD29 to the end in CD38 in one hour and 34 minutes, which would be a bit more than four miles. I walk about seven miles a day on average, and thus the idea took shape.

The thing about doing something like this, though, is that you can’t do it alone. I knew I could walk from point A to point B easily enough, but I had to get to point A and then get home from point B. Doing that all by myself would mean a heck of a lot more walking, and a lot more time. My plan was to get my elder daughter to drop me off at point A, basically at the Leonel Castillo Community Center, and then pick me up later near the traffic circle on Washington at Westcott. We would have done this over Christmas break last year. But for one reason or another it didn’t happen, and once school and work started up there was never a good time for it. So the idea, and the post that I began that included that Chron link and those pictures, got put on the shelf.

And then this Christmas rolled around, and I saw the old entry in my drafts, and I said hey, what about this year? Elder daughter was game, the weather was great for walking, and the plan came together. Wednesday, January 4 was a gloriously sunny day with morning temperatures in the 60s. I reviewed my route, coordinated the dropoff and pickup, told my ever-patient wife about the shenanigans I was about to get up to, and set out. I took some pictures along the way. I will tell you all about it and show you the pics of interest tomorrow.

Precinct analysis: The not-as-good statewide races

Jan 2nd, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

PREVIOUSLY
Beto versus Abbott
Beto versus the spread
Hidalgo versus Mealer
Better statewide races

The difference between these statewide races and the ones we have already looked at, including the Governor’s race, is very simple: These Republican candidates did better than the ones we have seen, and the Democrats did less well. The Dems in the first four races we analyzed all topped 53% of the vote in Harris County. The high score with these three is Jay Kleberg’s 51.11%. Luke Warford, who had a Green opponent as well as a Libertarian opponent, fell short of a majority in Harris County, getting 49.95% for a plurality. Let’s see how this breaks down.

Comptroller


Dist    Hegar  Dudding     Lib
==============================
HD126  36,931   21,555   1,269
HD127  40,053   24,746   1,441
HD128  32,350   12,795   1,014
HD129  38,119   24,936   1,559
HD130  46,320   18,701   1,229
HD131   6,114   24,275     906
HD132  36,340   23,387   1,259
HD133  35,123   24,187   1,043
HD134  32,915   46,611   1,330
HD135  17,107   22,475   1,135
HD137   8,263   12,428     646
HD138  32,580   23,012   1,269
HD139  12,325   30,301   1,174
HD140   5,761   12,183   1,066
HD141   4,586   20,094     815
HD142   8,957   24,548     997
HD143   8,538   14,611   1,218
HD144  11,734   13,368   1,167
HD145  13,855   29,642   1,839
HD146   9,031   32,118     953
HD147   9,676   35,412   1,338
HD148  16,203   19,567   1,251
HD149  12,278   18,681     882
HD150  34,841   21,318   1,294
							
CC1    72,584  195,779   6,893
CC2    97,146   99,729   7,605
CC3   225,304  134,394   7,641
CC4   114,966  121,049   5,955
							
JP1    65,832  117,292   5,140
JP2    22,125   28,127   2,055
JP3    35,715   40,576   2,117
JP4   173,366  120,182   6,806
JP5   146,733  136,478   6,730
JP6     5,130   16,223   1,342
JP7    12,325   64,437   1,904
JP8    48,774   27,636   2,000

Dist   Hegar% Dudding%    Lib%
==============================
HD126  61.80%   36.07%   2.12%
HD127  60.47%   37.36%   2.18%
HD128  70.08%   27.72%   2.20%
HD129  58.99%   38.59%   2.41%
HD130  69.92%   28.23%   1.86%
HD131  19.54%   77.57%   2.90%
HD132  59.59%   38.35%   2.06%
HD133  58.20%   40.08%   1.73%
HD134  40.71%   57.65%   1.64%
HD135  42.01%   55.20%   2.79%
HD137  38.73%   58.25%   3.03%
HD138  57.30%   40.47%   2.23%
HD139  28.14%   69.18%   2.68%
HD140  30.31%   64.09%   5.61%
HD141  17.99%   78.82%   3.20%
HD142  25.96%   71.15%   2.89%
HD143  35.04%   59.96%   5.00%
HD144  44.67%   50.89%   4.44%
HD145  30.56%   65.38%   4.06%
HD146  21.45%   76.29%   2.26%
HD147  20.84%   76.28%   2.88%
HD148  43.77%   52.85%   3.38%
HD149  38.56%   58.67%   2.77%
HD150  60.64%   37.11%   2.25%
			
CC1    26.37%   71.13%   2.50%
CC2    47.51%   48.77%   3.72%
CC3    61.33%   36.59%   2.08%
CC4    47.51%   50.03%   2.46%
			
JP1    34.97%   62.30%   2.73%
JP2    42.30%   53.77%   3.93%
JP3    45.55%   51.75%   2.70%
JP4    57.72%   40.01%   2.27%
JP5    50.61%   47.07%   2.32%
JP6    22.60%   71.48%   5.91%
JP7    15.67%   81.91%   2.42%
JP8    62.20%   35.25%   2.55%

Land Commissioner


Dist     Buck  Kleberg     Grn   W-I
====================================
HD126  36,849   21,629   1,070     1
HD127  40,131   24,789   1,092     0
HD128  32,446   12,873     706     9
HD129  38,169   25,015   1,149     3
HD130  46,145   18,886     963     5
HD131   6,081   24,219     829     1
HD132  36,155   23,542   1,053     2
HD133  34,565   24,654     915     2
HD134  31,902   47,475   1,190     6
HD135  17,116   22,492     963     1
HD137   8,141   12,532     562     2
HD138  32,324   23,310     968     2
HD139  12,258   30,317   1,025     1
HD140   5,859   12,433     613     3
HD141   4,635   20,039     691     3
HD142   8,984   24,532     839     4
HD143   8,646   14,845     732     5
HD144  11,869   13,567     682     4
HD145  13,820   30,044   1,276     3
HD146   8,914   32,076     990     0
HD147   9,684   35,282   1,243     1
HD148  16,142   19,762     959     2
HD149  12,314   18,717     714     0
HD150  34,884   21,411   1,016     3
								
CC1    71,640  196,243   6,241    17
CC2    97,762  100,816   4,930    24
CC3   224,673  135,288   6,151    14
CC4   113,958  122,094   4,918     8
								
JP1    64,874  118,648   3,973    11
JP2    22,268   28,432   1,306     7
JP3    35,847   40,620   1,612     8
JP4   173,174  120,696   5,428    13
JP5   145,487  137,664   5,652    10
JP6     5,253   16,428     881     4
JP7    12,214   64,137   2,011     2
JP8    48,916   27,816   1,377     8

Dist    Buck% Kleberg%    Grn%  W-I%
====================================
HD126  61.88%   36.32%   1.80% 0.00%
HD127  60.79%   37.55%   1.65% 0.00%
HD128  70.48%   27.96%   1.53% 0.02%
HD129  59.33%   38.88%   1.79% 0.00%
HD130  69.92%   28.62%   1.46% 0.01%
HD131  19.53%   77.80%   2.66% 0.00%
HD132  59.51%   38.75%   1.73% 0.00%
HD133  57.48%   41.00%   1.52% 0.00%
HD134  39.59%   58.92%   1.48% 0.01%
HD135  42.19%   55.44%   2.37% 0.00%
HD137  38.33%   59.01%   2.65% 0.01%
HD138  57.11%   41.18%   1.71% 0.00%
HD139  28.11%   69.53%   2.35% 0.00%
HD140  30.99%   65.76%   3.24% 0.02%
HD141  18.27%   78.99%   2.72% 0.01%
HD142  26.15%   71.40%   2.44% 0.01%
HD143  35.69%   61.27%   3.02% 0.02%
HD144  45.44%   51.94%   2.61% 0.02%
HD145  30.61%   66.55%   2.83% 0.01%
HD146  21.23%   76.41%   2.36% 0.00%
HD147  20.96%   76.35%   2.69% 0.00%
HD148  43.79%   53.61%   2.60% 0.01%
HD149  38.79%   58.96%   2.25% 0.00%
HD150  60.86%   37.36%   1.77% 0.01%
				
CC1    26.13%   71.58%   2.28% 0.01%
CC2    48.03%   49.53%   2.42% 0.01%
CC3    61.36%   36.95%   1.68% 0.00%
CC4    47.29%   50.67%   2.04% 0.00%
				
JP1    34.60%   63.28%   2.12% 0.01%
JP2    42.81%   54.66%   2.51% 0.01%
JP3    45.91%   52.02%   2.06% 0.01%
JP4    57.86%   40.32%   1.81% 0.00%
JP5    50.37%   47.67%   1.96% 0.00%
JP6    23.28%   72.80%   3.90% 0.02%
JP7    15.59%   81.84%   2.57% 0.00%
JP8    62.62%   35.61%   1.76% 0.01%

Railroad Commissioner


Dist    Chris  Warford     Lib     Grn
======================================
HD126  36,287   21,192   1,384     648
HD127  39,533   24,297   1,535     651
HD128  32,057   12,551     995     399
HD129  37,473   24,455   1,607     766
HD130  45,640   18,396   1,369     597
HD131   5,986   23,853     942     400
HD132  35,684   22,981   1,395     627
HD133  34,391   23,900   1,215     616
HD134  31,677   46,420   1,533     844
HD135  16,804   21,988   1,227     559
HD137   8,017   12,261     612     350
HD138  31,928   22,708   1,350     641
HD139  12,044   29,784   1,169     555
HD140   5,685   11,976     991     277
HD141   4,527   19,765     784     332
HD142   8,851   24,073   1,025     411
HD143   8,457   14,290   1,159     373
HD144  11,679   13,015   1,125     328
HD145  13,535   29,065   1,855     677
HD146   8,716   31,720     927     581
HD147   9,406   34,678   1,363     730
HD148  15,938   19,168   1,217     514
HD149  12,101   18,269     925     429
HD150  34,404   20,882   1,366     623
								
CC1   70,449   192,875   7,107   3,563
CC2   95,951    97,604   7,402   2,627
CC3  221,887   132,181   8,202   3,726
CC4  112,533   119,027   6,359   3,012
								
JP1   63,938   115,819   5,264   2,359
JP2   21,846    27,531   2,021     648
JP3   35,348    39,739   2,132     865
JP4  170,806   118,025   7,219   3,145
JP5  143,838   134,221   7,231   3,484
JP6    5,019    15,850   1,277     447
JP7   11,907    63,400   1,926   1,109
JP8   48,118    27,102   2,000     871

Dist   Chris% Warford%    Lib%    Grn%
======================================
HD126  60.98%   35.61%   2.33%   1.09%
HD127  59.88%   36.80%   2.33%   0.99%
HD128  69.69%   27.28%   2.16%   0.87%
HD129  58.28%   38.03%   2.50%   1.19%
HD130  69.15%   27.87%   2.07%   0.90%
HD131  19.20%   76.50%   3.02%   1.28%
HD132  58.80%   37.87%   2.30%   1.03%
HD133  57.20%   39.75%   2.02%   1.02%
HD134  39.36%   57.68%   1.90%   1.05%
HD135  41.41%   54.19%   3.02%   1.38%
HD137  37.74%   57.73%   2.88%   1.65%
HD138  56.38%   40.10%   2.38%   1.13%
HD139  27.65%   68.39%   2.68%   1.27%
HD140  30.03%   63.27%   5.24%   1.46%
HD141  17.82%   77.79%   3.09%   1.31%
HD142  25.76%   70.06%   2.98%   1.20%
HD143  34.83%   58.86%   4.77%   1.54%
HD144  44.67%   49.78%   4.30%   1.25%
HD145  29.99%   64.40%   4.11%   1.50%
HD146  20.78%   75.62%   2.21%   1.39%
HD147  20.37%   75.10%   2.95%   1.58%
HD148  43.27%   52.03%   3.30%   1.40%
HD149  38.14%   57.59%   2.92%   1.35%
HD150  60.07%   36.46%   2.38%   1.09%
				
CC1    25.71%   70.39%   2.59%   1.30%
CC2    47.13%   47.94%   3.64%   1.29%
CC3    60.63%   36.12%   2.24%   1.02%
CC4    46.71%   49.40%   2.64%   1.25%
				
JP1    34.12%   61.81%   2.81%   1.26%
JP2    41.97%   52.90%   3.88%   1.25%
JP3    45.27%   50.89%   2.73%   1.11%
JP4    57.09%   39.45%   2.41%   1.05%
JP5    49.81%   46.48%   2.50%   1.21%
JP6    22.21%   70.15%   5.65%   1.98%
JP7    15.20%   80.93%   2.46%   1.42%
JP8    61.62%   34.71%   2.56%   1.12%

Not too surprisingly, what we see in all three of these races is…more votes for the Republican candidate and fewer votes for the Democrat across the precincts, with a couple of exceptions here and there. The effect was generally stronger in the Republican districts than in the Democratic ones, with HDs 133 and 134 being the most notable.

The total number of votes in these elections is comparable – the number declines gently as you go down the ballot, but more undervoting does not explain the shifts in percentages. In a few cases you can see a greater number of third-party votes, which can explain a part of a Democratic vote decline, but again the overall effect is too small to be generally explanatory. The only logical conclusion is that across the board, some number of people who votes for Beto and Collier and Garza and Hays also voted for Glenn Hegar and Dawn Buckingham and Wayne Christian.

The question then is why. To me, the most likely explanation is that the most visible Republicans, the ones most likely to loudly and visibly stake out unpopular and divisive positions – and yes, this means “unpopular”, or at least “less popular” with Republicans, with opposing marijuana reform and expanded gambling and rape/incest exceptions for abortion – are losing votes that their lower profile/less visibly extreme colleagues are not losing.

This makes sense to me, but as it agrees with my priors, I’d like to check it. I’m pretty sure I’ve expressed this sentiment before, but if I had the power and the funds I’d order a study, to try to identify these voters and ask them why they did what they did. Not out of disbelief or derision but curiosity, to get a better understanding. Maybe other Democratic candidates could get them with the right message, and if they were the right candidates. Maybe they just didn’t know enough about the Dems in these races to be in a position to consider them. Maybe a strategy that attempts to maximize Democratic turnout overall – we have already discussed how Dems fell short in this election on that front – would make them less likely to cross over, even for Republicans they don’t approve of. We can speculate all week, but there’s only one way to find out. I really wish I could make that happen.

One more thing to note is that despite the lesser Democratic performance, these candidates all still carried the three Commissioner Court precincts that are now Democratic. I’ll be paying closer attention to these precincts, because this isn’t always the case going forward. In the meantime, let me know what you think.

Precinct analysis: The better statewide races

Dec 30th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

PREVIOUSLY
Beto versus Abbott
Beto versus the spread
Hidalgo versus Mealer

As noted before, Greg Abbott got 490K votes in Harris County, far less than the 559K he received in 2018 running against Lupe Valdez. Of the other six races for statewide executive offices, three were similar in nature to the Governor’s race and three were friendlier to Republicans. This post is about the first three, and those are the races for Lite Guv, Attorney General, and Ag Commissioner. For those of you whose memories stretch back as far as 2018, yes those were the three best races for Dems after the Beto-Cruz race for Senate as well. Let’s look at the numbers.

Lieutenant Governor


Dist  Patrick  Collier     Lib
==============================
HD126  35,244   23,460   1,482
HD127  38,578   26,405   1,691
HD128  31,548   13,748   1,148
HD129  36,347   26,966   1,802
HD130  44,307   20,934   1,434
HD131   5,886   24,670     933
HD132  34,417   25,498   1,374
HD133  31,931   27,421   1,396
HD134  28,262   51,502   1,828
HD135  16,373   23,514   1,050
HD137   7,690   13,164     650
HD138  30,328   25,534   1,383
HD139  11,536   31,304   1,246
HD140   5,850   12,681     647
HD141   4,494   20,290     851
HD142   8,641   25,030   1,043
HD143   8,469   15,270     804
HD144  11,551   14,029     854
HD145  12,368   32,031   1,449
HD146   8,285   33,018   1,148
HD147   8,809   36,618   1,383
HD148  15,383   20,840   1,065
HD149  11,923   19,315     824
HD150  33,548   22,898   1,431

CC1    65,573  204,223   7,632
CC2    94,272  105,549   6,218
CC3   214,555  146,441   8,815
CC4   107,368  129,927   6,251
							
JP1    58,698  126,202   5,083
JP2    21,608   29,498   1,599
JP3    34,975   41,776   2,126
JP4   166,204  128,604   7,578
JP5   137,161  147,432   7,185
JP6     4,941   17,062     885
JP7    11,370   65,643   2,250
JP8    46,811   29,923   2,210

Dist Patrick% Collier%    Lib%
==============================
HD126  58.56%   38.98%   2.46%
HD127  57.86%   39.60%   2.54%
HD128  67.93%   29.60%   2.47%
HD129  55.82%   41.41%   2.77%
HD130  66.45%   31.40%   2.15%
HD131  18.69%   78.34%   2.96%
HD132  56.16%   41.60%   2.24%
HD133  52.56%   45.14%   2.30%
HD134  34.64%   63.12%   2.24%
HD135  40.00%   57.44%   2.56%
HD137  35.76%   61.22%   3.02%
HD138  52.98%   44.60%   2.42%
HD139  26.17%   71.01%   2.83%
HD140  30.50%   66.12%   3.37%
HD141  17.53%   79.15%   3.32%
HD142  24.89%   72.10%   3.00%
HD143  34.51%   62.22%   3.28%
HD144  43.70%   53.07%   3.23%
HD145  26.98%   69.86%   3.16%
HD146  19.52%   77.78%   2.70%
HD147  18.82%   78.23%   2.95%
HD148  41.25%   55.89%   2.86%
HD149  37.19%   60.24%   2.57%
HD150  57.96%   39.56%   2.47%

CC1    23.64%   73.61%   2.75%
CC2    45.75%   51.23%   3.02%
CC3    58.02%   39.60%   2.38%
CC4    44.09%   53.35%   2.57%
			
JP1    30.90%   66.43%   2.68%
JP2    41.00%   55.97%   3.03%
JP3    44.34%   52.96%   2.70%
JP4    54.96%   42.53%   2.51%
JP5    47.01%   50.53%   2.46%
JP6    21.59%   74.55%   3.87%
JP7    14.34%   82.82%   2.84%
JP8    59.30%   37.90%   2.80%

Attorney General


Dist   Paxton    Garza     Lib
==============================
HD126  35,146   23,166   1,681
HD127  38,480   26,208   1,817
HD128  31,566   13,692   1,110
HD129  36,386   26,643   1,914
HD130  44,397   20,427   1,713
HD131   5,857   24,875     694
HD132  34,454   25,125   1,539
HD133  31,901   26,700   1,898
HD134  28,201   50,706   2,371
HD135  16,314   23,615     964
HD137   7,704   13,091     643
HD138  30,154   25,204   1,732
HD139  11,438   31,372   1,145
HD140   5,605   13,078     466
HD141   4,487   20,489     610
HD142   8,580   25,228     859
HD143   8,346   15,595     594
HD144  11,375   14,337     662
HD145  12,220   32,097   1,425
HD146   8,320   32,991     999
HD147   8,731   36,766   1,206
HD148  15,221   20,981   1,035
HD149  11,876   19,423     706
HD150  33,382   22,726   1,595
							
CC1    65,204  204,223   7,257
CC2    93,611  106,606   5,426
CC3   214,042  144,575  10,162
CC4   107,284  129,131   6,533
							
JP1    58,125  125,740   5,522
JP2    21,364   29,906   1,317
JP3    34,843   42,072   1,833
JP4   165,760  127,783   8,087
JP5   136,969  146,132   7,898
JP6     4,815   17,369     687
JP7    11,411   65,835   1,804
JP8    46,854   29,698   2,230

Dist  Paxton%   Garza%    Lib%
==============================
HD126  58.58%   38.61%   2.80%
HD127  57.86%   39.41%   2.73%
HD128  68.08%   29.53%   2.39%
HD129  56.03%   41.03%   2.95%
HD130  66.73%   30.70%   2.57%
HD131  18.64%   79.15%   2.21%
HD132  56.37%   41.11%   2.52%
HD133  52.73%   44.13%   3.14%
HD134  34.70%   62.39%   2.92%
HD135  39.89%   57.75%   2.36%
HD137  35.94%   61.06%   3.00%
HD138  52.82%   44.15%   3.03%
HD139  26.02%   71.37%   2.60%
HD140  29.27%   68.30%   2.43%
HD141  17.54%   80.08%   2.38%
HD142  24.75%   72.77%   2.48%
HD143  34.02%   63.56%   2.42%
HD144  43.13%   54.36%   2.51%
HD145  26.72%   70.17%   3.12%
HD146  19.66%   77.97%   2.36%
HD147  18.69%   78.72%   2.58%
HD148  40.88%   56.34%   2.78%
HD149  37.11%   60.69%   2.21%
HD150  57.85%   39.38%   2.76%
			
CC1    23.57%   73.81%   2.62%
CC2    45.52%   51.84%   2.64%
CC3    58.04%   39.20%   2.76%
CC4    44.16%   53.15%   2.69%
			
JP1    30.69%   66.39%   2.92%
JP2    40.63%   56.87%   2.50%
JP3    44.25%   53.43%   2.33%
JP4    54.95%   42.36%   2.68%
JP5    47.07%   50.22%   2.71%
JP6    21.05%   75.94%   3.00%
JP7    14.44%   83.28%   2.28%
JP8    59.47%   37.70%   2.83%

Dan Patrick (481K votes) and Ken Paxton (480K) were the two low scorers among Republicans. Mike Collier and Rochelle Garza both had leads against them of just over 100K votes, right in line with Beto’s lead against Abbott. That’s not as robust as what Dems did in 2018 as we know, but I can’t blame Collier and Garza for that. They were still top scorers, it was mostly that the environment wasn’t as good for them.

Overall, it looks like Collier and Garza did about as well percentage-wise as Beto did. Collier actually did a tiny bit better in HD133, and both did better in HD134. In some cases, like HD132 and HD138, Collier and Garza were about equal with Beto but Patrick and Paxton were a point or two behind Abbott. That looks to me to be the effect of the larger Libertarian vote in those races – there were about 29K Lib votes in these two races, while there were about 16K third party and write-in votes for Governor. At least in those cases, you can make the claim that the Libertarian received votes that might have otherwise gone to the Republican.

In the Ag Commissioner race, Sid Miller got 507K votes to top Abbott’s total, but he was aided by not having any third party candidates. Susan Hays did pretty well compared to the other Dems in that straight up two-way race:

Ag Commissioner


Dist   Miller     Hays
======================
HD126  36,872   22,678
HD127  40,060   25,992
HD128  32,447   13,641
HD129  38,091   26,236
HD130  46,273   19,792
HD131   6,091   25,170
HD132  36,189   24,576
HD133  34,548   25,581
HD134  31,793   48,687
HD135  17,174   23,491
HD137   8,207   13,090
HD138  32,276   24,389
HD139  12,291   31,372
HD140   5,904   13,079
HD141   4,667   20,779
HD142   9,047   25,391
HD143   8,631   15,710
HD144  11,849   14,344
HD145  13,871   31,301
HD146   8,922   33,114
HD147   9,761   36,482
HD148  16,238   20,657
HD149  12,270   19,513
HD150  34,895   22,408
						
CC1    71,746  202,649
CC2    97,753  106,167
CC3   224,670  141,583
CC4   114,198  127,074
						
JP1    64,850  122,675
JP2    22,256   29,898
JP3    35,923   42,332
JP4   173,381  126,119
JP5   145,619  143,496
JP6     5,243   17,412
JP7    12,266   66,242
JP8    48,829   29,299

Dist  Miller%    Hays% 
=======================
HD126  61.92%   38.08%
HD127  60.65%   39.35%
HD128  70.40%   29.60%
HD129  59.21%   40.79%
HD130  70.04%   29.96%
HD131  19.48%   80.52%
HD132  59.56%   40.44%
HD133  57.46%   42.54%
HD134  39.50%   60.50%
HD135  42.23%   57.77%
HD137  38.54%   61.46%
HD138  56.96%   43.04%
HD139  28.15%   71.85%
HD140  31.10%   68.90%
HD141  18.34%   81.66%
HD142  26.27%   73.73%
HD143  35.46%   64.54%
HD144  45.24%   54.76%
HD145  30.71%   69.29%
HD146  21.22%   78.78%
HD147  21.11%   78.89%
HD148  44.01%   55.99%
HD149  38.61%   61.39%
HD150  60.90%   39.10%
		
CC1    26.15%   73.85%
CC2    47.94%   52.06%
CC3    61.34%   38.66%
CC4    47.33%   52.67%
		
JP1    34.58%   65.42%
JP2    42.67%   57.33%
JP3    45.91%   54.09%
JP4    57.89%   42.11%
JP5    50.37%   49.63%
JP6    23.14%   76.86%
JP7    15.62%   84.38%
JP8    62.50%   37.50%

Miller was definitely a slight notch up from the first three. How much of that is the lack of a third choice versus some other consideration I couldn’t say, but you can see it in the numbers.

I’ll get into it a bit more in the next post when we look at the higher-scoring Republicans, but my sense is that these three Dems, plus Beto, received some crossovers. Beto and Collier and Garza had enough money to at least run some ads, while Hays was still running against perhaps the highest-profile (read: got the most negative news for his ridiculous actions) incumbent after those three. We have definitely seen races like this, certainly in elections going back to 2016 – Hillary versus Trump, Biden versus Trump, Beto and the Lite Guv/AG/Ag Commish triumvirate this year and 2018. We saw it with Bill White in 2010, too – as I’ve observed in the past, White received something like 300K votes from people who otherwise voted Republican. That’s a lot! Democrats can persuade at least some Republicans to vote for their statewide candidates, but only under some conditions. If we can get the baseline vote to be closer, that could be enough to push some people over the top. We’re still working on the first part of that equation.

Like I said, I’ll get into that a bit more in the next post. Looking at what I’ve written here, I need to do a post about third party votes, too. Let me know what you think.

Precinct analysis: Hidalgo versus Mealer

Dec 29th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

6 comments

PREVIOUSLY
Beto versus Abbott
Beto versus the spread

We’ve looked at the Governor’s race, in which Beto was the top Democratic performer. Now we’ll look at the next highest profile race, in which the result was a surprise to some people who didn’t connect Democratic performance at the top of the ticket with the other local races. Here’s the data for the County Judge race, in which Judge Lina Hidalgo won re-election by a close margin, though on a percentage basis it was slightly wider than her initial win in 2018. As with the first Beto post, I’m just going to dump all the data and will add my comments at the end.


Dist   Mealer  Hidalgo    W-I
=============================
CD02   77,665   46,669     21
CD07   53,108   77,625     29
CD08   46,156   45,668     17
CD09   23,451   71,374     29
CD18   46,492  107,792     46
CD22   13,292    8,076      2
CD29   33,392   66,220     27
CD36   70,392   41,817     24
CD38  170,772   87,662     46

CD02   62.45%   37.53%  0.02%
CD07   40.61%   59.36%  0.02%
CD08   50.26%   49.73%  0.02%
CD09   24.72%   75.25%  0.03%
CD18   30.13%   69.85%  0.03%
CD22   62.20%   37.79%  0.01%
CD29   33.51%   66.46%  0.03%
CD36   62.72%   37.26%  0.02%
CD38   66.07%   33.91%  0.02%

Dist   Mealer  Hidalgo    W-I
=============================
SD04   58,925   34,135     14
SD06   45,259   81,877     39
SD07  163,993   97,075     50
SD11   60,351   32,991     17
SD13   25,998   96,440     45
SD15   97,303  146,861     50
SD17   64,692   46,518     22
SD18   18,199   17,006      4

SD04   63.31%   36.68%  0.02%
SD06   35.59%   64.38%  0.03%
SD07   62.80%   37.18%  0.02%
SD11   64.64%   35.34%  0.02%
SD13   21.23%   78.74%  0.04%
SD15   39.84%   60.14%  0.02%
SD17   58.16%   41.82%  0.02%
SD18   51.69%   48.30%  0.01%

Dist   Mealer  Hidalgo    W-I
=============================
HD126  38,281   21,401     17
HD127  41,603   24,533      5
HD128  33,175   12,968     12
HD129  39,519   24,982     11
HD130  47,660   18,606     13
HD131   6,519   24,611     13
HD132  37,180   23,721      7
HD133  36,909   23,379     11
HD134  35,653   45,142     16
HD135  17,620   22,982      7
HD137   8,600   12,670      9
HD138  33,875   22,977      9
HD139  13,492   30,143     11
HD140   6,238   12,885      5
HD141   5,209   20,104     17
HD142   9,939   24,454      7
HD143   9,087   15,412      6
HD144  12,242   14,069      9
HD145  15,445   30,141     11
HD146   9,975   31,981     11
HD147  10,964   35,240     12
HD148  16,934   20,004      8
HD149  12,496   19,196      4
HD150  36,105   21,302     10

HD126  64.12%   35.85%  0.03%
HD127  62.90%   37.09%  0.01%
HD128  71.88%   28.10%  0.03%
HD129  61.26%   38.72%  0.02%
HD130  71.91%   28.07%  0.02%
HD131  20.93%   79.03%  0.04%
HD132  61.04%   38.95%  0.01%
HD133  61.21%   38.77%  0.02%
HD134  44.12%   55.86%  0.02%
HD135  43.39%   56.59%  0.02%
HD137  40.42%   59.54%  0.04%
HD138  59.58%   40.41%  0.02%
HD139  30.91%   69.06%  0.03%
HD140  32.61%   67.36%  0.03%
HD141  20.56%   79.37%  0.07%
HD142  28.89%   71.09%  0.02%
HD143  37.08%   62.89%  0.02%
HD144  46.51%   53.45%  0.03%
HD145  33.87%   66.10%  0.02%
HD146  23.77%   76.21%  0.03%
HD147  23.72%   76.25%  0.03%
HD148  45.83%   54.14%  0.02%
HD149  39.42%   60.56%  0.01%
HD150  62.88%   37.10%  0.02%

Dist   Mealer  Hidalgo    W-I
=============================
CC1    80,014  194,272     79
CC2   101,745  103,117     48
CC3   233,567  133,554     63
CC4   119,394  121,960     51

CC1    29.16%   70.81%  0.03%
CC2    49.65%   50.32%  0.02%
CC3    63.61%   36.37%  0.02%
CC4    49.46%   50.52%  0.02%

Dist   Mealer  Hidalgo    W-I
=============================
JP1    71,793  116,463     40
JP2    23,249   29,149     10
JP3    37,340   40,840     31
JP4   180,017  119,979     60
JP5   152,130  137,293     52
JP6     5,840   17,018      5
JP7    13,972   64,220     27
JP8    50,379   27,941     16

JP1    38.13%   61.85%  0.02%
JP2    44.36%   55.62%  0.02%
JP3    47.74%   52.22%  0.04%
JP4    59.99%   39.99%  0.02%
JP5    52.55%   47.43%  0.02%
JP6    25.54%   74.43%  0.02%
JP7    17.86%   82.10%  0.03%
JP8    64.31%   35.67%  0.02%

Hidalgo got 50.78% of the vote, which is 3.25 points less than Beto. She got 553K votes, which is 42K less than Beto. Mealer got 534K votes, 44K more than Abbott. Third party candidates accounted for over 16K votes in the Governor’s race, while the write-in candidate for County Judge got 241 total votes. I do not and never will understand anyone who thinks that writing in a candidate for County Judge could possibly be productive, but that’s not important right now.

For the most part, Hidalgo’s performance in each district is about what you’d expect in comparison to Beto. Generally speaking, she did a couple of points worse. The two glaring exceptions to this are HDs 133 and 134, both wealthy, well-educated, predominantly white districts that, in keeping with recent trends, are a lot more Democratic than they used to be. Hidalgo trailed Beto by six points in HD133 and seven in HD134. If I were the New York Times, I’d spend the next six months visiting brunch counters in those districts to talk to more-in-sadness-than-in-anger Mealer voters, who will turn out to have been almost uniformly Ed Emmett voters in 2018 but who will insist that they really wanted to support Hidalgo, they largely agreed with her on how she handled the pandemic and all, but for reasons they can’t quite articulate they just couldn’t. I’m sure it would be compelling reading, but I don’t have the staff or the budget for that. Plus, the idea of it makes me gag, so it’s just as well.

Anyway. The other notable thing is that with the lone exception of JP/Constable Precinct 5, Hidalgo still carried every district Beto carried. (I’m not concerning myself with fractional districts like CD08.) I was worried that if Hidalgo lost, there was a real chance Dems could lose not one but both of the Commissioners Court races as well. Looking at the numbers, it’s not an irrational fear. I’ll have more to say about those Commissioners Court precincts later, so let’s put a pin in that for now.

We have to talk about the many millions of dollars spent by various wealthy wingnuts against Judge Hidalgo and Democratic criminal court judges. We can’t say for certain how much all that spending affected the final outcomes, but it’s impossible to think it had no effect. What I wonder about is whether there will be much appetite for that kind of spending in future races. For sure, it’s hard to imagine much money spent on Republicans locally in 2024. Democrats haven’t lost a judicial race in a Presidential year since 2012, and haven’t lost a majority of judicial races in a Presidential year since 2004. In 2020, eleven Democratic judicial candidates were unopposed. I won’t be surprised if that number is matched or exceeded in 2024. I won’t speculate about 2026 – at the very least, Republicans will have four incumbents to try to defend, so they’ll want to do something – but I don’t see them having a $25 million budget. Maybe Judge Hidalgo will have an easier time of it as well.

I’ll have more to say about judicial races later. In the meantime, let me know what you think.

Precinct analysis: Beto versus the spread

Dec 19th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

PREVIOUSLY
Beto versus Abbott

So last time we saw the numbers for the 2022 Governor’s race. But what numbers need in order to be meaningful is context, and that means other numbers to compare them to. We’re going to do that in a few different ways, and we’ll start with the numbers from the Texas Redistricting Council for these new districts. Specifically, the numbers from 2018 and 2020.


Dist    Abbott    Beto     Cruz    Beto
=======================================
HD126   35,835  23,627   38,851  26,028
HD127   39,102  26,791   40,573  28,326
HD128   31,983  13,915   32,586  15,892
HD129   37,118  27,144   38,281  29,112
HD130   44,983  20,891   42,747  20,968
HD131    5,963  25,387    5,628  33,440
HD132   35,079  25,603   32,220  23,431
HD133   33,195  26,971   34,930  30,329
HD134   29,592  51,010   32,114  54,514
HD135   16,443  24,121   16,162  27,762
HD137    7,860  13,421    8,713  19,309
HD138   31,077  25,464   32,754  28,778
HD139   11,643  32,115   11,599  38,842
HD140    5,717  13,400    5,393  19,532
HD141    4,549  20,922    4,459  28,096
HD142    8,666  25,793    8,265  29,705
HD143    8,420  16,047    8,751  23,602
HD144   11,566  14,683   12,511  21,278
HD145   12,631  32,765   12,101  37,672
HD146    8,511  33,610    9,227  40,111
HD147    8,952  37,366    9,575  45,020
HD148   15,451  21,460   16,281  26,815
HD149   12,068  19,844   12,097  27,142
HD150   33,857  23,303   33,084  23,466


Dist   Abbott%   Beto%    Cruz%   Beto%
=======================================
HD126   59.37%  39.14%   59.40%  39.80%
HD127   58.50%  40.08%   59.30%  40.00%
HD128   68.66%  29.87%   66.80%  32.60%
HD129   56.80%  41.53%   56.30%  42.80%
HD130   67.29%  31.25%   66.60%  32.70%
HD131   18.78%  79.96%   14.30%  85.20%
HD132   57.06%  41.64%   57.50%  41.80%
HD133   54.41%  44.21%   53.10%  46.10%
HD134   36.16%  62.34%   36.80%  62.40%
HD135   39.97%  58.63%   35.00%  64.40%
HD137   36.32%  62.01%   30.90%  68.40%
HD138   54.09%  44.32%   52.80%  46.40%
HD139   26.25%  72.41%   22.90%  76.50%
HD140   29.36%  68.82%   21.50%  78.00%
HD141   17.61%  80.98%   13.60%  85.80%
HD142   24.79%  73.80%   21.60%  77.80%
HD143   33.86%  64.53%   26.90%  72.50%
HD144   43.34%  55.02%   36.80%  62.50%
HD145   27.31%  70.85%   24.10%  75.00%
HD146   19.95%  78.80%   18.60%  80.70%
HD147   19.04%  79.49%   17.40%  81.90%
HD148   41.18%  57.19%   37.50%  61.70%
HD149   37.31%  61.36%   30.60%  68.70%
HD150   58.34%  40.15%   58.10%  41.20%

Greg Abbott got 490K votes in 2022, whereas Ted Cruz got 498K in 2018. It’s therefore not a surprise that Abbott generally matched Cruz’s vote totals in the districts, with a bit of variation here and there. Beto, meanwhile, got 595K votes in 2022 after getting 700K in 2018, a significant drop. You can clearly see that in the district data. What’s interesting to me is that Beto was pretty close to his 2018 performance for the most part in Republican districts. His dropoff was almost entirely in strong Democratic districts, which accounts for the decrease in vote percentage he got. This is consistent with reports that Republicans had the turnout advantage nationally, due in part to weaker Democratic turnout among Black voters.

You can shrug your shoulders about this or freak out for What It All Means for 2024 as you see fit. I tend to lean towards the former, but I will readily acknowledge that the job of working to get turnout back to where we want it for 2024 starts today. I’ll have more to say about this in future posts as well, but let me open the bidding by saying that the target for Democratic turnout in Harris County in 2024, if we want to make a serious run at winning the state for the Democratic Presidential nominee, is one million Democratic votes; it may actually need to be a little higher than that, but that’s the minimum. It’s doable – Biden got 918K in 2020, after all. Ed Gonzalez got 903K in his re-election for Sheriff. Really, we may need to aim for 1.1 million, in order to win the county by at least 300K votes, which is what I think will be needed to close the statewide gap. Whether we can do that or not I don’t know, but it’s where we need to aim.

I also want to emphasize the “Abbott got more or less the same number of votes in each district as Cruz did” item to push back as needed on any claims about Abbott’s performance among Latino voters. His improvement in percentage is entirely due to Beto getting fewer votes, not him getting more. That’s cold comfort from a big picture perspective for Democrats, and as we saw in 2020 a greater-than-expected share of the lower-propensity Latino voters picked Trump, so we’re hardly in the clear for 2024. All I’m saying is that claims about Abbott improving his standing with Latino voters need to be examined skeptically. Remember that if we compared Abbott to Abbott instead of Beto to Beto, he got 559K votes in 2018, so he dropped off quite a bit as well. He got fewer votes in each of the Latino districts in 2022 than he did in 2018:

HD140 – Abbott 6,466 in 2018, 5,717 in 2022
HD143 – Abbott 10,180 in 2018, 8,420 in 2022
HD144 – Abbott 13,996 in 2018, 11,566 in 2022
HD145 – Abbott 15,227 in 2018, 12,631 in 2022
HD148 – Abbott 18,438 in 2018, 15,541 in 2022

So yeah, perspective. I suppose I could have done the Governor-to-Governor comparison instead, but I was more interested in Beto’s performance, so that’s the route I took. Beto would look better from a percentage viewpoint if I had done it that way. There’s always more than one way to do it.

One last thing on turnout: In 2014, Wendy Davis led the Democratic ticket with 320K votes in Harris County. Beto was at over 401K even before Election Day. His total is almost twice what Davis got. We can certainly talk about 2022 being “low turnout”, but we’re in a completely different context now.


Dist    Abbott    Beto    Trump   Biden
=======================================
HD126   35,835  23,627   50,023  35,306
HD127   39,102  26,791   53,148  38,332
HD128   31,983  13,915   46,237  21,742
HD129   37,118  27,144   51,219  38,399
HD130   44,983  20,891   58,867  29,693
HD131    5,963  25,387   10,413  42,460
HD132   35,079  25,603   46,484  35,876
HD133   33,195  26,971   42,076  40,475
HD134   29,592  51,010   38,704  66,968
HD135   16,443  24,121   26,190  40,587
HD137    7,860  13,421   12,652  24,885
HD138   31,077  25,464   42,002  37,617
HD139   11,643  32,115   17,014  49,888
HD140    5,717  13,400   10,760  24,045
HD141    4,549  20,922    8,070  38,440
HD142    8,666  25,793   13,837  41,332
HD143    8,420  16,047   15,472  28,364
HD144   11,566  14,683   20,141  25,928
HD145   12,631  32,765   18,390  45,610
HD146    8,511  33,610   12,408  51,984
HD147    8,952  37,366   14,971  55,602
HD148   15,451  21,460   24,087  34,605
HD149   12,068  19,844   21,676  35,904
HD150   33,857  23,303   45,789  34,151

Dist   Abbott%   Beto%   Trump%  Biden%
=======================================
HD126   59.37%  39.14%   57.80%  40.80%
HD127   58.50%  40.08%   57.30%  41.30%
HD128   68.66%  29.87%   67.10%  31.60%
HD129   56.80%  41.53%   56.20%  42.20%
HD130   67.29%  31.25%   65.50%  33.00%
HD131   18.78%  79.96%   19.50%  79.60%
HD132   57.06%  41.64%   55.60%  42.90%
HD133   54.41%  44.21%   50.30%  48.40%
HD134   36.16%  62.34%   36.10%  62.50%
HD135   39.97%  58.63%   38.70%  59.90%
HD137   36.32%  62.01%   33.20%  65.40%
HD138   54.09%  44.32%   52.00%  46.60%
HD139   26.25%  72.41%   25.10%  73.70%
HD140   29.36%  68.82%   30.60%  68.30%
HD141   17.61%  80.98%   17.20%  81.80%
HD142   24.79%  73.80%   24.80%  74.10%
HD143   33.86%  64.53%   34.90%  64.00%
HD144   43.34%  55.02%   43.20%  55.60%
HD145   27.31%  70.85%   28.30%  70.10%
HD146   19.95%  78.80%   19.00%  79.80%
HD147   19.04%  79.49%   20.90%  77.60%
HD148   41.18%  57.19%   40.50%  58.10%
HD149   37.31%  61.36%   37.20%  61.70%
HD150   58.34%  40.15%   56.50%  42.10%

Obviously, the vote totals don’t compare – over 1.6 million people voted in 2020, a half million more than this year. But for the most part, Beto was within about a point of Biden’s percentage, and even did better in a couple of districts. Abbott did best in the Republican districts compared to Trump. As we’ll see when we look at the other statewide races, Abbott (and Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton) was one of the lower performers overall among Republicans, as was the case for Trump in 2020, but maybe there were slightly fewer Republican defectors this year.

It will take an improvement on the 2020 Biden and 2018 Beto numbers for Dems to put any State Rep districts into play, with HD138 being the first in line; remember that HD133 was a bit of an outlier, with a lot of Republican crossovers for Biden. Incumbency has its advantages, and as we have seen Dem performance can be a lot more variable downballot than at the top, especially when the top has the most divisive Republicans, so it will take more than just (say) Biden getting 50.1% in HD138 for Rep. Lacy Hull to really be in danger. It’s more that this will be another incentive to really work on boosting overall turnout. Having a good candidate in place, which I think Stephanie Morales was this year, and making sure that person has the financial and logistical support they need (which she didn’t have) will be key.

I’ll have more to say as we go along. Please let me know what you think and ask any questions you may have.

November 2022 mail ballot rejection report

Dec 18th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Still getting better, still some room to improve.

The statewide ballot rejection rate dramatically reduced to 2.7 percent in the general election this fall after it had skyrocketed to six times that in the primaries following the introduction of a Republican-backed change to mail ballot ID requirements, state data shows.

“That’s obviously a big improvement,” said Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who helped author the law that instituted the new rule. “I expect that even 2.7 will continue to go down as everyone understands exactly how the system works.”

Senate Bill 1 — passed by Texas Republicans in 2021 in the name of election integrity — requires voters to include a state ID number, such as a driver’s license or partial Social Security number when applying for a mail-in ballot and when submitting it. The ID number on the ballot has to match what is on the voter’s registration record, a detail many voters did not recall.

Remi Garza, the elections administrator for Cameron County and president of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators, said he was pleased to see the decrease statewide (his county’s rate was 1.34 percent). But at the same time, he said he still sees room for improvement.

“I think it’s a great indication of the hard work that election offices across the state are doing,” Garza said. “I’m glad the information that has been distributed by everyone has had an impact on bringing the rejection rate down, but obviously it’s still way too high. We need to work harder to communicate with the vote-by-mail applicants on how to assure their vote is going to be counted.”

Sam Taylor, spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, added that the office launched a bilingual voter education campaign, updated the design of the mail ballot envelopes to highlight the ID field in red, sent out example inserts to remind voters of the ID rule and produced an educational video series on voting by mail.

[…]

This latest 2.7 percent rate brings the state nearly back to normal levels. A federal survey estimated the state’s ballot rejection rate was 1.76 percent in the 2018 midterm and 1.5 percent in the 2014 midterm.

Preliminary numbers last month showed about 4 percent of ballots were denied during the general election this November, or about 10,000 among most of the state’s largest counties. That was before the deadline for voters to correct errors on their ballots, however. In total, about 9,300 ballots were finally rejected.

Harris County, the state’s largest county with almost 3 million voters registered, lagged behind most large counties with about 4.5 percent of ballots tossed.

Nadia Hakim, deputy director of communications for Harris County Elections, in a statement Thursday attributed the difference to the county’s size.

“We have significantly more voters over a greater area than our neighbors statewide,” Hakim said. “Dallas County is the second-largest, and Harris County has over a million more registered voters.”

Dallas County’s rejection rate was 1.76 percent, per the state data. At least two other large counties had higher rates than Harris — Fort Bend at 5 percent and Bell at 5.5 percent.

See here and here for some background. This is an improvement, and the extra time at the end to make corrections helped, but screw Paul Bettencourt and his rationalizations. If we had to pass this provision – and there’s no reason to believe it has actually done anything to improve election security – we needed to delay it long enough for the education and communication efforts made by county officials and the Secretary of State to take place first. If that had been done, then maybe we wouldn’t have had such and embarrassing and shameful number of rejections in the first election where this was in effect. Bettencourt and the rest of the Republicans didn’t care about that, They don’t get to feel good, or to try to make us feel good, about the eventual improvements made thanks to the hard work of election officials, candidate campaigns, and coordinated county campaigns.

I will also note that I don’t know where the Chron got their 4.5% figure from. Going by the reconciliation report, there were 2,672 mail ballots rejected out of 64,259 total mail ballots. That’s a 4.16% rejection rate. Even if you incorrectly use 61,264 (the total number of mail ballots successfully cast) as the denominator, that’s a 4.36% rejection rate, still less than the 4.5% number cited in the story. Maybe they did that math and then “rounded up” from there, I don’t know. However they got it it, it’s wrong.

Speaking of the reconciliation report, the numbers there are a little off from what we can see elsewhere. The form says that 80,995 mail ballots were sent, which is 579 more than what the final early vote report said. That report is not “official”, though, so perhaps there’s a bit of slack in there. Since the question came up in an earlier comment, I think the 19,486 figure for “Mail ballots not returned by voters” must include those 2,672 rejected ballots, as technically they weren’t returned. The difference between those two figures is 61,509, which is pretty accurate for the mail ballots cast total. Going by the official canvass, there were 61,264 mail ballots cast, not 61,509. It’s a small difference, but I don’t know what accounts for it. Maybe some provisional ballots were mail ballots? I don’t know. But again, it’s close enough that I’m not too fussed by it. I strongly suspect that the 6,557 “Mail ballots surrendered” are also contained within the “Mail ballots not returned” figure, as again they were technically not returned. I blame any confusion here on the Lege for not requiring that definitions of these terms be included on the report. Anyway, I hope I have lessened the confusion a bit rather than add to it. Let me know if you have any questions.

Hays County DA questions San Marcos marijuana ordinance passed by voters

Dec 17th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Add this to the pile.

San Marcos voters passed a marijuana ordinance this November that would halt San Marcos police from arresting people for low-level marijuana offenses. Now, the Hays County district attorney is looking to Texas leaders for their opinion on the ordinance.

Hays County District Attorney Wes Mau sent a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton requesting his opinion on San Marcos’ marijuana ordinance on Thursday, December 8.

“I am asking for the opinion because San Marcos officials are justifiably concerned that if the ordinance is legally or constitutionally void, then if the city disciplines officers for enforcing the marijuana law, as the ordinance requires, the city could be liable,” Mau said to MySA in an email.

In the letter, Mau noted that the ordinance would attempt to stop officers from using the smell of marijuana as probable cause.

“It is inconsistent with state and federal law for an ordinance to declare that the odor of marijuana may never be used as probable cause for a search or seizure when, as a matter of law, there are certainly times when the odor of marijuana constitutes probable cause under state or federal law,” Mau said in the letter. “The determination of probable cause is to be made on a case-by-case basis by the judicial branch.”

[…]

The ordinance went into effect on November 17 and covers possession of up to four ounces, but doesn’t cover THC oil and only applies to the San Marcos Police Department.

Mau said in the email to MySA that the local government code and the Texas constitution appear to prohibit an ordinance like the one that got passed.

“The attorney general cannot overturn the referendum, nor am I asking him to, but an opinion as to whether the ordinance is enforceable may be helpful to the city moving forward,” Mau said in the email to MySA.

I think this is a slightly different case than what we saw in three other cities that passed similar referenda only to see their City Councils pass laws modifying or nullifying them. If this is a valid concern, then it makes sense to seek an opinion rather than let the situation play out and deal with the inevitable lawsuits later. I presume that if the AG opinion aligns with this concern, then San Marcos’ city council will have a decision to make about that ordinance. I’ll keep an eye on this, because the likelihood that there will be more of these referenda passed by voters around the state is very high, and the same question would apply in those places as well. Reform Austin has more.

Please don’t threaten to kill your political opponents

Dec 16th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

We really shouldn’t have to say these things, except that nowadays we really do.

Rep. Randy Weber

A former candidate for U.S. representative has been accused of threatening to kill his political opponent, U.S. Rep. Randy Weber, TX-14, according to federal court filings.

Keith Douglas Casey has been charged in connection with making a threat against a U.S. official, according to a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.

Casey has run several times to unseat Weber from office. For instance, in 2022, he received some 5,178 votes, or 7.9%, compared to Weber’s 89%, or 58,439 votes, in the Republican primary.

Weber also handily defeated Casey in the 2018 Republican primary, with Casey finishing in third place with about 5% of the vote.

And in 2016, the Galveston County Daily News reported Weber had defeated challenger Casey in the primary race for the U.S. House of Representatives District 14, garnering about 84% of the vote compared to Casey’s 16%.

But the politics then reportedly gave way to something more sinister. In March 2022 Casey allegedly began telling people he’d defeated Weber in the race for the spot — and that he was going to kill him, according to the complaint.

Staff members in Weber’s office first reported the matter to federal law enforcement as early as March 29.

In reading the rest of the story, it seems that Casey was acting erratically, and there may be some underlying issues that I am in no way qualified to guess at. It also appears that he was in the thrall of election denialism, and I hope we can all agree that that leads nowhere good. I hope that in the end this all winds up being much ado about nothing. But whatever does happen, we have to take this sort of thing very seriously.

Kirk Watson again elected Mayor of Austin

Dec 15th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Party like it’s 1997, y’all.

Kirk Watson

In a tight race, Austin voters picked a familiar face Tuesday night to guide the capital city over the next two years as the region deals with skyrocketing housing costs and explosive growth.

In a contest between two Austin Democrats, former state Sen. Kirk Watson narrowly prevailed over state Rep. Celia Israel and retook the seat he last held more than two decades ago.

“I’m as grateful today as I was 25 years ago to be entrusted with this job,” Watson said at a watch party in Austin’s Rosedale neighborhood. “It means a lot to me to know that Austinites in every part of this city still want the kind of leadership that I’ve tried to deliver both as mayor and as your state senator.”

Miles away at a watch party in North Austin, Israel conceded to Watson — while ruefully acknowledging Austin’s growing unaffordability, the race’s defining issue.

“Our campaign was founded on a very simple idea: The people who built this city and who continue to build this city, who dress our wounds, who teach our kids, who drive our buses, who answer our 911 calls … they deserve the respect and the compassion that a progressive city can give them,” Israel said.

The race to lead Texas’ fourth-largest city was a squeaker. Israel beat Watson in Travis County, which contains almost all of Austin, by 17 votes. But Watson built a lead of 881 votes in Williamson County and 22 votes in Hays County, according to unofficial election night tallies — delivering him the mayor’s seat.

[…]

On top of the city’s housing crisis, Watson will have to deal with the state’s Republican leadership, which has grown increasingly hostile to Austin and Texas’ bluer urban areas.

Within the past two years, Austin cut the city’s police spending in the wake of George Floyd protests and rolled back a ban on homeless encampments in public areas — moves that Republican lawmakers in the Texas Legislature later rebuked by passing new laws reining in those measures and restricting other major Texas cities from following in Austin’s steps.

During the campaign, Watson pitched himself as a veteran of the Legislature who could build a working relationship with state GOP leaders — or at least avoid their unfriendly gaze.

“When we choose to work together, we will heal old divides and solve old problems,” Watson said Tuesday night. “When we choose to work together, Austin’s future will get brighter and brighter and brighter, I promise.”

Congratulations to Mayor-elect Watson, who at least should have a pretty good idea of what he’s getting into. I liked both candidates but might have had a preference for Celia Israel, as I tend to see the big city Mayors as potential future statewide candidates (we need to get them from somewhere), which was Watson himself in 2002. Maybe she’ll give that some thought for next go-round anyway. As for dealing with the Lege, I’m pretty sure not having to put up with Dan Patrick’s bullshit was a proximate cause of Watson’s departure for UH a couple of years ago in the first place. Speaking as a resident of a city with a former Legislator as its Mayor and another who hopes to succeed him, I hope that sentiment works for you, but I’d keep my expectations very, very modest. The Austin Chronicle has more.

Precinct analysis: Beto versus Abbott

Dec 14th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

All right, I have the full landscape data for Harris County and the November 2022 election, and I’ll be doing my usual thing with it. There’s a lot of data and a lot of ways to explore it, some of which I don’t realize until I’m in the process of looking at something else. I’m going to start here with the top of the ticket. Let’s roll out the numbers, and at the other side I’ll have all the words.


Dist   Abbott     Beto     Lib     Grn
======================================
CD02   73,159   50,757   1,333     445
CD07   45,780   84,973   1,545     452
CD08   43,294   48,380     860     371
CD09   20,661   74,545     788     504
CD18   39,628  115,106   1,562     703
CD22   12,585    8,669     264      83
CD29   30,228   69,265     920     778
CD36   66,728   44,969   1,410     439
CD38  158,198   98,989   3,130     751

CD02   58.20%   40.38%   1.06%   0.35%
CD07   34.49%   64.01%   1.16%   0.34%
CD08   46.60%   52.07%   0.93%   0.40%
CD09   21.41%   77.25%   0.82%   0.52%
CD18   25.24%   73.32%   0.99%   0.45%
CD22   58.26%   40.13%   1.22%   0.38%
CD29   29.87%   68.45%   0.91%   0.77%
CD36   58.77%   39.60%   1.24%   0.39%
CD38   60.60%   37.92%   1.20%   0.29%

Dist   Abbott     Beto     Lib     Grn
======================================
SD04   55,846   36,950   1,005     312
SD06   41,043   85,936   1,225     927
SD07  153,513  106,557   2,933     853
SD11   57,156   35,725   1,214     339
SD13   22,813  100,559     958     680
SD15   83,653  160,077   2,850     932
SD17   59,143   51,734   1,307     363
SD18   17,094   18,115     320     120

SD04   59.34%   39.26%   1.07%   0.33%
SD06   31.78%   66.55%   0.95%   0.72%
SD07   58.18%   40.38%   1.11%   0.32%
SD11   60.52%   37.83%   1.29%   0.36%
SD13   18.25%   80.44%   0.77%   0.54%
SD15   33.80%   64.67%   1.15%   0.38%
SD17   52.55%   45.97%   1.16%   0.32%
SD18   47.95%   50.81%   0.90%   0.34%

Dist   Abbott     Beto     Lib     Grn
======================================
HD126  35,835   23,627     711     185
HD127  39,102   26,791     722     221
HD128  31,983   13,915     513     171
HD129  37,118   27,144     864     227
HD130  44,983   20,891     775     198
HD131   5,963   25,387     231     169
HD132  35,079   25,603     627     173
HD133  33,195   26,971     684     156
HD134  29,592   51,010   1,044     181
HD135  16,443   24,121     369     208
HD137   7,860   13,421     245     116
HD138  31,077   25,464     708     209
HD139  11,643   32,115     394     199
HD140   5,717   13,400     166     187
HD141   4,549   20,922     210     156
HD142   8,666   25,793     289     204
HD143   8,420   16,047     208     192
HD144  11,566   14,683     260     178
HD145  12,631   32,765     623     228
HD146   8,511   33,610     333     200
HD147   8,952   37,366     476     216
HD148  15,451   21,460     435     175
HD149  12,068   19,844     256     173
HD150  33,857   23,303     669     204

HD126  59.37%   39.14%   1.18%   0.31%
HD127  58.50%   40.08%   1.08%   0.33%
HD128  68.66%   29.87%   1.10%   0.37%
HD129  56.80%   41.53%   1.32%   0.35%
HD130  67.29%   31.25%   1.16%   0.30%
HD131  18.78%   79.96%   0.73%   0.53%
HD132  57.06%   41.64%   1.02%   0.28%
HD133  54.41%   44.21%   1.12%   0.26%
HD134  36.16%   62.34%   1.28%   0.22%
HD135  39.97%   58.63%   0.90%   0.51%
HD137  36.32%   62.01%   1.13%   0.54%
HD138  54.09%   44.32%   1.23%   0.36%
HD139  26.25%   72.41%   0.89%   0.45%
HD140  29.36%   68.82%   0.85%   0.96%
HD141  17.61%   80.98%   0.81%   0.60%
HD142  24.79%   73.80%   0.83%   0.58%
HD143  33.86%   64.53%   0.84%   0.77%
HD144  43.34%   55.02%   0.97%   0.67%
HD145  27.31%   70.85%   1.35%   0.49%
HD146  19.95%   78.80%   0.78%   0.47%
HD147  19.04%   79.49%   1.01%   0.46%
HD148  41.18%   57.19%   1.16%   0.47%
HD149  37.31%   61.36%   0.79%   0.53%
HD150  58.34%   40.15%   1.15%   0.35%

Dist   Abbott     Beto     Lib     Grn
======================================
CC1    67,070  207,830   2,747   1,167
CC2    95,270  108,943   2,266   1,188
CC3   218,228  147,384   4,148   1,218
CC4   109,693  131,496   2,651     953

CC1    24.06%   74.54%   0.99%   0.42%
CC2    45.88%   52.46%   1.09%   0.57%
CC3    58.83%   39.73%   1.12%   0.33%
CC4    44.81%   53.72%   1.08%   0.39%

Dist   Abbott     Beto     Lib     Grn
======================================
JP1    60,159  127,746   2,343     728
JP2    21,749   30,575     520     300
JP3    35,283   42,924     715     405
JP4   168,373  130,575   3,308   1,100
JP5   140,459  148,609   3,076   1,101
JP6     4,970   17,898     228     168
JP7    11,615   67,072     582     414
JP8    47,653   30,254   1,040     310

JP1    31.50%   66.89%   1.23%   0.38%
JP2    40.92%   57.53%   0.98%   0.56%
JP3    44.48%   54.11%   0.90%   0.51%
JP4    55.50%   43.04%   1.09%   0.36%
JP5    47.90%   50.68%   1.05%   0.38%
JP6    21.36%   76.93%   0.98%   0.72%
JP7    14.58%   84.17%   0.73%   0.52%
JP8    60.12%   38.17%   1.31%   0.39%

My notes:

– Going forward, for the most part, I’m going to skip the Congressional and State Senate districts. Most of them are not wholly contained within Harris County – only CDs 18, 29, and 38, and SDs 06 and 15 are fully represented here – so I don’t find there’s sufficient value for the added work. When we get the Texas Legislative Council dataset for the 2022 election, then I’ll return to these districts plus the SBOE districts (none of which are entirely within Harris County now that SBOE6 extends into Montgomery). Also note that CD10 no longer includes any of Harris County.

– I will have a separate post on this, but if you’re wondering how Beto did compared to expectations on the new maps, see here and here for a first look. There will be more, I promise.

– Beto was the top performer for Dems in Harris County, getting 54.03% of the vote. That makes his performance in the precincts the best case scenario (usually), at least for this election. He would be a top performer but not the top performer in 2020 or 2018, so this is hardly an upper bound. For districts that Dems would ideally like to target, like HDs 133 and 138, this shows where we’re starting out in an okay but not great year.

– Honestly, I don’t have a whole lot to say here. I think the more interesting stuff will come when I look at the comparisons to past years and when I look at some of the other races. Even without looking at past data, there wasn’t much of a surprise in anything here. All of the districts performed more or less as you’d expect. The one item of interest may be Beto carrying (barely) JP/Constable precinct 5, given our previous discussion of those precincts. I’m sure we could draw six, maybe even seven Democratic precincts, though whether we could do that while equalizing population and not violating the Voting Rights Act is another question. For sure, we could make five solid Dem precincts.

– So I’ll end here, with a note that I will also look at how the vote went in the city of Houston, the split in the statewide races, the easy passage of the Harris County bonds, and a very deep dive into judicial races. All this and more, coming up soon. Let me know if you have any questions.

Judge assigned to hear election loser contest

Dec 14th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

From the inbox, a press release from Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee:

Judge David Peeples will preside over the election contest filed by Republican candidate Erin Lunceford to void the results of her race for the 189th District Court in the November 2022 Harris County General Election. Judge Peeples has set an initial status conference for today, Tuesday December 13, at 3:00 p.m.

“This will be an important case, and I’m glad to see it’s progressing,” said Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee. “The County will participate in the case, and we plan to make clear that it would be a grave injustice to throw out more than a million legally cast votes, especially given Ms. Lunceford’s completely baseless theories. Each of those votes represents a Harris County resident who participated in our democratic process. That is a sacred act, and we’re going to fight to protect it.”

Judge Peeples is based in San Antonio, and was appointed by the Honorable Susan Brown, the Presiding Judge of the Eleventh Administrative Judicial Region of Texas. Texas law disqualifies the judges in a county from presiding over an election contest filed in that county.

This contest is one of two current requests by losing Republican candidates to throw out the results of the November 2022 election in certain races. The other challenge is regarding State Representative District 135, which will be heard in the State House of Representatives.

“This election took countless hours of work not only by county employees, but by election judges and workers from both parties. We should be looking for ways to support these public servants rather than constantly undermining the hard work it takes to run an election in the third largest county in the country,” added County Attorney Menefee.

See here for the background. If the name sounds familiar, it may be because Judge Peeples was the jurist who ruled that the abortion bounty hunter law SB8 violated the state constitution last December, though he did not issue a statewide injunction against it. I did not see any news items related to this, so what you see here is all I know. Hopefully we will hear more about how this is progressing quickly.

State and county election result relationships: Tarrant County

Dec 12th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

In years past, Tarrant County was a pretty close bellwether for election results in the state of Texas. From 2004 through 2016, the closeness of their Presidential numbers with the statewide numbers was eerie. But since 2018 the talk has been about how Tarrant is on the verge of turning blue, which puts it at least a little to the left of the state as a whole. As I did before with Harris County, I thought I’d take a closer look at how statewide candidates have done in Tarrant County compared to the state overall, to see what it might tell me. We start as we did with Harris in the distant past of 2002:


2002                 2004                   2006
State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff
===================   ===================   ===================
43.33   41.27 -2.06   38.22   37.01 -1.21   36.04   34.80 -1.24
39.96   38.53 -1.43   40.94   37.36 -3.58   29.79   31.07  1.28
46.03   42.63 -3.40   40.77   38.06 -2.71   37.45   37.06 -0.39
41.08   37.76 -3.32   42.14   39.15 -2.99   37.23   36.99 -0.24
32.92   30.86 -2.06                         37.01   36.41 -0.60
41.48   37.94 -3.54                         40.96   40.67 -0.29
37.82   34.85 -2.97                         41.79   40.86 -0.93
41.49   39.02 -2.47                         41.73   40.52 -1.21
40.51   37.55 -2.96                         44.89   42.79 -2.10
41.54   38.73 -2.81                         43.35   41.56 -1.79
41.89   38.49 -3.40								
43.24   39.74 -3.50								
45.90   42.26 -3.64								
39.15   35.90 -3.25								
42.61   39.20 -3.41								
40.01   36.92 -3.09								
										
Min   -3.64           Min   -3.58           Min   -2.10
Max   -1.43           Max   -1.21           Max    1.28
Avg   -2.96           Avg   -2.62           Avg   -0.75

You can read the earlier posts for the explanation of the numbers. The bottom line is that in early to mid Aughts, Tarrant was more Republican overall than the rest of the state. As was the case with Harris, there was a step in the Democratic direction in 2006, with the chaotic multi-candidate Governor’s race providing the first Democrat to do better in Tarrant than in the state, but it was still about a point more Republican than overall.


2008                  2010                  2012
State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff
===================   ===================   ===================
43.68   43.73  0.05   42.30   40.98 -1.32   41.38   41.43  0.05
42.84   42.52 -0.32   34.83   34.97  0.14   40.62   40.41 -0.21
44.35   43.39 -0.96   33.66   33.90  0.24   39.60   39.20 -0.40
43.79   43.47 -0.32   35.29   35.24 -0.05   41.91   41.40 -0.51
45.88   44.16 -1.72   35.80   35.83  0.03   41.24   40.31 -0.93
44.63   43.51 -1.12   36.24   35.64 -0.60				
45.53   43.81 -1.72   37.26   35.39 -1.87				
43.75   42.49 -1.26   37.00   35.97 -1.03				
                      35.62   35.17 -0.45				
                      36.62   36.05 -0.57				
										
Min   -1.72           Min   -1.87            Min   -0.93
Max    0.05           Max    0.24            Max    0.05
Avg   -0.92           Avg   -0.55            Avg   -0.40

Still slightly on the Republican side as we move into elections that feel more familiar to us – as I’ve said before, looking at those elections from 2002 through 2006 is like visiting a foreign country – and you can see how dead on the Tarrant Presidential numbers were. Tarrant was a bit more Republican in the judicial races than in the executive office and Senate races, but otherwise not much else to say.


2014                  2016
State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff
===================   ===================
34.36   36.13  1.77   43.24   43.14 -0.10
38.90   41.08  2.18   38.38   38.62  0.24
38.71   39.53  0.82   38.53   38.43 -0.10
38.02   38.91  0.89   41.18   40.49 -0.69
37.69   38.67  0.98   39.36   39.58  0.22
35.32   36.49  1.17   40.05   39.75 -0.30
36.84   38.14  1.30   40.20   40.91  0.71
37.25   38.43  1.18   40.89   40.59 -0.30
36.49   38.02  1.53				
37.60   38.41  0.81				
36.54   38.00  1.46				
						
Min    0.81           Min   -0.69
Max    2.18           Max    0.71
Avg    1.28           Avg   -0.04

I wouldn’t have guessed that 2014 would be the year that Tarrant County officially became (slightly) more Democratic than the state as a whole, but here we are. Maybe because 2014 was such a miserable year, maybe because Wendy Davis was the Dem nominee for Governor, maybe it was just time. It wasn’t quite the start of a trend, as things snapped back a bit in 2016, but a threshold had been crossed.


2018                  2020                  2022
State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff   State Tarrant  Diff
===================   ===================   ===================
48.33   49.93  1.60   46.48	49.31  2.83   43.81   47.24  3.43
42.51   43.75  1.24   43.87	46.18  2.31   43.44   47.36  3.92
46.49   47.25  0.76   43.56	45.25  1.69   43.62   46.80  3.18
47.01   48.11  1.10   44.49	46.71  2.22   40.91   44.33  3.42
43.39   44.70  1.31   44.08	46.14  2.06   42.10   44.90  2.80
43.19   43.99  0.80   44.76	47.23  2.47   43.63   46.72  3.09
46.41   47.37  0.96   44.35	46.50  2.15   40.51   43.83  3.32
43.91   44.85  0.94   45.18	47.38  2.20   41.81   45.14  3.33
46.83   47.86  1.03   44.70	47.03  2.33   42.87   46.36  3.49
46.29   47.44  1.15   45.47	47.91  2.44   43.55   46.75  3.20
46.29   47.68  1.39                           43.02   46.48  3.46
45.48   46.24  0.76                           42.74   46.22  3.48
45.85   47.14  1.29								
										
Min    0.76           Min    1.69            Min    2.80
Max    1.60           Max    2.83            Max    3.92
Avg    1.10           Avg    2.27            Avg    3.34

And thus, despite the small hiccup of 2016, the ball moved ever forward. It would be easy to look at the Tarrant County results in 2022, especially at the top, compare them to 2018 and 2020, and declare that Tarrant had backslid, but as you can see that would be a misreading of the data. I’m going to step a little out on a limb here and say that Tarrant will be Democratic at a Presidential level again in 2024, and there’s a good chance that will be true elsewhere on the statewide ballot as well. Going by the average gap in 2022, two other Dems would have carried Tarrant County in 2018. If the trend we see here continues, getting to about 45% statewide would probably be enough to win Tarrant in 2024. Please feel free to point at this and laugh at me if this turns out to be wildly off base. Until then, I’ll do this same exercise for a couple more counties, just for the fun of it.

At least we avoided violence

Dec 11th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I’ve tried and failed to come up with a better post title than that for this.

After two years of fears of electoral dysfunction and violence, voting rights advocates breathed bated sighs of relief this week as Texas finished a relatively calm midterm election cycle.

“It was a little bit better than I thought, but I also had very low expectations,” said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of the voting rights group Common Cause Texas. “We were really concerned about violence at the polls, and most of that was pretty limited.”

But he’s not celebrating.

Citing thousands of voter complaints received throughout the midterm cycle, Common Cause and other voter advocacy groups want the Texas Legislature to bolster voter protection and education measures and revisit recently passed laws that empowered partisan poll watchers.

The complaints ranged from long lines, malfunctioning machines and delayed poll site openings to harassment, intimidation, threats and misinformation. Common Cause received at least 3,000 such complaints on its tipline, Gutierrez said, and most of the harassment, misinformation and intimidation allegations came from voters of color, sparking fears that there were targeted efforts to quell election turnout in 2022 and future contests.

Other voting rights groups said this week that they saw a similar number of complaints. They warned that even isolated incidents can have reverberating effects on voter confidence or exacerbate political tensions that are already at dangerous levels.

“It could be chilling to thousands and thousands of voters,” said Emily Eby, senior election protection attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project. “We can’t underestimate the impact of fear entering the voting equation.”

The 2022 cycle was the first major electoral contest since the passage of Senate Bill 1, a package of voting laws that the Texas Legislature pursued in part due to unfounded claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election. The legislation tightened mail-in voter identification requirements, banned drive-thru and 24-hour voting and curtailed early-voting hours.

It also enhanced partisan poll watchers’ access to polling places, giving them “free movement” at sites and allowing for misdemeanor charges to be pursued against election officials accused of obstructing them “in a manner that would make observation not reasonably effective.”

Voting and civil rights groups warned at the time that the new law — coupled with rising election denialism — would disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color in Texas. In 2020, Texas had the most Black eligible voters in the nation, the second-largest number of Hispanic eligible voters and the third-largest number of Asian eligible voters, according to Pew Research Center. Texas has routinely ranked among the nation’s most restrictive for voting due to, among other things, its tight rules on mail-in and absentee ballots. This year, Texas ranked 46th out of 50 states for ease of voting, according to the Election Law Journal’s annual Cost of Voting Index.

I drafted this right after the election and am just running it now. You can read the rest, I don’t have much to add. I was pleasantly surprised that early voting went as smoothly as it did, and while there were some polling place issues in Harris County they were snafus and not the result of intimidation or sabotage, despite the risible efforts to nullify the results. There were some issues with poll watchers elsewhere in the state but I didn’t hear of anything here. Nationally, at least at this very minute, there seems to be a moment of reckoning for election denialism, though given the results here there’s no reason to believe any Texas Republican has had anything remotely close to a change of heart on that score. I too am glad we made it through this election without anything horrible happening, but I don’t know that I’m more optimistic about 2024. Ask me again later, I sure hope I can give a different answer.

And now we have a judicial loser contesting the election

Dec 9th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

8 comments

The Republicans did warn us they’d be sore losers.

Republican judicial candidate Erin Lunceford filed a petition Wednesday seeking a new election in Harris County’s 189th judicial district court race after losing by 2,743 votes out of more than 1 million ballots cast.

Lunceford’s opponent, Democrat Tamika Craft, won the election by 0.26 percent of the vote.

The petition, which names Lunceford as the contestant and Craft as contestee, claims numerous violations of the Texas Election Code, including a failure to provide a sufficient amount of ballot paper to 25 polling locations.

Harris County Republican Party Chair Cindy Siegel indicated there could be more election contests to come.

“During the last month, we’ve had a lot of our candidates that were in very close races that have been talking to us wanting to know the information that we’ve accumulated and have reported,” Siegel said. “Several of them are considering election contests.”

Andy Taylor, general counsel for the Harris County GOP, is representing Lunceford.

Taylor accused Harris County Elections Administrator Cliff Tatum, who took over the office starting in August, of intentionally causing ballot paper shortages in Republican-leaning neighborhoods.

“If it was just mismanagement, it was just gross incompetence, wouldn’t one think that the lack of paper would apply equally and uniformly across the map, so that there would be roughly an equivalent number of Democratic stronghold precinct neighborhoods as well as Republican precinct stronghold neighborhoods?” Taylor said. “And, yet, that’s not the way it’s breaking.”

Taylor alleged 80 percent of polling places with paper shortages on Nov. 8 were in areas considered Republican strongholds.

“I want to send a message to the Harris County elections administrator,” Taylor said. “Mr. Tatum, your day of reckoning has just started.”

In a statement, Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee said his office will keep a close eye on Lunceford’s election contest.

“I’m disappointed to see another losing candidate challenging the results of their election. Judge Lunceford previously served on the bench, so I trust she understands the seriousness of asking a court to disregard the votes of over a million residents across Harris County,” Menefee said. “This case will focus on the details of every aspect of the November 8 election in Harris County. My office will be involved in the case every step of the way to ensure people’s votes are protected.”

The petition is filed in Harris County, but the case will be heard by a judge from outside the county, according to Menefee’s office.

So many things to say, so I’ll bullet-point it:

– This is different from the ridiculous election contest filed in HD135 by a candidate that lost by 15 points and over 6,000 votes. That one would be heard in the House by a House committee, if Speaker Phelan for some reason doesn’t toss it as a frivolous waste of time. This one will be heard in a courtroom.

– As a reminder and a general principle, never believe a word Andy Taylor says.

– To put it another way, good luck proving intent. Also, reports from the field on Election Day about paper issues were very much coming from Democratic sites. The Texas Organizing Project didn’t file its lawsuit to extend voting hours because of problems in The Villages and Cy-Fair.

– Random fact: In 2020, Democrat Jane Robinson lost her race for Chief Justice of the 14th Court of Appeals by 1,191 votes out over over 2.3 million cast, a margin of 0.06 percent of the vote. You know what she did? She conceded gracefully and went on with her life.

– Another reminder: There were 782 voting locations on Election Day, and you could vote at any of them. There were a half-dozen voting locations within walking distance of my house on Election Day. Anyone who ran into a problem at one location could have gone to another. By all accounts, there were maybe 20-25 sites that have paper issues. That left a mere 750 or so alternatives, including ones that would have been very close by.

– In other words, please find me the people who showed up to vote at a location that was having paper problems, and did not wait for them to be fixed, did not go to another location, did not come back later, and as a result did not vote. You really gonna claim that there were over two thousand of them, and all of them were going to vote for Erin Lunceford?

– Did I mention that the Republicans opposed the extension of voting hours in Harris County (and not in red-voting Bell County, which also had voting location issues), and also opposed the counting of provisional ballots cast by people who voted after 7 PM? As I said before, the obvious way to deal with delays in opening a given voting location is to push back the closing time for it. But the Republicans opposed that at every turn.

– Can you imagine what the Republican response to this would be if it were a Democrat complaining about voting location problems? You could have voted elsewhere! You could have voted early! It’s your own damn fault you didn’t vote! Look at how zealously they opposed all of the efforts to expand voting access in the pandemic, including the third week of early voting that Greg Abbott ordered. You’re immunocompromised and you want to vote by mail or from your car because you’re afraid of a deadly disease? Too bad!

– The remedy, if they somehow win on these laughable claims, would be to redo the entire damn election. To say the least, that is a massive, massive upending of the regular democratic order. The amount of evidence they’d need to provide to come close to justifying such an ask, I can’t even begin to comprehend.

– But really, this is all about making noise and trying to cast doubt on the election administrator’s office and government in general in Harris County. It’s just the Big Lie in a slightly sanitized package.

Precinct analysis: Specifically, my precincts

Dec 4th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

I’m still waiting for the full landscape canvass data from Harris County – things are a bit up in the air right now because of the lawsuit filed by the local GOP, but I expect to get that data soon, and when I do I’ll do the usual set of analyses on it for you. In the meantime, I’ve been idly speculating about my own precincts in the Heights. I saw a lot of Mealer signs around, which is in part because she lives in the neighborhood, but it got me wondering if there was a significant crossover vote for her here. I never saw a yard that had both a Beto sign and a Mealer sign in it, but maybe those who voted that way wanted to keep it on the down low. The only way to know is to look at the data.

So I went to the canvass reports that are available now on the HarrisVotes website. I specifically wanted to see what the vote for Beto looked like versus what the Lina Hidalgo vote looked like in the two precincts around where I live and where I spend most of my time. For comparison, I did the same for 2018, to see how much Beto/Emmett crossover there was. It’s a limited look – I’ll be able to learn much more when I have the full landscape report – but all I’m looking for here is quick and dirty. That will do for now.

Here are the numbers. I added the vote totals for the two precincts. The percentages include the third party (and for 2022 County Judge, write in) candidates, so they don’t sum to 100. Note that precincts were redrawn last year, and the net effect is that there are more voters in them in 2022 than in 2018.


Year  Candidate   Vote    Pct
=============================
2018       Beto  1,819  72.0%
2018       Cruz    674  26.7%

2018    Hidalgo  1,205  49.2%
2018     Emmett  1,169  47.8%

2022       Beto  2,546  70.2%
2022     Abbott  1,019  28.1%

2022    Hidalgo  2,279  63.6%
2022     Mealer  1,302  36.3%

So yes, there were Beto/Mealer voters in my neighborhood. That’s not surprising, given that Beto got 54% of the vote and 595K votes total, while Hidalgo got under 51% and 553K votes. As I said, I won’t know if our neighborhood was substantially different than others in the improvement that Mealer had over Abbott until I get the full picture. She did fall well short of Ed Emmett in 2018, getting a bit more than half as many crossovers as he did then. Again, not a big surprise given Beto’s 58% versus Hidalgo’s 49% four years ago. Indeed, my neighborhood was a pretty good proxy for the count as a whole in the County Judge’s race in 2018, but it was significantly more Democratic in that race this year. Make of all that what you will.

From a turnout perspective, in 2018 2,527 of 3,431 registered voters came out, for 73.7% of the total. In 2022, it was 3,641 out of 5,298, or 68.7% turnout. The county as a whole declined from 52.86% to 43.54%, so again not a surprise. If anything, the decline was less steep here than elsewhere. But a decline it was.

Anyway, that’s what there is for this comparison. I will of course look at this in more depth once I have the data I need.

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