For your consideration:
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Fixating on Zapata County and saying Dems have a Latino problem in Texas is inaccurate.The reality is Latino voter participation broke records and expanded the democratic vote margins in the state.
#Texas #LatinoVote Thread 1/5 ⇩
@LatinoDecisions / @JoltAction— Antonio Arellano (@AntonioArellano) 12:30 PM – 05 November 2020
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Historic Latino voter turnout: 500,000 first-time Latino voters voted during early voting in Texas.Overall the Latino vote increased compared to 2016 and 2018.
3/5
#Texas #LatinoVote— Antonio Arellano (@AntonioArellano) 12:30 PM – 05 November 2020
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Don’t use the RGV to try and pin Texas red on us. Trump ran ahead in Texas with white voters.Don’t fall for this Latino RGV distraction. Yes, we have work to do in the RGV but the bigger story is anglos did not match Beto numbers, they went Trump.
5/5
#Texas #LatinoVote— Antonio Arellano (@AntonioArellano) 12:30 PM – 05 November 2020
It’s very much not my intent to pin blame on anyone. As I noted in my post about how voting went in these Latino counties, which includes a lot of RGV counties as well as Bexar and El Paso, I’m just showing what happened. I think Jolt has done a lot of good work, a lot of hard and necessary work, and I salute them for it.
I can’t address the specifics of the numbers cited in those tweets – I don’t have his data, and the public data is quite limited right now. I do have some limited Harris County canvass data, courtesy of Greg Wythe, so I thought I’d bring that in here to continue the discussion. Here’s what I can say about how voting went in the five predominantly Latino State Rep districts in Harris County:
Dist Trump Clinton Trump% Clinton% Margin
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140 6,119 21,009 21.8% 75.0% 14,890
143 8,746 23,873 26.0% 70.9% 15,127
144 10,555 15,885 38.3% 57.6% 5,330
145 10,102 23,534 28.7% 66.8% 13,432
148 14,815 31,004 30.3% 63.4% 16,279
50,337 115,305 30.4% 69.6% 64,968
Dist Trump Biden Trump% Biden% Margin
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140 10,175 22,651 30.3% 67.4% 12,476
143 13,105 25,109 33.5% 64.1% 12,004
144 14,415 17,174 44.5% 53.0% 2,759
145 15,198 28,200 34.1% 63.4% 13,102
148 20,207 40,821 32.2% 65.0% 20,614
73,100 133,955 35.3% 64.7% 60,855
The first table is 2016, the second is 2020. Please note that while the percentages for each candidate is their actual percentage for all voters in the district, the totals at the bottom are just the two-candidate values. I apologize for mixing apples and oranges. We should note that while these five districts are the five predominantly Latino districts in Houston, there is some variance. HDs 140 and 143 have the largest Latino population totals by percentage, while the others have a significant minority of Anglo residents. HD144 includes the Pasadena area, while HDs 145 and 148 include parts of the Heights and surrounding neighborhoods. HD148 is probably the least Latino of the five, and is currently represented by Anna Eastman, who won the special election to serve the remainder of Jessica Farrar’s term, though she was defeated in the primary by Penny Shaw.
As you can see, Trump improved on his 2016 performance in all five districts. Biden got more votes than Clinton in all five districts, but had a lower percentage in all but HD148. The reason both Trump and Biden could see an increase in percentage in HD148 is because the third-party share of the vote was so high in 2016 – it was over six percent that year, but looks to be less than three percent this year. Overall, Trump lost these five districts by about four thousand fewer votes than he did in 2016, with about 20K more votes cast.
This is not an eye-popping change like what we saw in some RGV counties was, but it’s still a decline. I don’t know how much of that is from Latinos voting for Trump, and how much is from Anglo voters in these districts turning out for Trump. Jolt’s mission is to turn out Latino voters, and in the aggregate that’s going to be good for Democrats even if there are some rough spots, and even if it’s not quite as good as we might have expected. My approach is not as granular as it could be, so we shouldn’t draw broad conclusions from it. There are plenty of Latino precincts elsewhere in Harris County – HDs 137 and 138 will have quite a few – so there’s much more to be said. This is the data I have right now. Make of it what you will.