A few of my thoughts and a few from other people…
– There were 114,059 votes cast in the Democratic runoff in Harris County, with 552,678 in the Lite Guv race. (There’s no way I can see to get the actual total number of ballots cast, so this is the best approximation I have.) Thus, 20.6% of Dem runoff votes were cast in Harris County. And as noted before, this was the second-highest turnout Democratic primary runoff of the century. I’m not going to do a full historical review of statewide runoff turnout, but there were 486,912 votes cast in 2022 (in the AG race) and 434,889 in 2018.
– There were 146,190 votes cast in the Republican runoff in Harris County, with 1,387,674 in the Senate race. Thus, 10.5% of GOP runoff votes were cast in Harris County. I don’t think that means anything, I just thought it was interesting.
– Once again we see how tricky it is to poll in these races. Annise Parker had an 18-point lead in the UH/Hobby poll, and lost by two. Christian Menefee has a seven-point lead in the UH/Hobby poll, and won by 39. Alex Mealer had a nine-point lead in that same poll and won by 36. It’s hard out here on a pollster.
– A couple of other Harris County results of interest that I didn’t mention yesterday: Judge Brian Warren held onto his bench with a 60-40 victory, while Melanie Miles ousted incumbent Justice of the Peace Sharon Burney. In re: Judge Warren, the HCDP sent out an email to precinct chairs last week confirming that we will be picking nominees for two judicial races, not just one, at the next CEC meeting. Judge Warren likely would have been an attractive candidate for one of those spots if he had fallen in the runoff, but that didn’t happen. I’m aware of three other potential candidates for the District Court bench at this time.
– Thoughts From Other People #1, from G. Elliott Morris:
Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated incumbent U.S. Senator John Cornyn in the Republican Senate runoff today, giving Democrats their preferred and weaker opponent. That’s not because Paxton is all that much more “conservative” than John Cornyn (whatever that means these days), but because he’s just generally a bad dude who has earned a lot of bad press over the last year. Paxton has what we call in political science a “negative candidate residual.”
The general impression that Paxton is a worse general election candidate than Cornyn would have been is not misguided. Empirically, hypothetical general election polling showed Talarico doing about 1-2 points better against Paxton than Cornyn across many polls. That is not an earth-shattering difference — but it might be enough in a close race.
And this race is looking really, really close.
[…]
Texas is not all crimson red all of the time. Back in 2018, Beto O’Rourke lost to Ted Cruz by 2.6 points. That was the closest a Democrat had come to a statewide Texas win in decades. Importantly for our benchmarking purposes, it happened in a year with a roughly D+7 to D+8 national environment. In other words: Democrats came within striking distance of Texas in a very good year for their party — about 9-10 points to the right of the national vote.
Now look at where things stand for 2026. The national generic ballot today is roughly D+6 to D+7 — not quite 2018, but close. In fact, Democrats seem to be running even with Democrats at this point in that last “wave” election — the generic ballot at this point in 2018, per my historical average, was also D+6. If Democrats gain another 1-2 points in the next 6 months (which is extremely doable in a midterm), that puts them in line with 2018 or better.
And there’s a real argument that the D+6 national number understates Democrats’ actual position in non-presidential electorates today. I’ve made this case in detail at this blog already: the people who turn out in midterms and specials have been disproportionately Democratic this cycle, and special election results have been running well to the left of 2024 presidential numbers. This alone means we should expect Democrats to do better in 2026 than in 2018, all else being equal.
Zoom in to Texas specifically, and the picture gets even more interesting. My state-level generic ballot estimates now have Democrats at 50.7% of the two-party vote for House candidates in the Lone Star state — essentially even with, or slightly ahead of, Republicans on the generic ballot in a state Trump won by 14 points just 18 months ago.
Morris applies all the usual caveats, but go read the rest anyway, because there’s a lot more to see.
– Thoughts From Other People #2, from Suzanne Bellsnyder:
A word to my fellow Republicans
I want to talk to the people reading this who feel the same knot in their stomach I do this morning.
You know who you are. You voted in the primary. Maybe you voted for Cornyn. Maybe you voted for Hunt. Maybe you held your nose and voted for Paxton because you’d been told he was the more “conservative” Republican. Either way, you are looking at this November ballot and something in you is recoiling.
And then a quieter voice in your head says: But I’m a Republican. I have to vote the ticket.
I want to take that voice seriously for a minute, because it isn’t a stupid voice. It’s the voice of every family Thanksgiving, every Sunday school class, every business relationship, every community board you’ve ever served on. It’s the voice that tells you who your people are. It is doing real work for you, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But I want to ask you a harder question. What are you actually being loyal to?
You are not being loyal to the candidate. You don’t know him. He’s never visited your part of the world. You probably don’t like him. I might even argue he didn’t earn your vote and the votes he did manage to get were few and far between in the great scheme of things.
And frankly, the Republican party as you understood it — the party of Reagan, of limited government, of personal integrity, of character mattering — is not what’s on the ballot this November. The brand is the same. The candidates have changed.
I am asking you to think long and hard about this.
If your values are integrity, character, and showing up to do the job, then a vote for a candidate who fails those tests is a vote against your values, not for them.
So if you don’t align with these candidates on the values that matter most to you, what are you pledging your loyalty to?
Is it habit? The muscle memory of forty years of pulling the same lever?
Is it the discomfort of doing something different — the strangeness of standing in that booth and making a choice you’ve never made before?
Or is it the quiet fear that the alternative — voting independent, splitting your ticket, skipping a race — would feel worse than swallowing hard and pulling the lever one more time?
I am here to tell you it doesn’t.
Bellsnyder, who writes (and also podcasts) Texas Rural Reporter and is a big public school supporter and voucher opponent, has previously written about her disapproval of Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick as well; I daresay she’s not a Bo French fan, either. I’m putting this here mostly to show that there are Republicans who are not happy with at least some of their choices on the ballot this November. How many of them there are I couldn’t say, nor what they ultimately decide to do. But they’re there, and they’ll be a factor.
– Thoughts From Other People #3, from Tim Murphy at Mother Jones:
Cornyn’s trajectory is instructive, although there are vanishingly few pre-MAGA Republicans left to take note of it. He was a less partisan attorney general than Paxton, in his previous life in Austin. In his current one in Washington, Cornyn passed a modest, bipartisan gun control law after the massacre in Uvalde, and called Trump “reckless” after January 6th. A lot of people in the chamber seemed to respect him. There is not even a billow of smoke about a messy personal life. But there has also probably never been a point in the last two years of Trump’s rule where anyone has thought, Well, John Cornyn will put a stop to this. He, too, told a story about what MAGA does to Republican officeholders, about how people who might know better simply find a different version of themselves. When Democrats in the state escaped to Illinois last summer to deny quorum, it was Cornyn who suggested the FBI be used to track them down. This was the fallacy of his campaign—that in order to stop Paxton, he must essentially become him. But there was no substitute for the real thing.
As I explained in a profile of Paxton several years ago, the newly minted Republican nominee embodies something essential about the GOP in the age of Trump. He is remarkable not for his smarts or charisma, but for his willingness to do what is asked regardless of what might be proper. Shame can only hold you back. Under Paxton, the AG’s office has been a fully weaponized agency, that has launched frivolous but harassing investigations of voting rights groups and immigrant aid organizations; targeted Trump critics and Democrats; and built the legal foundation for overturning a presidential election. He has been elected over and over again by running against the enemies of Donald Trump and Christian nationalists—a Jewish Republican speaker; business-minded Republicans in the state legislature; a Bush scion; and now a white-haired elder statesmen who looked like someone who might broker a grand bargain even if he never really did.
It’s fitting that when Paxton was impeached in 2023, it was for allegedly using his office to benefit the interests of a single donor. While he was acquitted by the state senate and has denied wrongdoing, that kind of concierge service is the secret to his staying power. Increasingly, it’s just how you get ahead in Republican politics—not by blocking and tackling, or constituent services, or quietly building a reputation, but doing what is asked by the big guy.
Trump is who they want to be—saying and doing what he wants, making deals, getting rich. But Ken Paxton is all that most of them are: A bad lawyer looking to get ahead, background music in someone else’s story. After all, the Senate Republican caucus already includes two other former state attorneys general who signed the Texas AG’s shoddy brief seeking to throw out the results of the 2020 election. Graham and the rest will welcome him, even if it costs $100 million to get him there, because whoever was left of the old guard has retired or been forced out. There’s no more delusion about what a Republican senator is or needs to be in Trump’s second term: They’re all Ken Paxton now.
Murphy added this observation: “Of the state’s 254 counties, all but one went for the AG. The exception was tiny Kennedy County—Cornyn carried it 6 votes to 2.” The level to which Cornyn utterly debased and degraded himself in this campaign, all to get his ass absolutely demolished, is the sort of thing that deserves to have ba textbook be written about it.
Bellsnyder? Meh. Wrong about Prop 4, as were Democrats, Rethuglicans and even Greens, sadly. A few fellow leftist enviromentalists saw the reality better than those folks and voted “no” on reality, not wingnuttery. (Her Sherman County is second-highest Panhandle County on overappropriating the Ogallala.)
Beyond that, she and plenty of others will eventually get in bed with Kenny Boy. Say, 65 percent. Another 20-25 percent will stay home. That’s 10-15 percent for Dems in general, or Talarico and the RRC candidate vs Bo French in particular. (Sad, no Green there.)