A bullish take on the State House

From Mike Hailey of Capitol Inside:

The wildly unpredictable coronavirus appears to be fueling a massive blue wave that sweeps the Democrats back into power in the Texas House of Representatives with President Donald Trump as their all-time greatest ally.

With the president blowing up a submissive GOP in Texas and beyond, the Democrats are poised to take the Legislature’s lower chamber back as long they stay out of the way of the runaway train called the Trump campaign between now and November.

The Capitol Inside crystal ball foresees a cataclysmic November shaping up for the Republicans who could be on the verge of fumbling away the 38 Texas electoral votes and a U.S. Senate seat as well if Trump doesn’t pull off the biggest comeback in modern American history.

Barring a miraculous economy recovery that’s Trump’s only hope for a successful re-election bid, the tentative forecast here has the Democrats running up the score on the critical state House battlefield this fall with a net gain of at least 15 seats with the potential for more at the rate the Republicans are going now.

While the 2020 election is harder to predict than votes in the past, the current outlook for the Legislature’s lower chamber is a solid blue with a minimum of 82 Democrats and 68 Republicans or less taking the oath in January. The Democrats have a good chance to flip more than a half-dozen congressional districts in Texas with a toxic president leading the charge for the GOP. The minority party will oust GOP State Senator Pete Flores of Pleasanton in a district where he was lucky to win in the first place in a special election in 2018.

After predicting that Democrats would pick up 11 Texas House seats in 2018 when they wrestled a dozen away from the GOP, the crystal ball here sees Republican incumbents and open race candidates with cause for concern in any district where Trump failed to win less than two-thirds of the vote four years ago.

U.S. Senator John Cornyn would have won a new term in a November blowout if he hadn’t wrapped himself in a president who’d sought to portray the worst public health crisis in more than a century as a partisan hoax before ordering the military to attack peaceful protesters for the sake of a campaign photo op.

Cornyn might still have a 50-50 chance of surviving Trump in a development that could help minimize the down-ballot devastation that appears to be on the horizon for the Republicans here.

[…]

Texas Republicans have tried to dismiss the blue wave in 2018 as an offshoot of Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s strong showing as the minority party ticket leader in a battle that he almost won against U.S. Senator Ted Cruz. But the truth is that Trump had dramatically accelerated the conversion of Texas from red to blue with the results at the polls in 2016 and 2018 as obvious evidence of the unprecedented drain that he’s had on the Republicans here.

The Democrats would reclaim the state House with a net gain of nine seats. They could accomplish that simply by winning in every GOP-controlled district that O’Rourke carried two years ago.

Republicans will be running as underdogs in most of 17 House districts where Trump garnered less than 55 percent of the vote in his first White House race. Some of seven GOP candidates in House districts where the president claimed between 55 percent and 60 percent of the 2016 vote are probably going to lose as well.

At the top of the page, there’s a summary that predicts 15 seats picked up by Dems in the House, one seat picked up in the Senate, eight (!) Congressional seats flipped by Dems, and it also rates the US Senate and Railroad Commissioner races as tossups. Heady stuff, to say the least. The Dems are officially targeting something like 22 State House seats, so a net of plus fifteen is conceivable, if quite aggressive. Picking up eight Congressional seats means not only taking all of CDs 10, 21, 22, 23, and 24, but also three out of 02, 03, 06, 25, and 31. That’s way on the high end of my imagination – though I will note it’s right in line with the Rachel Bitecofer model – and I confess I have a hard time wrapping my brain around it. That said, you see bits like this excerpt from the Daily Kos Elections digest, and you wonder:

TX-06: The DCCC’s Targeting and Analytics Department has conducted an in-house poll that gives freshman Republican Rep. Ron Wright a small 45-41 lead over Democrat Stephen Daniel in a race that hasn’t attracted much outside attention. The survey also shows Joe Biden and Donald Trump deadlocked 46-46 here. This seat, which includes Arlington and rural areas south of Dallasbacked Trump 54-42, but last cycle, GOP Sen. Ted Cruz carried it just 51-48. Wright won his first term 53-45 in a contest that featured very little outside spending.

It’s an internal poll, so take it with an appropriate level of salt. But if it’s accurate, if CD06 really is a tossup for Biden, then at the very least those first five seats would all be leaning Dem to some degree, and the other four would be very tight as well. It’s way optimistic, but that doesn’t mean it’s unrealistic. The Texas Signal has more.

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2 Responses to A bullish take on the State House

  1. Flypusher says:

    It’s a damn shame that Beto didn’t try again for Senate.

  2. mollusk says:

    Agreed, Fly. He would have had pretty much an open field in the primary, and IMHO would have had a better than even chance to take out Cornyn even before the current potential electoral earthquake.

    That said, I think (OK, hope) we’ll do OK with either Hegar or West.

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