Battleground Texas

We hit a new peak in voter registrations

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Texas now has almost 17.7 million voters — 1.9 million more than four years ago, when Gov. Greg Abbott won re-election.

New voter registration totals from the Texas Division of Elections show the state’s voter rolls are continuing to grow even faster than the population. While the state’s population has grown about 7 percent since 2018, voter registrations have grown about 12 percent.

Nowhere has the surge been bigger than in Harris County, where 230,000 people have been added to the voter rolls since 2018. Tarrant and Bexar counties are next, with more than 130,000 more voters than four years ago. All three counties voted Democratic in the 2020 presidential election.

The result is that at least 1 of every 5 voters in Texas never cast a general election ballot in the Lone Star State prior to 2014 — a remarkable wild card in a state that had stable politics and a slow stream of new voters for a generation before that.

Some of the biggest percentage increases in voter registrations are coming from booming counties that voted Republican in 2020.

Comal County, just north of San Antonio, saw a 29 percent increase in voter registrations from four years ago — the highest growth percentage of any county in the state. Not far behind was Kaufman County, east of Dallas, which also grew by about 29 percent.

[…]

Since 2014, Texas has added 3.6 million voters — roughly equivalent to the populations of Wisconsin and Minnesota.

The increase can be traced to 2014, when a group of campaign strategists from President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign launched an effort they called Battleground Texas to build an army of volunteer registrars.

See here and here for some background, and here for historic data. It’s wild that this has accelerated so much in recent years – we’ve talked about how Harris County was basically flat for years prior to 2012. This will have to slow down, at least to equalize to the rate of population growth, but today is not that day.

The increase in voter registration is absolutely a factor in the recent surge in turnout. In 2014, with 14 million voters and 33.7% turnout, there were 4.7 million total ballots. With 17.7 million voters, 33.7% turnout would be almost 6 million votes. Needless to say, we expect a higher percentage turnout than that this year. If we get the 8.3 million voters we got in 2018, that’s 47% this year, while it was 53% in 2018. I don’t know what we’ll get and I’m not trying to make a projection, I’m just noting that we have a higher floor now.

We continue to register more voters

Nov 30th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Seventeen million and counting.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Texas has surpassed 17 million registered voters for the first time, continuing a pace that is reshaping the state’s electorate so rapidly that even the politicians cannot keep up.

Despite a series of new election regulations from the Republican-led Legislature and more purges of inactive voters from the rolls, the state has added nearly 2 million voters in the last four years and more than 3.5 million since eight years ago, when Gov. Greg Abbott won his first term.

The result is at least 1 of every 5 voters in Texas never cast a ballot in the Lone Star State prior to 2014 — a remarkable wild card in a state that had stable politics and a slow stream of new voters for a generation before that.

“You have a largely new electorate that is unfamiliar with the trends and the personalities in the area,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor. “That rapid turnover leads to a lot of uncertainty for candidates.”

Texas was just short of 17 million people eligible to vote in the constitutional amendment elections Nov. 2. Harris and Dallas counties combined to add nearly 12,000 more voters as Election Day approached, putting the state over the threshold.

It’s all setting up for a 2022 election cycle that is more competitive, more expensive and more uncertain than statewide candidates are used to seeing in Texas.

Just a reminder, these are the voter registration figures for Harris County since 2014:

2014 = 2,044,361
2016 = 2,182,980
2018 = 2,307,654
2020 = 2,431,457
2021 = 2,482,914

That’s 438K new voters in the county over those seven years. I’ve gone over these numbers before, but 2014 was the first two-year cycle in the 2000s that saw a real increase in the voter rolls. It makes a difference having a government in place that wants to increase voter participation. (And yes, as I have said multiple times before, I credit Mike Sullivan, in whose tenure these numbers started to increase, for his role in getting that started.)

But there’s a group that deserves a lot of credit, too.

Texas is unique in how it runs voter registration, barring non-Texas residents from volunteering to help people through the process. Even Texans can’t help fellow Texans register without first jumping through a series of hurdles or facing potential criminal charges.

Anyone in Texas who wants to help voters register must be trained and deputized by county election officials. But going through the one-hour course in Harris County allows volunteer registrars to sign up voters only in that county. To register voters in a neighboring county, they have to request to be deputized there as well and take that training course, too.

To be able to sign up any voter in the state, a volunteer registrar would need to be deputized in all 254 Texas counties — and those temporary certifications last only two years.

Consequently, voter registrations in Texas grew at a glacial pace before 2014. From 2000 to 2014, the state added just 1 million registered voters — about the number of voters Texas now adds every two years.

Those boots on the ground that [Michael] Adams, the Texas Southern University professor, mentioned began to arrive in 2014, when a group of campaign strategists from President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign launched an effort they called Battleground Texas to build an army of volunteer registrars.

“What we’re going to do is bring the fight to Texas and make it a battleground state so that anybody who wants to be our commander in chief, they have to fight for Texas,” the group’s co-founder, Jeremy Bird, said in a national interview with talk show host Stephen Colbert in 2013.

While pundits scoffed — especially after Abbott beat Democrat Wendy Davis by 20 percentage points in the 2014 gubernatorial election — Battleground Texas says it has identified and helped train 9,000 voter registrars across Texas to find eligible voters and sign them up.

It hasn’t gotten easier to register voters in Texas. There are just more people who are able to do it, and Battleground Texas deserves praise for that. Other groups have picked up the torch from there, and the results speak for themselves. We saw in the 2020 election that Republicans can register voters, too, so like all things this strategy needs to be refined and advanced by Democrats to continue making gains. Let’s keep moving forward.

Despite it all, voter registration keeps increasing

Aug 17th, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

You love to see it.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Not even the worst pandemic to hit Texas in a century was enough to stem the surge in voter registrations that has remade the state’s electorate over the past four years.

Just since March, Texas has added nearly 149,000 voters even as the political parties and voter registration groups face new obstacles in signing up people in a world of social distancing and stay-at-home orders.

The state now has a record 16.4 million voters, 2.1 million more than it had just over four years ago — a 15-percent increase in registrations that is nearly equivalent to the voter rolls of the entire state of Connecticut.

“It is a totally different electorate than it was in 2016,” said Luke Warford, voter expansion director for the Texas Democratic Party.

Harris County and Bexar County have led the way in the last three months with voter registration efforts. In Harris County, voter rolls have grown by 16,000, while in Bexar they are up almost 14,000. Combined, the two counties account for one-fifth of the increase in registrations statewide.

Texas voter registration rolls historically have grown very slowly. From 2002 to 2012, the rolls grew by 800,000. But now, registration is in hyperdrive. Just since November of 2018, Texas has added almost 600,000 voters.

Some of the change is coming from transplants moving from other states, while many others are coming from minority communities that voter registration advocacy groups have targeted over the last four years.

In short, Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor, said 2020 is setting up as a real shootout in regions of the state that have become more competitive because of the diversification and growth of the electorate.

“It’s another step toward Texas being a true battleground,” Rottinghaus said.

[…]

In Texas voters don’t register by party affiliation like many other states, making it unclear exactly how many Republican or Democratic voters are in the state.

But about one-third of the 1.3 million new voters since November 2018 come from three counties: Harris, Travis and Bexar — all deeply blue since 2016.

Harris and Bexar being at the top of the list doesn’t surprise Antonio Arellano, who is the leader of Jolt, a voter advocacy group focused on registering young Latino voters and getting them involved in politics. He said his group has been on the ground in those two counties.

While the coronavirus made registration drives impossible in traditional locations such as libraries, county fairs and large events, younger voters can still be found with direct messages on social media, text messages, and digital ads. The virus hasn’t affected those efforts at all.

“We harness culture, art and technology to get it done,” Arellano said.

Each year in Texas, 200,000 Latinos turn 18 — a population that is Jolt’s main focus.

Nice. The March voter registration figures are here, the January figures are here, and the November of 2018 figures are here. Harris County is right at 2.4 million, and I think we have a shot at getting to 2.5 million for November. As the story notes, average monthly voter registration figures are actually up since April, about double what it had been from November of 2018 through March. People have been working it, with Jolt, Battleground Texas, and Beto’s Powered by People all doing a lot of heavy lifting. You want to make a difference, get trained as a volunteer deputy voter registrar – the Harris County Tax Assessor has online ZOOM training sessions to become a VDVR – and join up with one of these groups. Every new voter matters.

I actually drafted this about a month ago, just before the primary runoffs, then as is sometimes the case kept putting off publishing it. Because I procrastinated, you can now see the state and county-by-county voter registration figures by looking at the contest details for the Senate runoff. But this post is even more of a delayed special than that. In the Before Times, I had drafted a story about where a lot of voter registrations were coming from – short answer, the I-35 corridor from San Antonio to D/FW – but between the primary and the world falling apart, I never got around to publishing it. I’m repurposing it for this post, so read on for what I had written a couple of months ago.

(more…)

Speaking of voter registration

Jan 23rd, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

The Chron notes the latest milestone.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

For the first time in history, Texas has topped 16 million registered voters and is adding voters faster than its population grows heading into the 2020 presidential election.

With the voter registration deadline for the March 3 primaries just two weeks away, the state is already on the brink of having 2 million more registered voters than it did just four years ago when President Donald Trump was first elected.

“What you’re seeing is a true transformation of the Texas electorate,” said Antonio Arellano, interim executive director of Jolt, a voter advocacy group focused on registering young Latino voters and getting them involved in politics.

He said despite all the barriers Texas has put in place to depress voter registration and voter turnout, groups like his are drawing younger and more diverse voters, which is making the politics of Texas more reflective of its demographics — about 40 percent of the state’s population is Latino, census data shows.

Since 2017, the population in Texas has grown by about 5 percent. But the state’s voter registration has grown about 8 percent during that period. The increase is even more dramatic in urban areas such as Harris County, the state’s most populous county. While Harris County’s population has grown an estimated 4 percent since 2014, its voter registration has jumped 14 percent.

In Bexar County the population has grown an estimated 11 percent since 2014, while the voter registration has jumped 19 percent.

[…]

While Texas doesn’t require voters to register by party, Texas Democratic Party officials say their internal data shows that the voter gains are largely due to voters that skew their way — younger and more diverse.

Cliff Walker, Deputy Executive Director of the Texas Democratic Party, said as the state has looked more competitive with each election, that in turn has drawn even more younger and diverse voters to sign up, which then makes the state still more competitive. In other words, the success begets more success, he said.

See here for the background. The correlation with the growth in urban voter registration is no surprise. I’ve tracked the Harris County numbers before, and while the surge in statewide voter registration lags a bit behind, it’s all happened in the last couple of years. Which, not coincidentally, is when Democrats and Dem-aligned groups have made voter registration a priority and really put a bunch of resources into it. That latter bit is key, because registering voters in Texas is even harder than you thought.

In 2013, former campaign operatives who worked with President Barack Obama launched a group called Battleground Texas. The mission was to more aggressively register voters in Texas, a place that has a history of making it difficult to register to vote. That was a tall task, given a 2011 Texas law that significantly toughened voter registration rules to require people wanting to register voters to go through county-specific voter registrar training; the law also blocked non-Texans from joining that work.

So to register voters statewide, a volunteer would be forced to attend 254 different trainings. Texas also does not accept online voter registration applications — the paperwork must include a handwritten signature, and that signature cannot be a copy, digital signature or photo of a signature.

But slowly Battleground Texas and other groups started to make headway. Other groups have joined the cause, with Jolt, The Lone Star Project and Be One Texas among them.

This strategy also includes litigation, over things like the “motor voter” law and electronic signatures, but those won’t yield any fruit for this election. In a sane world, voter registration would be easy, but this is Texas. We have to do it the hard way. Put fixing all this on the agenda for when Dems finally control state government.

One more thing, which I have discussed but which I don’t see get mentioned in other stories, is that boosting registration totals is by itself a turnout program. I’ll say again, turnout as a percentage of registered voters was down in Harris County in 2016 compared to 2008, but because there were so many more registered voters the total number of folks who showed up increased. Statewide turnout in 2016 was 59.39%, for 8,969,226 total voters. Taking the 16,106,984 number we have now – and remember, that will go up some more before the primary deadline – and at the same 59.39% turnout rate you get 9,565,937 voters, or 600K more. If the 18 million goal is reached, that puts turnout at 10.7 million if the rate is the same. Now of course there’s no guarantee of reaching the same rate – as was the case in Harris County, the statewide turnout rate in 2008 (59.50%) was higher than it was in 2016 – my point is that you can catch more fish with a bigger net. Add in a real turnout push on top of that, and who knows what can happen. It all starts with getting more people registered.

The TDP 2020 plan

Sep 14th, 2019

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Bring it on.

The Texas Democratic Party is pulling back the curtain on its 2020 strategy ahead of the Houston presidential debate, releasing a plan to flip the state that targets 2.6 million potential Democratic voters who are not registered yet and commits to deploying over 1,000 organizers by the end of the election cycle.

The 10-page proposal, shared first with The Texas Tribune, primarily focuses on dramatically expanding the Democratic vote in Texas while building a massive coordinated campaign. Both are ambitious undertakings for a party that has long been out of power — no Democrat has won statewide since 1994 — but has seen its prospects brighten over the last two election cycles, especially in 2018.

“At the Texas Democratic Party, we know that to win we must build a state party infrastructure larger than anyone has ever seen,” the party’s deputy executive director, Cliff Walker, says in a statement accompanying the plan. “Change is coming to Texas — a new wave of activists and progressive candidates demand it.”

[…]

The plan broadly seeks to register as many as possible of the 2.6 million Texans it says are not registered to vote but would vote Democratic if registered. There are another 2.4 million voters from minority communities who are registered to vote but did not cast a ballot in 2018 and “are primed to be mobilized in a presidential year,” according to the plan.

To close those gaps, the party offers four possible paths based on its data analysis: increasing turnout in communities of color (over 400,000 new votes), increasing turnout in urban, reliably blue counties (at least 225,000 new votes), registering voters in the politically changing suburbs (over 130,000 new votes) and reaching out to conservative rural voters (more than 100,000 new votes).

The party plans to tackle those opportunities by doing things like sending more vote-by-mail applications in 2020 than ever before — more than 1.5 million. But most important will be a statewide coordinated campaign that can support over 1,500 Democratic nominees throughout the ballot in 2020, by the party’s count. Key to that campaign would be the 1,000 organizers, a big ramp-up from the party’s current staffing levels. They would be paid through the coordinated campaign.

The plan also puts an emphasis on protecting voting rights from GOP efforts that make it more difficult to cast a ballot. The party will launch a year-round hotline on Jan. 1, 2020, to deal with such issues, in addition to other new and ongoing efforts.

The doc is here, but you get the basics of it from the Trib story. In a broad sense, this is the Battleground Texas plan – register new voters, boost turnout among traditional Dem constituencies, work to turn out lower-propensity Dems, all using a hands-on community model. That requires a lot of resources – people, training, equipment, office space, data – and that in turn requires money. For the TDP to talk like this, they either have a plan to raise the money, or they’re publicly thinking big and hoping to impress enough people to get the money to follow. I hope it’s the former, but the next finance report will tell the tale.

How well will this work? Well, as the story notes, the 2018 election and the Beto campaign gave them a good head start, as well as a road map. The fact of the matter is that Dems need to bring out a lot more voters to have a reasonable shot at winning statewide in 2020. Beto broke Democratic records getting to four million votes, but Republicans have been regularly topping four million since Dubya in 2004. Trump underperformed relative to other Republicans in 2016, but he still got nearly 4.7 million votes, which was a gain of 116K over Mitt Romney. I’ve said before, to me the over/under for 2020 is five million, and that may be too conservative. The Republicans are working to boost their own turnout next year, too. Five million may be just the opening bid. There’s room to bring in a lot more Democratic voters, but we won’t have the field to ourselves. The Chron and Daily Kos have more.

The potential for more

Dec 8th, 2018

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

Beto O’Rourke came very close to beating Ted Cruz. How much closer can Dems get in 2020?

Rep. Beto O’Rourke

As newly updated election results showed U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s victory was even tighter than first realized, Democratic-led voter registration groups are saying they’ve never felt closer to turning Texas into a true battleground.

Cruz’s margin of victory fell to just 214,901 votes, according to official results certified by Gov. Greg Abbott this week. That is about 5,000 votes closer than unofficial results showed last month.

Cruz won the race 50.9 to 48.3 percent — the closet U.S. Senate race in Texas since 1978.

While O’Rourke lost, groups like Battleground Texas say that margin of defeat is nearly four times closer than they thought was even possible and it has them itching to get to work on 2020.

“We can register that gap,” said Oscar Silva, executive director of Battleground Texas, a group that runs an aggressive registration program targeting potential Democratic voters.

The state saw twice that number of voters just registered between March and October, and Silva noted that every year 300,000 more Texas high school students come of age to register.

He said while many people suggest that 2018 was a one-year blip because of O’Rourke’s campaign, groups like Battleground Texas have been on the ground building an infrastructure that has lasting implications.

“That is sustainable,” he told the American Association of Political Consultants at a conference in Austin on Wednesday.

Battleground Texas said its data shows that, during early voting, nearly one out of every 25 voters under age 35 was registered by the group. Silva added that 69 percent of the people the group registered this year were voters of color, helping the electorate to begin to look more like the state’s overall minority-majority population.

Just a reminder, when BGTX showed up on the scene in 2013, their initial goal was to make Texas a competitive state for the 2020 Presidential election. Whatever amount of credit you give them at this point, we seem to be on track for that. I do believe that a big key to that is voter registration, which has been way up statewide and in Harris County. Look at it this way: If we get registration in Harris County into the 2.4 million to 2.5 million range for 2020, we could very reasonably aim for total turnout in the 1.5 million zone. Set a goal of 900K Democratic votes for a Presidential candidate in Harris County, and you’re talking a margin of victory in the 300K range. (I am, let’s just say skeptical, that Republicans will be able to push their turnout number much past the 600 to 620K they reached in 2016.) Beto won Harris County by 200K, and he lost the state by 215K. By this math, which I admit is ambitious, you’ve just that deficit almost in half. Obviously, I’m making a lot of other assumptions in here, but you get my point. More voters registered means more voters to turn out, and that’s a winning formula, one we have finally demonstrated we can achieve. Keep on keeping on.

Lots more voters registered statewide

Sep 28th, 2018

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Always good to hear.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

The Texas voter rolls have grown to 15.6 million people, a new record, Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos confirmed.

That is nearly a 400,000-person increase since March and a jump of 1.6 million since the last time Texas held a midterm election in 2014, according to election records.

And there is still time for more voters to join the rolls before Oct. 9, the final day to register in time to vote in the midterm elections.

[…]

Registering to vote and casting a ballot are two different things in Texas. Despite having 14 million registered voters in 2014, just 4.7 million people voted — about 34 percent of voters. In presidential cycles, voter turnout is much higher, hitting almost 60 percent in 2016 and 2012.

Here’s a convenient table that was included in the story to illustrate the progression of the voter rolls:

Voter Registration in Texas For Midterm elections over last 20 years


2018 - 15.6 million

2014 - 14.0 million

2010 - 13.2 million

2006 - 13.1 million

2002 - 12.6 million

1998 - 11.5 million

So there’s been more people registered to vote in the last four years than there were in the twelve years before that combined. There has been a comprehensive effort among various groups to increase Texas’ voter numbers – registering voters was in fact one of the few things that Battleground Texas did well in the 2014 cycle – so it’s good to see that pay off. Harris County by itself can account for nearly 250K of those new registrations since 2014. There’s definitely been a big focus on registering people in this cycle, which should not come as a surprise to anyone who has not been in a cryogenic state.

As noted, registering and voting are two different things. That said, even if the turnout rate remained at 34 percent as it was in 2014, that would translate to 5.3 million ballots cast, modulo however many more people get signed up before the 9th. For what it’s worth, I investigated the question of new voters voting in Harris County in 2014. As I recall (I can’t find the post I wrote about it right now), something like 21% of the brand-new voters turned out in 2014. That’s not great, but it’s not nothing, either. Twenty-one percent turnout of those 1.6 million new voters statewide would still push the 2014 total to just over five million. In 2016, turnout as a percentage of registered voters in Harris County was down compared to 2008 and 2012, but the total number of actual voters was up 130K over 2012, precisely because there were so many (300K in all) more voters. One way or another, expect 2018 turnout to exceed 2014. The real question is who those voters will be.

On enthusiasm and fundraising

Jul 3rd, 2018

by Charles Kuffner.

33 comments

RG Ratcliffe engages the “can Lupe Valdez be competitive” question.

Lupe Valdez

Valdez will almost certainly lose to Greg Abbott in November. Yet if she inspires Hispanic voters to turn out, she could help Democratic candidates in tight down-ballot races and make a big difference in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Texas House.

That scenario assumes that Valdez can significantly increase Hispanic turnout. But not everyone is certain she can. “I see the value of having Lupe Valdez running for governor,” [Julian] Castro said at the Blue Star pub. “She’s a great candidate, and her experience as Dallas County sheriff, her life experience, and the issues that she is addressing speak to a lot of Texans. Whether having her at the top of the ticket would impact the Latino vote . . . that’s hard to tell.”

Valdez, after all, has significant deficiencies as a candidate. She’s unpolished as a speaker and has demonstrated little command of statewide issues. She’s also underfunded—her latest campaign finance report showed she had a little more than $115,000 cash on hand, compared to Abbott’s $43 million. That has forced her to forgo campaign fundamentals such as an internal vetting process, in which the campaign looks for skeletons in its own candidate’s closet. Two days after Valdez won the Democratic runoff, for example, the Houston Chronicle revealed that she owed more than $12,000 in unpaid property taxes. A vetting would have prepared her better to respond when a Chronicle reporter asked about it; instead, a campaign spokesman tried to blame Abbott for allowing property taxes to rise.

In short, Valdez may not be the transformational figure many Democrats hope for. In the March 6 primary, Democrats turned out a million voters—their best primary showing since 1994—30 percent of whom had Hispanic surnames. But that high turnout seems to have been in spite of Valdez’s presence on the ballot. In several South Texas counties, thousands of voters cast ballots in the U.S. Senate contest and various local races but skipped voting for governor entirely. In Hidalgo County, Valdez failed to capture even half the voters with Hispanic surnames. One prominent South Texas Democrat told me that when Valdez campaigned in the area, her lack of knowledge of state issues turned off a lot of local voters. “We’re not blind,” he said. He also admitted that many conservative Hispanics just would not vote for a lesbian.

[…]

At her Blue Star Brewing event, Valdez turned the sanctuary cities bill into a major talking point, emphasizing her belief that Republicans only control Texas because many people—especially Hispanics—don’t vote. “Texas is not a red state,” Valdez intoned. “It’s a nonvoting state.”

Perhaps. But this is still Texas; even if Valdez manages to help a few of her Democratic colleagues, that doesn’t mean she’ll be able to help herself. There was tremendous enthusiasm for Wendy Davis four years ago too, and she was crushed by Greg Abbott by 20 points. Democratic enthusiasm this election cycle is, arguably, even greater, thanks to anti-Trump fervor. But to capitalize on that, Valdez will have to pull off something that no other Democrat has done: awaken the sleeping giant of Hispanic voters. And right now the giant seems content to catch a few more z’s.

Ratcliffe spends some time discussing the three highest-profile Congressional races and their effect, which I appreciate. There’s been too much coverage of the Governor’s race that seems to think it exists in a vacuum. It was Ratcliffe’s mention of enthusiasm levels that caught my eye, though. While he acknowledges that enthusiasm is high this year, which anyone who can read a poll knows, he cites 2014 as an example of high enthusiasm not translating to good results. I admit that’s something I worry about as well, but I can think of three factors that make this year different:

1. I feel like the enthusiasm in 2014 peaked when Davis announced her candidacy, with a bounce when Leticia Van de Putte followed suit, but trended steadily downhill after that, while this year enthusiasm has remained high and if anything has intensified. Maybe peak 2014 compares favorably to 2018, but I’d be willing to bet that June 2018 is well ahead of where June 2014 was.

2. There are a number of reasons why enthusiasm trended downward in 2014, including gripes about how Davis ran her campaign – remember when she said she favored open carry? – and concerns about just what the hell Battleground Texas was doing. I don’t think you can underestimate the effect the national atmosphere had on the enthusiasm level here, though. Say what you want about Davis and her campaign, she was far from alone in underperforming that year, and the national mood, which was strongly in the Republicans’ favor, was a big part of that. That’s just not the case this year, and it’s something I continue to believe that the pundit class here has not grappled with.

3. I’ll get into this more in a minute, but the full top-to-bottom slate of candidates that are working hard and raising money has an effect that we haven’t figured out how to quantify yet, too. The number of spirited Democratic challengers to Republican incumbents, in places both traditional and pioneering, is much greater this year.

I’m not arguing that the political world as we know it is about to be turned upside down. It may well be that Texas Republicans are better engaged than Republicans elsewhere, or that Democratic enthusiasm is overstated, or that Democratic weaknesses in organization and infrastructure will limit the potential gains from the positive factors that we have. We could look back on this in December and wonder what we were thinking. I’m willing to stand by the assertion that conditions are different now than they were four years ago and in ways that tend to favor Democrats. Beyond that, we’ll see.

On a related note:

Fundraising can be a reliable indicator of support for a candidate, and Valdez has struggled to raise money. Some analysts say she’ll need to raise $10 million to compete against Abbott in the general election. At last report in May, she had $115,000 on hand.

O’Rourke has raised $13 million from small-dollar donors, which worries Republicans because he’ll be able to go back to those people for more. He may also share those donors with other Democrats in the future.

Valdez, lieutenant governor candidate Mike Collier and other statewide candidates’ fundraising efforts, though, have paled in comparison. Collier warned that raising money for statewide races alone does not guarantee success.

Democrats watched gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis raise tons of money in 2014 but fail to turn out voters. This election year, there was a concerted effort to field more candidates even in tough red areas. That way dozens of candidates will be using money to turn out Democrats instead of just hoping the top of the ticket will take care of everything.

“It has to come from the bottom up,” said Collier. “It can’t be top down.”

For what it’s worth, Wendy Davis had raised about $13 million across three campaign accounts as of the June 2014 finance report. Beto had raised $13 million as of April, though to be fair he had been running for Senate longer than Davis had been running for Governor by then. I expect he’ll have a few million more when the June quarterly report hits. Beyond Davis in 2014, Leticia Van de Putte had raised $1.2 million as of June, but the well got empty pretty quickly after that. Whatever Lupe Valdez and Mike Collier and the other statewides do – I’ll bet Justin Nelson has a decent report – I think we can conclude that Beto and crew will have raised more as of June than Davis and VdP and their squad.

But of course there’s more to it than that. I keep coming back to the Congressional fundraising because it really is so completely different than what we have seen before. Here are the final reports from the 2014 cycle. Pete Gallego raised $2.6 million in his unsuccessful defense of CD23, Wesley Reed raised $300K for CD27, and no one else in a potentially competitive race broke the $100K mark. As of this April, three Democratic Congressional challengers – Lizzie Fletcher, Joseph Kopser, Gina Ortiz Jones – had surpassed $1 million, with Colin Allred right behind them. Todd Litton and MJ Hegar are well on their way to $1 million. Dayna Steele and Jana Sanchez should break $500K. Sri Kulkarni and Lorie Burch are past $100K, with Julie Oliver and Mike Siegel not far off. At this level, it’s not even close, and that’s before we factor in outside money like the DCCC. And we haven’t even touched on legislative or county races.

Now of course Republicans are going to raise a bunch of money, too. Greg Abbott by himself probably has more cash on hand than what all these people will raise combined. What I’m saying, again, is that Dems are in a better position than they were in 2014, and that you shouldn’t focus on the Governor’s race to the exclusion of everything else. It would be nice if Lupe could raise more money. Maybe she’ll surprise us on her June report. Nonetheless, Dems just aren’t as dependent on one statewide candidate raising money as they were four years ago.

Framing the 2018 question

Oct 30th, 2017

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

This Chron story asks the question “what might it take for a Democrat to win statewide in Texas in 2018, then never actually engages it.

At the five-top table in the corner at Russell’s Bakery, a northwest Austin restaurant and coffee bar, the conversation among the five women, all self-described as “recovering Republicans,” veered from the signature cinnamon rolls and traffic to President Donald Trump and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

“I have two questions I’d like to know the answer to: Is there any way for a Democrat to win a state office next year, and what would it take for some Republicans to lose in this state?” Chrys Langer, a 47-year-old tech consultant and mother of three, asked a reporter sitting at a nearby table. “Politics has taken a turn for the worse, in my opinion, in Austin with the bathroom bill and all kinds of other conservative-male nonsense and in the White House with – well, with Trump being Trump.”

[…]

In interviews with voters of both parties, from Houston to suburban San Antonio to Dallas to Austin, the question comes up time and time again, as does an underlying frustration with governments in both Washington and Austin.

Despite that, more than a dozen political scientists and consultants interviewed by the Chronicle said they see almost no chance that Republicans will lose hold of their 23-year grip on statewide elective offices during next year’s elections, despite the fact that Democrats made notable inroads in Dallas and Houston a year ago when Trump won Texas by just nine percentage points – down from previous double-digit support of Republican presidential candidates.

“There isn’t any way Democrats can win statewide office in Texas, short of some astounding collapse of the Republicans in Washington or Austin,” said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University. “Winning is a habit, and so is losing. The Democrats right now have no well-known candidate, no bench, their funding has evaporated, and they have no experience in their volunteer base. The Republicans have all of that.

“And at the end of the day, the Republicans who say they’re not satisfied with things will vote for a Republican because, with the polarization of the political process in recent years, Democrats are now seen as enemies of the state, and they won’t jump across and vote for them.”

Jillson’s sentiments echoed those of all the others, even with the so-called “Trump Factor” that Democrats are touting as a key to some unexpected victories in the November 2018 elections.

“Trump’s approval rating would have to drop into the teens where it might hurt Abbott and Patrick and the other Republicans on the ballot in Texas, and even then I doubt the effect would be significant,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston. “Even though the Democrats will try to tie Abbott and Patrick as close to Trump as they can, every time they get a chance, they can distance themselves from Trump because Texas voters in a midterm election pay more attention to state issues than Washington.”

Let me begin by saying that Rottinghaus’ statement about midterm elections is not at all in line with the results of at least the last four midterms, at least as far as Republican turnout goes. If you don’t think Texas is reflective of the national climate, I’m not sure what to tell you.

That’s the first thing to think about when considering possibilities for 2018: What will Republican turnout look like? On the one end, we have 2006, where statewide Republican vote totals ranged from 2,135,612 to 2,661,789. On the other end, there’s 2010 where the low was 2,737,481 and the high was 3,151,064 (I’m skipping races where there was no Democratic challenger, such as Comptroller in 2010). In between is 2014, with a range from 2,691,417 to 2,827,584. Which of those years will 2018 most closely resemble? Obviously, a 2006-style year makes for a more competitive environment for Democrats, but it’s not something Dems have control over. What are the factors that might lead one to expect a 2006 versus a 2014 or a 2010? Polls, fundraising, tone of rhetoric and advertising, Presidential popularity, some combination, something else? Put those PhDs to use and give me your thoughts on that.

Then there’s Democratic turnout, which as I’ve noted ad nauseum has remained stubbornly flat since 2002. The high end, with a few exceptions, has been around 1.8 million. If Dems could boost their base turnout by about 600K votes – that is, roughly the boost Republicans got from 2006 to 2010 – they’d be at 2.4 million, which would have been enough to capture the three Commissioner races and two contested judicial seats in 2006. Two point four million represents about two-thirds of the 2016 overall turnout for Dems, which again is about what Republicans achieved in 2010 over 2008. What factors might make a political science professor think such an achievement was possible? We know that the key in Harris County in 2016 was a big increase in voter registration, which in turn led to a much larger pool of Democratic-aligned voters. Dems may not have the infrastructure Republicans have enjoyed, but there are now multiple grassroots organizations – Pantsuit Nation, Indivisible, Our Revolution, the scaled-down version of Battleground Texas – that are out there engaging and registering and doing the things Dems should have been doing all along. Multiple Democratic Congressional candidates continue to excel at fundraising. Again, what do the people that the newsies reach out to for comment think of all that? What if anything might make them think there’s something happening here?

Picking the Republicans to hold serve again is very likely to be accurate, but it’s not very interesting. It doesn’t address the obvious fact that the climate is very different now, so it doesn’t give us any way to think about how that might change what could happen in 13 months – or five months, if you want to ask the same question about the primaries. It will be much harder to answer these questions than it was for me to ask them, and those answers may well change over the next year and a month, but surely we should be asking them anyway. I’d like to think I’m not the only one thinking along these lines.

Beto on the road

Aug 21st, 2017

by Charles Kuffner.

7 comments

A great chance to meet our Senate nominee, if you haven’t already.

Rep. Beto O’Rourke

Looking to overcome the long odds in his U.S. Senate campaign, U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-El Paso, has hit the road for an aggressive 34-day tour of Texas.

O’Rourke launched the trip without much fanfare at the end of last month, when he flew to San Antonio and bought a new truck for the trip. He does not plan to return home to El Paso until Aug. 31, when he’s due for a monthly town hall with his constituents. No other candidate is currently campaigning across Texas quite as aggressively.

“I want to do this as hard as I can and make every effort to meet every Texan as possible,” O’Rourke said in an interview Thursday. In a state as large as Texas, he added, such an itinerary is the “only way you’re going to have any hope of meeting the people that you want to represent.”

O’Rourke’s campaign has a name for the trip: “Town Hauling Across Texas.”

The trip, much of which O’Rourke has been livestreaming on his Facebook page, has already taken him to the Rio Grande Valley, Far West Texas and the Panhandle. In those places, he has held traditional campaign events such as town halls and meet and greets, as well as less-formal activities — such as block walking Thursday in Wichita Falls.

Over the next week, he’s set to hit North Texas and East Texas, with stops planned after that in Houston, College Station, Waco, Victoria, LaGrange, San Angelo, Midland, Odessa and Abilene.

Beto was in and around Houston this weekend, and I got to see and hear him speak at an event on Friday night. He’s got charisma and is an engaging speaker. I’m sure that the people who are going to hear him will come away impressed and ready to support him. O’Rourke name-checked a lot of towns and counties that he’s been to in places where there aren’t a lot of Dems – in the Panhandle, in East Texas, and more. He’s apparently been drawing some good crowds, which is encouraging. There’s only so many people that even the most energetic candidate can meet via live events, but the intent is to activate volunteers to proselytize to friends and neighbors. Which is to say, the Battleground Texas model, which was never really employed in 2014. Along the same lines, they plan to work on college students, in the same less-common places as well as the usual ones. How well it will all work remains to be seen, but it’s a sound plan and a good person to try and make it happen. But don’t take my word for it, take advantage of an opportunity this time or another time – there will surely be one – to see Beto yourself and make your own judgment.

Trib overview of the Pasadena elections

May 3rd, 2017

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Good stuff.

Pasadena City Council

When voters head to the polls here Saturday, their city council and mayoral picks could have repercussions well beyond this working-class Houston suburb.

It will be the first election since a federal judge struck down the city’s 2013 redistricting plan as discriminatory, paving the way for a new balance of power at City Hall.

It comes as Texas Democrats redouble their efforts on the local level after a 2016 election that gave them ample reason to be optimistic about their future, especially in Harris County.

And it could offer a gauge of just how far down the ballot President Donald Trump, unpopular in even a deep-red state like Texas, is energizing Democrats.

For Pasadena, a city whose representation has long lagged its majority-Hispanic population — much like Texas writ large — it could actually be the “new day” that multiple candidates are promising.

“You have racial discord undergirding partisan politics,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “You’ve got one side trying to use the rules of the vote to change the structure of elections. And the other side is using the legal process … to fight the electoral damage that might result.”

“That,” Rottinghaus added, “sets the stage for Pasadena as an important part of the story in Texas’ transition to a new racial electorate.”

[…]

The Texas Democratic Party has endorsed five city council candidates in Pasadena — more than it has endorsed in any other municipality for the May 6 elections. Other Democratic groups are on the ground in the city, including Battleground Texas, which has been working to make the state more competitive for Democrats since the 2014 election cycle.

Much of their efforts are focused on two council races — in District A and District B — that are considered key to ushering in a new Democratic, predominantly Hispanic majority at City Hall. Battleground Texas is specifically working with District A candidate Felipe Villarreal and District B candidate Steve Halvorson, husband of Area 5 Democrats President Jennifer Halvorson, the only instances this election cycle where the group has directly partnered with candidates.

In those districts, which cover the heavily Hispanic north side of Pasadena, Democrats face a test similar to the one they face statewide: turnout.

“Those two districts — they vote overwhelmingly Democratic in November elections,” Jennifer Halvorson said. “Those voters don’t typically vote in May elections.”

See here for those endorsed candidates, among others. I’ll have one more look at early voting turnout tomorrow, though it will be limited in that I can’t tell you where the voters are coming from. Republicans are paying attention to the Pasadena elections as well, and the chair of the Harris County GOP, which as we know had such a stellar showing last year, says they are fully engaged. I don’t want to put too much emphasis on one election, but this is our first chance to vote in the Trump era, and it will tell us something one way or another. In the meantime, if you live in Pasadena or know someone who does, make sure you and they get out to vote on Saturday.

Early voting starts today

Oct 24th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

6 comments

From the inbox:

Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart announced today that 46 locations will be open Monday, October 24 to Friday, November 4 where voters in the third largest County in the nation may cast ballots during the early voting period for the November 8, 2016 Election. The total is approximately 25 percent more than the number of early voting locations available in the County during the previous presidential election.

“Since the 2012 Election, nine additional early voting locations have been added. Additionally, the time to vote during the first week of early voting has been extended to 6:00 pm,” said Stanart, the chief election official of the County.

“I expect approximately 800,000 voters will choose to vote during the early voting period for this election. Preparedness on the part of the County Clerk’s Election Division, as well as voters, is key to a successful election,” added Stanart.

To ensure the voting process is a pleasant experience, the chief election officer of the County has a few suggestions for voters heading to the polls:

1.   Voters should confirm voter registration status. A voter registration search can be performed athttp://www.hctax.net/voter/search;

2.   Voters should study a sample ballot, mark it, and take it to the poll. Voters can download a voter-specific ballot at www.HarrisVotes.com;

3.   Voters should identify the nearest or most convenient early voting location. Voters can vote at any one of the 46 early voting locations;

4.   Voters should find out what photo identification is acceptable to vote at the poll, what other identification options are now available to vote a regular ballot, and what identification expedites the qualification process. The voter identification guidelines are available at www.HarrisVotes.com;

5.   Voters should NOT wear clothing or paraphernalia that promotes a party, a candidate or a proposition to the poll;

6.   Voters should be aware that the use of electronic devices is prohibited inside the poll. The right to cast a secret ballot must be respected;

7.   Voters should not wait until the last minute to vote early. During peak voting hours, the wait time could be longer than we wish.

“Don’t procrastinate. Do your homework. Then, go vote early,” summed up Stanart. “For voters in Harris County, voting early is the simplest and easiest method of voting. ”

To obtain the early voting schedule, a list of acceptable credentials to vote at the polling location and other election information, voters may visit the Harris County Clerk’s website at www.HarrisVotes.com or call 713.755.6965.

Early Voting Days and Hours

October 24 – October 28: 8:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.

October 29: 7:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.

October 30: 1:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

October 31 – November 4: 7:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.

November 8, 2016 Early Voting Locations, Harris County, Texas

Location Address City Zip

Harris County Administration Building 1001 Preston Street Houston 77002

Champion Forest Baptist Church 4840 Strack Road Houston 77069

Prairie View A&M University Northwest 9449 Grant Road Houston 77070

Baldwin Boettcher Branch Library 22248 Aldine Westfield Road Humble 77338

Kingwood Branch Library 4400 Bens View Lane Kingwood 77345

Lone Star College Atascocita Center 15903 West Lake Houston Parkway Houston 77044

Crosby Branch Library 135 Hare Road Crosby 77532

Kyle Chapman Activity Center 7340 Spencer Highway Pasadena 77505

Freeman Branch Library 16616 Diana Lane Houston 77062

Harris County Scarsdale Annex* 10851 Scarsdale Boulevard Houston 77089

Juergen’s Hall Community Center 26026 Hempstead Highway Cypress 77429

Tomball Public Works Building 501B James Street Tomball 77375

Hiram Clarke Multi Service Center 3810 West Fuqua Street Houston 77045

Katy Branch Library* 5414 Franz Rd Katy 77493

Lone Star College Cypress Center 19710 Clay Road Katy 77449

Harris County MUD 81 805 Hidden Canyon Road Katy 77450

Nottingham Park 926 Country Place Drive Houston 77079

Harris County Public Health Environmental Services 2223 West Loop South Freeway Houston 77027

Metropolitan Multi Service Center 1475 West Gray Street Houston 77019

City of Jersey Village City Hall 16327 Lakeview Drive Jersey Village 77040

Richard & Meg Weekley Community Center 8440 Greenhouse Road Cypress 77433

Bayland Park Community Center 6400 Bissonnet Street Houston 77074

Tracy Gee Community Center 3599 Westcenter Drive Houston 77042

Bear Creek Park Community Center 3055 Bear Creek Drive Houston 77084

Trini Mendenhall Community Center 1414 Wirt Road Houston 77055

Acres Homes Multi Service Center 6719 West Montgomery Road Houston 77091

Fallbrook Church 12512 Walters Road Houston 77014

Lone Star College Victory Center 4141 Victory Drive Houston 77088

Hardy Senior Center 11901 West Hardy Road Houston 77076

Northeast Multi Service Center 9720 Spaulding Street, Building 4 Houston 77016

Octavia Fields Branch Library 1503 South Houston Avenue Humble 77338

Kashmere Multi Service Center 4802 Lockwood Drive Houston 77026

North Channel Branch Library 15741 Wallisville Road Houston 77049

Alvin D. Baggett Community Center 1302 Keene Street Galena Park 77547

Ripley House Neighborhood Center 4410 Navigation Boulevard Houston 77011

Baytown Community Center 2407 Market Street Baytown 77520

John Phelps Courthouse 101 North Richey Street Pasadena 77506

HCCS Southeast College 6960 Rustic Street, Parking Garage Houston 77087

Fiesta Mart 8130 Kirby Drive Houston 77054

Sunnyside Multi-Purpose Center 9314 Cullen Boulevard Houston 77033

Palm Center 5300 Griggs Road Houston 77021

Moody Park Community Center 3725 Fulton Street Houston 77009

SPJST Lodge 88 1435 Beall Street Houston 77008

Alief ISD Administration Building 4250 Cook Road Houston 77072

Champion Life Centre 3031 FM 2920 Road Spring 77388

Lone Star College – Creekside Center 8747 West New Harmony Trail Tomball 77375

* Indicates New Location

www.HarrisVotes.com

That of course is for Harris County. Early voting information for some other counties of interest:

Fort Bend
Brazoria
Galveston
Montgomery

Check your local county clerk or election administrator if you are elsewhere.

Battleground Texas reminds you what form of ID is acceptable:

The state of Texas has made it easier for more Texans to vote in this election by expanding the types of identification that a voter can present at the polls!

If you don’t have a photo ID (reminder of the accepted forms of photo ID here), you’ll just need to fill out a short form stating the reason why you haven’t been able to get one and swearing that you are who you say you are.

Then you can present any government document that lists your name and address. A copy of the document will do, unless it has a photo, in which case be sure to bring the original. Poll workers cannot question or challenge you regarding your lack of a photo ID.

If you don’t have a photo ID, bring one of these documents to the polls:

Voter registration certificate (the card mailed to you shortly after you register to vote)

Certified birth certificate (original)

Current utility bill (copy or original)

Bank statement (copy or original)

Government check (copy or original)

Paycheck (copy or original)

Election poll workers are prohibited by law from challenging your reason for being unable to obtain a photo ID. If you experience any issues at the polls, call our Voter Protection Hotline at 1-844-TXVOTES, and we can help.

Voters with a disability may apply with the county voter registrar for a permanent exemption to showing ID at the polls.

And here’s a guide as to what poll watchers may and may not do.

Poll watchers may look on as voters cast ballots or as officials count them. They can also observe inspection of voting machines. But they can’t talk to voters or election officials unless they are reporting an irregularity to an election officer. They also can’t make audio or video recordings or take photos inside a polling place.

The Texas Election Code includes several other rules governing poll watchers:

They must be eligible to vote in the county where they they are serving (or in elections limited to a smaller jurisdictions, they must be eligible to vote in those communities).

They must present a “certificate of appointment” to the election judge at a polling station and the certificate must come from the political party, candidate or ballot measure group that appointed them (Groups of registered voters may also appoint poll watchers on behalf of certain write-in candidates.).

They may not access a voting station while someone is casting a ballot.

State law also prohibits poll watchers — or any voter, for that matter— from wearing a badge, insignia or emblem related to a candidate, measure or party on the ballot within 100 feet of a polling place’s door.

Here are two other relevant rules:

Parties, candidates and campaigns may not appoint more than two watchers at each precinct polling spot, early voting ballot board meeting or central counting station. They may appoint as many as seven watchers to each early voting polling location, but no more than two may serve at the same time.

Candidates on the ballot may not serve as poll watchers during their own elections. State law also bars from the following from serving: current public office holders, close relatives of election judges at the polling place and people convicted of election-related offenses.

Bottom Line: Poll watching is a common practice in Texas elections, but those who do it must follow plenty of rules.

Here’s a Chron story about poll watchers and the Trump-inspired hysteria that has boosted their numbers. Make no mistake, some number of them will be up to no good and should be closely watched themselves. On the plus side, there will be no Russian poll watchers, which is a sentence I never thought I’d type. If you see poll watchers engaging in activities they shouldn’t be, I strongly urge you to call your elections administrator and county party. I haven’t seen an announcement that the HCDP has set up a hotline for such complaints, but their main number is 713-802-0085 if you need it. Now go forth and vote. I expect it will be a busy early voting period.

What should the goals for 2016 be for Texas Dems?

Jun 16th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Given that carrying the state is highly unlikely, what else is there to aim for this year?

So will Democrats make a presidential play for Texas or not?

Presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton stoked the issue last month by saying she could win the Lone Star State. Texas Republicans responded with ridicule, pointing to their party’s longstanding dominance at the state level.

And on Tuesday, some key Democrats took a more measured approach.

“We’re not a battleground state,” said Garry Mauro, a former state land commissioner who’s a top leader in Clinton’s Texas campaign. “You won’t see the Democratic Party or Hillary Clinton spend a hundred million dollars in Texas.”

But, Mauro and others said, the bellicose talk of GOP nominee Donald Trump has presented Texas Democrats with opening – if they are willing to seize it.

“We’re going to have to do it ourselves,” interjected Jacob Limon, the Texas director for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.

[…]

So does that include a real Democratic push this fall in Texas, where Democrats haven’t won statewide since 1994? Mauro insisted that Trump’s comments about minorities – and the state’s demographic mix – could make it difficult for him to carry Texas.

Crystal Perkins, the Texas Democratic Party’s executive director, didn’t disagree. But she also made sure to point to the future.

“We’re thinking about 2018 and 2020,” she said. “We have big priorities in Texas.”

I certainly agree with that last sentence, and the more we can tie Donald Trump to the state leadership, the better. Regardless of anything else, the main goal here should be to increase turnout over 2012, ideally over 2008. The conditions are right to bring a bunch of new voters to the polls, and then maybe – just maybe – a few of them will be persuaded to come out again in two years’ time. It’s nice to think, isn’t it? The first step needs to be taken before that can happen, and that’s voting this year. What’s a good number to set as a goal? I’ll let a Republican make a suggestion.

The last time a Democratic presidential candidate lost to a Republican by only single digits in Texas was the 1996 Bill Clinton-Bob Dole race, and Ross Perot that year got nearly 7 percent of the vote.

“It’s hard for me to see how Hillary breaks a 45 percent ceiling,” said Republican consultant Matt Mackowiak. “I would tend to respect Garry Mauro’s expert opinion about Texas a hell of a lot more than I would respect Hillary’s.”

Forty-five percent may sound daunting – you can count on your fingers the number of Dems who have reached that level since 2002 – but it’s not that far off. Obama got 43.68% in 2008, after all. To reach 45% would mean Hillary Clinton would need to collect 3.8 million votes if the total number of Republican and others remains the same – in other words, a 500,000 vote increase (15%) on 2012’s mark of 3.3 million. If Clinton can steal votes from Trump, or if he has the effect of depressing Republican turnout, then fewer votes are needed. Clinton would have to reach 3.6 million if total turnout remains at 8 million as it was 2012. That’s a 300,000 vote increase, or 9% higher than it was in 2012. I wouldn’t suggest that either of these targets will be easy to hit, but they’re hardly insurmountable.

The prize for this is twofold. One, an overall increase in turnout means an increase in places where it will swing elections, like Harris County, maybe Fort Bend County, CD23, the attainable competitive legislative districts, et cetera. Beyond that is the change of narrative that will come if Texas is not a double-digit win for the Rs as it has been and as they are confident it will continue to be. Even a nine-point gap will make people think “hey, that’s not THAT much”. If we want to get to the point where it does seem reasonable for a Presidential campaign to pump a few million bucks into the state, that’s the cover charge. Is this likely? It would be nice to know that there’s a plan in place with the strategy and resources to achieve it – I’ll say again, for whatever it’s worth, this was the original idea behind Battleground Texas – rather than just point to the Trump dumpster fire and hope it’s enough to move the needle. Is it doable? I certainly believe so. In the meantime, and until we finally get some polling for the state, let’s keep up the pressure on Trump’s local lackeys. In addition everything else, that’s fun.

Checking in on Battleground Texas

Feb 20th, 2016

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

They’re still here.

So where does [Lon] Burnam see Battleground Texas in his plan to be the first Texas Democrat elected to a statewide office since 1994?

“No comment,” he said, before adding as he walked away, “In 20 years of public service, that’s the first time I’ve ever said that.”

Burnam’s response echoed that of many of the longtime liberal activists in the room and around Texas, underscoring the complicated feelings many Democrats have toward Battleground Texas. Many declined to comment for this story. Others were careful to avoid either actively criticizing the group or offering strong praise of it.

“They’re pretty easy to set up as a piñata,” said state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, a San Antonio Democrat running for state Senate, at a recent Texas Tribune event. “I mean, at a bare minimum, they’re trying, and sometimes that’s just half the battle. Whether they’re set up for this, whether they are doing this the right way, I don’t have any way to judge.”

[…]

After feeling that the group sought excessive attention in 2014, now many activists see the opposite problem: Battleground Texas seems to be hibernating. The group has scaled down its paid staff operation and will likely only do some field work in a few priority House races this year, according to sources close to the party.

In the meantime, Battleground is ignoring an important opportunity by not being more engaged in the current election cycle, argues Christian Archer, a veteran Texas campaign strategist based in San Antonio.

“We want to be able to harness the energy of right now and use it in future elections,” Archer said. “You’re never going to get the level of engagement that you do in a presidential, so there’s no better time to get involved than today. And yet I haven’t even heard the name Battleground in six months.”

I still get emails from them, but I agree that the volume is considerably lower right now. BGTX does not currently have an executive director, which I suspect is part of why that is. Most of the people quoted in the story seem willing to put the past behind us and focus on working together to do some good in this year’s election. So at least the next ED of BGTX won’t have to do too much groveling as part of the job. What I want to see in the next generation of leadership at BGTX is a full accounting of what went wrong in 2014 – I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface of that story – what we learned from it, and what will be different this time. Some specific goals for this year would be nice, in particular targets for registering new voters and turning them out at the polls. In an alternate universe, this would be the year that BGTX was gearing up to Do Big Things, as their original intent was to focus on Presidential year turnout. They’ve taken a very different path to get where they are now, one that has inflicted some painful lessons on us all. Surely BGTX and everyone else can make something of that brutal experience. We’ll be the better for it if we can.

BGTX 2.0

Sep 20th, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

They will have a lot to prove, let’s just leave it at that.

Battleground Texas, nearly a year after it and Wendy Davis were crushed in an uphill governor’s race, officially has launched an effort to re-brand itself in light of new — and some old — challenges. The group aimed at breaking Republican dominance in Texas announced this week “strategic shifts that will allow us to expand on the work of the last two and a half years.”

The leadership and staff changes, which touch some of its most senior jobs, are an undeniable acknowledgement that Battleground Texas wants to re-focus. Nothing will match the hype it saw during its first few months of operation, when veterans from Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign and senior Texas Democratic strategists teamed up to transform the state. Battleground Texas obviously is not the same organization, and plenty of people are glad that is so, but this marks the best chance yet for a meaningful pivot.

To start, the changes include a new advisory board whose membership is a nod to the support it needs from Democratic constituencies and politicos across the state, from the Brownsville mayor to a labor leader, from community activists to a well-heeled angel investor.

A few big names in state Democratic politics also are joining the board, including former Dallas mayor Ron Kirk and U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro. Some original backers are staying with the organization, such as Houston lawyer Amber Mostyn and Jeremy Bird, the Obama 2012 field chief. The founding executive director, Jenn Brown, also an Obama loyalist, will become the board’s chairman, traveling to Texas periodically even as she takes a new job in Washington, D.C.

[…]

Whomever is chosen to replace Brown will have one of the hardest jobs in Texas politics: set a new vision, work with a new advisory board, keep existing talent and ramp up recruitment efforts. The structure, or what’s left of it after 2014, remains, but the new executive director has the opportunity to start relatively from scratch. That is a tall order for anyone, which makes it even more difficult to see how someone without roots in Texas Democratic politics, who is willing to be there for years, is worthy of the job at this crucial moment.

What also matters now, in a positive sense for Battleground, is that the staff shuffle includes the promotion of several folks who started as volunteers and organizers. Many of them have Texas ties, or they have worked in state politics since 2013. An El Paso native is the new political director, for example, while the training director who worked through the 2014 gubernatorial race will be the new field director.

That is the kind of long term, bench-building effort the group’s founders have said inspired them to launch the outfit.

I’ve seen plenty of commentary on this elsewhere, and I will leave it at that. My point in posting about this is simply that the original vision of BGTX was to increase Democratic turnout in Presidential years to the point where Texas would competitive – a battleground state, if you will. It would be nice if someone were to put some effort into that for next year. I don’t care who – BGTX, the TDP, the Clinton/Sanders/Biden campaign, anyone else – just that someone works to make it happen. See, for all the dominance that Republicans have had in this state, the little secret is that their turnout level in Presidential years has been basically flat since 2004:

The same is true if we just look at Harris County:

There was that big jump in 2008 for the Dems, then a slight backslide in 2012 (it was smaller in Harris County), while GOP turnout dipped a bit in 2008 then rebounded to 2004 levels in 2012. I’m convinced some of that is because President Obama drew a non-trivial number of crossover votes in 2008 – if you combed through the precinct and county data like I did, it was easy to spot – but not in 2012. Even with that interpretation, however, Democrats at best broke even in 2012. A 2008-style improvement is highly unrealistic, but some kind of bump would be nice to see. It won’t make the state competitive, but it would at least suggest we may be on the right path, and it would greatly help with reclaiming the legislative seats we lost in 2014 and with turning Harris County blue. Again, and I can’t stress this enough, I don’t care who would get the credit for that. I just care that there would be credit to claim, and not fingers to point.

SOS to review motor voter complaints

Jul 8th, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I hope this amounts to more than lip service.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

The Texas Secretary of State has agreed to study why thousands of Texans have complained over the past year and a half that they had problems registering to vote despite a federal law that requires all states to offer voter registration in offices where citizens apply for a driver’s license.

The state began its review only after Battleground Texas, a nonprofit voter registration aligned with the Democratic Party, said it might take legal action on behalf of individual Texans who have claimed they were disenfranchised because voter applications filed at driver’s licensing offices were not promptly processed, according to correspondence the Houston Chronicle obtained through public information requests.

In all, 4,600 individuals complained online between September 2013 and February 2015 about processing issues they experienced at motor vehicle offices run by the Department of Public Safety, public records show.

“Texas is failing to comply with the law and voters are being disenfranchised,” Mimi Marziani, legal director of Battleground Texas, wrote in a letter to the state. The fact that so many Texas voters complained through a relatively obscure online “portal” provided by the state, she said, indicates that the problem is likely much more common.

Alicia Phillips Pierce, communications director for the Secretary of State, told the Chronicle the office “is committed to fully complying with all State and federal law, and to safeguarding the voting rights of all Texans.”

“Our office is currently investigating the allegations in Battleground Texas’ letter, and, accordingly, is not in a position at this time to confirm or deny any of the allegations or characterizations contained therein,” she added.

[…]

One of the most common complaints is that driver’s licensing employees failed to process voters’ requests to register. Only if that voter later complained online or by contacting a county election official would state officials review scanned files to determine whether an individual had checked “yes” on a voter application. If that “yes” was verified, the individual was then registered to vote.

Other voters got confused when trying to update their Texas addresses on a Department of Public Safety website, which they wrongly assumed would simultaneously update their driver’s license file and their voter registration record. In fact, the Texas Secretary of State does not allow Texas voters to update their voter registration addresses online. Voters must do that separately by printing out and mailing in a new application.

Battleground Texas has argued that both of those glitches in Texas’ motor voter process violate the National Voter Registration Act. “Under the NVRA, every time an eligible resident obtains, renews or updates his or her driver’s license with DPS, DPS must simultaneously register that person to vote or update that person’s voter registration file. … There is considerable evidence that (Texas) is violating these mandates on an ongoing and continuing basis,” Marziani of Battleground Texas wrote in her letter.

Good for BGTX for pursuing this. Registering voters is tricky enough in Texas, and there’s no help on the way from the Legislature. The least we can do is make sure the registrations we do get don’t get screwed up.

Keeping up with Team Hillary

May 18th, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Just checking in, but this story does address a question I’ve been wondering about.

The dozen or so Hillary Clinton supporters gathered here late Tuesday had no illusions that ruby-red Texas would play a key role in electing the next Democratic president. They acknowledged they may get sent to other states to phone bank and block walk, and they were told — repeatedly — not to expect Clinton’s campaign to open a brick-and-mortar outpost in the Lone Star State anytime soon.

Yet they held out hope that the former secretary of state could put up a fight in Texas, where Democrats are desperately looking for a boost after devastating losses in last year’s statewide elections.

“She may not win this state,” said Terry Adkins, a former union official who recalls registering voters with the Clintons decades ago in the Rio Grande Valley. “But I do believe she’s going to really scare some Republicans.”

The meeting at the back of the Llano Public Library — held on a dreary evening in the heart of the Hill Country, 90 minutes outside Texas’ liberal refuge of Austin — highlighted the Clinton campaign’s first public efforts to build an organization in a state that rejected President Barack Obama by double-digit margins in 2008 and 2012. The campaign is decisively concentrating on the primary in Texas and elsewhere, reflective of a humble approach to a presidential race in which Clinton has long been presumed as the Democratic nominee.

Still, as they rally donors and volunteers, some Texas Democrats cannot help but imagine a general election in which Clinton shakes the party out of its statewide slump.

“I’m not giving up on the general election in Texas because I think she’s the kind of candidate who could build on the work Battleground Texas and other groups have done and make a credible showing,” said Carrin Patman, a Houston trial lawyer who is helping raise money for the campaign. “It may sound quixotic, but I wouldn’t rule out her putting Texas in play in 2016.”

[…]

For Texas Democrats, it remains an open question how the campaign will mesh with the network of state-level groups working to turn the state blue, especially as those groups find their footing after getting crushed up and down the ballot in 2014. Battleground Texas Executive Director Jenn Brown said in a statement Tuesday that it is “too soon to tell what things will look like in Texas in 2016 or how Battleground Texas and its supporters will interact with the president campaign.”

Clinton’s fans in Texas nonetheless see Battleground as an eventual partner for the campaign. Some believe the benefits of its work last year will not be evident until a presidential election cycle, when Democrats tend to turn out more than they do in midterm elections.

See here and here for the background. This is the first explicit mention of BGTx I’ve seen in one of these stories, though we still don’t know how they will interact with Team Hillary. All I know is that whatever it turns out to be, if it works well we need to keep it going from there. We need for 2018 to be a lot better than 2014 and 2010 were.

More on Hillary Clinton’s 50-state strategy

May 4th, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Again, I like what I’m hearing so far.

Hillary Clinton had a message to relay in private meetings with state and local Democrats during her highly-choreographed swings through Iowa and New Hampshire this month: let me help you.

The implication? She’ll fix the party infrastructure that withered under President Barack Obama.

The Democratic front-runner has stressed the importance of bolstering — and in the case of Iowa, rebuilding — the state parties from the ground up, as they received scant national attention since 2008. Some Democrats even pin the blame on the president himself.

[…]

“What typically happens is when a president comes in, the national [party] committee becomes a presidential re-elect, and that hollows out the local parties,” says former Vermont Governor and Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean, who ran for president in 2004. The result, as outlined in the party’s February midterm autopsy report, has been sweeping losses for Democrats at every level during the Obama era, from statehouses to the U.S. House and Senate.

Without blaming the president by name, Clinton’s team is telling early state officials and activists that they feel their pain — and that they’re here to help.

“For the last eight years there were a large number of people who were attracted to be involved in campaigns because of Barack Obama, and that didn’t necessarily translate into those folks being party activists for other candidates, which is what you’ve been seeing in the off-year elections,” said New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Raymond Buckley, who saw Clinton last week. “We really need to be able to build something that is a permanent infrastructure, right from the precinct level.”

The story focuses on Iowa and New Hampshire. which isn’t of much interest to me, but the principle involved is good and important and would be applied to Texas as well, in some form. Lots of questions remain about what that form looks like. How many resources will they put into Texas? What are the goals for the state, in 2016 and beyond? How, if at all, does Battleground Texas fit in, and how does Team Hillary avoid the mistakes they made in dealing with the locals? How do they handle the fiefdoms, factions, and would-be kingmakers our party is full of? For now it’s good to know that they plan to do something, because Lord knows we need it. I’m just very interested in knowing what that something will be. Link via dKos.

Hillary Clinton’s Texas staffer

Apr 27th, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Here he is.

Hillary Clinton is dispatching a full-time organizer to Texas, part of a 50-state strategy to build support for her presidential bid.

Manfred Mecoy, the Texas grassroots organizer, is a Fort Worth native and University of Texas at Austin graduate. He has worked as a Democratic organizer in North Carolina last year, and in Ohio in 2010 and 2012.

He’ll be based in the Dallas area, and will travel statewide, a Clinton campaign aide said.

The “Ramp Up Grassroots Organizing Program” includes one paid campaign staffer in every state, with more in the four states with the earliest contests in 2016 – Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

They’ll recruit and train volunteers, at least through the end of May.

Obvious question #1: What role, if any, does Battleground Texas play in this? We know there’s a connection between BGTX and Ready for Hillary, but where does Manfred Mecoy fit in? How does it all work together? As of Friday afternoon when that item hit the web, I had not received a press release from either organization. Maybe someone will say something on Monday, I don’t know.

Obvious question #2: What’s the goal here? Having an organization in place just in case it’s needed in a contested primary? Continuing to carry on the original mission of BGTX, which despite the 2014 debacle was about boosting turnout in Presidential elections? Checking off the “implement a 50-state strategy” box on their to do list? Leading us to believe we’ll be putting in effort to organize in Texas but really looking for people who will make GOTV calls to Florida and Ohio next year? It would be nice to know.

BGTX’s self-assessment

Mar 5th, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Texas Monthly has a good overview of where Battleground Texas stands – and where the people inside it think they stand – two years and one electoral beatdown into their existence.

Still, it’s the winners who write the history books. In the meantime, the losers have some explaining to do. With that in mind, last week I traveled to Austin and spent two days in the company of Battleground Texas’s senior staff: Bird, Brown, Lucio, communications director Erica Sackin, political director Cliff Walker, digital director Christina Gomez, legal director Mimi Marziani, and fundraising director Adrienne Donato. I had interviewed most of them in Battleground’s earlier, happier times. As a species, field organizers tend to be sunny, even gratingly so (where political journalists are uniformly sullen), and that remained in force at their new offices on 1519 E. Cesar Chavez. The disaster in November has not caused them to second-guess the group’s core premise that Texas can one day turn blue. “The fundamental underlying demographics of Texas, people who are unregistered, the number of Democrats who voted in previous elections but not this one—taken together, it’s enough to win,” Jenn Brown told me. The theory that increased turnout in Texas will help its minority party would seem to be confirmed by the ruling party’s determination to make voting in Texas more difficult than elsewhere in America (about which more later).

Nonetheless, I could detect a whiff of humility among the group, albeit one mingled with defiance. In the first two years of its life, Battleground had received about $10 million in donations. Post-defeat, it would now have to get by with a fraction of that sum. It was in that somewhat wounded posture that the group discussed with me those areas where they must improve in order to have any relevance in future election

It’s a good read, and I encourage you to check it out. I came away from it with a fair amount of optimism that the hard-won lessons of 2014 were in fact learned, and future efforts will yield better results. A lot of things went wrong last year, some due to circumstance, some to inexperience, some to too many people who should be working together working instead at cross purposes. I’m glad they’re sticking it out for the longer term. Someone has to, and besides as I’ve said before, there are still plenty of opportunities to get involved this year and make a difference in local elections. Pasadena is one, but it’s far from the only one. There will be plenty of opportunities to make gains at the local level next year as well. BGTX has some work to do to mend fences and prove that they’ve learned from last year’s debacle – as the Trib reported last month, they spent a lot of time going around talking to volunteers and donors and whoever else would listen about those thing. But it’s not all on them. Ben Franklin’s words about hanging together or hanging separately ring as true now as ever. We are all on the same team. We should act like it. Trail Blazers has more.

On playing small ball

Jan 13th, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Campos reacts to Mayor Parker’s future statewide plans.

And here again is my small ball take from a few weeks ago:

It is time for small ball instead of the big inning.

In baseball, small ball is a strategy where you manufacture runs by utilizing the bunt, stealing bases, the hit and run, walks, hitting behind the runner, and contact hitting. You have to use this strategy if your offense is short of bashers. The big inning is a strategy where you rely heavily on the extra base hit, the walks, dingers, and have the capability of scoring a lot of runs in an inning. You need to have a lineup that includes a few power hitters and fence swingers.

Moving forward, Dems in the Lone Star State should consider utilizing the small ball strategy. We need to look at where we can pick up a run here and there. Let’s look at the map and see here we have a shot at a legislative seat, a county commissioner, county judgeship, district judgeship, county clerk, JP, constable – you get the picture. In a state with 254 counties, don’t tell me there are not any opportunities.

We are not ready for big inning play and I am not talking about a lack of quality statewide candidates. We had a good slate this past go-around. We just didn’t have the weapons to swing for the fences – a solid, organized, and energetic base. We build the base by playing small ball and picking up a run here and there. That’s how you manufacture some Ws.

Maybe the Mayor is thinking the statewide political environment will dramatically be altered in two or four years. Maybe she thinks the GOP in charge of our state government will run our state into the ground and the voters will be ready for the Mayor’s leadership. Of course, the GOP has been running the state for ten years now and they have only gotten more votes. Or maybe she has the confidence she can put together a big inning style campaign. I don’t know about that. Maybe she just wants to make sure that her name stays out there in the mix along with all the other politicos that have gotten previous statewide potential mention.

All I can say is get on out to places like Lufkin, Brownwood, Raymondville, Sherman, and Odessa and see if folks are interested.

Three thoughts:

1. I agree that there needs to be an increased focus on local elections, and have said so previously. I would simply note that there’s no need to wait until 2016 for this. There are plenty of elections this year that need attention, and anything we can do to get our people into a habit of voting outside of Presidential years will be a good thing. The May elections in Pasadena and Plano, where I’m sure some Council members will need defending, will require involvement. It would also be nice to see a worthy successor elected to fill Diego Bernal’s Council seat in San Antonio. Here in Houston, CM Richard Nguyen in District F made a courageous vote in favor of the HERO last year, and will be running for re-election having come out as a Democrat in a district that hasn’t elected anyone of the Democratic persuasion in my memory. He deserves our support, and if we’re not rallying to his side then there’s something wrong with us. The two open At Large seats – three if CM Christie decides to run for Mayor – are opportunities to elect strong progressive voices. If we want to act locally, there’s no time like the present.

2. As far as 2016 goes, if we are interested in trying to gain some ground at the county level, I would note that that is what the Texas County Democratic Campaign Committee (TCDCC) was created to do. I don’t know where things stand with that now – I suspect they got lost in the shuffle last year – but the point is that some work in identifying potential downballot targets has already been done. If there’s nothing left of the TCDCC to speak of, then frankly this is a place where Battleground Texas could step in and do some good. Crunch the numbers, identify some opportunities, share the information, and work with the locals to find and support good candidates. And if not the TCDCC or BGTX, then I don’t know who else. It’s easy to talk about this stuff. Actually doing it is a lot harder.

Here in Harris County, there are a few elections of interest for 2016. Winning back HD144, hopefully with a plan to not fumble it away again in 2018, is a priority. I still believe there is ground to be gained in HDs 132 and 135, perhaps more as a long-term investment. Countywide, we’ll have Ogg v. Anderson 2.0 for DA, someone to run for Tax Assessor, and depending on what Adrian Garcia decides to do, possibly a Sheriff’s office to win back or hold. If we want to think big – and I see no reason why playing small ball means thinking small – there’s Steve Radack’s seat on Commissioners Court. Precinct 4 was about 60-40 red in 2012, but if we’re serious about growing the vote here, that’s where a lot of untapped voters are going to be. We can wait around until he decides to retire, whenever that may be, or we can take a shot at it. You tell me what you would prefer.

3. As a reminder, there are no statewide elections in 2016 other than one Railroad Commissioner spot and the judicial races. As was the case last year, there won’t be much action in the legislative races, even with more attention on HD144. District Attorney, maybe Sheriff, and at a lower level Tax Assessor are the only countywide races that will draw interest, though perhaps if someone steps up to run against Steve Radack that will make a bit of noise. Obviously, there’s the Presidential race, and it is always the main driver of turnout, but what I’m saying is that as things stand right now, that will be even more the case in 2016. Barring anything unexpected, that means Team Hillary, which in turn means Battleground Texas, since the two are so closely intertwined. I don’t know what is going to happen to BGTX, and I don’t know how people are going to feel about them in another 18 or 20 months. What I do know is that we will have a better outcome, here and elsewhere in the state, if we – all of us, everyone – can find some way to work together rather than work at cross purposes. I personally don’t care who’s in charge, or who gets the credit when there is credit to be had. As Benjamin Franklin once said, if we do not hang together we will surely hang separately. It’s up to us what path we take.

We need to understand why our voters didn’t vote

Jan 3rd, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

So now we know that Battleground Texas wasn’t pursuing a base turnout-increase model for the 2014 election, for reasons that have not yet been adequately explored. I’m mad about that, but I don’t want to get bogged down in that. I want to learn from what happened and I want to move forward, in whatever form. I refuse to accept that the way things are now is the way they will always be. It’s just ten years ago that much (mostly virtual) ink was spilled about how hard it is for Democrats to win the Presidency, what with Republicans having such a lock on the Electoral College. Things are a bit different today, and I daresay they will continue to evolve, usually as a result of things most of us (though not all of us) didn’t see coming.

Basically, at a national level we have had two elections in which that “Emerging Democratic Majority” has held sway, and two in which they stayed home. Here in Texas, Democratic turnout was significantly higher in 2008 and 2012 than it was in 2004, but turnout in 2010 and 2014 was basically indistinguishable from 2002. Here’s that chart again from my previous post:


County     2002 GOP  2002 Dem  2010 GOP  2010 Dem  2014 GOP  2014 Dem
=====================================================================
Harris      330,801   272,032   423,275   334,098   358,425   299,255
Dallas      218,496   198,499   196,103   209,001   179,014   206,546
Bexar       133,733   124,129   161,443   131,397   156,144   134,876
Tarrant     195,384   125,416   208,976   123,200   213,812   138,944
Travis       93,524   110,026    95,431   127,803    91,372   155,335

County     2002 GOP  2002 Dem  2010 GOP  2010 Dem  2014 GOP  2014 Dem
=====================================================================
Harris       17.64%    14.50%    22.05%    17.42%    17.53%    14.64%
Dallas       18.08%    16.43%    17.13%    18.25%    14.83%    17.11%
Bexar        15.14%    14.05%    17.88%    14.55%    16.27%    14.06%
Tarrant      22.42%    14.39%    22.30%    13.15%    21.37%    13.89%
Travis       17.18%    20.22%    15.80%    21.16%    14.00%    23.81%

We can argue all we want about why Travis County is “different” and whether or not Battleground Texas had anything to do with it, but the fact remains that Travis is the only county to improve performance over 2002 and 2010. Harris County saw a huge improvement in Democratic turnout in 2010, and then it basically disappeared in 2014. What I want to know – what I hope everyone would want to know – is why this happened.

Look at those numbers. Some 35,000 people that voted Democratic in 2010 did not turn out at all in 2014. Forget the Presidential year/off year conundrum for a moment. What happened to those voters? Why didn’t they vote last year? Maybe it would be a good idea to take a sample of 400 or 500 of those didn’t-show-up voters, and call them and ask them that question. Why didn’t you vote this year? What if anything could we have done differently to have gotten you to vote? I don’t know about you, but I’d sure like to know the answer to those questions.

And why stop there? Nearly half of the people who generally voted Democratic in 2012 didn’t show up in 2014. That’s true in Harris County, and it’s true in the state of Texas as a whole. Maybe instead of cursing our fate we could contact some of those people and ask them why they didn’t vote this year. We probably won’t like a lot of the answers we’d get. Some will be nonsensical, some will be deeply frustrating, some will be of the “shit happens” variety. But at least if we knew what those answers were, maybe we could do better the next time. We might also check on some of those brand-newly registered voters, and as those that voted why they did, and those that didn’t why they didn’t. Wouldn’t that be nice to know?

As I see it, we can accept that our turnout sucks in non-Presidential years, as it has done in the entire history of the United States going all the way back to 2010, or we can try to understand it and maybe do something about it. I don’t care who tries to find out the answers to these questions – this isn’t a scientific poll, it shouldn’t be a big expense; hell, a half dozen or so volunteers could probably make the 500 calls needed to get a decent sample of answers in fairly short order – as long as they share the answers they get. We can try to learn about what happened, or we can just give up and nominate Jim Hogan for Governor in 2018 and save us all a lot of heartache. I know which choice I prefer.

On BGTX, Wendy Davis, and the future

Jan 2nd, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

5 comments

This has been a pretty busy Christmas break, as far as blog-worthy news has gone, so in order to preserve the small illusion that I’m taking a breather and recharging my batteries, I’m just going to give three quick thoughts on this Observer postmortem of the 2014 election and Battleground Texas, which you really should read.

1. I can’t tell you how stunned and disillusioned I am to read that their strategy for 2014 was a swing voter/crossover strategy, and not the base-building one that it sure sounded like they were going to do, and which was screamingly obvious we needed. I mean, even the most cursory review of election data for the past few cycles should have made this clear. The only semi-optimistic thing I can say about this is that I hope it proves, once and for all and beyond any semblance of a doubt, that nothing else matters in Democratic campaigning until we get our base turnout up. We had a huge leap forward from 2004 to 2008, then regressed a bit in 2012, but at least we made progress in Presidential years. Non-Presidential years have been a flat-lined albatross since 2002. I thought BGTX had figured this ridiculously easy insight out and was working on a plan to combat it. I can only hope they’ve figured it out now.

2. Much of the story is about friction between BGTX and the local and state Democratic parties and other organizations. I can’t speak to any of that – I get why the folks that were here first felt steamrolled, and I get why BGTX thought they could do things better – but I will say this: The story notes that in Travis County, there was a formal agreement between BGTX and the locals to work together. Well, if there was one honest success story in terms of performance in Texas in 2014, it was in Travis County. Here’s some data I’d collected for a post that I may or may not ever get around to finishing, about off-year turnout patterns in the five biggest urban counties:


County     2002 GOP  2002 Dem  2010 GOP  2010 Dem  2014 GOP  2014 Dem
=====================================================================
Harris      330,801   272,032   423,275   334,098   358,425   299,255
Dallas      218,496   198,499   196,103   209,001   179,014   206,546
Bexar       133,733   124,129   161,443   131,397   156,144   134,876
Tarrant     195,384   125,416   208,976   123,200   213,812   138,944
Travis       93,524   110,026    95,431   127,803    91,372   155,335

County     2002 GOP  2002 Dem  2010 GOP  2010 Dem  2014 GOP  2014 Dem
=====================================================================
Harris       17.64%    14.50%    22.05%    17.42%    17.53%    14.64%
Dallas       18.08%    16.43%    17.13%    18.25%    14.83%    17.11%
Bexar        15.14%    14.05%    17.88%    14.55%    16.27%    14.06%
Tarrant      22.42%    14.39%    22.30%    13.15%    21.37%    13.89%
Travis       17.18%    20.22%    15.80%    21.16%    14.00%    23.81%

The numbers in question are (for the top chart) the average vote totals for judicial candidates (*) in each year and for each party (I skipped 2006 because it was such an atypical down year for Republicans), and (for the bottom chart) the percentage of registered voters that each of those totals represents. As you can see, the only county with consistent growth, in terms of total numbers and share of registered voters, is Travis County. The Dallas County miracle is largely the result of the bottoming out of the Republican vote there; the Dem vote has grown somewhat, but not that much, and it backslid from 2010. Harris and Bexar are stuck in the mud, while Tarrant is still catching up to 2002. Whatever happened elsewhere in the state and with the Wendy Davis campaign, what happened in Travis County worked. We should learn from that.

(*) – These totals are from contested races only, for which there are a limited supply in Travis and Tarrant. I used statewide and circuit appeals court races in those counties in addition to the rare contested local judicial election; in Harris and Dallas I used district court races, and in Bexar I used district and county court races.

3. If I see any indication that BGTX plans to direct Texas volunteer effort and/or contributions to other states in 2016, I’m going to be very seriously pissed off. That’s not what we were promised, it’s not what anyone signed up for, and it’s not what we deserve. I don’t want to ever have to discuss this again.

As far as the story about Wendy Davis contemplating her political future, which I have not gotten around to reading yet but which Campos has, I see no reason why she can’t run again, whether it’s for SD10 in 2018 (she’d have as good a shot at it as anyone) or statewide again. Remember when we were all calling Rick Perry “Governor 39%”? Everyone had forgotten about that by the time 2010 rolled around. The public has a very short memory. As for Davis, if she has learned the lessons that should have been learned before this year, she might be a much stronger candidate next time out. Bottom line, she was a really good State Senator who won two tough races and served her district very well, and she’s only 51. I see no reason why she can’t have a second act.

Re-deputizing registrars

Dec 27th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Did you undergo the training to become a deputy voter registrar this year, perhaps at the urging of Battleground Texas? Well, you’re going to have to do it again if you want to register people for 2015 and/or 2016.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

A decades-old part of Texas’ election code is receiving new attention as Democrats look to chart a path forward and maintain their ranks of volunteers qualified to register voters.

Perhaps no organization is expected to feel the effect more than Battleground Texas, whose thousands of deputy voter registrars will lose their certification Dec. 31, and will have to go through training before they can earn it back in the new year.

“This is wildly burdensome,” said Mimi Marziani, voter protection director at Battleground Texas. “The only logical explanation is that all of those things are aimed at the same goal, which is making it much harder to vote.”

Under state election law, deputy volunteer registrars serve two-year terms that expire at the end of even-numbered years. While the provision has been on the books since the 1980s, Democrats predict this year will bring its most far-reaching consequences yet because the number of deputy volunteer registrars has ballooned in just two years.

Activists cite a trio of bills passed in 2011 that toughened the provision. The new laws narrowed the qualifications to be a registrar, made it a crime for registrars to be compensated on the basis of how many voters they sign up, and ordered the secretary of state’s office to set up a training program for registrars.

Activists especially are frustrated with the training requirement, which they say is yet another impediment to building a stable community of registrars. It is one more hurdle the Democrats say they must overcome if they want to bounce back from their worse-than-expected losses in November.

State Rep. Jim Murphy, R-Houston, sponsored House Bill 1570, which requires training for volunteer deputy registrars. He said the legislation may set up another hurdle for groups like Battleground Texas, but it is worth ensuring the registrars know what they are doing.

“It takes away the defense of ‘I didn’t know I couldn’t do that,'” Murphy said. “Clearly, I would agree it’s additional work, but so is having insurance for your house if it burns down.”

In a statement, Battleground Texas spokeswoman Erica Sackin said the group’s volunteers already are signing up to get re-deputized in 2015. Texas’ tough election laws “may have kept away other voter registration organizations, but they can’t stop our volunteers,” Sackin added.

For what it’s worth, I’m a fire warden at my office. I’m officially certified in high-rise fire safety. That means I attended a training session given by a Houston Fire Department captain, along with a couple hundred other people, and I passed an online test related to this training. That certification was good for five years, and as that five years expired a few months ago, I had to take an online review and re-pass the test. I didn’t have to undergo the four hour, in-person training class, I just had to demonstrate via this online test that I still knew what I was supposed to do. It’s not like anything has changed with the procedures in the interim, though I presume that if something had changed the building operations folks with whom we interact would have let us know about it, and it would have been reflected in the recertification test.

My point is that if this sort of process is good enough to be a city of Houston fire warden, it ought to be good enough to be a deputy vote registrar. I doubt anything has changed in how one goes about registering voters this year, and I’m sure local election admins have better things to do that to retrain a bunch of folks who already know the material. Sure, registrars should kow what they’re doing and what is required of them, but an online certification test would accomplish that, at a lower cost and with less inconvenience for all than making everyone trudge down to an office to be lectured at. You tell me what the purpose of all that is. A statement from Battleground Texas is beneath the fold.

(more…)

Ty McDonald for HD17

Dec 19th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Ty McDonald

As you know, the special election to replace Rep. Tim Kleinschmidt in HD17 has been set for January 6, with early voting to begin on December 29. This is the same schedule as the elections in HD123 and SD26. As you also know, I have been an advocate for running a Democrat in HD17, on the grounds that in a low-turnout election unpredictable things can happen, and with a bit of a GOTV push the Dems could steal a seat, even if it would only be a one-term rental.

Given all that, you will be as pleased as I am to see that there is a Dem running in HD17, and that Dem is Ty McDonald, wife of former Bastrop County Judge Ronnie McDonald and a former school board trustee in Bastrop. As had her husband, who eventually made an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for CD27 in 2012, Ty McDonald considered running for HD17 last year before deciding instead to try to succeed her husband as Bastrop County Judge. She lost that race in a year that wasn’t friendly to Democrats in Bastrop or elsewhere, and has now decided to toss her hat into this ring. With the filing deadline on Monday the 22nd, there are at least two announced Republican candidates (see the comments here), so at the very least she ought to have a decent shot at making it to a runoff.

I don’t know what Battleground Texas is doing now that it’s completed its post-election explanation tour of the state, but my reason for championing this special election, other than it being a free shot at a pickup, is that it just doesn’t take that many votes to win, or at least advance. Here are the vote totals from the last three State House special elections, plus two runoff elections:


Date   Dist   Votes    Win
==========================
12/10   044  11,036  5,518
11/11   014  13,519  6,760
12/11   014   6,736  3,368
11/13   050  14,936  7,468
01/14   050  10,520  5,260

Note that the specials in HDs 14 and 50 took place in November of 2011 and 2013, so they got a bit of an artificial boost in turnout, though probably not that much. I skipped the special elections in HDs 16 (from this November) and 84 (in 2010) precisely because they coincided with high-turnout general elections and thus would extreme outliers on this list. My guess is that turnout for this race is more likely to resemble the HD14 runoff, from December 2011, than anything else. That suggests an electorate of between (say) 6,000 and 10,000 voters, meaning that to win outright you’d need between 3,000 and 5,000 votes.

Now then. There were 35,196 total votes cast in 2014 general in HD17. Democratic candidate Carolyn Banks received 12,459 votes of them. Obviously, a lot of those folks are November-only types. If we want to narrow it down to just the hardcore Dems, the kind of people that might be receptive to a “Hey! We have a special election and we need your vote!” campaign, there were 4,492 votes cast in HD17 in the 2014 primary, and 5,259 votes in the 2012 primary. It shouldn’t be that hard to figure out who those people are and send them some mail, and maybe follow it up with a phone call or two.

That’s assuming that we want to try to win, of course, and if there’s someone to underwrite this expense. I’d assume sending mail to five thousand or so voters in this district would run in the low to medium five figures, not exactly a back-breaking expense for a campaign, and I feel reasonably confident that if BGTX put out a call for volunteers to do some phone banking they’d get a decent response from people who’d love a chance to put the taste of this November behind them. The odds are that this won’t work – HD17 was drawn to elect a Republican, and they have plenty of their own voters to contact – but again, what is there to lose? Not doing anything here would be a much bigger loss, in my opinion, than trying and coming up short. We have a race, we have a candidate, we have a win number, and we have a reasonable idea of how to achieve it. What else do we need?

Art Murillo

Nov 14th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Congratulations to Art Murillo, the first person of color elected to the Lone Star College Board of Trustees. Need I mention that it took a lawsuit for this to happen?

Art Murillo

Murillo, who is Latino, at one time might have seemed a long shot to win a seat on the Lone Star College board of trustees. But he was running in a newly drawn majority-Latino district, the result of a lawsuit that challenged the LSC’s “at-large” system of representation. On Tuesday, Murillo was elected the only Latino member of the nine-member board.

[…]

Lone Star College officials created the new district after a lawsuit alleged that the old election system – where all voters in the community college district could vote for each candidate – disenfranchised minorities because whites across the district would reject minority candidates.

The district currently has about 83,000 students enrolled in college credit courses.

Starting this year, that system is gone, and the college system isn’t alone in tackling the voting rights issue.

“As to the suburban areas, because of the white flight that this country experienced for half a century, those districts have been exceedingly Anglo for so long that at-large districts didn’t really commit a great deal of harm on minority citizens,” said Chad Dunn, who represented the group that sued Lone Star last year and specializes in litigation involving such systems.

“What is uniquely going on now, and about the last decade as the city center has redeveloped, the suburbs are becoming much more mixed-race,” Dunn said.

Latinos make up about 32 percent of people living in the Lone Star College district, which spans north Harris and Montgomery counties, according to the most recent census figures. African-Americans make up 15 percent.

Advocates argue that the new single-member districts that have a majority of minority voters will ensure they have a voice in college affairs.

“There’s not a lot of Hispanic leadership at all,” Murillo told another resident as they discussed Hispanic participation in local elections.

Two points to note here. One is that no matter what the Supreme Court may think there is still a lot of work to be done to ensure that minority communities have something resembling a proportionate amount of representation in government. Single member districts, for city councils and school boards and the like, are often the best, or at least the fastest, way to make this happen. It’s not a panacea, and some problems could be alleviated by higher rates of voter participation, but you can run into a chicken-and-egg problem there. It’s hard to convince someone to run for an office they don’t see a way to win. The plaintiffs in the LSC single-member litigation couldn’t do a proper comparison of how white and non-white candidates did in these elections in the past because there weren’t any non-white candidates running.

The other point is that those of us that would like to see more diverse representation in elected offices need to pay more attention to local races like this one. Your future legislators and Congressfolk and whatnot often get their start in places like the Lone Star College Board of Trustees; Harris County Clerk Chris Daniel is one example. The potential to change outcomes by increasing voter participation is great as well. Frankly, if Battleground Texas wants to regain some ground, and some credibility, between now and 2016 I’d strongly advise them to look around at the various municipal and school board elections that will happen in 2015, identify some targets and some candidates, and work to get them elected. Doing so would help keep the kind of voters they want to target engaged, it would help put some future candidates for other offices in place to start doing good and building a record, and it give them a chance to apply whatever lessons they learned from this election while maybe claiming a victory or three to build on for 2016. Honestly, the conservative movement figured this out thirty or forty year ago. Isn’t it time we catch up a bit?

The Battleground effect in legislative races

Nov 7th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

10 comments

So here’s a crazy idea. Rather than judge Battleground Texas by our own beliefs about how things should have gone, what say we take a look at the actual numbers of a few races and see what they tell us? In particular, let’s look at the numbers in the Blue Star Project races, which were legislative elections in which BGTX engaged directly. There was SD10 and eight State House races; I’m going to throw in CD23 as well even though BGTX did not specifically get involved there. I’m going to compare the performance of the Democratic candidates with those of Bill White, since everyone is obsessing about the White numbers even though about 15% of his vote total came from Republicans, and with Lt. Gov. candidate Linda Chavez-Thompson, since I believe her totals are a more accurate reflection of what the base Democratic turnout was in 2010. Here’s what I’ve got:


Dist  Candidate   Votes   Pct   White   Pct     LCT   Pct   Needed
==================================================================
CD23    Gallego  55,436  47.7  55,762  45.6  47,950  40.2   57,902

SD10     Willis  80,806  44.7  76,920  44.6  66,783  38.8   95,485

023       Criss  14,716  45.4  19,224  50.1  15,866  41.8   17,703
043    Gonzalez  10,847  38.6  14,049  45.8  12,635  41.7   17,274
105      Motley  10,469  42.7  11,766  43.8   9,793  36.7   13,588
107     Donovan  13,803  45.0  14,878  46.3  11,936  37.5   16,880
108      Bailey  16,170  39.3  17,401  42.0  12,859  31.3   24,954
113     Whitley  12,044  40.6  13,483  44.8  11,575  38.7   17,639
117      Cortez  11,519  47.3  10,247  48.0   8,829  42.2   12,832
144       Perez   5,854  49.3   8,411  52.7   7,273  46.0    6,010

It’s a mixed bag. The best performances came from Libby Willis in SD10 and Phillip Cortez (one of two incumbents on BGTX’s list) in HD117. Both exceeded White’s totals and far surpassed Chavez-Thompson’s. This is partly a reflection of what happened in Tarrant and Bexar Counties, respectively. In Tarrant, not only did Wendy Davis beat Bill White’s numbers in her backyard, so too did Leticia Van de Putte and Sam Houston, with Mike Collier just behind. White and Van de Putte were the only ones to carry Bexar for the Dems, with VdP being the high scorer, but Davis came close to White’s number and downballot Dems improved by about 20,000 votes. Willis and Cortez both beat the spread, but not by enough.

Gallego, who again was not directly assisted by BGTX, and the four Dallas County candidates all fell short of White but exceeded, in some cases by a lot, Chavez-Thompson. As I said above, I think topping LCT’s totals represents an improvement in base turnout from 2010, and again that’s consistent with what we saw in Dallas overall, as White was the standard-bearer while the top four Dems all surpassed Chavez-Thompson. Gallego did about as well in Bexar as Ciro Rodriguez did in 2010, and there’s no one place where he did worse, though he could have used more turnout in Maverick County.

The other three results are just bad. Turncoat Dem Lozano carried Jim Wells and Kleberg counties even as all the statewide Dems won in Jim Wells and most of them carried Kleberg despite generally losing it in 2010. Davis didn’t win Kleberg, and she scored lower in Jim Wells than several other Dems. That may have been a contributing factor, but on the whole it was fairly marginal. Still, that needs to be understood more fully, and someone needs to come up with a strategy to keep Dems from crossing over for Lozano if we want to make that seat competitive again.

Criss had a tough assignment, as HD23 has been trending away as places like Friendswood have made Galveston County and that district more Republican. Unlike the other two Dem-held State Rep seats that were lost, HD23 isn’t going to flip to “lean Dem” in 2016. Turnout by both parties was down in HD23 from 2010, and it’s probably the case that White was a boost there four years ago. Better turnout could have gotten her closer, but Susan Criss was always going to have to persuade some Rs to support her to win. I will be very interested to see what the Legislative Council report on this one looks like when it comes out.

The loss by Mary Ann Perez was the worst of the bunch, partly because it looked like she was up in early voting and partly because Harris was alone among the five largest counties in not improving Dem turnout. You can ding BGTX or whoever you like as much as you want for the latter, but the candidate herself has to take some responsibility, too. Winning this seat back needs to be a priority in 2016, and making sure it stays won needs to be a bigger priority after that.

So like I said, a mixed bag. The 2010 numbers were pretty brutal overall in these districts, and where there were improvements it was encouraging, and offers hope for 2016. Where there wasn’t improvement was disappointing, and needs to be examined thoroughly to understand what happened. I’d give the project a final grade of C – there’s some promise going forward and some lessons to be learned, but while improvements are nice, results are necessary.

First impressions of the 2014 results

Nov 6th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

10 comments

My initial thoughts, for what they are worth.

– Let me begin by saying that for all the criticism I had of the UT/Texas Trib’s polling and the skepticism of Internet-sample methodology, they were fairly accurate in the end. In particular, the last YouGov result just about nailed it. I still think what they do is more alchemy than anything else, and their subsample results often look ridiculous, but however they did it, they got it right and they deserve credit for it.

– I’m sure we’re about to be deluged with critical stories about Battleground Texas and public doubts about their future viability – the Trib and the Observer are already on it – but I have to ask, given the way this election went nationally, why they are more deserving of scorn than anyone else. In particular, how did they do any worse than the DCCC, DSCC, and DGA? The DSCC’s fabled “Bannock Street Project”, which was supposed to save the Senate by increasing Democratic turnout in battleground states, was a spectacular dud. Democratic candidates for Governor lost in such deep red states as Illinois and Maryland. Hell, the chair of the DGA, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, who pooped on Wendy Davis’ campaign a few months ago, failed to get a majority of the votes in his own election. BGTX doesn’t have much to brag about today, and I have no doubt they could have done plenty of things better. But I know a lot of people – friends of mine – who worked their tails off for BGTX and the Davis campaign, and I will not demean the work they did. If you want to criticize them, go right ahead, but please be specific about your complaints. I’m not going to pay attention to any generalized rants.

– Davis didn’t come close to matching Bill White’s vote total, and no statewide Dem reached 40% of the vote. That’s the harsh truth, and there’s no sugarcoating it. The funny thing is, though, for all the talk about turnout being down, it wasn’t actually Democratic turnout that was down. Here’s a comparison of the vote totals for the Democrats running for the top four offices over the last four non-Presidential cycles:


                  2002       2006       2010       2014
=======================================================
Governor     1,819,798  1,310,337  2,106,395  1,832,254
Lt Gov       2,082,281  1,617,490  1,719,202  1,810,720
Atty Gen     1,841,359  1,599,069  1,655,859  1,769,943
Comptroller  1,476,976  1,585,362        N/A  1,739,308

Davis didn’t peel crossover votes away from Abbott the way White did from Rick Perry, but beyond that I don’t see a step back. If anything, it’s an inch or two forward, though of course that still leaves a thousand miles to go. Where turnout did decline was on the Republican side. Greg Abbott received about 360,000 fewer votes than he did in 2010. Given the whipping that Republicans were laying on Dems across the country, one might wonder how it is they didn’t do any better than they did here.

One thing I’m seeing, and I’ll have more to say about this tomorrow, is that some people seem to think that because Davis got about 265K fewer votes than Bill White that means that overall Democratic turnout was down by that amount. In a word, this is baloney. White drew the votes of some 300K people that otherwise voted Republican. Their presence in his tally was nice for him, and would have been critical in a different year, but they had nothing to do with Democratic turnout. I am at a loss for why people are making that claim, and why they are overlooking or ignoring the gains in the races just below the Governor’s race, where a coordinated turnout effort would have an effect. Like I said, more about this tomorrow.

– Harris County wasn’t any prettier than the state was, and here in Harris there were declines in the vote totals of both parties. I’ve been looking at the statewide results more closely to see where the gains and losses were, and my initial impression is that the other big counties did move forward in ways Harris did not. The mail program was a success, but it seems clear that it mostly shifted behavior. If there was a net gain, in terms of votes we wouldn’t have had at all without the mail program, it means that in person turnout efforts were that much less successful. If we’re going to be introspective, that’s the place to start.

– All that said, if I’m newly-elected Harris County DA Devon Anderson, I’d take a few minutes to be concerned about the fact that I have to be on the ballot again in 2016. Consider this: By my calculation, the average Republican judicial candidate who had a Democratic opponent received 359,759 votes. The average Dem judicial candidate got 297,311. Anderson received 354,098 while Kim Ogg got 311,094. To put it another way, Ogg got crossover votes, which stands both her and Anderson in contrast to Pat Lykos in 2008 and Mike Anderson in 2012. Frankly, if she’s up for it, I’d tell Kim Ogg to keep running and start fundraising now for 2016. Assuming the patterns from the last two Presidential years hold here, she’d have a real shot at it.

– Along the same lines, of the five legislative seats the Dems lost (three in the House, one each in Congress and the Senate), HDs 117 and 144 should flip back in 2016, and if I were Pete Gallego I’d keep running for CD23 as well. (If he doesn’t want to run any more, allow me to be the first to hop on the Mary González bandwagon.) If Susan Criss can’t win HD23, which had been trending red for some time, I doubt anyone can. As for SD10, it’s not up again till 2018, but for the record, Libby Willis basically hit the Bill White number, which suggests she drew a non-trivial number of crossovers. Someone ought to take another crack at that one next time around but bear in mind this was always going to be a tough hold. I strongly suspect that if Wendy Davis had decided to run for re-election instead that we’d still be mourning her defeat.

– One prize Dems did claim was knocking off longtime Bexar County DA Susan Reed. Republicans claimed a victory over DA Craig Watkins in Dallas, where he was his own worst enemy. I refer you to Grits for more on that.

– Other results of interest: You already know about the Denton fracking ban. The Katy and Lone Star College bond initiatives passed. Austin Council Member Council Member Mike Martinez and attorney Steve Adler are in a runoff for Mayor; other Council race results, the first single member district elections in Austin, are here. And finally, Old Town Tomball repealed its ban on alcohol sales. Pour one out, y’all.

– Finally, a word on the matter of the efficacy of campaign ads, in particular negative ads. Yesterday morning after we dropped off the kids at school, Tiffany mentioned to me that Olivia’s understanding of the Governor’s race was that if Abbott won, there would be more standardized tests, which did not please her. “He wants to test four-year-olds!” she said. “That’s just wack!” I will simply note that at no time this year did I ever discuss the Abbott and Davis pre-k plans with her, and leave it at that.

Two in Tarrant to watch

Nov 4th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Tarrant County isn’t often an electoral battleground, but this time it is, at least in two legislative races.

Libby Willis

[HD94 Republican nominee Tony] Tinderholt’s race is one of two legislative contests in Tarrant County where Democrats are pinning their hopes on Republican voters soured by the most conservative elements of their party.

The second is a race to fill the Senate seat left open by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis. There, in a district dominated by Republicans until Davis’ election, Democrat Libby Willis faces Konni Burton, a grassroots activist from Colleyville who touts the rare endorsement of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

Like Tinderholt, who ousted Diane Patrick, an eight-year incumbent, in a primary upset, Burton sailed to GOP victory by questioning the conservative credentials of other Republicans. Now, in the general election, both candidates are under fire from their opponents for positions on abortion, gun rights and illegal immigration that Democrats say are out of sync with mainstream voters.

“I’m looking for those people who just don’t care about the partisan nonsense,” said Cole Ballweg, the Arlington businessman running against Tinderholt. “I’m looking for those people who’re more like me, who say, ‘What is really going to move the needle for my community, for my schools, for my kids?’ And there’s actually a lot of them out there.”

[…]

Ballweg acknowledged that it would take a “miracle” for a Democrat to carry Arlington’s staunchly Republican House District 94.

“I understand that so many of these people are still going to vote against me,” Ballweg said. “But you know what, they’re a lot more reasonable than a lot of people give them credit. They don’t want rifles in their streets; they don’t want angry, off-the-rails rhetoric about the border or anything else.”

The contest for the state Senate seat is closer. With advertising buys still rolling in, Willis and Burton have each spent over $1 million getting their message to Tarrant County voters since May, according to Texas Ethics Commission data.

Burton has raked in high-dollar donations from prominent conservative backers, including $100,000 from Midland oil and gas developer Tim Dunn and Texans for Lawsuit Reform, which has spent more than $300,000 on last-minute direct mail and television ads on her behalf.

Willis has received substantial sums from Democratic donors, including Houston trial lawyer Steve Mostyn, who has contributed a combined $850,000 to her campaign through his law firm and Back to Basics, the political action committee he funds. She has also received support from Planned Parenthood, the Democratic organizing group Battleground Texas and Annie’s List, which helps Democratic female candidates run for office.

But in her run for the high-profile swing district, Willis has also made inroads with groups otherwise supporting a slate of primarily Republican candidates, like the Texas Medical Association and the statewide law enforcement association known as CLEAT.

The former teacher and past president of the Fort Worth League of Neighborhood Associations has attempted to draw a sharp contrast with her opponent, billing herself as a coalition builder and Burton as a partisan.

“I have so many Republicans saying, ‘I am not a Tea Party person, I am not extreme, I am just not that far out there.’ And they are voting for me,” Willis said. “A lot of them are voting for a Democrat for the first time in their lives, and they are voting for me.”

I’ve written about the SD10 race before, both as a benchmark of success and an example of what else Battleground Texas is doing. I continue to believe that Libby Willis has at least as good a chance to hold this seat with Wendy Davis running for Governor as Davis would have with a mystery candidate for Governor. Early voting was up in Tarrant County, and one presumes these races as well as the Governor’s race were the driving forces behind that. As for the HD94 race, it would be nice to think that Republicans would be “soured by the most conservative elements of their party”, but one expects that if they were then Tinderholt would have lost in the primary to Rep. Diane Patrick, who had a solid reputation and was on Tom Craddick’s leadership team. I’ll hope for the best here, and I won’t be surprised if Cole Ballweg exceeds the partisan norm, but I’m not expecting more than that.

Final 2014 EV thoughts

Nov 2nd, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Here’s the Chron story about how early voting went.

“Each (side) is emphasizing areas of comparative advantage, but the overall pattern seems to be unimpressive in terms of overall turnout,” said Jim Henson, who directs the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “I don’t see anything in the voting numbers as we have them so far to suggest a disruption in the normal pattern.”

Based on numbers kept by the secretary of state’s office, nearly 1.5 million people had voted early through Thursday in Texas’ 15 biggest counties, barely topping the same number at this point in 2010. The early voting turnout rate was down more than 7 percent.

“The numbers for early voting in this 2014 election cycle are comparable to what we saw in 2010,” said Alicia Pierce, a spokeswoman for the office, echoing not only Republicans but also independent experts who have been crunching the numbers on their own.

Polling stations in Harris County experienced a surge on Friday, the last day to cast a ballot in-person before Election Day on Nov. 4. Workers processed 51,628 voters – the highest daily number of the early-voting period.

But overall, early turnout in Harris County dropped 16 percent compared to the midterm count four years ago, from 444,648 to 375,247 this cycle.

In-person voters numbered 307,280 for the dozen days of early voting, compared to the final early number in 2010 – 392,536.

Still, more mail-in ballots were returned this cycle, 67,967 compared to 52,112 in 2010, which may suggest that efforts to get more people to vote using that method worked.

Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart said he expects a non-record-breaking turnout of about 300,000 voters on Tuesday. “Voters, they do their own thing,” he said, adding that state and national moods appear to influence turnouts.

The analysis of Friday’s batch of votes was that it was a good day for the Democrats, which brought the projected Dem share of the overall early vote in Harris County to 46.7%. That happens to be a very conducive number for some back-of-the-envelope math. With turnout so far at 375K, this puts Democrats down about 25K votes, 200K to 175K. That’s without taking into account the Greens and Libs, the extra mail ballots that will arrive by Tuesday, and undervotes, but it’s close enough for these purposes. If we accept Stan Stanart’s guess of 300K turnout for Tuesday, that means Dems need a win of 162,500 to 137,500 for a 50-50 county. That’s roughly a 54.2-45.8 spread for the Ds, or an improvement of 7.5 points over EV. In 2010, Dems improved by about 7 points from EV to E-Day (39% to 46%). So it’s doable, though obviously a bit of a stretch.

One thing to note from this is that if this projection is accurate, Dem turnout in Harris County will be up a smidge from 2010 – could be a slightly larger smidge if the projection underestimates the Dems, or it could be that there is no smidge if it’s an overestimate – while Republican turnout is down considerably. That shouldn’t be a big surprise – 2010 was fueled by a huge wave of previously Presidential-year-only Republican voters. I’ve said all along that while we ought to expect some of them to show up this year, it’s unlikely they all would. It stands to reason that a lack of these surge voters would have an effect. I suspect that this pattern will hold around the state, with perhaps some local variations here and there, like in Bexar County, but I have no data to verify this. What this means for final state totals remains to be seen. Let’s assume that the Rs have something like 2002 turnout, which is to say between 2.7 million and 2.8 million. If Dems can reach or edge past the Bill White line – say 2.1 or 2.2 million – that puts them at 43 or 44 percent, more or less. If that’s true for the whole ticket and not just one Bill White-like candidate, I’d count that as solid progress, if perhaps a bit short of my fonder hopes. It would also still be a double-digit loss, likely between 12 and 14 points. You can close a lot of the gap from 2010 and still have a lot more gap left to close. If however we’re looking at no more than an “up a smidge” situation statewide, so that Dems are still in the 1.8 million range, we’re looking at a 20-point loss. I’d be hard pressed to find anything positive about that regardless of what else might have happened.

None of this should be taken as gospel. I’m extrapolating from a limited data set. It would have been awesome to have seen some clear evidence of a Democratic surge, but I don’t. There is room to make up ground on Election Day, though, so keep at it till the final bell rings. Remember also that when BGTX first arrived, back when no Democrats were running for Governor, they were talking about a multi-year process, with a target date of 2020. Whatever does happen, we have to build on it. Move forward or get left behind.

Finally, a small point of disagreement with my friend PDiddie. If Susan Criss holds HD23, I see no way the Dems lose any seats in the Lege. The most likely outcomes range from -1 to +3 for the Dems, depending on HD23, those two Dallas districts, and HD43. There are Dem incumbents that would have to sweat it out in a year more like 2010, but there’s no evidence to suggest we have that kind of year.

Fort Bend’s electoral future

Oct 29th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Fort Bend County isn’t what it used to be politically, but it’s also not what it ought to be headed for yet.

It has been more than two decades since a Democrat won countywide office in Fort Bend, but swift growth and shifting demographics are prompting the party to take a second look at the traditionally red county west of Houston and forcing Republicans to adapt.

The number of registered voters in Fort Bend has increased by a third since 2008, and non-Hispanic whites no longer comprise a majority.

The Fort Bend County Democratic Party is using digital analysis to target a narrow segment of likely liberal voters. The effort is being bolstered by paid staff from Battleground Texas, a political action committee formed to make Texas competitive for Democrats.

By fielding a candidate to oppose Fort Bend’s longtime Republican district attorney – another first – Democrats hope to test their new strategies.

Also seeking to capitalize on the area’s growth, the Fort Bend County Republican Party has opened its first field office in Katy.

“My goal is to prove that (Battleground Texas) was wasted money,” county GOP Chairman Mike Gibson said. “But am I taking it lightly? No. We’re going to run like we’re 20 points behind with an outside organization trying to influence it.”

Political analysts still place Fort Bend solidly in the GOP column, but say the margin of victory in Fort Bend elections could signal the health of the dominant Republican party and the odds of Democrats keeping their promise to turn Texas blue.

To Donald Bankston, the Fort Bend Democratic chairman, it’s inevitable that his party will regain dominance.

“There’s been a seismic shift in the demographics,” he said. “If this was a highly voting county, this county would be reliably Democratic.”

The share of the population that is non-Hispanic white shrunk from 54 percent in 1990 to 36 percent in 2013, according to Census figures. Because Latino, African-American and Asian voters tend to lean liberal, Bankston hopes to convince them to turn out at the polls as reliably as their white counterparts, giving Democrats a fighting chance.

Rice University political scientist Mark Jones said the equation for taking over Fort Bend is not so simple.

“Minority doesn’t equal Democrat,” Jones said. “Minorities on average tend to vote Democrat significantly more than Republican, but that varies notably among some groups.”

True, but not that big a factor in this case. It’s about turnout and engagement. Democrats can’t take for granted that turnout among populations friendly to them will continue to rise as their share of the overall population increases, they can’t assume that people who have been turned off by Republicans’ harsh and often racist rhetoric will necessarily flock to them, and they can’t assume that Republican rhetoric will remain that toxic forever. Republicans can’t assume that Asians and Latinos “just don’t know yet” that they’re really Republicans, and sooner or later they really are going to have to figure out how to tame the dominant but shrinking enraged nihilist faction of their party. I have considered Fort Bend to be like Harris politically, just maybe a step or two behind. FB came close to being blue in 2008, and like Harris took a bit of a step backward in 2012 when the excitement wasn’t quit as high as it had been then. In between was 2010, and the less said about that, the better. There are some good candidates running under the Fort Bend Democratic Party banner this year, but sometimes outside forces are too big for that. No matter what happens, there should be plenty of lessons to learn from this election.

2014 first week EV totals

Oct 27th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

EarlyVoting

Here they are, and here are the full 2010 EV totals. Democrats still have a lot of work to do, at least in Harris County. I sure hope it happens, that’s all I can say.

We’re already seeing postmortems for this election – I guess some people like to be ahead of the game – and so we have this effort from yesterday’s op-ed pages. Author William Thorburn makes some valid points, but I think he’s reaching a bit here:

Battleground Texas, with its commitment to expanding the Democratic base by registering more voters and turning them out, had its first test with the 2014 Democratic primary. This year, 555,000 Texans cast a ballot in the Democratic primary, a total that for the third straight election year has been decreasing rather than increasing. In fact, this year’s total of Democratic primary voters is lower than in any year since 1920 when 450,000 voted. In 1920, however, the state’s total population was only 4,723,000, as contrasted with a current population of 26 million plus.

Having failed to recruit candidates for many county and state legislative offices, with no one willing to conduct a primary in 22 counties, and the lowest primary turnout in more than 90 years, the remaining test for Battleground Texas and the state Democratic Party is the performance of its statewide candidates next week. Should this year’s slate of candidates fail to do much better than those in recent elections, one must wonder whether Democratic big-dollar donors will continue to pour money into Battleground Texas or move their contributions and resources to more favorable territory.

I don’t recall candidate recruitment being part of BGTX’s mission statement. In fact, I’m pretty sure the county parties would have resented it like hell if they had tried. Be that as it may, his point about primary turnout is a bit weak. In 2002, with hot races for Governor and US Senate, Dem primary turnout topped one million; in 2006, with snoozers across the board, it was half that; and in 2010, with Bill White duking it out with Farouk Shami, it about 700K. Yet as we know, base Democratic turnout in each year was about the same. In 2008, during the most exciting Democratic primary in at least a generation, turnout was 2.8 million. In 2012, it was less than one fifth of that. In each case, November turnout was about the same. I don’t dispute his larger points, but there’s no correlation here.

Anyway. It’s the last five days of early voting. No time to lose. Let’s hope the numbers improve.

More on the voter registration numbers

Oct 22nd, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Wayne Slater has a contrarian perspective on the voter registration numbers.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Getting new voters begins with registering new people. When the secretary of state last week announced a record-high 14 million Texans are registered to vote, Battleground Texas trumpeted that number as evidence their efforts are working. Not so much, it turns out, according to the actual numbers.

For example, voter-registration in the top five Democratic-rich South Texas counties where Davis expects to do well is up 5.8 percent from the last time there was a governor’s race – slightly better than the average statewide. But voter registration in five top GOP-rich suburban counties is up a whopping 13.8 percent.

The Davis camp hopes for a good showing in Dallas County and Harris County, especially among Democratic-leaning black and Hispanic voters. Dallas County voter registration is up about 5 percent from four years ago. Harris County is up over 6 percent. And voter registration in Travis County where Battleground Texas has a strong presence is up 8.4 percent.

But the real voter-registration increases this election are in suburban GOP strongholds like Fort Bend County (17.5 percent), Collin County (14.3 percent), Rockwall County (12.9 percent), Denton County (11.6 percent) and Williamson County (14.2 percent).

Does that mean Battleground Texas has failed to deliver on its much-ballyhooed promise to register new voters? Not necessarily. In the big South Texas counties they say they’ve targeted, the increase in registered voters is a lot better this year than four years earlier. For example, in Hidalgo County, voter registration is up 7.5 percent from 2010. Four years earlier, when Democrat Bill White was on the ballot, voter registration grew 5.9 percent in from 2006 to 2010. The same thing for Cameron County, where voter registration this time has grown twice as much as it did between 2006 and 2010, the last governor’s race.

Three things here:

1. Comparing percentage increases can be misleading, because things that are smaller to begin with can have sizable percentage increases without actually increasing all that much. Rockwall County, for example has 51,787 registered voters in it. That’s an increase of 5,944 over their 2010 number of 45,843. That doesn’t crack the top 20 total increases as I noted in my previous post, and the total number of registered voters in Rockwall County is less than the increase in registered voters in Dallas County, which grew by 58,086.

2. We can argue over the numbers all we want, or at least until we start seeing some data about who actually voted, but who was registered matters at least as much as how many of them were. As I’ve said before, some of the increase in voter registration is the natural result of population growth. We know that Battleground Texas has focused a lot of resources on voter registration. One presumes they’re smart enough to target people that will be likely to go Democratic if they vote. There may have been some concerted Republican effort to register like-minded voters – I don’t know, and the story Slater links to doesn’t address the question – but again, one would think that if there were something comparable on the GOP side it might have warranted some attention from the press. Be that as it may, we don’t have to guess, or at least we don’t have to guess blindly on insufficient data. The various county clerks and elections administrators could provide, if asked by a professional reporter, more detailed information about where those new voters came from – what precincts, for example, whose more fine-grained electoral information might provide a richer illustration – and about their racial and ethnic composition. We don’t have enough information here to base a judgment on this, but that doesn’t mean that information doesn’t exist. It’s there if a professional political reporter wants to find out about it.

3. All that said, the burden of proof remains with BGTX. They are trying to do something that hasn’t been done before, and some level of skepticism is warranted until we see evidence of success in the results. A lot of those heavily GOP counties Slater cites have been slowly trending Democratic in Presidential years, but outside of Fort Bend the increase in Democratic votes from 2006 to 2010 failed to keep up with the growth in registered voters. That’s the challenge, and that’s what it will take to move the needle in the GOP strongholds. The good news is that we should have some idea of how this is going as soon as we have data about who is voting early. Whether the good news continues from there, that’s the question.

Voter registration numbers top 14 million

Oct 19th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Sweet.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

More than 14 millions Texans have registered to vote in the November elections, the secretary of state’s office announced Thursday, calling the number a record high.

The total marks an increase of 2.8 percent since the most recent presidential contest and 5.7 percent since the last time candidates for governor were on the ballot.

More attention than usual is being paid to voter registration this year. Groups such as Battleground Texas have been working to “expand the electorate” to make the state competitive for Democrats.

Oct. 6 was the last day to register to vote. Early voting begins Monday for the elections on Nov. 4.

Far as I can tell, that’s based on this tweet from the Secretary of State’s office. They have not yet updated their Turnout and Voter Registration Figures page, but we do have this page, which gives the total enrollment number as 14,025,441, as well as suspense file numbers and a county-by-county breakdown. I’ll get to the latter in a second, but first here’s a look at the numbers over time:


Date     Reg voters   % of VAP
==============================
Mar 06   12,722,671      76.47
Nov 06   13,074,279      78.58

Mar 08   12,752,417      71.90
Nov 08   13,575,062      76.54

Mar 10   13,023,358      69.31
Nov 10   13,269,233      71.00

Mar 12   13,065,425      71.47
Nov 12   13,646,226      74.65

Mar 14   13,601,324      71.91
Nov 14   14,025,441      74.15

So the number of registered voters is up about a million from this time in 2010. That’s five times the growth from November 2006 to November 2010. Not too shabby. How it translates into turnout and what that turnout looks like is of course still to be determined. But as noted, this was one of the key pillars of the Battleground Texas plan. It’s encouraging to see that this part of it has worked as well as it has so far.

And because I can never leave it at that, here are the 20 counties that saw the greatest increase in registrations since 2010:


County   2014 Voter Reg  2010 Voter Reg   Reg Diff
==================================================
HARRIS        2,062,792       1,937,850    124,942
TARRANT         999,687         936,735     62,952
COLLIN          485,406         424,672     60,734
DALLAS        1,203,513       1,145,427     58,086
FORT BEND       363,147         309,026     54,121
BEXAR           957,110         905,859     51,251
TRAVIS          655,056         604,374     50,682
DENTON          407,040         364,593     42,447
WILLIAMSON      271,612         237,763     33,849
MONTGOMERY      281,496         249,954     31,542
EL PASO         403,979         379,727     24,252
HIDALGO         318,772         296,510     22,262
BELL            168,877         154,566     14,311
BRAZORIA        183,488         170,784     12,704
CAMERON         186,563         174,188     12,375
GUADALUPE        84,076          74,783      9,293
GALVESTON       191,961         182,802      9,159
COMAL            82,137          73,750      8,387
HAYS            106,581          98,210      8,371
ELLIS            93,126          84,991      8,135

Some of that is the effect of plain old population growth, but it’s still pretty impressive. Note this doesn’t take into account the effect of the suspense files – go here and click on the “I don’t remember seeing my certificate lately. Is that a problem? Don’t I just stay registered?” question for details – but I don’t know how to factor that in, so I’ll just go with this. We’ll have some idea of the turnout effect beginning Monday. In the meantime, make sure you and everyone you know will be voting.

November 8, 2016 Early Voting Locations, Harris County, Texas
Location	Address	City	Zip
Harris County Administration Building	1001 Preston Street	Houston	77002
Champion Forest Baptist Church	4840 Strack Road	Houston	77069
Prairie View A&M University Northwest	9449 Grant Road	Houston	77070
Baldwin Boettcher Branch Library	22248 Aldine Westfield Road	Humble	77338
Kingwood Branch Library	4400 Bens View Lane	Kingwood	77345
Lone Star College Atascocita Center	15903 West Lake Houston Parkway	Houston	77044
Crosby Branch Library	135 Hare Road	Crosby	77532
Kyle Chapman Activity Center	7340 Spencer Highway	Pasadena	77505
Freeman Branch Library	16616 Diana Lane	Houston	77062
Harris County Scarsdale Annex*	10851 Scarsdale Boulevard	Houston	77089
Juergen’s Hall Community Center	26026 Hempstead Highway	Cypress	77429
Tomball Public Works Building	501B James Street	Tomball	77375
Hiram Clarke Multi Service Center	3810 West Fuqua Street	Houston	77045
Katy Branch Library*	5414 Franz Rd	Katy	77493
Lone Star College Cypress Center	19710 Clay Road	Katy	77449
Harris County MUD 81	805 Hidden Canyon Road	Katy	77450
Nottingham Park	926 Country Place Drive	Houston	77079
Harris County Public Health Environmental Services	2223 West Loop South Freeway	Houston	77027
Metropolitan Multi Service Center	1475 West Gray Street	Houston	77019
City of Jersey Village City Hall	16327 Lakeview Drive	Jersey Village	77040
Richard & Meg Weekley Community Center	8440 Greenhouse Road	Cypress	77433
Bayland Park Community Center	6400 Bissonnet Street	Houston	77074
Tracy Gee Community Center	3599 Westcenter Drive	Houston	77042
Bear Creek Park Community Center	3055 Bear Creek Drive	Houston	77084
Trini Mendenhall Community Center	1414 Wirt Road	Houston	77055
Acres Homes Multi Service Center	6719 West Montgomery Road	Houston	77091
Fallbrook Church	12512 Walters Road	Houston	77014
Lone Star College Victory Center	4141 Victory Drive	Houston	77088
Hardy Senior Center	11901 West Hardy Road	Houston	77076
Northeast Multi Service Center	9720 Spaulding Street, Building 4	Houston	77016
Octavia Fields Branch Library	1503 South Houston Avenue	Humble	77338
Kashmere Multi Service Center	4802 Lockwood Drive	Houston	77026
North Channel Branch Library	15741 Wallisville Road	Houston	77049
Alvin D. Baggett Community Center	1302 Keene Street	Galena Park	77547
Ripley House Neighborhood Center	4410 Navigation Boulevard	Houston	77011
Baytown Community Center	2407 Market Street	Baytown	77520
John Phelps Courthouse	101 North Richey Street	Pasadena	77506
HCCS Southeast College	6960 Rustic Street, Parking Garage	Houston	77087
Fiesta Mart	8130 Kirby Drive	Houston	77054
Sunnyside Multi-Purpose Center	9314 Cullen Boulevard	Houston	77033
Palm Center	5300 Griggs Road	Houston	77021
Moody Park Community Center	3725 Fulton Street	Houston	77009
SPJST Lodge 88	1435 Beall Street	Houston	77008
Alief ISD Administration Building	4250 Cook Road	Houston	77072
Champion Life Centre	3031 FM 2920 Road	Spring	77388
Lone Star College – Creekside Center	8747 West New Harmony Trail	Tomball	77375
* Indicates New Location

Battleground Texas

Calendar

Search

Categories

Archives

My linkage

Polling Texas 2020

Polling Texas 2018

Polling Texas 2016

Polling Texas 2014

Polling Texas 2012

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Tags

Blogroll

Utilities

Categories

Archives

Calendar

Pages

Meta