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Beto O’Rourke

Precinct analysis: Other jurisdictions

Dec 21st, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
5 comments

Introduction
Congressional districts
State Rep districts
Commissioners Court/JP precincts
Comparing 2012 and 2016
Statewide judicial

You may be wondering “Hey, how come you haven’t reported on data from SBOE and State Senate districts?” Well, I’ll tell you, since the SBOE and Senate serve four-year terms with only half of the races up for election outside of redistricting years, the results in the districts that aren’t on the ballot are not discernable to me. But! I was eventually able to get a spreadsheet that defined all of the relevant districts for each individual precinct, and that allowed me to go back and fill in the empty values. And now here I present them to you. Oh, and as a special bonus, I merged the data from the 2012 city of Houston bond elections into this year’s totals and pulled out the numbers for the city of Houston for the top races. So here you have it:


Dist     Trump    Biden    Lib    Grn  Trump%  Biden%   Lib%   Grn%
===================================================================
SBOE4  110,192  350,258  3,530  1,787  23.66%  75.20%  0.76%  0.38%
SBOE6  371,101  391,911  8,796  2,157  47.95%  50.64%  1.14%  0.28%
SBOE8  219,337  176,022  4,493  1,185  54.69%  43.89%  1.12%  0.30%
								
SD04    55,426   25,561    936    145  67.54%  31.15%  1.14%  0.18%
SD06    61,089  123,708  1,577    770  32.64%  66.10%  0.84%  0.41%
SD07   232,201  188,150  4,746  1,216  54.47%  44.13%  1.11%  0.29%
SD11    77,325   51,561  1,605    389  59.08%  39.40%  1.23%  0.30%
SD13    38,198  166,939  1,474    753  18.42%  80.51%  0.71%  0.36%
SD15   110,485  208,552  3,444  1,045  34.15%  64.46%  1.06%  0.32%
SD17   110,788  140,986  2,706    720  43.41%  55.25%  1.06%  0.28%
SD18    15,118   12,735	   331     91  53.47%  45.04%  1.17%  0.32%

Hou    285,379  535,713  8,222  2,704  34.30%  64.39%  0.99%  0.32%
Harris 415,251  382,480  8,597  2,425  51.34%  47.29%  1.06%  0.30%


Dist    Cornyn    Hegar    Lib    Grn Cornyn%  Hegar%   Lib%   Grn%
===================================================================
SBOE4  110,002  330,420  8,479  5,155  23.62%  70.94%  1.82%  1.11%
SBOE6  387,726  359,196 13,130  4,964  50.68%  46.95%  1.72%  0.65%
SBOE8  220,500  164,540  7,608  2,770  55.76%  41.61%  1.92%  0.70%
								
SD04    56,085   23,380  1,405    393  69.02%  28.77%  1.73%  0.48%
SD06    59,310  115,620  3,609  2,257  32.80%  63.95%  2.00%  1.25%
SD07   237,216  173,948  7,682  2,796  55.64%  40.80%  1.80%  0.66%
SD11    77,887   47,787  2,508    854  60.36%  37.03%  1.94%  0.66%
SD13    39,386  157,671  3,502  2,149  19.43%  77.78%  1.73%  1.06%
SD15   114,616  195,264  6,065  2,657  35.43%  60.35%  1.87%  0.82%
SD17   118,460  128,628  3,892  1,603  46.42%  50.40%  1.53%  0.63%
SD18    15,268   11,859    554    180  54.80%  42.56%  1.99%  0.65%

Hou    297,735  498,078 14,537  7,021  36.43%  60.94%  1.78%  0.86%
Harris 420,493  356,080 14,680  5,868  52.75%  44.67%  1.84%  0.74%


Dist    Wright    Casta    Lib    Grn Wright%  Casta%   Lib%   Grn%
===================================================================
SBOE4  102,521  332,324  8,247  7,160  22.01%  71.35%  1.77%  1.54%
SBOE6  379,555  347,938 16,311  9,217  50.40%  46.21%  2.17%  1.22%
SBOE8  214,771  163,095  8,573  4,631  54.92%  41.70%  2.19%  1.18%
								
SD04    54,997   22,915  1,715    685  68.48%  28.53%  2.14%  0.85%
SD06    54,732  118,635  3,389  2,751  30.49%  66.09%  1.89%  1.53%
SD07   232,729  169,832  9,084  4,902  54.59%  39.84%  2.13%  1.15%
SD11    75,580   47,284  2,906  1,454  59.41%  37.17%  2.28%  1.14%
SD13    37,009  156,577  3,653  3,306  18.45%  78.08%  1.82%  1.65%
SD15   111,109  192,351  6,833  4,347  34.34%  59.45%  2.11%  1.34%
SD17   115,654  124,174  4,931  3,219  45.32%  48.66%  1.93%  1.26%
SD18    15,037   11,590    620    344  54.50%  42.01%  2.25%  1.25%

Hou    286,759  491,191 16,625 11,553  34.47%  59.04%  2.00%  1.39%
Harris 410,088  352,168 16,506  9,455  50.71%  43.54%  2.04%  1.17%

Dist     Hecht  Meachum    Lib  Hecht% Meachum%  Lib%
=====================================================
SBOE4  104,675  334,600 10,745  23.26%  74.35%  2.39%
SBOE6  387,841  349,776 17,294  51.38%  46.33%  2.29%
SBOE8  217,760  164,210  9,466  55.63%  41.95%  2.42%
						
SD04    55,773   22,920  1,721  69.36%  28.50%  2.14%
SD06    56,313  117,884  4,832  31.45%  65.85%  2.70%
SD07   235,317  172,232  9,800  56.38%  41.27%  2.35%
SD11    77,081   47,122  3,169  60.52%  37.00%  2.49%
SD13    37,495  158,731  4,500  18.68%  79.08%  2.24%
SD15   113,248  194,232  7,612  35.94%  61.64%  2.42%
SD17   119,941  123,630  5,196  48.21%  49.70%  2.09%
SD18    15,108   11,836    675  54.70%  42.85%  2.44%

Dist      Boyd   Will's    Lib   Boyd% Will's%   Lib%
=====================================================
SBOE4  104,397  336,102  8,832  23.23%  74.80%  1.97%
SBOE6  380,861  354,806 15,618  50.69%  47.23%  2.08%
SBOE8  217,360  164,288  8,525  55.71%  42.11%  2.18%
						
SD04    55,481   22,982  1,621  69.28%  28.70%  2.02%
SD06    56,932  117,444  4,132  31.89%  65.79%  2.31%
SD07   234,080  173,025  8,683  56.30%  41.61%  2.09%
SD11    76,633   47,377  2,834  60.42%  37.35%  2.23%
SD13    36,755  160,184  3,557  18.33%  79.89%  1.77%
SD15   111,564  195,699  6,798  35.52%  62.31%  2.16%
SD17   116,011  126,731  4,723  46.88%  51.21%  1.91%
SD18    15,162   11,755    627  55.05%  42.68%  2.28%


Dist     Busby   Triana    Lib  Busby% Triana%   Lib%
=====================================================
SBOE4  104,071  335,587  9,074  23.19%  74.79%  2.02%
SBOE6  389,317  343,673 17,392  51.88%  45.80%  2.32%
SBOE8  218,278  162,376  9,125  56.00%  41.66%  2.34%
						
SD04    55,864   22,402  1,739  69.83%  28.00%  2.17%
SD06    55,719  118,801  4,006  31.21%  66.55%  2.24%
SD07   235,948  169,843  9,532  56.81%  40.89%  2.30%
SD11    77,324   46,265  3,101  61.03%  36.52%  2.45%
SD13    37,498  158,536  3,962  18.75%  79.27%  1.98%
SD15   113,780  192,651  7,220  36.28%  61.42%  2.30%
SD17   120,435  121,393  5,349  48.72%  49.11%  2.16%
SD18    15,098   11,746    682  54.85%  42.67%  2.48%


Dist    Bland    Cheng  Bland%   Cheng%
=======================================
SBOE4  112,465  336,620  25.04%  74.96%
SBOE6  401,946  350,154  53.44%  46.56%
SBOE8  225,783  164,516  57.85%  42.15%
				
SD04    57,378   22,793  71.57%  28.43%
SD06    60,243  118,418  33.72%  66.28%
SD07   243,089  172,941  58.43%  41.57%
SD11    79,757   47,134  62.85%  37.15%
SD13    40,242  160,069  20.09%  79.91%
SD15   119,474  194,619  38.04%  61.96%
SD17   124,299  123,453  50.17%  49.83%
SD18    15,712   11,864  56.98%  43.02%


Dist     BertR  Frizell  BertR% Frizell%
=======================================
SBOE4  107,445  340,670  23.98%  76.02%
SBOE6  392,514  355,217  52.49%  47.51%
SBOE8  221,860  166,900  57.07%  42.93%
				
SD04    56,609   23,176  70.95%  29.05%
SD06    57,800  120,402  32.44%  67.56%
SD07   239,113  175,071  57.73%  42.27%
SD11    78,483   47,818  62.14%  37.86%
SD13    38,419  161,433  19.22%  80.78%
SD15   115,389  197,276  36.90%  63.10%
SD17   120,576  125,566  48.99%  51.01%
SD18    15,430   12,046  56.16%  43.84%


Dist     Yeary  Clinton  Yeary%Clinton%
=======================================
SBOE4  107,727  339,999  24.06%  75.94%
SBOE6  387,309  359,489  51.86%  48.14%
SBOE8  221,725  166,780  57.07%  42.93%
				
SD04    56,405   23,323  70.75%  29.25%
SD06    58,285  119,666  32.75%  67.25%
SD07   238,608  175,225  57.66%  42.34%
SD11    78,085   48,109  61.88%  38.12%
SD13    38,214  161,577  19.13%  80.87%
SD15   114,407  197,949  36.63%  63.37%
SD17   117,277  128,438  47.73%  52.27%
SD18    15,480   11,982  56.37%  43.63%


Dist    Newell    Birm  Newell%   Birm%
=======================================
SBOE4  110,449  336,329  24.72%  75.28%
SBOE6  392,944  352,514  52.71%  47.29%
SBOE8  223,453  164,440  57.61%  42.39%
				
SD04    56,669   22,936  71.19%  28.81%
SD06    59,575  117,944  33.56%  66.44%
SD07   240,463  172,769  58.19%  41.81%
SD11    78,816   47,161  62.56%  37.44%
SD13    39,166  160,126  19.65%  80.35%
SD15   116,700  195,074  37.43%  62.57%
SD17   119,849  125,464  48.86%  51.14%
SD18    15,608   11,810  56.93%  43.07%

To be clear, “Harris” refers to everything that is not the city of Houston. It includes the other cities, like Pasadena and Deer Park and so forth, as well as unincorporated Harris County. There are some municipal results in the 2020 canvass, and maybe I’ll take a closer look at them later – I generally haven’t done that for non-Houston cities in the past, but this year, we’ll see. Please note also that there are some precincts that include a piece of Houston but are not entirely Houston – the boundaries don’t coincide. Basically, I skipped precincts that had ten or fewer votes in them for the highest-turnout 2012 referendum, and added up the rest. So those values are approximate, but close enough for these purposes. I don’t have city of Houston results for most elections, but I do have them for a few. In 2008, Barack Obama got 61.0% in Houston and 39.5% in non-Houston Harris County. In 20122018, Beto reached a new height with 65.4% in Houston; that calculation was done by a reader, and unfortunately he didn’t do the corresponding total for Harris County. Joe Biden’s 64.39% fits in just ahead of Adrian Garcia in 2012, and about a point behind Beto. Not too bad.

SBOE4 is a mostly Black district primarily in Harris County with a piece in Fort Bend as well; Lawrence Allen, son of State Rep. Alma Allen and an unsuccessful candidate for HD26 in the Dem primary this year, is its incumbent. SBOE8 is a heavily Republican district with about half of its voters in Harris County and about a third in Montgomery County. It was won this year by Audrey Young over a Libertarian opponent, succeeding Barbara Cargill. Cargill was unopposed in 2016 and beat a Dem candidate in 2012 by a 71-29 margin, getting about 66% of the vote in Harris County. Like just about everywhere else, that part of the county is a lot less red than it used to be. SBOE6 was of course the focus of attention after Beto carried it in 2018. Biden fell a tad short of Beto’s mark, though Trump also fell short of Ted Cruz. No other Dem managed to win the vote there, with the range being about four to seven points for the Republicans, which does represent an improvement over 2018. Michelle Palmer lost by two points here, getting 47.38% of the vote (there was a Libertarian candidate as well; the victorious Republican got 49.76%), as the Dems won one of the three targeted, Beto-carried seats, in SBOE5. I presume the Republicans will have a plan to make the SBOE a 10-5 split in their favor again, but for now the one gain Dems made in a districted office was there.

I don’t think I’ve ever done a full accounting of State Senate districts in previous precinct analyses. Only three of the eight districts that include a piece of Harris County are entirely within Harris (SDs 06, 07, and 15; 13 extends into Fort Bend), and only SD17 is competitive. Beto and a couple of others carried SD17 in 2018 – I don’t have the full numbers for it now, but Rita Lucido won the Harris County portion of SD17 by a 49.4-48.8 margin in 2018, and every Dem except Kathy Cheng won SD17 this year, with everyone else except Gisela Triana exceeding Lucido’s total or margin or both. An awful lot of HD134 is in SD17, so this is just another illustration of HD134’s Democratic shift.

The other interesting district here is SD07, which Dan Patrick won by a 68.4-31.6 margin in 2012, and Paul Bettencourt won by a 57.8-40.3 margin in 2018. Every Dem had a smaller gap than that this year, with most of them bettering David Romero’s percentage from 2018, and Biden losing by just over ten points. It would be really interesting to see how this district trended over the next decade if we just kept the same lines as we have now, but we will get new lines, so the question becomes “do the Republicans try to shore up SD07”, and if so how? SD17 is clearly the higher priority, and while you could probably leave SD07 close to what it is now, with just a population adjustment, it doesn’t have much spare capacity. If there’s a lesson for Republicans from the 2011 redistricting experience, it’s that they have to think in ten-year terms, and that’s a very hard thing to do. We’ll see how they approach it.

Precinct analysis: Commissioners Court and JP/Constable precincts

Dec 10th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Introduction
Congressional districts
State Rep districts

We now zoom in for a look at various county districts, which are also called “precincts”. I don’t know why we have County Commissioner precincts and JP/Constable precincts to go along with regular voting precincts – it makes for a certain amount of either monotony or inaccuracy when I have to write about them – but it is what it is. Dems made a priority of County Commissioner Precinct 3 and didn’t get it, but did flip a longstanding Republican Justice of the Peace bench.


Dist    Trump    Biden    Lib    Grn  Trump%  Biden%   Lib%   Grn%
==================================================================
CC1    90,536  295,657  3,355  1,338  23.16%  75.64%  0.86%  0.34%
CC2   154,159  154,516  3,250  1,028  49.26%  49.37%  1.04%  0.33%
CC3   220,205  234,323  4,876  1,328  47.79%  50.86%  1.06%  0.29%
CC4   235,730  233,697  5,338  1,435  49.50%  49.08%  1.12%  0.30%

Dist    Trump    Biden    Lib    Grn  Trump%  Biden%   Lib%   Grn%
==================================================================
JP1    85,426  182,182  3,199    822  31.45%  67.07%  1.18%  0.30%
JP2    35,864   51,624    741    330  40.50%  58.29%  0.84%  0.37%
JP3    53,543   70,746  1,055    375  42.59%  56.27%  0.84%  0.30%
JP4   232,147  199,750  4,698  1,250  53.02%  45.62%  1.07%  0.29%
JP5   199,292  236,253  4,525  1,384  45.14%  53.52%  1.03%  0.31%
JP6     8,554   28,500    357    158  22.77%  75.86%  0.95%  0.42%
JP7    17,977  104,457    835    464  14.53%  84.42%  0.67%  0.38%
JP8    67,827   44,681  1,409    346  59.36%  39.10%  1.23%  0.30%

Dist   Cornyn    Hegar    Lib    Grn Cornyn%  Hegar%   Lib%   Grn%
==================================================================
CC1    94,601  278,805  6,735  3,743  24.20%  71.33%  1.72%  0.96%
CC2   152,772  144,150  6,038  2,703  48.82%  46.06%  1.93%  0.86%
CC3   229,016  214,734  7,608  3,129  49.71%  46.61%  1.65%  0.68%
CC4   241,839  216,469  8,836  3,314  50.79%  45.46%  1.86%  0.70%

Dist   Cornyn    Hegar    Lib    Grn Cornyn%  Hegar%   Lib%   Grn%
==================================================================
JP1    93,109  167,648  4,655  2,101  34.28%  61.72%  1.71%  0.77%
JP2    35,186   48,126  1,638    946  39.73%  54.34%  1.85%  1.07%
JP3    52,663   67,120  2,257  1,121  41.89%  53.39%  1.80%  0.89%
JP4   235,664  186,072  8,077  2,923  53.82%  42.50%  1.84%  0.67%
JP5   205,996  217,791  7,543  3,288  46.66%  49.33%  1.71%  0.74%
JP6     8,342   26,680    795    472  22.20%  71.02%  2.12%  1.26%
JP7    19,157   99,241  2,051  1,291  15.48%  80.21%  1.66%  1.04%
JP8    68,111   41,480  2,201    747  59.61%  36.30%  1.93%  0.65%

Dist   Wright    Casta    Lib    Grn Wright%  Casta%   Lib%   Grn%
==================================================================
CC1    90,035  276,291  7,330  5,863  23.03%  70.68%  1.88%  1.50%
CC2   146,598  145,934  6,329  3,756  46.84%  46.63%  2.02%  1.20%
CC3   223,852  208,983  9,167  5,678  48.59%  45.36%  1.99%  1.23%
CC4   236,362  212,151 10,305  5,711  49.64%  44.55%  2.16%  1.20%

Dist   Wright    Casta    Lib    Grn Wright%  Casta%   Lib%   Grn%
==================================================================
JP1    90,194  163,531  5,804  3,640  33.20%  60.20%  2.14%  1.34%
JP2    32,881   49,373  1,605  1,218  37.13%  55.75%  1.81%  1.38%
JP3    50,924   67,644  2,207  1,398  40.51%  53.81%  1.76%  1.11%
JP4   230,575  183,069  9,233  5,036  52.66%  41.81%  2.11%  1.15%
JP5   200,704  213,004  8,895  5,800  45.46%  48.25%  2.01%  1.31%
JP6     7,490   27,172    730    651  19.94%  72.33%  1.94%  1.73%
JP7    17,970   98,421  2,115  2,039  14.52%  79.54%  1.71%  1.65%
JP8    66,109   41,145  2,542  1,226  57.86%  36.01%  2.22%  1.07%

First things first, the Justice of the Peace and Constable precincts are the same. There are eight of them, and for reasons I have never understood they are different sizes – as you can see, JPs 4 and 5 are roughly the size of Commissioners Court precincts, at least as far as voting turnout goes, JP1 is smaller but still clearly larger than the rest, and JP6 is tiny. When I get to have a conversation with someone at the county about their plans for redistricting, I plan to ask if there’s any consideration for redrawing these precincts. Note that there are two JPs in each precinct – Place 1 was up for election this cycle, with Place 2 on the ballot in 2022. The Constables are on the ballot with the Place 1 JPs. I’ll return to them in a minute.

You may recall from my first pass at Harris County data, Donald Trump had a super slim lead in Commissioners Court Precinct 2, home of Adrian Garcia. That was from before the provisional ballots were cured. There were something like five or six thousand provisional ballots, and overall they were pretty Democratic – I noted before that this almost pushed Jane Robinson over the top in her appellate court race – though they weren’t uniformly pro-Dem; Wesley Hunt in CD07 and Mike Schofield in HD132 netted a few votes from the provisionals, among those that I looked at more closely. In CC2, the provisional ballots put Joe Biden ever so slightly ahead of Trump, by a teensy but incrementally larger lead than Trump had had. MJ Hegar lost CC2 by a noticeable amount, and Chrysta Castaneda missed it by a hair.

Now, in 2018 Beto won CC2 by over six points. Every statewide candidate except for Lupe Valdez carried it, and every countywide candidate except for Lina Hidalgo carried it. Oddly enough, Adrian Garcia himself just squeaked by, taking the lead about as late in the evening as Judge Hidalgo did to claim the majority on the Court for Dems. I’d have thought Garcia would easily run ahead of the rest of the ticket, but it was largely the reverse. The conclusion I drew from this was that being an incumbent Commissioner was an advantage – not quite enough of one in the end for Jack Morman, but almost.

I say that for the obvious reason that you might look at these numbers and be worried about Garcia’s future in 2022. I don’t think we can take anything for granted, but remember two things. One is what I just said, that there’s an incumbent’s advantage here, and I’d expect Garcia to benefit from it in two years’ time. And two, we will have new boundaries for these precincts by then. I fully expect that the Dem majority will make Garcia’s re-election prospects a little better, as the Republican majority had done for Morman in 2011.

The bigger question is what happens with the two Republican-held precincts. I’ve spoken about how there’s no spare capacity on the Republican side to bolster their existing districts while moving in on others. That’s not the case here for Dems with Commissioners Court. Given free rein, you could easily draw four reasonable Dem districts. The main thing that might hold you back is the Voting Rights Act, since you can’t retrogress Precinct 1. The more likely play is to dump some Republican turf from Precincts 2 and 3 into Precinct 4, making it redder while shoring up 2 for the Dems and making 3 more competitive. I wouldn’t sit around in my first term in office if I’m Tom Ramsey, is what I’m saying.

I should note that Beto also won CC3, as did Mike Collier and Justin Nelson and Kim Olson, but that’s largely it; I didn’t go back to check the various judicial races but my recollection is that maybe a couple of the Dem judicials carried it. Overall, CC3 was still mostly red in 2018, with a few blue incursions, and it remained so in 2020. I feel like it would be gettable in 2024 even without a boost from redistricting, but why take the chance? Dems can set themselves up here, and they should.

What about the office Dems flipped? That would be Justice of the Peace, Place 1, where longtime jurist Russ Ridgway finally met his match. You will note that Precinct 5 Constable Ted Heap held on by a 51.5 to 48.5 margin, almost the exact mirror of Israel Garcia’s 51.4 to 48.6 win over Ridgway. What might account for the difference? For one, as we’ve seen, candidates with Latino surnames have generally done a couple of points better than the average. For two, it’s my observation that more people probably know their Constable’s name than either of their JPs’ names. Your neighborhood may participate in a Constable patrol program, and even if you don’t you’ve surely seen road signs saying that the streets are overseen by Constable so-and-so. I think those two factors may have made the difference; I’m told Garcia was a very active campaigner as well, and that could have helped, but I can’t confirm that or compare his activity to Dem Constable candidate Mark Alan Harrison, so I’ll just leave it as a second-hand observation. Dems can certainly aim for the Place 2 JP in Precinct 5, and even though Precinct 4 was in the red I’d really like to see someone run against Laryssa Korduba, who is (as of last report, anyway) the only JP in Harris County who no longer officiates weddings following the Obergefell ruling. She’s consistent about it, and acting legally by not doing any weddings, and that’s fine by me as a personal choice, but that doesn’t mean the people of Precinct 4 couldn’t do better for themselves. I’d like to see them have that choice in 2022.

Next up, some comparisons to 2012 and 2016. Next week, we get into judicial races and county races. Let me know what you think.

Precinct analysis: State Rep districts

Dec 9th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

Introduction
Congressional districts

We move now to State Rep districts, which is my usual currency since they provide complete coverage of the county with no partial pieces. You can also get a much more nuanced view of how things have shifted over time. There are more numbers here since there are more districts, so buckle up.


Dist    Trump   Biden    Lib    Grn  Trump%  Biden%   Lib%   Grn%
=================================================================
HD126  38,651  36,031    740    264  51.07%  47.61%  0.98%  0.35%
HD127  53,644  38,409  1,024    215  57.50%  41.17%  1.10%  0.23%
HD128  49,349  23,343    742    198  67.02%  31.70%  1.01%  0.27%
HD129  47,389  38,941  1,125    246  54.03%  44.40%  1.28%  0.28%
HD130  69,369  35,958  1,298    220  64.92%  33.65%  1.21%  0.21%
HD131  10,508  45,904    331    192  18.46%  80.63%  0.58%  0.34%
HD132  50,223  51,737  1,190    360  48.52%  49.98%  1.15%  0.35%
HD133  47,038  43,262    965    201  51.43%  47.30%  1.06%  0.22%
HD134  42,523  67,811  1,356    238  37.99%  60.58%  1.21%  0.21%
HD135  36,114  39,657    862    246  46.98%  51.58%  1.12%  0.32%
HD137  10,382  22,509    308    144  31.14%  67.51%  0.92%  0.43%
HD138  31,171  34,079    703    226  47.10%  51.50%  1.06%  0.34%
HD139  15,691  46,918    511    241  24.76%  74.05%  0.81%  0.38%
HD140  10,259  22,819    227    150  30.67%  68.21%  0.68%  0.45%
HD141   7,443  37,222    289    178  16.49%  82.47%  0.64%  0.39%
HD142  14,187  43,334    469    189  24.39%  74.48%  0.81%  0.32%
HD143  13,229  25,318    282    141  33.95%  64.97%  0.72%  0.36%
HD144  14,598  17,365    308    150  45.03%  53.56%  0.95%  0.46%
HD145  15,393  28,572    462    185  34.50%  64.05%  1.04%  0.41%
HD146  10,938  45,784    439    204  19.07%  79.81%  0.77%  0.36%
HD147  14,437  56,279    734    278  20.13%  78.46%  1.02%  0.39%
HD148  20,413  41,117    901    203  32.59%  65.65%  1.44%  0.32%
HD149  22,419  32,886    428    172  40.10%  58.82%  0.77%  0.31%
HD150  55,261  42,933  1,125    287  55.48%  43.10%  1.13%  0.29%

Dist   Cornyn   Hegar    Lib    Grn Cornyn%  Hegar%   Lib%   Grn%
=================================================================
HD126  39,298  33,618  1,343    535  52.54%  44.95%  1.80%  0.72%
HD127  54,433  35,689  1,690    543  58.94%  38.64%  1.83%  0.59%
HD128  48,646  22,029  1,323    447  67.15%  30.41%  1.83%  0.62%
HD129  48,318  35,924  1,715    603  55.82%  41.50%  1.98%  0.70%
HD130  70,329  32,961  1,933    551  66.49%  31.16%  1.83%  0.52%
HD131  10,557  43,670    938    621  18.92%  78.28%  1.68%  1.11%
HD132  50,865  48,460  2,011    774  49.81%  47.46%  1.97%  0.76%
HD133  51,111  38,148  1,232    471  56.19%  41.94%  1.35%  0.52%
HD134  48,629  61,015  1,408    489  43.60%  54.70%  1.26%  0.44%
HD135  36,728  37,050  1,427    628  48.43%  48.86%  1.88%  0.83%
HD137  10,617  20,914    629    343  32.66%  64.34%  1.94%  1.06%
HD138  31,993  31,508  1,183    486  49.09%  48.35%  1.82%  0.75%
HD139  15,984  44,273  1,168    647  25.75%  71.33%  1.88%  1.04%
HD140   9,771  21,167    630    423  30.54%  66.17%  1.97%  1.32%
HD141   7,409  35,278    820    511  16.83%  80.14%  1.86%  1.16%
HD142  14,269  41,061  1,055    562  25.06%  72.10%  1.85%  0.99%
HD143  12,535  23,679    737    511  33.46%  63.21%  1.97%  1.36%
HD144  14,107  16,246    629    374  44.99%  51.81%  2.01%  1.19%
HD145  15,236  26,758    899    490  35.12%  61.68%  2.07%  1.13%
HD146  11,598  43,259    938    563  20.58%  76.76%  1.66%  1.00%
HD147  15,359  53,237  1,359    707  21.74%  75.34%  1.92%  1.00%
HD148  22,087  37,707  1,303    489  35.86%  61.23%  2.12%  0.79%
HD149  22,329  30,630    888    471  41.11%  56.39%  1.63%  0.87%
HD150  56,019  39,872  1,959    650  56.87%  40.48%  1.99%  0.66%

Dist   Wright   Casta    Lib    Grn Wright%  Casta%   Lib%   Grn%
=================================================================
HD126  38,409  32,979  1,562    942  51.98%  44.63%  2.11%  1.27%
HD127  53,034  35,348  1,948  1,026  58.05%  38.69%  2.13%  1.12%
HD128  47,576  22,153  1,382    605  66.34%  30.89%  1.93%  0.84%
HD129  46,707  35,326  2,084  1,095  54.81%  41.46%  2.45%  1.29%
HD130  69,295  31,825  2,387    981  66.32%  30.46%  2.28%  0.94%
HD131   9,786  43,714    930    899  17.69%  79.01%  1.68%  1.62%
HD132  49,947  47,483  2,288  1,389  49.40%  46.96%  2.26%  1.37%
HD133  50,069  36,455  1,636    998  56.16%  40.89%  1.83%  1.12%
HD134  47,504  57,938  2,155  1,239  43.65%  53.23%  1.98%  1.14%
HD135  35,845  36,487  1,706    988  47.78%  48.63%  2.27%  1.32%
HD137  10,168  20,606    695    589  31.72%  64.28%  2.17%  1.84%
HD138  31,201  30,796  1,377    859  48.57%  47.94%  2.14%  1.34%
HD139  15,235  44,188  1,166    895  24.78%  71.87%  1.90%  1.46%
HD140   8,840  21,955    515    509  27.78%  69.00%  1.62%  1.60%
HD141   6,885  35,470    766    654  15.73%  81.03%  1.75%  1.49%
HD142  13,584  41,134  1,041    788  24.02%  72.74%  1.84%  1.39%
HD143  11,494  24,467    657    563  30.91%  65.81%  1.77%  1.51%
HD144  13,250  16,851    603    417  42.58%  54.15%  1.94%  1.34%
HD145  14,246  27,135    903    703  33.14%  63.12%  2.10%  1.64%
HD146  10,964  42,686  1,034    947  19.71%  76.73%  1.86%  1.70%
HD147  14,711  52,289  1,554  1,199  21.09%  74.96%  2.23%  1.72%
HD148  21,527  36,656  1,580    869  35.50%  60.46%  2.61%  1.43%
HD149  21,458  30,419    976    727  40.05%  56.77%  1.82%  1.36%
HD150  55,111  38,995  2,186  1,127  56.57%  40.03%  2.24%  1.16%

There’s a lot here, and I’m going to try to limit the analysis in this post to just what’s here, since I will have a separate post that looks back at previous elections. I’m going to pick a few broad themes here and will continue when I get to that subsequent post.

It’s clear that the big districts for Republicans crossing over to vote for Biden were HDs 133 and 134. Biden basically hit Beto’s number in 134, and he made 133 nearly as competitive as 126. The same effect is visible but smaller in 126, 129, 138, and 150, but it’s more noticeable in the lower downballot Democratic total than the Republican number. Some of those votes migrate to third party candidates, some may be people just voting at the Presidential level – it’s hard to say for sure. In 2016, there were bigger third party totals at the Presidential level, but this year those numbers were more like prior norms.

However you look at this, the fact remains that Republicans don’t have a lot of areas of strength. Only HDs 128 and 130 performed consistently at a 60% level for them; as we will see with the judicial races, some candidates reached that number in HD127 as well. Spoiler alert for my future post: That’s a big change from 2012. We’ll get into that later, but what that means for now is what I was saying in the Congressional post, which is that there’s little spare capacity for Republicans to distribute. There’s some red they can slosh into HDs 132, 135, and 138 if they want, but it’s going to be hard to make more than a few Republican incumbents feel safe.

I’m still not comfortable calling HD134 a Democratic district – which is a bit meaningless anyway as we head into redistricting – but the numbers are what they are. There’s still some volatility, mostly in judicial races as you’ll see, but this district just isn’t what it used to be. After the 2016 election, when Greg Abbott went hard at Sarah Davis and the Trump effect was already obvious, I wondered what Republicans would do with that district, since they didn’t seem to care about Davis. Abbott subsequently rediscovered his pragmatic side, but Davis is now history, and this district is at least as blue as Harris County is overall, so they have a whole different problem to contemplate. If anyone reading this is of a mind to mourn Davis’ demise, I say put 100% of the blame on Donald Trump and the degeneracy he has brought forward in the GOP. Sarah Davis never took my advice to leave the Republican Party, but a lot of her former voters did. The future is always in motion, but at this point I would not expect them to come back.

On the flip side, Trump and the Republicans saw some gains in Democratic areas. The two that stand out to me are HDs 144 and 149 – Dems were well above 60% in the latter in 2016. Note how Chrysta Castaneda was the best performer in this group among Dems – her numbers in HD144 were comparable to Rep. Mary Ann Perez’s totals. As for 149, it was the inverse of HD133, more or less, without anyone making it look competitive. Here, Biden did about as well as Rep. Hubert Vo. I think this is more likely to be a Trump-catalyzed fluke than the start of a trend, but we’ll just have to see what the next elections tell us.

Finally, I should probably do a separate post on third party voting by State Rep district this cycle, but for now let me state the obvious that there was a whole lot less of it than in 2016, for a variety of reasons. I didn’t bother naming the Libertarian and Green candidates in the column headers above because honestly, even with the kerfuffle over both Republicans and Democrats trying to force them off the ballot for filing fee non-payment, there just wasn’t any attention on them this year. HD148 was the high-water mark for the Libertarian candidate in 2016 at the Presidential level, and HD134 topped the chart for Railroad Commissioner levels, with 4.53% in the former and an eye-popping 12.18% in the latter; the Chron endorsement of Mark Miller for RRC in 2016 surely helped him there. HD148 was the “winner” this year for each, though at much tamer 1.44% and 2.68%, respectively. For the Greens in 2016, it was HD137 for President (1.30%) and HD145 for RRC (6.49%), and this year it was HD144 (0.46%) for President and HD137 (1.84%) for RRC. You can say what you want about which third party affects which major party – I will note that Chrysta Castaneda outperformed Grady Yarbrough in HD134 by fifteen points, while Wayne Christian was four points better than Jim Wright in the same district. HD134 shifted strongly Dem in 2020, but the quality of the Dem also mattered.

Next up is a look at County Commissioner and JP/Constable precincts, and after that we’ll get that deeper look at 2020 versus 2016 and 2012. Let me know what you think.

Please stop with the straight ticket voting anecdotes

Nov 19th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

Either bring me some real data or leave these just so stories alone.

Rep. Sarah Davis

Judging from Donald Trump’s unpopularity in Dallas County, Morgan Meyer and Angie Chen Button should have been doomed this November.

Meyer and Button are the only two remaining Republican state House members in the state’s second-most-populous county, where former Vice President Joe Biden’s margin over Trump was nearly 32 percentage points.

The margins were slimmer in Button’s and Meyer’s districts: Biden won Button’s district by 9 percentage points and Meyer’s by 14.

Still, the two Republicans will be returning to the Texas House next year. According to unofficial vote counts as of Friday, Button eked out a win by 223 votes. (Her Democratic opponent, Brandy K. Chambers, conceded last week, saying she won’t call for a recount.) Meyer won by a larger, but still narrow, margin of 1,634 votes.

What appears to have been their lifeline was a willingness of some Texas voters to split their tickets, rejecting Trump but nonetheless pulling the levers for the Republican Party’s other candidates. And it may have been aided by lawmakers’ decision to eliminate straight-ticket voting in the state, starting with this year’s election.

“Republicans are probably breathing a sigh of relief that they didn’t invite people to take the easy way out” and do straight-ticket voting, said Sam Martin, an associate professor at Southern Methodist University. “The decision to end straight-ticket voting came at exactly the right moment for them.”

“It gives conservatives the opportunity to vote against Trump, but stick with their team,” Martin said.

Republicans weren’t the only beneficiaries of split tickets, however: State Rep. Ryan Guillen, D-Rio Grande City, and Eddie Morales Jr., who will replace state Rep. Poncho Nevárez, D-Eagle Pass, won their Democrat-held seats near the Texas-Mexico border after Trump carried each district by more than 50% of the vote share.

You know who wasn’t a beneficiary of the removal of the straight ticket option? Sarah Davis, who was ousted this year after winning in 2018, in a district that Beto O’Rourke carried with 60% of the vote, with the straight ticket option still available. This year she had a better opponent, and enough voters decided it was time for a change.

The issue is not the straight ticket option. People always had the ability to hit the straight ticket button and then change whatever votes they want to. They also had the option of not using it. People who wanted to vote a straight ticket, whether that meant pushing one button or 54 buttons (as was the case in Harris County this year), did so. It just took them longer. As the story notes later on, there are just fewer people who see value in splitting their tickets these days. If you want to lament that, I say place your blame on Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell. In the meantime, this horse is dead. Please stop hitting it.

A closer look at county races, Part 1

Nov 16th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

In this series of entries, I’m going to take a trip through the local election results pages on some counties of interest, to get a closer look at how they went this year and how that compares to 2016. We know Dems didn’t make the kind of gains they hoped for in Congress or the Lege, but there are other races on the ballot. How did things look there?

Harris County: We know the basic story of Harris County, where Republicans have claimed to get their mojo back. I’m not going to re-litigate that, but I will note that while things were mostly at stasis at the countywide and legislative levels, Dems flipped JP Precinct 5, long held by Republicans, though Constable Precinct 5 remained Republican. Beto carried all eight JP/Constable precincts in 2018, and while Biden only carried six in 2020, there still remain opportunities for Dems to win offices currently held by Republicans in Harris County.

Tarrant County: At a macro level, Dems were far more competitive in judicial races in 2020 than they were in 2016. None of the statewide judicial candidates got as much as 41% of the vote in 2016, while the range for statewide judicials in 2020 was 46.13% to 47.91%. In 2016, Dems fielded only one candidate for a district court bench; he lost by 15 points. In 2020, Dems challenged in 9 of 11 district court plus one county court race, with all candidates getting between 46 and 48 percent. This is basically where Harris County Democrats were in 2004, with more candidates in these races.

A little farther down the ballot, and Democrats flipped two Constable offices, in Precincts 2 and 7. Neither Republican incumbent had been challenged in 2016.

Fort Bend County: We know the topline, that Hillary Clinton won Fort Bend County in 2016, by a 51-45 margin. But there was no downballot effect – none of the statewide Democratic candidates won a plurality (all statewide candidates were below fifty percent). None of the Courts of Appeals candidates won, and none of the countywide candidates won, though most were around 48 or 49 percent. State Rep. Phil Stephenson won the Fort Bend part of HD85 by six points. Republicans won back County Commissioner Precinct 1 by finally running an untainted candidate against two-term incumbent Richard Morrison. Fort Bend was on the precipice, but it seemed like it had been there before.

As we know, Democrats broke through in a big way in 2018, and 2020 was more of the same. It’s not just that Biden carried Fort Bend by over ten points. It’s that every statewide Dem took a majority in Fort Bend, as did every Courts of Appeals candidates and every countywide candidate. Dems did not win back CC1, though challenger Jennifer Cantu did a smidge better than Morrison had done, but they did win the Constable race in Precinct 4; this was an open seat, as previous incumbent Trever Nehls ran unsuccessfully for Sheriff. Nehls had been unopposed in 2016.

Bexar County: Bexar is reliably blue at this point, and Biden’s 58-40 win is almost exactly in line with the October countywide poll we got. The big difference I see between Bexar 2020 and Bexar 2016 is in the legislative races. Phillip Cortez won HD117 back in 2016 by two and half points after having been swept out in the 2014 debacle. He won in 2020 by over 13 points. Tomas Uresti won HD118 in 2016 by ten points; Leo Pacheco won it in 2020 by seventeen. Rebecca Bell-Metereau lost the Bexar portion of SBOE5 in 2016 by 42K votes; she lost it by 24K votes in 2020, which is to say by 18K fewer votes. She won the district by 17K total votes, mostly boosted by Travis County, but she needed it to be closer in Bexar and it was. By the same token, Sen. Carlos Uresti won the Bexar portion of SD19 over challenger Pete Flores in 2016 by 34K votes. Incumbent Pete Flores lost the Bexar portion of SD19 to Roland Gutierrez by 33K votes, and he needed that margin to be as good as it was considering how the rest of the district went for Flores by 23K; Uresti had won the rest of the district by 3K in 2016. However you feel about the 2020 election in Texas, you would feel much worse about it if Rebecca Bell-Metereau had lost and Pete Flores had hung on. So thank you, Bexar County.

Williamson County: WilCo made news in 2018 when Beto carried the county, with MJ Hegar doing the same in CD31. I’ll get to the 2020 results in a minute, but first let’s remind ourselves where things were in 2016. Trump won WilCo by nine points over Hillary Clinton, John Carter beat Mike Clark in CD31 by 19 points, other statewide Republicans led by 16 to 19 points, and Tom Maynard led in SBOE10 by 16 points. State Rep. Larry Gonzalez had only a Libertarian opponent in HD52, Rep. Tony Dale won HD136 by eleven points. Republicans running for countywide office were all unopposed. The one Democratic victory was for County Commissioner, Precinct 1, which Terry Cook took with 51%.

Fast forward to 2020. Biden won Williamson County by about a point and a half – more than ten points better than Clinton in 2016. As with Tarrant County, his win was a solo at the county level, but the Democratic tide was much higher. Hegar lost to John Cornyn by three points, Donna Imam by five in CD31, and the other statewide Dems trailed by three to seven points. Tom Maynard carried WilCo in SBOE10 again, but only by four points. Dems had flipped HDs 52 and 136 in the 2018 wave, and both freshmen Reps were easily re-elected, James Talarico by three points in HD52, and John Bucy by 10 in HD136. Dems lost the two District Court races they challenged, and they lost for County Attorney, but they did oust the scandal-tainted Sheriff, by a massive 12 points. Terry Cook was re-elected as County Commissioner in Precinct 1 with over 57%, and Dems won Constable Precinct 1, while coming close in Precincts 3 (losing by five) and 4 (losing by two). It’s not at all hard to see Williamson as the next Fort Bend.

The point of all this is twofold. One is a reminder that there are more races than just the state races, and there’s more ways to measure partisan strength than just wins and losses. The other is that these much less visible races that Dems are winning is exactly what Republicans were doing in the 80s and 90s and into the aughts. Every election it seemed like I was reading about this or that traditionally Democratic county that had gone all Republican. There is a trend here, and we’d be foolish to ignore it. To be sure, this is happening in fewer counties than with the Republican march of the previous decades, but there’s a lot more people in these counties. I’ll take population over land mass any day.

I’ll be back with a look at more counties next time. Let me know what you think.

UPDATE: While I was drafting this, I received a press release from the TDP congratulating three Democratic Sheriffs-elect, all of whom had won offices previously held by Republicans: Eric Fagan in Fort Bend, Mike Gleason in Williamson – both of which were mentioned in this post – and Joe Lopez of Falls County, which is adjacent to McLennan and Coryell counties to the east; basically, it’s east of Waco. Falls was Republican at the Presidential level, with Trump carrying it 4,177 to 1,899, so I assume there was some reason particular to that race that assisted Lopez in his victory.

So how did my simple projection work out?

Nov 12th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Remember this? I divided the counties up by how much their voter rolls had grown or shrunk since 2012, then used the 2016 turnout levels and 2018 results to project final numbers for the Presidential election in 2020. Now that we have those numbers, how did my little toy do? Let’s take a look.

A couple of things to acknowledge first. The most up to date voter registration numbers show that the group of counties that looked to have lost voters since 2012 have actually gained them, at least in the aggregate. Second, the actual turnout we got so far exceeded past numbers that we literally couldn’t have nailed this, at least not at a quantitative level. So with that in mind, let’s move forward.

We start with the counties that had seen growth of at least 10K voters on their rolls since 2012. There were 33 of these. Here are the numbers I had in my initial review, updated to include what happened this year.


Romney  3,270,387   Obama    2,792,800
Romney      53.9%   Obama        46.1%
Romney +  477,587

Trump   3,288,107   Clinton  3,394,436
Trump       49.2%   Clinton      50.8%
Trump  -  106,329

Cruz    3,022,932   Beto     3,585,385
Cruz        45.7%   Beto         54.3%
Cruz   -  562,453

Trump   4,119,402   Biden    4,579,144
Trump       47.4%   Biden        52.6%
Trump  -  459,742

Year  Total voters   Total votes   Turnout
==========================================
2012    10,442,191     6,157,687     59.0%
2016    11,760,590     7,029,306     59.8%
2018    12,403,704     6,662,143     53.7%
2020    13,296,048     8,765,774     65.9%

When I did the original post, there were 12,930,451 registered voters in these 33 counties. As you can see, and will see for the other groups, that increased between August and November, by quite a bit. As you can see, Trump did considerably worse than he had in 2016 with these counties, but better than Ted Cruz did in 2018. That says it all about why this race wasn’t as close as the Beto-Cruz race in 2018. My projection had assumed 2016-level turnout, but we obviously got more than that. Here’s what I had projected originally, and what we would have gotten if the 2020 results had been like the 2018 results from a partisan perspective:


Trump   3,533,711   Biden    4,198,699
Trump  -  664,988

Trump   3,975,236   Biden    4,723,310
Trump  -  748,074

Fair to say we missed the mark. We’ll see how much of a difference that would have made later. Now let’s look at the biggest group of counties, the 148 counties that gained some number of voters, from one to 9,999. Again, here are my projections, with the updated voter registration number:


Romney  1,117,383   Obama      415,647
Romney      72.9%   Obama        27.1%
Romney +  701,736

Trump   1,209,121   Clinton    393,004
Trump       75.5%   Clinton      24.5%
Trump  +  816,117

Cruz    1,075,232   Beto       381,010
Cruz        73.8%                26.2%
Cruz   +  694,222

Trump   1,496,148   Biden      501,234
Trump       74.0%   Biden        26.0%
Trump  +  994,914

Year  Total voters   Total votes   Turnout
==========================================
2012     2,686,872     1,551,613     57.7%
2016     2,829,110     1,653,858     58.5%
2018     2,884,466     1,466,446     50.8%
2020     3,112,474     2,022,490     65.0%

As discussed, there’s a whole lot of strong red counties in here – of the 148 counties in this group, Beto carried ten of them. They had 2,929,965 voters as of August. What had been my projection, and how’d it go here?


Trump   1,264,954   Biden      449,076
Trump  +  815,878

Trump   1,496,148   Biden      501,234
Trump  +  994,914

The margin is wider due to the higher turnout, but Biden actually did a little better by percentage than Clinton did, and was right in line with Beto. This is obviously an area of great need for improvement going forward, but the projection was more or less right on target, at least from a partisan performance perspective. But as you can see, even with the more optimistic projection for Biden, he’s already in the hole. Like I said, this is an area of urgent need for improvement going forward.

Now on to the last group, the 73 counties that had lost voters from 2012, at least going by the August numbers. As you can see, that turned out not to be fully true:


Romney     182,073   Obama      99,677
Romney       64.6%   Obama       35.4%
Romney +    82,396

Trump      187,819   Clinton    90,428
Trump        67.5%   Clinton     32.5%
Trump  +    97,391

Cruz       162,389   Beto       79,237
Cruz         67.2%   Beto        32.8%
Cruz   +    83,152

Trump      226,104   Biden     105,490
Trump        68.2%   Biden       31.8%
Trump  +   120,514

Year  Total voters   Total votes   Turnout
==========================================
2012       517,163       284,551     55.0%
2016       511,387       286,062     55.9%
2018       505,087       243,066     48.1%
2020       546,997       335,110     61.2%

As you can see, that decline in registrations has reversed, quite dramatically. I didn’t check each individual county – it seems likely that some of them are still at a net negative – but overall they are no longer in decline. Good for them. As you can also see, Biden performed a little worse than Clinton and Beto, but close enough for these purposes. Let’s compare the projection to the reality:


Trump      187,587   Biden      91,561
Trump +     96,026

Trump      226,104   Biden     105,490
Trump  +   120,514

Put the best-case scenario from the first group with what we got in the last two, and we could have had this:


Trump    5,697,488   Biden   5,330,034
Trump       51.67%   Biden      48.33%

Which is pretty close to what I had projected originally, just with a lot more voters now. The actual final result is 52.18% to 46.39%, so I’d say my method came closer to the real result than most of the polls did. Clearly, I missed my calling.

All this was done as an exercise in frivolity – as I said at the time, I made all kinds of assumptions in making this projection, and the main one about turnout level was way wrong. The point of this, I think, is to show that while Dems have indeed improved greatly in performance in the biggest counties, they haven’t done as well everywhere else, and while the marginal difference from Obama 2012 to Clinton 2016 and Biden 2020 isn’t much, the overall direction is wrong (even as Biden improved somewhat on the middle group over Clinton), and we’re going to have a real problem making further progress if we can’t figure out a way to improve our performance in these smaller counties. There is room to grow in the big and growing counties – these include some fast-growing and very red places like Montgomery and Comal, for instance – but we’re going to reach diminishing marginal growth soon, if we’re not already there. We need to step it up everywhere else. I’ll be returning to this theme as we go forward. Let me know what you think.

Looking ahead to 2022

Nov 10th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
6 comments

Continuing with the brain dumps, which are my post-election tradition. This is a collection of thoughts about the next big election, in 2022.

As I said earlier, I take no position on the question of what effect the disparity in door-to-door campaigning had. I can buy there was some effect, but we have no way of how much of an effect it was. The good news is, whatever the case, this isn’t a trend, it’s a one-time effect of an election in a pandemic. I feel pretty confident saying that barring anything extraordinary, traditional door-knocking will be a big component of everyone’s 2022 campaigns. Perhaps Democrats will have learned something useful from this year’s experience that will enhance what they can do in 2022; admittedly, what they have learned may be “this sucks and we never want to do it this way again”.

There are a couple of things that concern me as we start our journey towards 2022. The first is that after four long years of hard work, with one rewarding election cycle and one disappointing cycle, people will be less engaged, which needless to say will make keeping the ground we have gained, let alone gaining more ground, that much harder. I think people will be focused on bringing change to our state government, but we can’t take this for granted. People are tired! These were four years from hell, and we all feel a great weight has been lifted. I get it, believe me. But we felt this way following the 2008 election, and we know what came next. We cannot, absolutely cannot, allow that to happen again. We know what we need to do.

Second, and very much in line with the above, the national environment matters. What President Biden will be able to accomplish in the next two years depends to a significant extent on the outcome of those two Georgia Senate runoffs, but however they go we need to remember that there are significant obstacles in his way. Mitch McConnell and the Republicans were greatly rewarded for their all-out obstructionism throughout the Obama presidency. We can’t control what McConnell et al do, but we can control our reaction to it. Do we get discouraged and frustrated with the lack of progress, or do we get angry with the people whose fault it really is? How we react will be a big factor in determining what the national mood in 2022 is.

I’m already seeing people give their fantasy candidate for Governor. They include the likes of Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro (my choice), Cecile Richards, Lina Hidalgo, and others. I don’t know who might actually want to run – it is still early, after all – but we just need to bear in mind that every candidate has their pros and cons, and we need to worry less about matters of personality and more about building coalition and continuing the work we’ve been doing.

For what it’s worth, four themes I’d like to see our eventual candidates for Governor and Lt. Governor emphasize: Medicaid expansion, marijuana legalization, emergency/disaster preparedness and response, and improving the voter experience, with a focus on online voter registration. The first two have proven they are popular enough to be adopted by voter initiative in deep red states, the third is obvious and should include things like hurricanes, flooding, and drought in addition to pandemics in general and COVID-19 in particular, and the fourth is something there’s already bipartisan support for in the Lege. Let Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick defend the status quo here.

(Increasing the minimum wage was also a ballot initiative winner in states like Florida, and it generally polls well. I very much support raising the minimum wage, but don’t have as much confidence that it would be an electoral winner here. I’m open to persuasion otherwise.)

Here are some numbers to contemplate as we look towards 2022:

I’d attribute the regression in performance in the biggest 15 counties to Republican improvement more than Democrats falling short – as noted multiple times, Democrats hit new highs in the big urban counties, but so did the GOP. There’s still room for growth here, especially in an environment where turnout level is much more volatile, but the marginal growth is smaller now. Putting that another way, there’s no longer a deficit of voter registration in these counties. We need to maintain and keep up with new population growth, but we’re not behind where we should be any more. If we do that, and we prioritize maximizing our own base, we’ll be fine.

It’s the bottom two groups that we need to pay some attention to. A lot of these counties have medium-sized cities in them, and that’s an obvious place to focus some effort. (I’ve been beating that drum for months and months now.) But we really need to do something about the small rural counties, too, or face the reality of huge vote deficits that we can’t control and have to overcome. I know this is daunting, and I have no illusions about how much potential for gain there is here, but I look at it this way: If Donald Trump can convince some number of Black and Latino people to vote for him in 2020, after four years of unrelenting racism and destruction, then surely nothing is impossible. I think marijuana legalization could be a good wedge issue here. Remember, the goal is to peel off some support. A few points in our direction means many thousands of votes.

It’s too early to worry about legislative and Congressional races, because we have no idea what redistricting will wrought. I think we should be prepared for litigation to be of limited value, as it was this decade, and for the Republicans to do as much as they can to limit the number of competitive districts. They may be right about it in 2022, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be right in subsequent years.

In Harris County, we should expect competitive primaries for all of the countywide positions, and for many of the judicial spots. Judge Lina Hidalgo has done an outstanding job, but we know there are people who could have run in 2018 who are surely now thinking “that could have been me”. Don’t take anything for granted. We need to keep a close eye on the felony bail reform lawsuit, and news stories about how the current judges are handling bail hearings, because we are going to have to hold some of our folks accountable. We need to make sure that all of the Republican justices of the peace have opponents, especially the ones who have refused to do same-sex marriages.

Overall, there’s no reason why we can’t continue to build on what we have done over the past decade-plus in Harris County. Complacency and disunity will be our biggest opponents. The rest is up to us.

It’s a range, not a number

Nov 9th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

I don’t have full canvass data yet, but as I have said, I have Presidential data courtesy of Greg Wythe. Here are a couple of districts of interest:


Dist     Biden    Trump   Biden%   Trump%
=========================================
CD02   170,707  178,840    48.1%    50.0%
CD07   168,108  141,749    53.5%    45.1%

SBOE6  387,589  367,658    50.6%    48.0%

HD126   35,693   38,313    47.6%    51.1%
HD132   51,384   49,821    50.0%    48.5%
HD133   42,556   46,453    47.2%    51.5%
HD134   66,889   42,027    60.5%    38.0%
HD135   39,345   35,846    51.6%    47.0%
HD138   33,739   30,928    51.4%    47.2%

CC2    153,300  153,394    49.3%    49.3%
CC3    231,808  218,167    50.8%    47.8%
CC4    233,594  238,468    48.8%    49.8%

JP2     51,115   35,546    58.3%    40.5%
JP3     70,725   53,284    56.4%    42.5%
JP4    200,061  235,435    45.3%    53.3%
JP5    233,798  197,420    53.5%    45.2%

So Biden carried four districts in which the Democratic candidate lost – SBOE6, HD132, HD138, and County Commissioners Court Precinct 3. He also carried Constable/JP precinct 5, where the Democrats won the JP race but lost for Constable. He came close in CD02 and HD133, as well as some other places. Biden also lost Commissioners Court Precinct 2 by a whisker. What do we take away from this?

First, a reminder that none of these districts will be the same in 2022. All of them, including CC2, will be redrawn. CC2 was more Democratic in 2016 and 2018, but still pretty close in 2016. I’m pretty sure the Commissioners will have a long look at these numbers before they begin their decennial task.

I don’t want to go too deep into these numbers, partly because none of these districts (except the JP/Constable districts, most likely) will exist as is in 2022, but also because as the title implies, they’re only part of the story.

It is pretty much always the case that there’s a range of outcomes in each district. We saw Hillary Clinton greatly outperform Donald Trump in 2016 in basically every district. It was so pervasive, and in some cases so large, that I had a hard time taking it seriously. As you may recall, I was initially skeptical of CDs 07 and 32 as potential pickups because in other races, the Republicans carried those districts with some ease. Harris County Republican judicial candidates generally won CD07 by ten to twelve points in 2016, which meant that a lot of people who voted for Hillary Clinton also voted mostly if not entirely Republican down the ballot. Which number was real?

We know how that turned out. And in 2018, we saw a similar phenomenon with Beto O’Rourke, who quite famously carried 76 State Rep districts. He also outperformed every other Democrat on the ticket, some (like Justin Nelson and Mike Collier and Kim Olson) by a little, others (like Lupe Valdez) by a lot. Once again, what was reality? Here, I confess, I wasn’t nearly as skeptical as I was with the Clinton numbers. I – and I daresay, the entire Democratic establishment and more – saw the potential in those numbers, but we were only looking at the top end.

That doesn’t mean that number wasn’t real, any more than the Hillary Clinton number wasn’t real. But it did mean that it wasn’t the only indicator we had. I don’t have the full range of numbers yet from this election, but I think we can safely say that the Biden figures will exist in a range, the same way that the Clinton and Beto numbers did. If I had to guess, I’d say that Biden will be at the top of more Republican districts, like HD133, but maybe below the average in the Latino districts. I will of course report on that when I have that data.

So when we have new districts and we know what the partisan numbers are in them, how should we judge them? By the range, which may span a big enough distance to make each end look like something completely different. We don’t know what we’re going to get, and won’t know until we’re well into the thick of the election. It’s fine to believe in the top end, as long as we remember that’s not the only possible outcome. For more on the Harris County results, see Jasper Scherer on Twitter here and here.

A comparison to 2012

Nov 8th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

A lot of the takes on this election – and I’m guilty of this, too – involve comparisons to 2016 and 2018. That’s fair – those are the most recent elections, the only other elections that involve Trump, the patterns that we’ve been seeing had their start in 2016 and accelerated in 2018, which is what led to the inaccurate expectations for this year – but perhaps a slightly broader lens can help illuminate something that I think is being missed right now. So let’s cast our eyes all the way back to the ancient year of 2012, and see where we are today compared to then.

In 2012, Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama for President by 1,261,719 votes, and by nearly 17 percentage points. Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden by 648,690 votes, which is less than six percentage points. Joe Biden received 1,903,282 more votes than Obama did; Trump received 1,290,243 more votes than Romney did.

In 2012, Republicans won 95 seats in the State House; they would win 98 in 2014, and 95 again in 2016. Ninety-three of those were the same as in 2012; HD21 went red in 2014, and HD107 flipped blue in 2016. I know they’re doing a victory dance about holding onto the 83 seats they won in 2018, but it really needs to be emphasized that with this map that they drew, which gave them at least 95 seats in each of the first three elections where it was used, they were now topped out at 83.

In 2012, Republicans held 19 State Senate seats; they picked up a 20th in 2014. Today they hold 18. In 2012, Republicans held ten SBOE seats; they had won an 11th in 2010 but couldn’t hold it in a normal year. Today they hold nine. In 2012, Republicans held 24 Congressional seats. Today they hold 23. We certainly would have liked for that number to be lower, and we felt we had reasons to believe it would be lower, but it is still lower than it was in 2012.

In 2012 in Harris County, Republicans held all of the county court benches, most of the district court benches, all but one of the First and 14th Courts of Appeals benches (the one held by Dems, which had been won in 2008, would be lost in 2014), four out of five seats on Commissioners Court, and all of the following executive offices: District Attorney, County Clerk, Tax Assessor, District Clerk, Treasurer. Today, Democrats hold all of the county court and district court benches, about half of the appeals court benches, three out of the five seats on Commissioners Court, and all of the executive offices.

You can tell a similar story in Fort Bend County, where Dems now hold a three-out-of-five seat majority on Commissioners Court, and all of the executive seats and judicial positions that had a Democrat running for them in 2018 or 2020.

We can talk about other counties, like Williamson and Tarrant, but you get the idea. I don’t want to downplay the issues that Democrats face, or the disconnect between our goals for 2020 and our accomplishments, but I do want to point out that we’ve come a long way in eight years. We shouldn’t lose sight of that.

Tarrant County has gone (tentatively) blue

Nov 6th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

At the Presidential level, with votes still being counted.

Though President Donald Trump has been declared the winner in Texas, former Vice President Joe Biden has taken the lead with the latest results in Tarrant County.

Biden had a 427 vote lead in the county after a new batch of votes were added Thursday afternoon.

Around 824,312 ballots have been cast in Tarrant County, according to the county’s election results website.

Tarrant County had a reported 1,185,888 registered voters for the election cycle, per the same website, which meant turnout was 69.51% for this year’s presidential election.

The vote count between Trump and Biden was separated by just a mere 427 votes just before 3 p.m. Thursday, according to the county’s results website.

Tarrant County officials say members of the Ballot Board from different parties have remade and verified 13,636 defective ballots.

The county says it plans to have all ballots counted by the end of the day Friday. Over 15,000 absentee ballots are pending processing.

You can see the Tarrant County election results here. There are still overseas and provisional ballots, and as of the time that story was posted it was not known how many more ballots are being reviewed. Biden’s advantage in the mail ballots was over 13K, which as of this writing was just enough to overcome Trump’s lead in early voting and Election Day voting. Looking down the ballot, the statewide Dems generally trailed by between four to six points, with the Democratic District Court candidates usually falling about seven points short, and the Democratic Sheriff candidate, running against a problematic incumbent, lost by five and a half. Roughly speaking, they’re a few points closer to winning countywide races everywhere on the ballot than Harris County Democrats were in 2004.

Democrats of course fell short in all of the State Rep races that they challenged this year, which in many ways was the more important metric. As commenter blank observed, redoing Tarrant’s State Rep districts in 2021 will present some challenges for Republicans, who have a lot of incumbents in tight spots. It’s not crazy to think that there could be a Dallas-like year for Tarrant down the line if they try to get too cute.

We’ll worry about that later. In the meantime, I need to figure out what new county is the closest proxy for the statewide Presidential results. Between Beto in 2018 and now Biden, Tarrant is officially too blue to serve that role.

Initial thoughts about the election

Nov 5th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
8 comments

And now for some reactions and analysis…

– The polls were garbage. Oy vey. Not just here, though they were definitely off here, underestimating Trump and the Republicans after doing the same to Beto and the Dems in 2018. This time, after all that national soul-searching following the 2016 state-level misfires (the national polling was fairly accurate overall in 2016), we got this flaming mess. Not my problem to solve, but I wonder how much of this is the known issue of “differential response” writ large. We know that in some circumstances, like when there’s been a big news event, one candidate’s supporters, or members of one party in general, may be more or less likely to answer the phone and respond to a pollster. It may be that just as a matter of course now, Republicans are less likely to respond to polls, in a bigger way than previously thought, and that had a disproportionate effect on the numbers. I’m just guessing here, but if that’s the case then perhaps the web panel approach to polling needs to be used more often. For what it’s worth, the UT/Texas Tribune and UH Hobby School polls from October, both of which had Trump up 50-45, used web panels. Maybe that’s a fluke, maybe they had a better likely voter model going in, maybe they were onto something that the others weren’t, I don’t know. But they came the closest, so they get the glory. As for the rest, thanks for nothing.

– Along those same lines, pollsters who did deeper dive polls on Latino voters, such as Univision and Latino Decisions, really need to question their methods and figure out how they went so mind-bogglingly wrong. I get that what we had, at least to some extent, appears to have been lower-propensity Latino voters turning out at surprisingly high levels for Trump, but damn, this is your job. You need to be on top of that.

– The old adage about “Texas isn’t a red state, it’s a non-voting state” can be safely buried for now. We had record-breaking turnout, over 11 million votes cast when we’d never surpassed nine million before, and yet Trump still won by six points while other statewide Republicans were winning by nine to eleven points. To be sure, that’s closer than 2016 was, but at this rate we’ll need to have thirty million people voting for Dems to catch up, and I feel confident saying that ain’t gonna happen anytime soon. The lesson here is that there are low-propensity Republican voters, too, and they are capable of showing up when they are persuaded. We saw that happen in 2018, and we saw it again this year.

I admit I bought into the hype, and put too much faith into the idea that the non-voters would be more consistently Democratic than Republican. To be fair, I think that was the case in 2018, as Democrats made huge gains relative to past off years. It’s certainly been the case in Harris County that increases in voter registration have led to significant increases in Democratic votes – I’ll get to this in more detail later in the post, but this can be pretty easily quantified, and it’s why Dems have been dominating the countywide races with increasing ease. It’s where those gains came from that seems to have been a difference-maker.

I don’t want to sell short what was accomplished here. Joe Biden got over 1.3 million more votes than Hillary Clinton; Trump improved on his total by about 1.15 million. Chrysta Castaneda got 1.36 million more votes than Grady Yarbrough. The statewide judicial candidates got between 3,378,163 and 3,608,634 votes in 2016; in 2020, the range was 4,762,188 to 4,899,270 votes. If you want to be particularly gruesome, Biden got 3.3 million more votes than Wendy Davis did for Governor in 2014. Granted, Trump outdid Greg Abbott by just over 3 million votes, but still. A lot more people now have voted for a Democrat in Texas than at any other point in history. Even as we pick through the wreckage, that’s worth keeping in mind.

So how do we close that remaining gap of 700K to one million voters statewide? One, we should remember that off year elections are far more volatile from a turnout perspective, and we need to do everything we can to make these new folks habitual voters while we continue to register and recruit new voters. Two, having dynamic statewide candidates, who can learn the lessons of these past elections while applying them to the environment they’re in, would help. And three, maybe we need to give another look to the reviled old “persuasion” strategy, and see how we can do a better job of peeling away some of the other guy’s voters. Easier said than done, but then that’s why I’m a blogger and not a campaign professional.

– By the way, if anyone asks you who the current all-time vote leader in Texas is, the answer as of 2020 is Supreme Court Justice Jane Bland, who tipped the scales at 6,002,233 votes. No one else topped six million. She was helped by not having a third-party opponent in the race; the Libertarians in three other races got between 254L and 283K votes.

– I take no position on the question about whether the Republicans’ continued use of traditional door-to-door campaigning during the pandemic, which the Democrats largely eschewed out of a sense of safety for their campaign workers and as a statement of living their values, was a factor in this election. The academic research on various methods of increasing turnout and persuading swing voters is mixed, and does not suggest that one method (such as door-knocking) is clearly superior to others (such as phone-banking). Winning teams always point to their methods and strategies as the reason why they won and the other team lost. I’m not saying this couldn’t have made a difference, or that it didn’t make a difference. It may have, and I have no way to disprove the assertion. I’m just saying that it’s anecdotal data, and I consider it to be such.

– Also, too: I saw people again cursing Beto’s name for not running for Senate this year. All I can say is that anyone who thinks Beto would have done better than Biden is not thinking clearly. He probably would have exceeded MJ Hegar, but there’s a lot of room between that and winning. With all the money that was spent in Texas this year, I do not buy the argument that having Beto on the ticket would have moved the needle for Dems.

– Speaking of money, hoo boy. I hope this isn’t the end of our candidates being able to raise enough of it. We’re going to need plenty in 2022.

– How much of an effect did the lack of straight ticket voting have? Far as I can tell, very little. In Harris County, there were 1,633,557 votes cast in the Presidential race. Way down at the bottom of the ballot, in the two At Large HCDE races, there were 1,551,731 and 1,548,760 votes. In other words, about 95% of the people who voted in the Presidential race also voted in these two HCDE races.

Now, if you look at the various judicial races, you will see that Democratic judicial candidates generally got 60-80K fewer votes than Biden, while most Republican judicial candidates (though not all) exceeded Trump’s total. Some of that was just crossover voting, which we knew was happening, but some of it may have been a greater propensity by Dems to skip some number of downballot races. It’s hard to say how much is each. For what it’s worth, 12 out of 15 Dem judicial candidates (district and county courts) who had a Republican opponent had fewer votes than MJ Hegar, who had 848K to Biden’s 911K, while 8 out of those 15 Republican opponents did better than John Cornyn’s 717K votes; Trump got 699K, and all but two of those Republicans did better than that, while no one came close to Biden.

So did the absence of straight ticket voting mean more crossovers in general? I will remind you, as I have done before, there’s always a range of outcomes in the judicial races, so there has always been some amount of crossover voting, just usually not that much. Why did MJ Hegar get so many fewer votes than Joe Biden did? Some of it was more voting for third party candidates – there were 22K votes for the Libertarian and Green Presidential candidates, and 42K such votes in the Senate race – some of it was the 26K fewer votes cast in the Senate race (about 98.5% of all Presidential voters also voted for a Senate candidate), and some of it was the 18K people who voted for Cornyn but not Trump. Make of that what you will.

– While I’m thinking about it, let me update that range-of-results table I just linked to:


2004 
Rep 524K to 545K
Dem 460K to 482K

2008
Rep 526K to 564K
Dem 533K to 585K

2012
Rep 550K to 580K
Dem 555K to 581K

2016
Rep 580K to 621K
Dem 643K to 684K

2020
Rep 690K to 740K
Dem 812K to 865K

So congratulations to Republicans, who have boosted their base vote by almost 200K since 2004, while Dems have increased theirs by over 380K. Five points was as close as any Republican got.

– Despite their successful defense of their Congressional and legislative seats, Republicans still face some tricky decisions in redistricting. Look at it this way – in an election year that clearly wasn’t as good for Dems as 2018 was, they still managed to hold onto all but one of the seats they won that year. The same map that gave Republicans 95 House members was only good for 83 this year, and it wouldn’t have taken much to knock that number down by a half dozen or so. Morgan Meyer and Angie Chen Button may have survived, but Dallas County is a problem for the GOP. Harris County has three safe Republican districts – HDs 127, 128, and 130 – four that are still pretty safe but have gotten a lot less so over the decade – HDs 126, 129, 133, and 150 – and two on the knife’s edge, HDs 132 and 138. That may have been hard to see from the vantage point of 2011, but the broad outlines of it were there, and as I have noted before, HDs 132 and 135 were already trending Dem in 2012, with both being a little bluer than they were in 2008 despite 2012 being a slightly lesser year for Dems overall. Who’s going to need protection, and whose seat may wind up on a target list a couple of cycles later because you didn’t understand the demographics correctly? In Congress, Dan Crenshaw won by a comfortable 14 points…in a district Ted Poe won by 24 points in 2016, and 32 points in 2012. How do you shore him up? Splitting pieces of Travis County into four Republican districts was a great idea, until it threatened the re-election of three of those Republicans. Who even knows how many Congressional seats we’ll have, given the chaotic nature of the Census?

Oh, and here in Harris County, I’m sure the Democratic majority on Commissioners Court will bolster Adrian Garcia in CC2, as the Republicans did for Jack Morman in 2010. The bigger question is do they go after their new colleague Tom Ramsey, or do they just not help him out and hope nature takes its course? That’ll be fun to watch.

I think that’s it for now. I’m sure more things will occur to me as we go. When I get a draft canvass, I’ll start doing the usual slicing and dicing.

The role Harris County can play in turning Texas blue

Nov 3rd, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Big county + big turnout = big margin.

Texas is not the sort of place national candidates visit just before Election Day or where political ads play on a loop during popular TV shows.

And, yet, here we are: Texas has been declared “in play,” with some polls rating the long solidly red state as a tossup between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

A key reason is decades of rapid growth, as a strong economy drew millions of residents from across the country to Texas, most of them to urban areas — and more residents means more voters.

Harris County alone has grown its voter roll by about 292,000 since the 2016 election, equivalent to absorbing all of registered voters in Galveston County and tacking on another 70,000.

To earn a shot at Texas’ 38 electoral votes, Biden would need to combine a blowout here with sweeps in the state’s other large metros to offset Trump’s expected dominance in rural areas. If that occurs, the Houston area’s newly minted voters likely will play a key role.

A Houston Chronicle analysis of precinct-level voting patterns shows the Houston area’s growth has moved in tandem with Democrats’ widening advantage here in recent elections.

You can read the rest, and I’ll get to some numbers in a minute. But first, the big question is who else is out there to vote?

With 9.7 million ballots already cast across Texas — more than 1 of 7 of them in Harris County — will anyone show up Tuesday?

Well, yes, political scientists and consultants agree, though their estimates of the expected turnout vary.

County voters have already matched the 58 percent total turnout of the 2004 election and are just short of the 61 to 63 percent turnout recorded in the last three presidential contests. Statewide, 57 percent of registered voters have cast ballots.

The Harris County Clerk’s Office expects 200,000 to 300,000 voters to turn out Tuesday. Two Democratic consultants expect about 350,000 — in line with the last two general elections. Two local political scientists think 400,000 is possible, though they differed on whether the higher tally would benefit Democrats or Republicans.

The lower estimate would produce a final tally of about 1.6 million votes, or 66 percent turnout. The higher figure would push turnout close to 75 percent, which would be a modern record, exceeding the 72 percent turnout posted in 1992, when Houstonian George H.W. Bush lost a tough reelection fight to Bill Clinton.

GOP political consultant Kevin Shuvalov expects a more modest mark, saying, “It’s going to be bigger, but we’re not going to have 2 million voters.”

Still, he added, “Looking at who’s left over, there’s a lot of reliable voters still out there who have participated in multiple general elections previously. And then you have a large chunk of voters they just really like to vote on Election Day. They’re traditionalists.”

Democratic consultant Robert Jara echoed that, noting that many older voters are in the habit of casting their ballots at the same nearby Election Day polling place.

“There’s a sense of community, really, of voting in your neighborhood,” Jara said.

Local Latino voters have also disproportionately voted on Election Day in the past, Jara said, noting that Democrats tend to get an Election Day boost from predominantly Latino eastside precincts.

We’ve talked about some of this before, including the propensity of Latino voters to vote later in the cycle. I’m on record saying that I expect 300K or more votes tomorrow – I think we end up over 1.7 million, but maybe not quite at 1.8 million. I’ll be more surprised if we fail to reach 1.7 million than if we exceed 1.8 million.

The thing about these big numbers is that they can, and very likely will, lead to big margins for Joe Biden, bigger perhaps than we might have expected. Remember, when I did my super-simple projection of the vote, one of the assumptions baked in was that turnout levels would be static. If counties like Harris, which will provide a big chunk of the Democratic vote, overperform their expectations, that changes the math. (The same is true for the heavily red counties, but the vast majority of those are small. There’s no equivalent of Harris, or Dallas, or Travis, on the Republican side.)

Here’s what that means in practice. As a reminder, Hillary Clinton carried Harris County by 162K votes in 2016, winning 53.95% of the vote to Trump’s 41.61%. Beto carried Harris County by 201K votes, getting 57.98% to Ted Cruz’s 41.31%. Let’s assume we hit the low end of turnout projections, with 1.7 million total votes. How would that affect Biden’s margins?

53.95% – 41.61% = 210K net votes for Biden
57.98% – 41.31% = 283K net votes for Biden

I think its safe to assume Biden will do better than Clinton’s 53.95% – among other things, the third party vote will be much smaller. Note how both Trump and Cruz were mired in the 41% range – other Republicans did do better, but these two uniquely disliked flag-bearers did particularly poorly. It’s not out of the question that Trump could fail to break 40% in Harris. If we assume a more maximalist final turnout of 1.8 million, and a 60-40 win for Biden, he’ll net 360K votes in Harris County. That’s a lot.

(For what it’s worth, months ago when I was discussing blue-sky scenarios with fellow Dems, I posited a 60-40 win with turnout of 1.5 million, which I thought was reasonably ambitious and assumed a voter registration goal of 2.4 million. Who knew I was actually being restrained?)

Now again, what happens in Harris is a piece of the puzzle, but it’s not determinative in and of itself. The number of counties that Trump will carry will far exceed the number of counties that Biden will carry, and while most of those counties will have a small number of voters, there are big ones out there like Montgomery. Republicans can make up the big numbers Dems will post in their few strongholds by posting a lot of 70-30 and 80-20 wins in small and medium-sized counties. Dems will need to at least hold those losses to what they were in 2016 and 2018 to have a manageable deficit to overcome. Longer term, by which I mean 2022 and 2024, Dems will need to figure out how to gain ground in places like Waco and Lubbock and Tyler and New Braunfels and Abilene and Amarillo.

That’s a discussion for another day. Here’s the final Derek Ryan email.

9,677,963 people voted in Texas! That’s 57.1% of all registered voters. To give you some perspective on how crazy that number is, turnout for the ENTIRE 2016 General Election was 59.4%. In 2012, it was 58.6%.

So where does that put us at the brief electoral intermission?

There are still 7.2 million registered voters who have NOT voted. Of those, 3.1 million have voted in a previous election in the last four election cycles (dating back to 2012). If 75% of these people vote on Election Day, that will get us to the 12 million figure I keep throwing out there.

Voters who most recently voted in a Republican Primary have a 432,000 vote advantage over those who most recently voted in a Democratic Primary. Again, it must be pointed out that 4.6 million people who voted early who have no previous primary history.

What has been the participation rate based on voters’ previous election history?

  • 81% of voters with previous Republican Primary history voted early
  • 82% of voters with previous Democratic Primary history voted early
  • 59% of voters with previous General Election history (and no primary history) voted early
  • 29% of voters with no previous General or Primary Election history voted early

[…]

So what should we expect on Election Night? Based on the data, here is what I expect to see. Typically, the first results that are released at 7:01pm are numbers from early voting. In many portions of the state, these results will likely favor Democratic candidates. Then, as results from Election Day trickle in, we will see data that likely favors Republican candidates. In previous election cycles, the opposite has been the case. If you are only following the statewide election results, this will certainly be the case. It is important to note that voting early is a bigger trend in urban and suburban counties more so than in rural counties. For example, the average turnout percentage in the top 20 counties was 58.1%, but in the remaining 234 counties, the average turnout percentage was 48.7%.

Why does that matter? In 2016, Hillary Clinton received 50.8% to Donald Trump’s 44.8% in the top 20 largest counties, but Donald Trump received 70.9% to Hillary Clinton’s 25.9% in the remaining 234 counties.

The report is here. Anyone out there who was waiting till today to vote?

UPDATE: I don’t have any better place to put this, and I only saw it on Monday even though it was published on Friday, but here’s a Chron interview with Chris Hollins that’s worth your time.

A focus on the SCOTX races

Nov 3rd, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

With so much litigation over a variety of voting issues, the Supreme Court of Texas is in the news a lot these days. Will that mean more attention being paid to the four races for SCOTX positions?

Justice Gisela Triana

The sleepy contests for seats on Texas’ highest courts have taken on new energy this year as Democrats, bullish on their chances to claim seats on the all-Republican courts, seek to capitalize on a series of controversial pandemic- and election-related decisions.

Voters have the chance to choose four justices on the nine-member Texas Supreme Court, the state’s highest court for civil matters, and three judges on its sister body, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

It’s notoriously difficult for judicial candidates, even those running for the state’s high courts, to capture voters’ attention, particularly with a hotly contested presidential race above them on the ballot. But this year, Democrats say they have something new to run against: decisions by the high court to end Texas’ eviction moratorium and election opinions that limited mail-in voting options.

“The Supreme Court has been in the news on almost a weekly basis over the last several months … with all the election shenanigans that are going on,” said Justice Gisela Triana, who serves on the Austin-based 3rd Court of Appeals and is running as a Democrat for a seat on the high court. “I think they’ve been complicit in allowing the Republican Party to try to make it harder for people to vote.”

For Republicans, meanwhile, the virus is an argument for sticking with the status quo. Chief Justice Nathan Hecht, who faces reelection this fall, said unprecedented challenges of access to justice and budget concerns during the pandemic would best be handled by a judge with experience running the court.

“We’re in such untraveled waters — dangerous, difficult, challenging times,” said Hecht, who has served on the court for more than three decades. “It takes some leadership not only to try to discern a wise course through all this, but to get the other branches to go along with you.”

[…]

Even as President Donald Trump runs an unusually tight race in Texas with Democratic nominee Joe Biden, less controversial Republicans lower on the ballot are expected to perform better in Texas. Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, facing Democrat MJ Hegar, has shown a wider lead in polling than the president, and statewide judicial candidates outperformed U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018 and Trump in 2016.

Republicans say they’re confident Trump will carry the state — but that the judges could win even if he doesn’t.

Pollsters sometimes view statewide judicial races as pure tests of a voter’s partisan allegiance since so few Texans are familiar with the candidates.

“Even though we’re toward the top of the ticket, people don’t know much about who we are,” Hecht said.

[…]

Along with new attention to the high court comes the uncertainty about what the end of straight-ticket voting will mean for Texas. This Nov. 3 marks the first election in which Texans won’t have the option of voting for every candidate in a certain party with just one punch — a colossal change whose effects neither party can fully anticipate.

All that, coupled with a volatile presidential race, means “you just can’t tell” where the outcome may land, Hecht said.

“It’s just completely unpredictable,” Boyd said. A higher profile for the court could help him as an incumbent, he said.

“If people are seeing the coverage and thinking, ‘I need to do my homework on these races,’ I have full confidence that when they do their homework they’ll end up supporting me,” Boyd said.

Democrats see reason for optimism in early voting totals, which have shattered records, especially in large, blue counties like Harris. But Republicans are also turning out to vote early in high numbers.

And there may be more reason for Democrats to be hopeful. Keir Murray, a Democratic operative in Houston, said based on the statewide numbers he’s seeing, women are outvoting men by 10 points — a potentially major boon for an all-female Democratic slate for Supreme Court.

“Women usually outvote men, but not to that degree,” he said.

Let’s start with the obvious – the statewide judicial races are mostly affected by the Presidential race. It’s true that the Supreme Court has been in the news a lot recently and have made a number of consequential rulings that affect not just the election and how it is being conducted but also the COVID pandemic and how it is being handled. The story does a good job laying all this out, and I’d be willing to believe that a lot of people are at least aware of these things. How many of those people are more likely to vote, or are likely to change how they vote, as a result of these stories is a question none of us can answer, but my suspicion is that it’s pretty small. Makes for good speculation and the basis of stories like these, but that’s as far as we can go.

What about the claim that Republicans are likely to win the statewide judicial races even if Biden carries Texas? It’s kind of amazing that Republicans would advance that hypothesis instead of just laugh off the question, but a check of recent elections suggests they’re onto something. All of the Republicans running for statewide judicial office in 2016 won by a wider margin than Trump did, and all of the Republicans running for statewide judicial office in 2018 won by a wider margin than Ted Cruz did. If there are Republican voters who don’t vote for Trump like that, then that’s a plausible scenario. I feel like a lot of the people who avoided Trump but otherwise mostly voted R in 2016 were voting mostly D in 2018, but maybe I’m wrong about that. Keir Murray’s point about the electorate being disproportionately female so far means Dems are probably doing pretty well so far and that’s a boost for all Dem candidates, but it doesn’t tell us anything about how the court candidates may do compared to Trump. I don’t think the Cornyn/Hegar polling tells us all that much either, as there’s a name recognition component to that.

An alternate possibility is that some number of people who vote for Trump will peace out after that. Trump has spent plenty of time attacking Republicans, too, so some of his supporters are loyal to him but not the party. The 2016 experience suggests that’s unlikely, but maybe this year is different. I don’t think the lack of straight ticket voting will matter much. The Supreme Court Chief Justice election is the fifth race people will see on their ballots, following the three federal elections (President, US Senate, US House) and Railroad Commissioner. Maybe some people who aren’t strong partisans will skip those races because they don’t feel they know the candidates well enough, but it won’t be because they’re tired of all that voting.

Look, Democrats are motivated to vote, and they’re pissed at the rulings in some of these lawsuits, even if SCOTX maintained its integrity in the latest Hotze provocation. I think there’s a strong urge to vote all the way down. I just don’t know how to quantify that. I’ll know more after the election.

Once again with Asian-American voters

Nov 1st, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Long story in the Trib, on a topic that could use more focus.

Rep. Gene Wu

When Debbie Chen temporarily closed her Houston restaurant in March due to the coronavirus, she was worried about her health and her financial livelihood.

But as a Chinese American, she was also worried about vandalism and her physical safety, given how President Donald Trump and others were blaming China for the pandemic and using racist monikers for the virus.

Seven months later, as Texans head to the polls in the 2020 elections, she hasn’t forgotten. Chen works on Asian American and Pacific Islander voter turnout every year, but this year she feels even more motivated.

“I was so afraid someone would get attacked,” Chen said. Trump’s rhetoric “perpetuates this stereotype that Asians are foreigners or something.” [Read more about Chen’s experience during the coronavirus here.]

Voters who share Chen’s feelings could have a major impact on the 2020 elections. The share of Asian Americans nationwide remains less than 5% of the total electorate. But it’s the fastest growing racial or ethnic voting group in the country, according to the Pew Research Center.

In Texas, there are sizable Asian American communities in districts that hold an outsized importance this year. Democrats are hopeful that they can flip nine seats in the state House to gain a majority in the lower chamber ahead of next year’s legislative session. Key among those efforts are nine seats held by Republicans in which former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat, received more votes than U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in 2018. In two-thirds of those districts, the Asian share of the population is more than double the statewide share. Multiple U.S. House seats targeted by Democrats have large Asian American populations, too.

“There are some districts where there’s a significant enough level of organization and voters that can make a difference if it’s a matter of turnout and the races are close enough,” said Madeline Hsu, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Asian American voters are hardly a monolith. While the Indian American population has leaned reliably Democratic for years, Vietnamese Americans tend to lean Republican. And Filipino Americans are more evenly divided.

Since 2016, Trump has made small inroads with Vietnamese and Indian Americans but lost support among Chinese Americans, according to polls from the Asian American Voter Survey.

But recent polling also suggests that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, who are sometimes referred to collectively as the AAPI community, overall may turn out in higher numbers for Democrats in 2020.

“You had this ‘Chinese Americans for Trump’ phenomenon in 2016 and it looked like that was a group that was maybe going to go conservative over time,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a University of California, Riverside political science professor who runs a survey on Asian American voters. “But his support has actually gotten worse among Chinese Americans. It’s not just the anti-China rhetoric, but all the bigotry he unleashed during the coronavirus is hurting.”

There’s more, so go read the rest. I’ve covered this topic before, so there’s not much to add. (There was also an earlier story in the Trib that I didn’t get around to.) I wish there was some Asian-American voter-specific polling done in Texas, the way Latino Decisions does the same for that community, but for now I need to keep waiting. As with Latino voters, the key here is engagement – these folks will vote more Democratic than Republican, but you have to make an effort to get them to vote. They’re just not used to candidates and campaigns speaking to them, which is something that those of us who always vote sometimes have a hard time understanding. Sri Kulkarni made a point of doing that in his 2018 campaign, and it’s a key to 2020 as well. Whatever happens, I hope there’s an effort made after the election to figure out how it went with this community.

November 2020 Early Voting Day Fourteen: Where will we end up?

Oct 27th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Because we like starting with tweets:

That was from Sunday, after the UT-Tyler poll was factored in. As you may know, there have been two polls released since then, both favorable to Trump, so the above may be a fleeting snapshot in time. Enjoy it anyway.

The two polls I mentioned have their issues, and I will be covering them both, one today and one tomorrow. There have been a lot of polls of Texas, some better than others and some more publicized than others. It’s hard to keep up with them.

President Donald Trump frequently derides “phony polls” after he proved them wrong by defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016. But in Texas, some public polls had the opposite problem: They overestimated Trump’s margin of victory by 3 percentage points.

Two years later, polls in Texas yet again underestimated Democrats, including Beto O’Rourke, who came within 3 percentage points of unseating U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz after public polling showed him down by as many as 9 percentage points that October.

As Texas appears to be acting more like a swing state than it has in decades, O’Rourke and other Democrats have turned the idea that polling underestimates them into a sort of rallying cry as they seek to convince voters that Texas is actually in play for former Vice President Joe Biden, or that former Air Force pilot MJ Hegar could unseat longtime Republican Sen. John Cornyn.

“Pollsters have a very hard time locating, tracking and counting the votes of likely Democratic voters,” O’Rourke said recently. “Even with the polling this tight, I think actually the advantage is to Biden.”

I’ll leave it to you to read the rest. I don’t know that the polls will necessarily underestimate Biden, as they did underestimate Beto – the final polling averages in 2016 were fairly accurate, as I have noted before. There is a lot of uncertainty this year – big turnout, super big early turnout, many newly registered voters – and the polls have varied wildly in things like Latino support for Trump, which has led to some big differences in overall numbers. Early turnout is very heavily female, and women poll much more strongly for Biden. Models factor a lot of stuff in, but they all have to make some assumptions.

The Day Fourteen daily EV totals are here. You can find the daily totals for 2008 and 2012 (and 2016 as well, but I’ve got a separate link for it) here, for 2016 here, and for 2018 here. I’m just going to keep on keeping on with the pretense that early voting actually began last Monday, except with 628K votes already in the bank. The first table is totals for the “normal” early voting time period for each year.


Election     Mail      Early      Total
=======================================
2008       46,085    376,761    422,846
2012       57,031    429,186    486,217
2016       85,120    555,383    640,503
2018       78,190    494,712    572,902
2020      156,157    439,488    595,645

One way you can see the shift to earlier voting for people is to compare Week One and Week Two for each of these pre-2020 years. In 2008 and 2012, Week Two early voting was generally higher each day than in Week One. That was not true in 2016 and 2018, where the daily levels were for the most part about the same or maybe a bit less in the second week. In those years, Week One had started at a higher level, so there was less room to grow, and in the end a lot more people wound up voting in the EV period. We saw crazy high daily totals in Week One this year, lower but still pretty good Week Two levels, and now we’re in the uncharted waters of Week Three. The only thing I expect to be the same is for the final day to be the busiest.

Day One of Week Three was slower than any of the five weekdays from Week Two, though the in person total was close to last Thursday’s. It was above the mark for Saturday and Sunday, and has us back ahead of the pace to equal or bypass 2016 total turnout during the EV period.


Vote type       Mon     Tue     Wed     Thu     Fri     Week
============================================================
Mail          6,407                                    6,407
Drive-thru    5,448                                    5,448
In person    46,747                                   46,747
Total        58,602                                   58,602

Vote type     Week 1    Week 2    Week 3      Total
===================================================
Mail          75,504    74,246     6,407    156,157
Drive-thru    54,105    39,264     5,448     98,817
In person    499,099   348,227    46,747    894,073
Total        628,708   461,737    58,602  1,149,047

For the next three days, there will be extended early voting hours, to 10 PM each day. I’m not going to be awake when the County Clerk sends out the daily totals, so for the rest of the week expect the updated figures to lag by a day. I’m very interested to see what effect the extended hours have – do the daily totals tick up in proportion to the extra three hours, or does the load just get spread out a bit more evenly? Same thing for the 24-hour voting, which will be happening at eight locations. How many people wander into an EV location at 2 AM? I can’t wait to find out. Note that even if the overnight tallies are low, they’re still worth doing, as this is about making it easier and more convenient to vote. One of those 24-hour EV locations is in the Medical Center, and you know there are plenty of people milling about there at all hours. I look forward to seeing this become the standard for future elections.

We are now about 40K away from surpassing 2008 total turnout, 55K from 2012 total turnout, and 70K from 2018. With a day like Monday, the first two are in range today. We need to average 47,463 over the next four days to surpass 2016. My next update will be tomorrow. Have you voted yet?

Abbott sloshes some money around the State House races

Oct 24th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Not really a surprise.

Gov. Greg Abbott’s campaign is ratcheting up its down-ballot efforts in the final weeks before the November election, working to defend the Republican majority in the state House and to remind voters about the importance of electing the party’s judges farther down the ballot.

In what his campaign described as a “mid-seven-figure” total expenditure, it is putting its weight behind two dozen House races and running statewide TV and radio commercials about judges. The news of the effort, detailed to The Texas Tribune, comes as early voting is underway and both sides have already invested millions of dollars in the House fight.

Abbott’s campaign is confident Republicans will beat back the Democrats’ drive to capture the majority, which would be a major prize ahead of the 2021 redistricting process.

“They’re spending a lot of money — there’s no question about that — and that’s nothing we didn’t expect from Day 1,” Abbott’s chief political strategist, Dave Carney, said in an interview. He acknowledged Republicans “will lose some members,” but noted the possibility that the party could win back some seats it lost in 2018.

“I think there’s zero chance that they can take control of the House,” Carney added.

Democrats are currently nine seats short of the majority in the 150-member House, after picking up 12 in 2018. Some Democrats see as many as 34 seats on the November battlefield — the 12 seats that they won two years ago and now have to defend, and 22 other pickup opportunities. Abbott’s campaign has zeroed in on 24 districts. Ten of those are held by Democratic freshmen, 10 are represented by GOP incumbents and four are open seats in battleground territory.

Across those 24 districts, Abbott’s campaign is appealing to 1,030,000 voters who Carney described as “either Abbott supporters or high-likelihood swing voters.” The campaign has already been targeting that group of voters with digital ads touting Abbott’s candidate endorsements, with mentions of specific issues that poll well in each district.

Apparently, that includes going after Beto O’Rourke and tying Dem candidates to him because there was a poll that suggested Beto was less popular than other statewide figures. I mean, with all the money coming in to support Democrats – there’s even more now – and with Abbott being basically Fort Knox and also needing to mend some fences with other Republicans, this was going to happen. Money is a necessary requirement to run a fully-functional modern campaign, but it is not sufficient.

The overlooked Congressional race

Oct 17th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

There are ten Congressional races involving Republican-held seats that are seen as competitive. Nine of them have gotten a fair amount of attention. The tenth is CD06, and the Texas Signal steps in to fill the gap.

Stephen Daniel

The race in the Texas sixth congressional district between challenger attorney Stephen Daniel and incumbent Rep. Ron Wright has been chugging along, under the radar from other clashes in the state. However, many pundits have looked at the district, which includes parts of Arlington, as well as Waxahachie and Corsicana, and have proclaimed it’s a sleeper for flipping, something Daniel himself sees in the final weeks of the campaign.

In 2018, Jana Lynne Sanchez ran for the seat. It was the first time in years a serious Democratic challenger had entered into the race. In the documentary film Surge, which recently premiered in Texas at the Dallas International Film Festival and is airing on Showtime, filmmakers chronicle the battle Sanchez endured to raise money and to get people interested in a race many deemed out of reach.

Sanchez came within seven points of Wright. Two years later, several polls are showing an even tighter race between Daniel and Wright, a combative Texas conservative and the former Chief of Staff to Rep. Joe Barton, who retired from the seat after explicit photos appeared on social media. Wright was recently hospitalized after complications from lung cancer treatment.

Wright has said that women who have abortions have committed murder and should be jailed. As a former columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, he said that “white males are the only species without some form of federal protection.” Like most Republicans in Congress, he supports dismantling the Affordable Care Act. Texas currently leads the nation in the number of uninsured, and since the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 650,000 Texans have lost their health insurance.

Access to healthcare prompted Daniel to enter into the race against Wright. In an interview with the Texas Signal, he spoke about his background growing up in a small town and being the first person in his family to go to college. “There’s a lot of people who flat out can’t afford healthcare,” said Daniel.

[…]

Like every campaign, Daniel and his team had to adjust to the pandemic era. He misses the in-person experience of block walking, where he could personally connect with voters. He particularly enjoyed campaigning alongside statehouse candidates. There are five competitive races in the sixth congressional district. Now, that campaigning has moved to Zoom and other virtual settings.

Daniel is optimistic. “The path to turning Texas blue goes through Texas sixth [district],” he said. Nearly seventy percent of the voting bloc in the district is in Arlington and Tarrant county. He sees firsthand how voters in the district are changing. The DCCC recently added the race to their Texas target list.

There was one poll of this race, done by the DCCC back in June, that had Wright up by four points, 45-41. The DCCC Executive Director mentioned CD06 as a race to watch a couple of weeks ago, for whatever that means. Daniel has been a modest but decent fundraiser who would need some help to get a boost. (I have not heard anything about his Q3 report as yet.) I should note that Beto lost CD06 by a 51.2 to 48.0 margin, which made it closer than the more-touted CDs 03 (51.3 to 47.9) and 25 (52.1 to 47.0), with that pattern holding true for other races as well. I don’t know exactly why CD06 has gotten less attention than the other races – Daniel was unopposed in the primary, so there hasn’t been much to report on – but that’s the way it is sometimes. However you want to look at it, this is a race to keep an eye on.

On a side note, seven of the ten Democratic candidates in those competitive races are women. Daniel, along with Mike Siegel in CD10, is vying to join Rep. Lloyd Doggett as the white Democratic Congressmen from Texas. I believe the last time there were as many as three white male Democratic members of Congress from Texas was 2009-10, when then-Reps. Chet Edwards and Gene Green were still serving. Nick Lampson had been there in the prior session, in that election where Tom DeLay withdrew and the Republicans ran Shelley Sekula Gibbs as a write-in, but he lost to Pete Olson in 2008. Edwards was wiped out in 2010, and Green retired prior to the 2018 election.

UT/Trib: Trump 50, Biden 45

Oct 10th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

I’ll get into a broader discussion in a minute, but for now, there’s this:

President Donald Trump leads former Vice President Joe Biden with the support of 50% of the state’s likely voters to Biden’s 45% in the 2020 race for president, according to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

The Republicans — Trump and his running mate, Vice President Mike Pence — had strong support from white (62%-34%) and male (55%-39%) voters, while the Democrats, Biden and U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, are the favorites of female (51%-46%), Black (87%-11%) and Hispanic (54%-37%) voters in Texas.

Among Republican voters, 92% favor Trump, while 96% of Democratic voters said they’ll vote for Biden. The state’s independent voters prefer Biden, 45%-37%, over Trump.

Despite the dramatic swings in events and issues during 2020, the contest for the hearts and minds of Texas voters has changed little in the race for the nation’s top elected office. The latest poll is a case in point; the survey was conducted during a period that included the first presidential debate and Trump’s hospitalization for COVID-19. Even so, the result is in line with previous UT/TT surveys. In February, a UT/TT Poll found Trump ahead of Biden 47%-43% in what was then a hypothetical head-to-head race, because the Democrats had not chosen their nominee. In April, Trump led 49%-44%, and in June, 48%-44%.

[…]

While Trump is 5 percentage points ahead of Biden in the head-to-head matchup, he comes up a bit short of what might be expected of a Republican on a Texas ballot. In a generic congressional race pitting an unnamed Republican against an unnamed Democrat, the poll found the Republican had a 7-percentage-point advantage (51%-44%) among Texas voters. In a generic race for the state Legislature, a Republican would have an 8-percentage-point edge (51%-43%). And Republican John Cornyn, seeking reelection to the U.S. Senate, has an 8-percentage-point lead over Democrat MJ Hegar in this poll, outperforming the president by 3 percentage points with Texans.

For what it’s worth, the UT/Trib poll has been more favorable to Trump than many others have been, and that remains true when compared with other recent polls. In October of 2018, they had Ted Cruz leading Beto O’Rourke by six points, 51-45; in 2016, they had the race as closer than it ended up, putting Trump up 45-42 over Hillary Clinton. In that race, they accurately pegged Clinton’s level of support but underestimated Trump. In 2018, they nailed Ted Cruz’s number but undershot Beto. Both the 538 forecast (Trump 51.2 to 47.8) and the Economist forecast (Trump 51.4 to 48.6 in the two-party vote) have it closer than this poll, but are nearer to where Trump is than to where Biden is.

In 2018, the Trib poll that had Cruz leading Beto by six had similar levels of partisan support for each candidate, but a bigger lead among indies for Beto. They had other Republican candidates leading by double digits – the next closest race they had was Ken Paxton leading Justin Nelson 48-36 – with Republican support often a bit overstated and Democrats way underestimated. That’s not unusual for a lower profile race, which everything other than Cruz-Beto was in 2018.

The UT/Trib poll is also in the “Trump is doing much better with Latinos this year than he did in 2016” camp, which we have explored before, though not quite as much as some other pollsters. I find this dichotomy fascinating and would much rather read someone’s attempt to analyze it instead of the eighty-seventh article about how Biden needs to step it up among Latino voters that is mostly based on Florida. This is one of those times for the old “the only poll that matters is on Election Day” proverb.

I’ll leave you with this before we go.

When early voting starts on Tuesday, Jill Biden will be in Texas hoping to boost turnout for the Democratic presidential ticket led by her husband, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Democratic sources say Jill Biden will make stops in Houston, Dallas and El Paso, although exact times and locations have not been released.

The Joe Biden campaign has begun to invest more heavily in Texas as polls show a closer-than-usual race in the Lone Star State.

Earlier this week, the campaign launched a TV ad blitz aimed at voters in San Antonio and El Paso. On Monday and Tuesday, Doug Emhoff, husband of Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, campaigned along the Texas border and in San Antonio and Dallas.

The New York Times cited unnamed sources in reporting that Democrats are trying to persuade Harris to campaign in Texas herself.

President Donald Trump took to Twitter early Friday morning to assert that his campaign is in great shape in Texas.

You can click over or search Twitter yourself if you find the need for that in your life for some reason. Does it mean anything that Jill Biden is scheduled to come to Texas next week? Well, it is the start of early voting, so that’s a reason. They could be sending her other places – candidates’ and surrogates’ time is a very precious commodity – so the fact that they think it’s a good use of that time to send her here is encouraging. I don’t know how much more I’d read into it than that.

Bexar County poll: Biden 52, Trump 35

Oct 1st, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

From the San Antonio Report:

The new Bexar Facts/KSAT/San Antonio Report poll showed former Vice President Joe Biden with a sizable lead over President Donald Trump among registered Bexar County voters.

Poll results released Tuesday, two weeks before early voting begins, found 52 percent of Bexar County voters support Biden while 35 percent back Trump. In 2016, Bexar County voters chose Democrat Hillary Clinton over Trump by 14 percentage points.

[…]

Pollster David Metz, whose firm conducted the Bexar Facts survey of 619 registered Bexar County voters Sept. 12-21, noted that age, race, and gender – in addition to party affiliation – play roles in determining whom voters support for the presidency. Voters under 50 said they will vote for Biden at a 2-to-1 margin, while 48 percent of voters age 65 and over are voting Trump, with 8 percent of senior citizens undecided.

Sixty-three percent of local voters of color said they supported Biden, and 49 percent of whites said they would vote for Trump. Ten percent of white voters were undecided or indicated support for another candidate. Fourteen percent of voters of color were undecided or indicated another candidate.

Only 27 percent of women said they would vote for Trump and his vice president, Mike Pence. Meanwhile, 64 percent favored Biden, whose running mate is California Sen. Kamala Harris.

The Bexar Facts/KSAT/San Antonio Report poll also asked voters about other items on the November ballot, including propositions concerning use of sales tax revenue to fund Pre-K 4 SA, a workforce development initiative, and mass transit.

The latest poll surveyed individuals online and by phone (both landlines and cellphones) in English and Spanish. The margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points with a 95 percent confidence level, which is typical of large community polls.

The Bexar Facts website hosts the poll data, which they have annoyingly broken up into a million individual posts about each question, all presented as graphics with text you can see when you hover your mouse over the graph item. For the record, Biden leads Trump 52-35 in Bexar County, with 13% in the “don’t know/no answer” column. As noted, Hillary Clinton won Bexar County 54.2 to 40.8 in 2016, so Biden is ahead of that pace. On a proportional basis, Biden is leading by a bit more than 60-40, though if you allocate the independents (Biden leads 42-30 among indies) that make up nearly all of the “DK/NA” respondents, you get 59-41 for Biden. In 2018, Beto took Bexar County 59.5 to 39.6, so Biden is just a hair behind that pace in this poll. In other words, this is consistent with Biden trailing statewide by two or three points.

There was also a question about the Senate race, and in Bexar County MJ Hegar leads John Cornyn 49-38, again with 13% answering “don’t know” or “no answer”. This is consistent with Hegar lagging Biden by a couple of points statewide, though as we have often discussed, that may be a function of lower name ID, which may come out in the wash when people are presented with the basic partisan choice. I stand by my belief that Hegar probably needs Biden to carry Texas for her to have a chance at winning.

I should note that the poll has some basic demographic subtotals. Biden leads Trump 60-25 among Latino voters, and 96-3 among Black voters. White voters go for Trump by a 49-41 margin, much smaller than his lead has been statewide in other polls. For Hegar, it’s 55-27 among Latinos, 89-7 among Blacks, and 54-39 for Cornyn among whites.

Biden’s margin of victory in Bexar County will have an effect on several key races, including CD21 (Chip Roy beat Joe Kopser in Bexar County 49.9 to 48.3, less than 2000 votes, in 2018), CD23 (Will Hurd beat Gina Ortiz Jones 51.1 to 46.8, but in 2016 he had defeated Pete Gallego 53.5 to 40.9), SD19, SBOE5, and HD121. If Jones in CD23 and Wendy Davis in CD21 can break even in Bexar, I feel pretty good about their chances.

CD10 poll: McCaul 45, Siegel 43

Sep 30th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

One more Congressional district polled.

Mike Siegel

A new internal poll from the Democratic nominee for Texas’ 10th Congressional District, Mike Siegel, showed the race against Rep. Michael McCaul within just two points.

The poll found a narrowing lead for McCaul, who defeated Siegel by four points in 2018. McCaul holds a 45-43 lead over Siegel with just over two weeks remaining before early voting begins, according to the poll.

The poll was conducted Sept. 21-24 by GBAO Strategies, a progressive polling firm in Washington. The results are based on live phone calls to 400 likely voters with a margin of error of 4.9%.

GBAO Strategies conducted a poll for the Siegel campaign in August which showed McCaul leading by seven points, according to a release. That poll was not made public by the campaign.

I’ve not been able to find any poll data for this, which is not unusual for an internal poll whose topline results were released. The Texas Signal reported that the poll also included a Presidential number, and it has Biden tied with Trump in the district, 47-47. Beto topped Ted Cruz by a tenth of a point in CD10 in 2018, so this is consistent with Trump having a small lead in the state. At this point I’ve seen at least one poll result from most of the targeted districts – I’d love to see one from CD02 but have not as yet – and they have tended to tell a consistent story about the state as a whole. The rest is up to us.

Trib overview of CD24

Sep 27th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

The focus of this story is mostly on Democrat Candace Valenzuela, as it should be.

Candace Valenzuela

She experienced homelessness at a young age. She worked several odd jobs throughout high school and college to make ends meet. A high school car accident left her with a chronic health condition.

Now she’s running for Congress hoping to flip a red seat blue, and Candace Valenzuela thinks her story as a political outsider who overcame hardships will win over voters.

“My story does resonate,” Valenzuela said in an interview with The Texas Tribune. “As soon as my constituents hear my story, it’s incredibly easy for them to relate.”

Seemingly overnight, Valenzuela has become a new face of Democrats’ optimism for 2020. Six months ago, she was an underdog in the Democratic primary for Congressional District 24, a mostly suburban North Texas district that straddles parts of Dallas, Denton and Tarrant counties. Now, she’s being touted as a potential future star — someone who could win a seat long held by U.S. Rep. Kenny Marchant, a retiring Tea Party Republican, and become the first Black Latina elected to Congress.

That Valenzuela is considered a viable candidate is another sign of the changes in Texas politics that have spurred a wave of Democratic optimism. Until recently, suburban areas like Congressional District 24 had been viewed as weak spots for the Texas Democratic Party. Now those sites are key to Democrats’ big plans for Texas in 2020. All 10 of the congressional districts Democrats hope to flip in the state are at least partially suburban — and the voters in suburban neighborhoods could decide whether the party can truly compete for the state’s Electoral College votes and win control of the Texas House.

“We need to make our Texas delegation look more like the Texans they’re designed to serve,” Valenzuela said. “We’re seeing record participation and engagement, and folks looking at what they want to see out of their representatives. If we see a win here, it’ll be the people stepping up and saying we want someone from our community who’s going to work for the community.”

There’s more, so go read the rest. I’ll be honest, I would have voted for Kim Olson in the CD24 primary based on her strong candidacy for Ag Commissioner in 2018 and her excellent fundraising. Valenzuela started out more slowly in that department but had caught up by the time of the July finance reports, and she prevailed by a convincing margin in the runoff. CD24 was a Beto-majority district, and the early polling is good. It seems very likely to me that Biden will carry CD24 by several points, and Valenzuela’s opponent is a major Trump shill, which should help. I have felt for a long time that not flipping CD24 would be a huge disappointment. I’m excited about the possibility of getting a Rep. Candace Valenzuela.

I should note, by the way, that Valenzuela has some company in the category of “would be the first person of this type elected to Congress from Texas”. (In her case, from the entire country as well.) Sima Ladjevardian and Lulu Seikaly would be the first people of Middle Eastern/North African descent to be elected to Congress from Texas. Sri Kulkarni and Gina Ortiz Jones would be the first Asian-Americans elected to Congress from Texas. We really do have a diverse state. This year we have a unique opportunity to better reflect that diversity in our elected leaders.

Trib overview of the Senate race

Sep 26th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

It really comes down to the top of the ticket. There’s no getting around it.

MJ Hegar

Even before a pandemic struck, protests over racial justice took to the streets and a vacancy opened on the U.S. Supreme Court, this year’s U.S. Senate race was poised to be different from the last one in Texas.

John Cornyn is not as polarizing as Ted Cruz, the thinking went, and MJ Hegar is no Beto O’Rourke.

Add in a wave of news and other high-profile 2020 contests, and Texas voters are getting a much lower-octane race, a far cry from Cruz’s battle royale against O’Rourke and all its theatrics.

But that does not mean this year’s race is lacking in contrast.

As he embarks on the final several weeks of his quest for a fourth term, Cornyn is pitching himself as a “steady hand on the wheel” who has the stature to guide Texas through a turbulent time. Hegar, meanwhile, is happily running to the contrary — as a disruptive change agent who can usher in a new era of federal representation for a changing Texas.

While Hegar’s pitch is broadly similar to what O’Rourke’s was, Cornyn is taking a notably different path than Cruz, a student of base-first politics who believed what he needed most in 2018 was maximum conservative turnout. Instead, Cornyn is running for reelection with more appeals to the political center, often inviting questions — most vocally from Hegar — about whether his rhetoric matches his record.

But in any case, it is a dynamic destined to shape the final several weeks of the top statewide race after the presidential contest.

[…]

At the end of the day, Cornyn’s fate may be tied to Trump more than anyone else come November. Asked about his biggest challenge this November, Cornyn brought up the massive turnout that is expected, largely driven by the polarizing president, and how different it will be from when he was last on the ballot. A total of 4.6 million people participated in the 2014 Senate election, and Cornyn said he likely will have to garner more votes than that alone this fall to win a fourth term.

With Trump dominating the political landscape across the country, Cornyn said he does not “just want to kind of surf the waves of national news cycles” and wants to make a case for himself independent of Trump. The president gave Cornyn an early reelection endorsement, helping to ensure a noncompetitive primary.

Cornyn occasionally offers gentle dissent with the president but has not emphatically broken with him on any major issue in recent memory. When it comes to the November election, he said he would like Trump to talk more about his accomplishments, namely on the economy — and that he has expressed as much to the president.

“To me the real question in this election is: Who do you think is best suited to help rebuild our economy in the wake of the pandemic?” Cornyn said. “Is it Joe Biden and Kamala Harris? Or is it Donald Trump and Mike Pence? And for me, it’s not even close.”

Beyond policy, though, Hegar has sought to make the race almost as much about character, pitching herself as a stronger avatar of Texas toughness.

In ads, Hegar talks up her military heroism and rides her motorcycle, and on the stump, she has denounced Cornyn as a “spineless, pantywaist, bootlicking ass-kisser.” She defended the approach in the interview, saying it is “important people understand his level of cowardice because I’ve been to D.C.” — to lobby for women in combat — and she has seen firsthand what it takes to overcome adversity there.

I agree with John Cornyn, it will take more than 4.6 million votes to win in November. That’s actually not saying much – even Wayne Christian topped 4.6 million in 2016, with the statewide judicial candidates all exceeding 4.7 million and in some cases 4.8 million. Five million seems like the bare minimum to win, and let’s be honest, that is a bigger leap for Dems to make, since Beto was the first Dem ever to top four million. To that extent, the Presidential race almost certainly helps Dems like Hegar more than it does Republicans like Cornyn. It’s still a big gap to close. The capacity is there, and Dems took a huge leap forward in 2018, but let’s keep the magnitude of the task in mind.

How much this race will be distinguished from the Presidential race is unclear. This is literally the first race on the ballot after the Presidential race, so any concerns about the lack of straight ticket voting should be minimal. I’ve seen maybe one ad for each candidate so far – Lacey Hull and Lizzie Fletcher, neither of whom are on my ballot, have been a much more frequent presence on my teevee. The Beto/Cruz race in 2018 was the top of that ticket, both literally and practically, since the Governor’s race was a much quieter affair. Some people may decide to vote in this race, in particular to split a ticket in this race, based on the campaigns, but my guess is that will be minimal. If Joe Biden wins Texas, MJ Hegar has an excellent chance of beating John Cornyn; if Donald Trump wins Texas, Cornyn will almost certainly get re-elected. I think a Biden/Cornyn combination is slightly more likely than a Trump/Hegar parlay, but how probable either scenario is I have no idea. The main message here is what it’s always been: Vote. Make sure everyone you know votes. It’s as simple as that.

Don’t expect any surprises in the judicial races

Sep 23rd, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

There’s a simple reason why the Democratic candidates and incumbents are expected to win all the judicial races in Harris County, as they did in 2016 and 2018. I’ll tell you why in a minute, but see if you can guess the reason for yourself.

Harris County judicial candidates from both parties traditionally have had little control over their electoral fates, with outcomes at the top of the ballot largely dictating results at the bottom in recent years. A single party has won every county-level judicial race in four of the last six election cycles, and from 2008 to 2016, more than half the judges from the party that carried Harris County finished within one percentage point of their fellow candidates that year, according to analysis from Rice University political science Professor Mark Jones.

After Democrats Hillary Clinton and Beto O’Rourke won Harris County by 12 and 17 percentage points in 2016 and 2018, respectively, Republicans acknowledge they face long odds of winning the countywide vote this year. Party officials and judicial candidates are encouraged, though, that Texas no longer allows voters to cast their ballots for every candidate from one party by pressing a single button, a process called straight-ticket voting the Texas Legislature eliminated.

“A lot of people do not know the judicial races,” said Kevin Fulton, vice chair of the Harris County Republican Party and the head of the party’s coordinated campaign for its judicial candidates. “Harris County has one of the longest ballots in the country. Most people do not know the difference between their county court and district court judges, and so they were just going in and checking the top of the ballot for ‘straight Democrat’ and not knowing the impact they were having on the bottom of the ballot.”

The absence of straight-ticket voting, Fulton said, gives Republican judicial candidates more influence over the outcome and leads to more people voting for “a judge that they actually know or a philosophy they actually believe in.”

Jones offered a different outlook.

“Barring one of the two dozen Democratic candidates committing a felony between now and Nov. 3, no Republican has any hope whatsoever of winning one of those races,” he said. “Even if they committed a felony, I’d be skeptical that they would lose.”

I’ve had plenty to say about straight-ticket voting, and I’m not going to repeat myself again. The willingness to believe that Democrats will somehow forget to vote in many, many more races than Republicans is adorable, not backed up by any evidence that I have been able to find, and will hopefully die a deserved death after this election.

As for the reason why Professor Jones is right about the judicial elections in Harris County? You may want to sit down for this, but the answer is because there are more Democrats in Harris County than there are Republicans. Shocking, I know. But how do I know? Let’s use my favorite metric, which happens to be judicial races themselves, to demonstrate. Here are the high and low vote totals for each party’s candidates in a District Court, County Court, or Court of Appeals (i.e., First or 14th) race over the past four Presidential years:


2004 
Rep 524K to 545K
Dem 460K to 482K

2008
Rep 526K to 564K
Dem 533K to 585K

2012
Rep 550K to 580K
Dem 555K to 581K

2016
Rep 580K to 621K
Dem 643K to 684K

However you want to look at this, the size of the Republican electorate didn’t budge much from 2004 to 2012, and grew by less than 100K voters total over that 12-year span. For Democrats, the growth was over 200K voters. Pretty simple, no? Part of the problem for the Republicans is that Harris County’s voter rolls really started to grow after 2012, and that increase in the voter population was fueled by people who mostly vote Democratic. That trend isn’t reversing, it’s not even slowing down just yet. We’re probably going to get well over 1.4 million votes cast in Harris County this year – remember, County Clerk Chris Hollins thinks we can hit 1.7 million – which means it’s going to take over 700K votes to win a countywide race. Which party’s candidates do you think is better positioned to do that? That’s pretty much all you need to know.

CD03 poll: Taylor 44, Seikaly 43

Sep 20th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

From Nate Cohn:

All we get is Twitter for this one, any other info about the poll is behind the National Journal paywall. It’s in line with an earlier poll that had Taylor leading 43-37 and Biden up by two in the district. Seikaly’s improved performance is likely due to greater name recognition at this stage of the campaign.

I can’t analyze the poll in any meaningful way, but I can add some context to Nate Cohn’s assertion that if Biden carries CD03 he’s likely to have won Texas. Here’s a review of recent elections:

In 2012, Mitt Romney carried CD03 by a 64.2-34.1 margin, as he won the state 57.2 to 41.2.

In 2016, Donald Trump carried CD03 by a 53.8 to 39.9 margin, as he won the state 52.2 to 43.2.

In 2018, Ted Cruz carried CD03 by a 51.3 to 47.9 margin, as he won the state 50.9 to 48.3.

As you can see, CD03 was more Republican than the state as a whole, though that margin had narrowed by 2018. But if the pattern of CD03 being more Republican than the state overall holds, then it’s trivial to see that a Democrat winning in CD03 would also win statewide.

That comes with a raft of assumptions, of course. Maybe CD03 will be less Republican than the state this year. It’s been trending in that direction, and as a heavily suburban and college-educated district, that trend should continue. Perhaps this year the lines will intersect, and a Dem running in CD03 will have to win it by a certain margin in order to be able to win the state. If Biden really is winning CD03 by three points, you’d think that would be enough slack for him.

There’s one more piece of objective evidence that both this district, and by implication the state as a whole, is perhaps doing better for the Democrats than people realize:

Those are the three districts most recently added by the DCCC to their target list. You might say, the DCCC is in the business of talking up opportunities, so why should we take this as anything more than hype? Mostly because the DCCC already had its hands full in Texas – those three districts came after seven others currently held by Republicans, plus the two where Dems are playing defense. The DCCC is going to prioritize the districts where it thinks it can win, both to maximize its resources and keep its donors (and members) happy. They’re not going to go off on flights of fancy. It may be on the optimistic end of their spectrum, but if they believe there’s action there, you can expect there is.

CD25: Williams 45, Oliver 43

Sep 17th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

The Congressional polls, they keep coming.

Julie Oliver

Progressive Democratic candidate Julie Oliver is in a close race with her GOP incumbent opponent Rep. Roger Williams, a new internal poll finds.

The poll of 400 likely voters by EMC Research shows Oliver only two percentage points behind Williams, 45 to 43, with a 5-point margin of error.

The same poll shows Williams has higher name ID recognition compared to Oliver (53 to 42 percent) but the incumbent lawmaker suffers from favorable-unfavorable ratings that are almost equal (23-20).

[…]

Monday’s poll is the second survey this cycle showing the competitiveness of Texas’ 25th congressional district, held by Republicans since 2013.

A DCCC in-house poll in July showed the same margin between William and Oliver, 45 to 43.

See here for more on that previous poll, and here for the polling memo. The main difference between these two polls is that Biden led Trump 47-46 in the July poll, and Trump leads Biden 49-45 in this one. The latter seems like a more realistic result – as noted, Trump won this district 55-40 in 2016, and Beto got 47% in 2018. He lost by five to Ted Cruz, so I can buy Trump beating Biden by four here. That would also bode pretty well for Biden’s statewide ambitions, even if it means Julie Oliver will likely lose, albeit by a smaller margin this time. But she’s running a strong race, she’s got the DCCC on her side, and she’ll almost certainly do better with the resources to make her case to the voters than without them.

I should note that Roger Williams’ campaign released a poll of its own last week, which showed the incumbent leading 52-40. That was a rare Republican poll release for this cycle, and it’s a pretty decent result for Rep. Williams. My guess is that this understates Oliver’s level of support – we have no details about this poll, so we really are just guessing – but it’s not completely out of the question. Hugely disappointing if accurate, but not impossible. That poll, which of course came via Patrick Svitek on Twitter, did not include a Biden/Trump matchup, or at least the public information released about that poll did not include such a question. Make of it what you will.

CD31 poll: Carter 43, Imam 37

Sep 14th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Another interesting Congressional race poll.

Donna Imam

With less than two months to go until Election Day, an increasing number of eyes are looking toward Texas, where Republicans are fighting to keep their grip on the once-reliably conservative state.

There is perhaps no better sign of Texas’ shift toward Democrats than what’s happening in the state’s 31st Congressional District. The previously deep red district north of Austin has shifted dramatically in recent years, and a new poll obtained exclusively by COURIER shows incumbent Rep. John Carter (R-Texas) is vulnerable.

The poll, conducted by Public Policy Polling (PPP), found Carter leading challenger Donna Imam by only six points, 43-37 among 831 voters in the district. Libertarian Clark Patterson and Independent Jeremy Bravo tallied 10% of the vote combined, while 11% of voters remained undecided.

Imam performs particularly well with independent voters, leading Carter 44-28. She also appears to have significant room to grow, as 53% of voters said they were unsure whether or not they had a favorable opinion about her.

The poll also surveyed voters on the presidential race and found that President Donald Trump holds a narrow one-point lead (48-47) over Democratic nominee Joe Biden, a substantial shift from 2016 when Trump won the district 54-41.

[…]

While Democrats have set their eyes on several prizes across the state, the recent blue shift in the 31st has been particularly notable. Between 2002 and 2016, Carter won each of his elections by at least 20 points. But in 2018, Carter faced the fight of his career and narrowly edged out his Democratic challenger, MJ Hegar, by only three points. Hegar is now challenging Cornyn and finds herself down only 2 points in the district (48-46), according to the PPP poll.

You can see the poll data here. It’s a solid result in a district where Beto got 48.4% of the vote. Hegar ran just a shade behind Beto – he lost to Ted Cruz 50.5 to 48.4, while Hegar lost 47.6 to 50.6 – and this district has been on the radar for the DCCC (and for the Republicans, and for the national race-raters) from the beginning of the cycle. The problem has been finding a standout candidate, as there was a rotating cast of players in the primary, with nobody raising any money or making much noise until the runoff, when Imam finally started to edge forward. She still has to establish herself as a fundraiser – the DCCC is in town, but they’ve got plenty of fish to fry. I’ll be very interested in Imam’s Q3 finance report.

This poll is reminiscent of the polling in CD21, another near-miss district from 2018 with a similar demographic profile. In 2018, Joe Kopser lost to Chip Roy 50.2 to 47.6, Beto lost the district by a tenth of a point, and in 2016 Hillary Clinton lost it to Donald Trump 52-42. These latest polls have Biden up by one in CD21 and down by one in CD31, consistent with statewide polling that has Texas as a real tossup.

They key here has been the shift in voter preferences in Williamson County, which comprises a bit more than two-thirds of the district. Here’s how the Williamson County vote has gone in recent elections:


2012       Votes    Pct
=======================
Romney    97,006  59.4%
Obama     61,875  37.9%

Cruz      92,034  57.3%
Sadler    60,279  37.5%

Carter    96,842  60.9%
Wyman     55,111  34.6%


2016       Votes    Pct
=======================
Trump    104,175  51.3%
Clinton   84,468  41.6%

Carter   112,841  56.8%
Clark     74,914  37.7%


2018       Votes    Pct
=======================
Cruz      99,857  48.0%
Beto     105,850  50.8%

Abbott   112,214  54.1%
Valdez    90,002  43.4%

Patrick  101,545  49.2%
Collier   98,375  47.6%

Paxton    98,175  47.7%
Nelson   100,345  48.7%

Carter    99,648  48.2%
Hegar    103,155  49.9%

The story of 2018 was of the huge gains Democrats made in suburban areas like Williamson, but the thing here is that Dems gained about as many votes from 2012 to 2016 as they did from 2016 to 2018, with Republicans barely growing their vote at all outside of a couple of races. It wasn’t so much a shift as an acceleration, and it took WilCo from being on the fringes of competitiveness, where you could see it off in the distance from the vantage point of 2016 but figured it was still a few cycles away, to being a true swing district just two years later. If Dems can even come close to replicating that kind of growth in 2020, then CD31 is likely being undersold as a pickup opportunity. Obviously, the pandemic and the ambient chaos and pretty much everything else is a variable we can’t easily quantify. But the numbers are right there, so if CD31 does go Dem, we can’t say we didn’t see it coming.

One more thing: That 10% total for the Libertarian and independent candidates combined is almost certainly way too high. Libertarian candidates actually do pretty well overall in this district. The Lib Congressional candidate in 2012 got 3.7%, while a couple of statewide judicial candidates in races that also had a Democrat topped five percent. In 2016, the Libertarian in CD31 got 5.2%, with Mark Miller getting 7.1% in the Railroad Commissioner’s race. They didn’t do quite as well in 2018, however, with the Congressional candidate getting 1.9%, and the high water mark of 4.1% being hit in the Land Commissioner’s race. I’d contend that’s a combination of better Democratic candidates, with more nominal Republicans moving from casting a “none of the above” protest vote to actually going Dem. My guess is 2020 will be more like 2018 than 2016 or 2012, but we’ll see. In any event, I’d put the over/under for the two “other” candidates at five, not at ten. The Texas Signal has more.

CD21 poll: Davis 48, Roy 47

Sep 13th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Second poll in this district.

Wendy Davis

Between August 31 and September 4, Garin-Hart-Yang interviewed a representative sample of 401 likely general election voters in Texas-21st CD. The survey, which was conducted on both landlines and cell phones, was fully representative of an expected November 2020 general election by key factors such as gender, age, geography, and race. The survey’s margin of error is +5%. The following are the key findings:

1. Joe Biden slight advantage in the presidential race is basically unchanged since our mid-July poll. The Vice President leads Donald Trump by 49% to 47%, compared to the 50% to 47% margin in the last survey.

2. The mid-July survey had the congressional candidates virtually tied, with Congressman Chip Roy ahead by one point. In the latest poll we find Wendy Davis with a one-point lead. Realistically, the Davis-Roy match-up continues to be extremely competitive and likely to remain a dead-heat.

One important finding is that despite several weeks of Club for Growth negative TV ads, Wendy’s initial TV ads emphasizing her inspiring personal story and bipartisan work in the Texas Senate are resonating with voters. Since our last survey, we find an increase in voters attributing positive sentiment to Wendy, including sizable gains for her among Independent voters.

See here for some background, and here for the Patrick Svitek tweet that you knew would be the source. CD21 has been a pretty good bellwether for the state as a whole these last couple of elections:


2016      District    State
===========================
Smith        57.1%
Wakely       36.5%

Trump        51.9%    52.2%
Clinton      42.1%    43.2%

Christian    53.9%    53.1%
Yarbrough    34.6%    38.4%

Keasler      56.7%    55.0%
Burns        38.1%    40.9%


2018      District    State
===========================
Roy          50.2%
Kopser       47.6%

Cruz         49.6%    50.9%
O'Rourke     49.5%    48.3%

Abbott       55.0%    55.8%
Valdez       42.8%    42.5%

Patrick      50.6%    51.3%
Collier      46.8%    46.5%

Craddick     53.3%    53.2%
McAllen      43.4%    43.9%

Hervey       54.3%    54.2%
Franklin     45.7%    45.8%

Closer correlations in 2018 than 2016, but they’re both in the ballpark. Ted Cruz underperformed relative to his peers. Lamar Smith ran ahead of the typical Republican, both in the district and statewide, while Chip Roy ran a little behind them. Don’t know if any of this means anything for 2020, but I’ll venture that CD21 will resemble the state as a whole fairly well. I don’t think Wendy Davis needs Joe Biden to carry the state to win, but as with any of the other hot races, the better he does, the better her odds are likely to be.

Another look at the County Commissioner race

Sep 11th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

It’s the most consequential local race on the ballot this year.

Michael Moore

Every four years since 1968, Harris County residents have been able to count on a Republican winning the Precinct 3 commissioner’s seat.

In that half century, a parade of Democrats have been trounced. Some years, the party did not even bother to field a candidate in the traditionally conservative district, which covers the western portion of the county. The past three Democratic presidential nominees carried Harris County, but no challenger in those cycles came within 16 points of Precinct 3 incumbent Steve Radack, who has held the post since 1989.

Of course, 2020 has been anything but normal. The COVID-19 pandemic has upended normal life. The Astros play in front of cardboard cutouts. And Democrats say they finally will capture Precinct 3, an open seat since Radack decided not to seek a ninth term.

They said the unpopularity of President Donald Trump in Harris County, against the backdrop of a mismanaged coronavirus response by state leaders and demographic shifts that favor Democrats will help the party’s nominee, political strategist Michael Moore, defeat his Republican opponent, former Spring Valley Village Mayor Tom Ramsey.

[…]

Demographic shifts in Precinct 3 give Moore an advantage, Democratic consultant Keir Murray said. When Radack first was elected, the west Harris County district largely was white and rural. It since has grown rapidly and diversified, with an increase in non-white and college-educated residents. Both groups favor Democrats.

“Precinct 3 now is probably about half white, and that’s a massive change from 15 years ago,” Murray said. “Forty percent of the voters are probably people of color now.”

He said Harris County’s shift to reliably Democratic also affects Precinct 3. Recent elections bear that out.

In 2016, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton lost the precinct by less than 1 point. The 2018 election, in a midterm year where Democrats traditionally struggle, U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Beto O’Rourke won the district by 4 points.

A wave of Texas Republicans, including six members of Congress, have decided against seeking re-election in 2020. University of Houston political science Professor Jeronimo Cortina said that suggests the party privately is pessimistic about its prospects this year, especially after Democrats made significant inroads in suburban communities in 2018.

“From a political perspective, it’s easier to retire than lose an election,” Cortina said.

I skipped over a bunch of back-and-forth about who’s gonna win, because that doesn’t tell us anything. We know about the Moore poll that shows both him and Joe Biden leading by double digits. Tom Ramsey claims to have his own poll that shows otherwise, and maybe he does, but we have no numbers to go with it, so. The 2016 and 2018 results tell a good story for Dems (see the Moore poll link for links to earlier precinct analyses), and I don’t think the current environment does Republicans any favors. Oh, and there’s some dire warnings in the story from a Republican about how those dumb Dems can’t count on straight-ticket voting to carry them anymore. I think you know what I think of such arguments.

On a side note, as Harris County’s registered voter population has grown over the past few years, so has the RV population in Commissioners Court Precinct 3:


Year      County RVs      CC3 RVs
=================================
2008       1,892,656      507,839
2012       1,942,566      501,988
2016       2,182,980      568,512
2020       2,370,540      622,890

The dip in RV population from 2008 to 2012 is due to redistricting. CC3 as a share of the total number of RVs in Harris County has grown slightly, from 25.8% in 2012 to 26.3% as of July, 2020. The main takeaway from that is that this precinct really is a different place than it was as recently as eight years ago. The precinct has 25% more voters than it did in 2012, and that’s pretty significant. As a whole, Harris County has gotten more Democratic as its number of registered voters has increased. Seems like that’s the same phenomenon in CC3, it’s just a question of whether it’s enough.

Why endorse Sarah Davis?

Sep 4th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
14 comments

It’s a good question.

Rep. Sarah Davis

Planned Parenthood’s Texas political arm on Thursday endorsed state Rep. Sarah Davis, rebuffing abortion rights activists who had lobbied the group to deny political support for the Houston Republican.

The efforts to deny Davis the endorsement had revolved around a petition circulated by Sherry Merfish, a deeply connected Democratic donor and former Planned Parenthood board member. The petition concedes that Davis “may have met the minimum standards of what it means to be ‘pro-choice,’” but argues that “the rest of her record stands completely at odds with the cause of reproductive justice and the purported mission of Planned Parenthood.”

It had gathered some 450 signatures by Wednesday afternoon, including numerous Planned Parenthood donors and two board members of the group’s Houston affiliate. One of the board members, Peggie Kohnert, had circulated her own petition.

The lobbying effort has revealed a fracture between key members of Houston’s abortion rights community and the leaders of Planned Parenthood Texas Votes, a political action committee that defines itself as nonpartisan but has struggled to find Republicans like Davis to endorse. As the debate plays out, Texas Democrats — desperate to capture a House majority before next year’s critical redistricting battle — are making an all-out push to unseat Davis, whom they view as one of the most vulnerable Republican legislators in the state.

Davis’ stances on abortion have angered members of her party but helped garner support from moderate voters. In the last two cycles, she won re-election while her party’s standard-bearers, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, each failed to crack 40 percent in her district.

Houston lawyer Ann Johnson, Davis’ Democratic opponent, argues the incumbent has worked against women’s reproductive issues by opposing the Affordable Care Act and declining to vote for the law’s optional expansion of Medicaid. Davis disagrees, saying she has voted against “every anti-choice bill” during her time in office.

Some of Johnson’s supporters say groups such as Planned Parenthood Texas Votes have allowed Davis to carefully curate her moderate reputation while she aligns with her party on immigration and gun policies. Merfish said the group also would paint a misleading picture of Johnson by backing Davis.

“By endorsing Sarah, in people’s minds who may not be as familiar with Ann, it would cast doubt on whether Ann is aligned with them on these issues,” Merfish said. “Because, then why wouldn’t they endorse both of them, or why wouldn’t they stay out of it?”

Planned Parenthood Texas Votes announced the Davis endorsement Thursday as part of a slate of 18 new endorsements. Davis is the only Republican among the 27 candidates the group is backing this cycle.

In a news release, Planned Parenthood Texas Votes said it is “working to elect officials not to just defend access to sexual and reproductive health care, but to repair and expand the public health infrastructure damaged by Governor Abbott and other extremist politicians.”

There was a preview story about this on Wednesday, which covered much of the same ground. As the story notes, Davis also received the endorsement from the Human Rights Campaign, despite Ann Johnson being an out lesbian. The story goes into a lot of detail about Davis’ career and various votes and issues that are at the heart of the dispute, so I encourage you to read the rest.

On the one hand, I get why PPTV and the HRC want to endorse Republicans like Davis, who are an increasingly rare breed. It’s in their best interests, at least as they see it, to be non-partisan, which means they need to find Republicans they can support. From a national perspective, Democrats may be the majority in Congress now, but partisan control is likely to swap back and forth over time, and you need to have some connections to the Republican majority when it exists, no matter how otherwise hostile it is, because you can’t afford to be completely shut out. Long term, I’m sure groups like these very much want for their issues to not be seen as strictly partisan, but to have broad consensus across party lines, and the only way to do that is to have Republican faces you can point to and say “see, they support us, too”. They have done this for a long time, and it’s just how they operate.

On the other hand, the simple fact of the matter is that having Sarah Davis in the State House makes it that much more likely that the Republicans will maintain their majority in that chamber, and a House with a Republican majority and a Republican Speaker is absolutely, positively, one hundred percent going to pass at least one major anti-abortion bill in 2021, just as it has every session since 2003, when the Republicans first took the majority and thus gained trifecta control of Texas state politics. A State House with a Republican majority and Speaker will absolutely not pass a bill to expand Medicaid. I agree, such a bill would almost certainly be DOA in the Senate, but at least it would get there, and the voters in 2022 would have a tangible example of what they’ve been missing out on. And of course, a State House with a Republican majority and Speaker will absolutely make further cuts to women’s health (which is already happening without any legislative input) and add further restrictions to Planned Parenthood, again as they have been doing for years now. All of this would happen regardless of the virtuous votes that Sarah Davis would cast. I mean, it may be true that she has helped stop some things and reverse some cuts and spoken against some other things, but all this has happened regardless. She’s only one member, and they have always had the votes to do all that without her.

This debate has played out for several years at the national level, with the national Planned Parenthood PAC being criticized in the past for supporting the likes of Arlen Specter and Susan Collins and a handful of Congressional Republicans for their reasonably pro-choice voting records while overlooking the “which party is the majority” aspect. Indeed, for the first time ever, Planned Parenthood has endorsed Collins’ challenger, with her vote for Brett Kavanaugh being the proverbial last straw. Activists, including blogs like Daily Kos, have made the same argument about control of the chamber versus individual members with acceptable voting records. However you feel about what PPTV and HRC did here, it’s not at all a surprise to see this debate arrive here on this level.

Ann Johnson

Though individual endorsements rarely have the power to swing elections, Planned Parenthood Texas Votes holds more sway in House District 134 than the average political group, said Renée Cross, senior director of the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston. The district, which covers Bellaire, West University Place, Southside Place, Rice University and the Texas Medical Center, is home to some of the most affluent, educated and politically engaged voters in the state and contains what Merfish described as a “trove of Planned Parenthood voters.”

The group’s endorsement is particularly significant for Davis, Cross said, because of President Trump’s struggles among suburban women.

“Just like the tea party helped bring her in back in 2010, the anti-Trump movement could help move her out, especially among women,” Cross said.

I agree that Davis is better positioned with these endorsements than without them. A bigger concern for Davis is just simply how Democratic HD134 was in 2018, when Beto took 60% of the vote, and Davis was fortunate to not have had a serious challenger. I see a parallel to Ellen Cohen, who won re-election in 2008 by a 14-point margin over a non-entity opponent, even as Republicans were carrying the district in nearly every other race. 2008 was a strong Democratic year overall in Harris County, but HD134 was actually a bit more Republican than it had been in 2006, when something like seven or eight downballot Dems also carried the district. Cohen still vastly outperformed other Dems in the Republican tidal wave of 2010, but that wave was too big for her to overcome. I get the same feeling about Davis this year. Maybe I’m wrong – no two elections are ever alike, and HD134 has been a Republican district far longer than it’s been a Democratic district – but there’s a reason why neutral observers view Davis as being endangered.

One last thing: When I say that groups like PPTV and HRC want to be supportive of Republicans like Sarah Davis, it’s because there’s literally no other Republicans like Sarah Davis, at least at the legislative level in Texas. The thing is, Republicans like her have been extremely endangered for some time now. Go ahead, name all of the Republican legislators you can think of from this century that you could classify as “pro-choice” with a straight face and without provoking a “no I’m not!” response from them. I got Joe Straus, Jeff Wentworth (primaried out by the wingnut Donna Campbell), and that’s about it. I’m old enough to remember when Gary Polland and Steven Hotze ousted Betsy Lake, the nice River Oaks Planned Parenthood-supporting lady who had been the Harris County GOP Chair in the 90s, thus completing a takeover of the party that has lurched ever further rightward since. If they can’t support Sarah Davis, I have no idea who else in the Republican Party they could support.

Poll: Michael Moore claims large lead in Commissioners Court race

Sep 2nd, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

From Keir Murray:

There’s an image of the polling memo at the tweet, and you can see the whole thing here. To sum up:

– About one fifth of voters had no preference initially, not surprising since Commissioners Court is a lower-profile race. Moore led Republican Tom Ramsey 42-39 in the initial ask, likely a recapitulation of the partisan mix, with Moore having slightly higher name recognition, perhaps due to having to compete in the primary runoff.

– After a positive message about both candidates, Moore led 53-39. After a negative message about both candidates, Moore led 50-35. Joe Biden led 53-39 in the precinct.

– This is of course an internal campaign poll, and the sample appears to be likely voters, sample size 508, margin of error 4.4%.

– While the notion of “shy Trump voters” has been discredited multiple times by various investigators, I can believe that Trump might get the bulk of the non-responsive respondents here. To put it another way, I believe Moore is winning. I don’t believe he’s really winning by fourteen points. It’s not impossible by any means, but it’s very much on the high end of my expected range of outcomes.

– For comparison, Beto carried CC3 by four points in 2018. The stronger statewide Dems in 2018 carried it by a bit less, while the weaker Dems were losing it by five to seven points. Hillary Clinton lost CC3 by less than a point in 2016, but she ran well ahead of the partisan baseline, as the average Dem judicial candidate was losing it by ten points. Kim Ogg and Ed Gonzalez, the next two strongest Dems in 2016, were losing CC3 by eight or nine points. You want to talk suburban shift? This here is your suburban shift. Not too surprisingly, there’s a fair bit of CD07 overlapping CC3.

– The larger point here is that if Dems have improved on Beto’s performance in CC3, that’s another data point to suggest that Biden is doing better than Beto, and a lot better than Clinton, in 2020. You can figure out what that means at the statewide level.

Again, internal poll, insert all the caveats here. I give you data points because I care.

A very simple projection of the November vote

Aug 31st, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

In my earlier post about the current state of voter registrations, I noted that you could see the county-by-county totals in the contest details for the Senate runoff. What that also means is that if you have current (till now, anyway) voter registration totals, you can do a comparison across the counties of where voter registration totals have gone up the most, and how the vote has shifted in recent elections. In doing so, you can come up with a simple way to project what the 2020 vote might look like.

So, naturally, I did that. Let me walk you through the steps.

First, I used the 2020 runoff results data to get current registration totals per county. I put that into a spreadsheet with county-by-county results from the 2012 and 2016 Presidential elections and the 2018 Senate election to calculate total voter registration changes from each year to 2020. I then sorted by net change since 2012, and grouped the 254 counties into three buckets: Counties that had a net increase of at least 10,000 voters since 2012, counties that had a net increase of less than 10,000 voters since 2012, and counties that have lost voters since 2012. From there, I looked at the top race for each year.

First, here are the 2012 big gain counties. There were 33 of these counties, with a net gain of +2,488,260 registered voters as of July 2020.


Romney  3,270,387   Obama    2,792,800
Romney      53.9%   Obama        46.1%
Romney +  477,587

Trump   3,288,107   Clinton  3,394,436
Trump       49.2%   Clinton      50.8%
Trump  -  106,329

Cruz    3,022,932   Beto     3,585,385
Cruz        45.7%   Beto         54.3%
Cruz   -  562,453

Year  Total voters   Total votes   Turnout
==========================================
2012    10,442,191     6,157,687     59.0%
2016    11,760,590     7,029,306     59.8%
2018    12,403,704     6,662,143     53.7%
2020    12,930,451

The shift in voting behavior here is obvious. Hillary Clinton did much better in the larger, growing counties in 2016 than Barack Obama had done in 2012, and Beto O’Rourke turbo-charged that pattern. I have made this point before, but it really bears repeating: In these growing counties, Ted Cruz did literally a million votes worse than Mitt Romney did. And please note, these aren’t just the big urban counties – there are only seven such counties, after all – nor are they all Democratic. This list contains such heavily Republican places as Montgomery, Comal, Parker, Smith, Lubbock, Ector, Midland, Randall, Ellis, Rockwall, and Kaufman. The thing to keep in mind is that while Beto still lost by a lot in those counties, he lost by less in them than Hillary Clinton did, and a lot less than Obama did. Beto uniformly received more votes in those counties than Clinton did, and Cruz received fewer than Trump and Romney.

Here’s where we do the projection part. Let’s assume that in 2020 these counties have 59.8% turnout at 2018 partisan percentages, which is to say Biden wins the two-party vote 54.3% to 45.7% for Trump. At 59.8% turnout there would be 7,732,410 voters, which gives us this result:


Trump   3,533,711   Biden    4,198,699
Trump  -  664,988

In other words, Biden gains 100K votes over what Beto did in 2018. If you’re now thinking “but Beto lost by 200K”, hold that thought.

Now let’s look at the 2012 small gain counties, the ones that gained anywhere from eight voters to 9,635 voters from 2012. There are a lot of these, 148 counties in all, but because their gains were modest the total change is +243,093 RVs in 2020. Here’s how those election results looked:


Romney  1,117,383   Obama      415,647
Romney      72.9%   Obama        27.1%
Romney +  701,736

Trump   1,209,121   Clinton    393,004
Trump       75.5%   Clinton      24.5%
Trump  +  816,117

Cruz    1,075,232   Beto       381,010
Cruz        73.8%                26.2%
Cruz   +  694,222

Year  Total voters   Total votes   Turnout
==========================================
2012     2,686,872     1,551,613     57.7%
2016     2,829,110     1,653,858     58.5%
2018     2,884,466     1,466,446     50.8%
2020     2,929,965

Obviously, very red. Beto carried a grand total of ten of these 148 counties: Starr, Willacy, Reeves, Jim Wells, Zapata, Val Verde, Kleberg, La Salle, Dimmit, and Jim Hogg. This is a lot of rural turf, and as we can see Trump did better here than Romney did, both in terms of percentage and net margin. Ted Cruz was a tiny bit behind Romney on margin, but did slightly better in percentage. The overall decline in turnout held Cruz back.

Once again, we project. Assume 58.5% turnout at 2018 partisan percentages. That gives us 1,714,030 voters for the following result:


Trump   1,264,954   Biden      449,076
Trump  +  815,878

Trump winds up with the same margin as he did in 2016, as the 2018 partisan mix helps Biden not fall farther behind. Trump is now in the lead by about 150K votes.

Finally, the counties that have had a net loss of registered voters since 2012. There were 73 such counties, and a net -17,793 RVs in 2020.


Romney     182,073   Obama      99,677
Romney       64.6%   Obama       35.4%
Romney +    82,396

Trump      187,819   Clinton    90,428
Trump        67.5%   Clinton     32.5%
Trump +     97,391

Cruz       162,389   Beto       79,237
Cruz         67.2%   Beto        32.8%
Cruz +      83,152

Year  Total voters   Total votes   Turnout
==========================================
2012       517,163       284,551     55.0%
2016       511,387       286,062     55.9%
2018       505,087       243,066     48.1%
2020       499,370

Again, mostly rural and again pretty red. The counties that Beto won were Culberson, Presidio, Jefferson (easily the biggest county in this group; Beto was just over 50% here, as Clinton had been, while Obama was just under 50%), Zavala, Duval, Brooks, and Frio.

Assume 55.9% turnout at 2018 partisan percentages, and for 277,148 voters we get:


Trump      187,587   Biden      91,561
Trump +     96,026

Again, basically what Trump did in 2016. Add it all up, and the result is:


Trump    5,012,802   Biden    4,770,351
Trump       51.24%   Biden       48.76%

That’s actually quite close to the Economist projection for Texas. If you’re now thinking “wait, you walked me through all these numbers to tell me that Trump’s gonna win Texas, why did we bother?”, let me remind you of the assumptions we made in making this projection:

1. Turnout levels would be equal to the 2016 election, while the partisan splits would be the same as 2018. There’s no reason why turnout can’t be higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, and there’s also no reason why the Democratic growth in those top 33 counties can’t continue apace.

2. Implicit in all this is that turnout in each individual county within their given bucket is the same. That’s obviously not how it works in real life, and it’s why GOTV efforts are so critical. If you recall my post about Harris County’s plans to make voting easier this November, County Clerk Chris Hollins suggests we could see up to 1.7 million votes cast here. That’s 360K more voters than there were in 2016, and 500K more than in 2018. It’s over 70% turnout in Harris County at current registration numbers. Had Beto had that level of turnout, at the same partisan percentages, he’d have netted an additional 85K votes in Harris. Obviously, other counties can and will try to boost turnout as well, and Republicans are going to vote in higher numbers, too. My point is, the potential is there for a lot more votes, in particular a lot more Democratic votes, to be cast.

Remember, this is all intended as a very simple projection of the vote. Lots of things that I haven’t taken into account can affect what happens. All this should give you some confidence in the polling results for Texas, and it should remind you of where the work needs to be done, and what the path to victory is.

DCCC expands the field in Texas again

Aug 28th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

This is as wide as it goes.

Lulu Seikaly

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is adding three more districts to its Texas target list, expanding an already ambitious battlefield in the state.

The new targets of the House Democratic campaign arm are Republican Reps. Van Taylor of Plano, Roger Williams of Austin and Ron Wright of Arlington. The DCCC is now targeting 10 districts across Texas, or nearly half the GOP-held seats in the state’s congressional delegation.

“Democrats are on offense across Texas, campaigning on access to quality, affordable health care and protections for those with pre-existing conditions,” DCCC spokesperson Avery Jaffe said in a statement. “That consistent message and our 16-month long investment in Texas have put fast-changing districts like these ones in play and Democratic candidates in strong position to deliver in November.”

Julie Oliver

Taylor, Williams and Wright all won their races in 2018 by margins ranging from 8 to 10 percentage points. However, Beto O’Rourke, that year’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, came closer in each district, giving some Democrats hope that they could come into play this fall with the right candidates and environment.

Taylor is being challenged by Plano lawyer Lulu Seikaly, Wright by Waxahachie attorney Stephen Daniel and Williams by Julie Oliver, who was the 2018 nominee against him and lost by 9 points.

The DCCC’s interest in the races has not been a secret. The committee polled in at least two of them earlier this summer, finding single-digit leads for the Republican incumbents — and dramatic swings in the presidential race in favor of the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden.

Still, the Democrats face an uphill battle. Taylor and Williams have large cash-on-hand advantages, and Taylor has demonstrated significant self-funding capacity. And while Wright is a weak fundraiser, he has the support of the deep-pocketed Club for Growth, which backed him in 2018 and endorsed him for reelection last week, calling him the “right candidate to represent the district and beat his radical liberal challenger, Stephen Daniel.”

See here for more on the CD25 poll, here for CD03, and here for CD06. As noted before, if Joe Biden really is in position to win Texas or come very close to it, then Dems really are in position to win a bunch of Congressional seats here as well. It’s certainly possible that Biden runs a couple of points ahead of most or all of these Dem challengers, much as Beto did in 2018, with the result that Biden carries several more than are won by the Congressional candidate. The best way to minimize that, and thus maximize the number of seats Dems win, is to boost all of the viable Democratic candidates. It’s true that some of the Dem challengers aren’t in great fundraising shape, but overall the Dems are carrying the day, so maybe the DCCC can afford to spend a bit less on the Wendy Davises and Gina Ortiz Joneses and more on the Lulu Seikalyes. Just a thought. I actually don’t know what this announcement means in real terms – it may mean little more than the DCCC telling its donors who are looking for new places to park their money that these are approved by them – but it should have some positive effect. We’ll certainly know more when the next finance reports are in. In the meantime, let us all pause for a moment and marvel at the realization that the DCCC is playing offense in ten Congressional districts in Texas. Who had that on their 2020 Bingo card?

The state of the Democratic bench

Aug 25th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
5 comments

It’s deeper now, and it could keep getting deeper after this year.

Rep. Victoria Neave

The speaking turns may have been brief and the spotlight not as bright, but Texas Democrats got a glimpse at their national convention this week of their emerging bench — beyond, notably, the usual suspects.

While names like Beto O’Rourke and Julián and Joaquin Castro continue to dominate the conversation — and O’Rourke had two roles in the convention — the virtual gathering also put on display at least four Texas Democrats who could have bright futures, too, either in 2022 or further down the line.

There was Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the 29-year-old leader of the state’s largest county, who appeared in video montages Monday and Thursday nights. There were U.S. Rep. Colin Allred and state Rep. Victoria Neave, both of Dallas, who spoke Tuesday night as part of a 17-person keynote address showcasing the party’s rising stars nationwide. And there was U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar of El Paso, who announced the Texas delegate count for Biden on Tuesday night while delivering a solemn reminder of the 2019 Walmart massacre in her home city. The next night, Escobar appeared in a compilation video about women’s suffrage.

The pared-down online convention meant the Texans may have not gotten as much time — or overall prominence — as usual, but for politicos watching closely, their inclusion alone was notable.

“As we know, for the last two decades, it’s been slim pickings for Democrats in Texas,” said Keir Murray, a Houston Democratic strategist. “I think Allred, Neave, Hidalgo — some of these up-and-comers who are likely not familiar at all to audiences outside their respective districts — even within the state of Texas is my guess — does show a sort of young and growing bench in the state of potential candidates who may move on to do bigger and better things in the future.”

The emergence of such rising leaders speaks to an obvious truth in politics, Murray said: “Winning is what creates stars.” Neave unseated a Republican in 2016, while Allred and Hidalgo took out GOP incumbents in 2018, and that same year, Escobar won the election to replace O’Rourke in the U.S. House.

None is actively entertaining plans to run for higher office, but they are part of a new wave of talent that is giving state Democrats hope that they no longer have to tie their fortunes to a singular figure like a Castro or O’Rourke. Plus, while the Castros have undoubtedly spent years helping the party, they have repeatedly passed on one of its greatest needs: running statewide.

I agree with Keir Murray, in that winning turns candidates into stars. Sometimes that’s because you’re new and interesting and the media loves new and interesting things to talk about; Dan Crenshaw is a good example of this. Sometimes it comes from being a first to win something, like Lizzie Fletcher being the first Democrat to win CD07 in however many decades. I guarantee you, the next Democrat to win a statewide race in Texas, even lower-profile races like Railroad Commissioner or Court of Criminal Appeals justice, is going to get a lot of attention. Obviously, accomplishing things and performing well in high-profile situations does a lot for one’s career as well.

But first you have to win, to get into position to do those things. And having a bench is about having more than stars, it’s about having people with knowledge, experience, connections, fundraising ability, and the desire to move up the ladder. The fact that there are more offices that a Democrat can run for and plausibly win – and then win again, in the next election – means more people who may have these qualities will put themselves in that position. It’s a lot harder to build a bench if there’s only a few things that are worth running for, as was the case earlier in the decade, in part because there’s no incentive to give up what you have when the next thing you try is so unlikely to be yours. We’ve moved from a world where Dems had a third of the Legislature, less than a third of the Congressional caucus, and nothing statewide, to a world where Dems have a plausible path to a majority in the State House and maybe half or even more of the seats in Congress from Texas. That’s naturally going to draw a lot more talent.

What’s ironic is that one needn’t be seen as a “rising star” necessarily to move up in the political world. Just look at the current Republican officeholders in Congress or statewide slots who got there from the State House. Sid Miller and Wayne Christian were State Reps before moving up. Hell, they had lost a primary for their State House seats before winning their statewide races. No one saw them as up-and-comers back then. Lance Gooden was a perfectly normal State Rep before winning the open seat primary in CD05 in 2018. Ken Paxton was a fairly bland State Rep who lucked into an open State Senate seat that he held for two years before winning the primary for Attorney General. Van Taylor, then a two-term State Rep, then stepped into Paxton’s Senate seat and was there for one term before moving up to Congress in CD03. All three seats were open at the time he ran for them, and he was unopposed in the primary for Senate and had token opposition in the primary for Congress. Timing is everything in this life. And as Texas moves from being a Republican state to one that anyone can win, that timing will help the newcomers on the scene.

As goes Tarrant, 2020 edition

Aug 23rd, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Hello, old friend.

Shortly after Democrat Beto O’Rourke launched his campaign to unseat U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018, he made several visits to Tarrant County in North Texas to press the message that if he could flip this county, he could defeat Cruz.

The former U.S. representative from El Paso was largely unknown to Tarrant County voters at the beginning of the campaign. O’Rourke narrowly lost the statewide race, but he defeated Cruz by a slim margin in Tarrant County, an entrenched Republican stronghold that is home to Fort Worth and Arlington.

The eyes of Texas will again be on Tarrant County this year as a critical political battleground. With Fort Worth as its county seat, Tarrant County voters have not supported a Democratic candidate for president since native Texan Lyndon B. Johnson was on the ballot in 1964, and the county’s election results have closely mirrored statewide results in recent years.

“Tarrant County is the largest urban Republican County so Republicans want to defend it, and Democrats want to flip it,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, professor and Pauline Yelderman Endowed Chair of political science at the University of Houston. “It is a clear bellwether of where the state is politically.”

“Tarrant County is a relatively new battleground, so every candidate and both parties want to plant their flags there,” Rottinghaus said.

[…]

Population changes are among the factors that helped Democrats claim some victories in Tarrant County in 2018. Besides O’Rourke’s squeaker finish over Cruz, Beverly Powell defeated State Sen. Konni Burton, a conservative Republican, to reclaim the Senate District 10 seat for Democrats. The seat was formerly held by Democrat Wendy Davis, who gave it up to run for governor against Greg Abbott in 2014.

A seat on the Tarrant County Commissioners’ Court also flipped from red to blue due to demographic shifts that have occurred in Arlington, the connector suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth.  And voters in Arlington also delivered a blow to Republican Ron Wright, who was outpolled in the Tarrant County portion of U.S. House District 6 despite his notoriety as Tarrant County Tax Assessor-Collector and a former Arlington City Council member.  Wright was able to defeat his unknown Democratic opponent to win the vacant Congressional seat because of Republican support in two rural counties that are part of the gerrymandered district.

The results of the 2018 election have both parties preparing for a slugfest over Tarrant County this year.

“Tarrant is a tossup county, winnable by either party,” Rottinghaus said. “Tarrant County may lag behind other large, urban counties but, like other urban areas, it will slowly migrate to the Democrats.

“Given how close the county was in 2018, Democrats across the country see it as an opportunity to move Texas to the Democrats’ column in 2020,” he said.

We have discussed this before. You can see the pattern from the last four Presidential elections in that post. Beto carrying Tarrant kind of broke the pattern, in that generally the state has been just a pinch more Republican than this county. None of this is predictive for November of course, but I’d sure love to see a quality poll of Tarrant County, just to get a reading. We have had a poll of CD06, which includes part of Tarrant County as well as two other counties, but a straight-up survey of the county would be cool. Hopefully someone will make that happen.

In addition to CD06, which is much more of a stretch district for Dems, Tarrant includes a big piece of CD24, and five – count ’em, five – hotly contested State House races, two of which are open seats. None of these are districts that Beto carried, though he came close in all five, ranging from 47.9% to 49.5% of the vote. If I want to put an optimistic spin on things, Tarrant looks a little like Dallas County earlier in the decade, in that it was gerrymandered to absolutely maximize the number of Republican State House seats, which meant they were drawn with tight margins. That didn’t look so bad when Republicans were winning easy majorities in Tarrant, but could come back to bite them in a big way if they don’t. The analogy isn’t completely apt – there are some safe red districts in Tarrant, and Dallas was an already-blue county in 2012 that simply got blue enough to overwhelm the creaky electoral calculus performed on it. It remains to be seen that Tarrant can be reliably won at a county level by Dems in the first place. So hope and faith is fine, but there’s work to be done.

Anyway. I’m interested in seeing how Tarrant goes regardless of anything else. I feel like once it goes Democratic, assuming it does, it’s going to be so much harder for the Republicans to be dominant at the statewide level. At some point, the biggest counties are too much to overcome. We’ll see if this is the year for that.

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