SD19

Sen. Roland Gutierrez

As he watched a couple load ice chests into their car at a gas station, something didn’t sit right with Roland Gutierrez. The pair were likely on their way to the lake to enjoy the late May sunshine in San Antonio—a normal way to spend the day, he knew. But Gutierrez, the state senator for District 19, couldn’t help thinking how surreal it is that life continues after a tragedy. He was on his way to Uvalde just days after an 18-year-old had opened fire on a classroom at Robb Elementary School, killing 19 students and two teachers.

“I was thinking how sad it is that … we move on with our lives,” Gutierrez said when we met at his San Antonio law office in September. “It’s not an unnatural thing. I get it. When these things happen, we always say, ‘Oh, it’s just too bad. I feel so sorry for those people.’”

Gutierrez represents a massive district that stretches from his hometown of San Antonio west to Big Bend National Park, encompassing a broad swath of southwest Texas, including Uvalde. The Democrat is relatively new to the Texas Senate, taking office in January 2021. His campaign had promised certain priorities: to push for legalized marijuana, to bolster mental health resources for rural Texans, and to improve public schools. Although he hasn’t dropped these issues, nearly all of his public appearances since May have been about Uvalde.

The shooting “changed me for sure,” Gutierrez said. “I won’t be a singular-issue public servant, but it has become a very, very big issue in my life and in the lives of these new friends that I’ve made. … For these parents … there’s no issue out there that matters if you don’t have your kid.”

Gutierrez, a father of two girls aged 15 and 13, has emerged as one of the most vocal lawmakers in the shooting’s aftermath. He called for accountability from the agencies that responded to the killings, appealed to Governor Greg Abbott to call a special session on gun laws, and sued the Texas Department of Public Safety and its powerful chief Steve McCraw to try and force the release of more records about the massacre. The state police agency’s response to the Uvalde shooting only deepened his concern. He’s been skeptical of DPS ever since the launch of the “bullshit propaganda machine for Greg Abbott” that is Operation Lone Star, the multi-billion-dollar border security initiative in which state troopers play a starring role.

[…]

If re-elected, Gutierrez said, he’ll go into the 2023 legislative session with a no-excuses plan: force the issue on gun reform. He plans to spearhead legislation on age increases for gun purchases, expanded background checks, and red flag laws. If that doesn’t work, he said he’ll force debate by offering gun control measures as amendments on all sorts of other priority legislation.

“If they don’t want to talk about guns, and they don’t want to talk about gun violence in this state, well, I’m going to be talking about it,” Gutierrez said. “We’ll have Uvalde families in there. … As far as I can see, those families aren’t going to stop, nor should they.”

I’m sure there are plenty of procedural ways in which he can make a pain of himself – Dems have had some success in this department in recent years, though generally speaking at some point the weight of the majority wins, if not in the same session. I would hope that he’ll have plenty of company – it’s clear that one of the Republican goals for this session is to limit Democrats’ influence, so it’s not like there’s much to lose. Not everyone needs to be actively involved with this, but plenty of Dems will have little else of substance to do, most likely. May as well make some political hay – if you want the public that agrees with you on the issues to support you in the next election, you have to make sure they know who is and is not on their side.

Sen. Gutierrez is already at work on this.

Texas Sen. Roland Gutierrez released call logs Monday that he said show Gov. Greg Abbott waited hours after the shooting at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School to have phone conversations about the tragedy with the state’s top cop.

Gutierrez, whose district includes Uvalde, said the late timing of the three calls Abbott made on May 24, the date of the shooting, to the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, shows the Republican governor’s lack of concern.

So do their brevity, the Democratic senator added. Records show the three calls totaled 31 minutes.

“That’s not what leaders do, but that’s what this person did,” said Gutierrez, who shared the call logs during a Monday press conference.

[…]

During his Monday press event, Gutierrez said he received the call logs 60 days ago but declined to share them until now because he wanted to give the state’s investigation into the shooting “the benefit of the doubt.”

However, Gutierrez said he’s dismayed by the lack of transparency from both DPS and Abbott’s office around the shooting. He also accused the governor of bankrolling recent ads against him.

“If he wants to play politics with me and with South Texas, then we’re going to tell the truth,” Gutierrez said.

“This man has done absolutely nothing, which is why we’re sharing this today,” the senator added.

I might have acted sooner than that, but at least we’re all clear about who has good faith. This will definitely be worth watching come January.

Flores wins CD34 special election

Jun 16th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

8 comments

Groan.

Republican Mayra Flores prevailed Tuesday in a special election for an open congressional seat in South Texas, marking a major breakthrough for Republicans eager to blaze new inroads in the historically blue region.

She beat Dan Sanchez, the leading Democrat, outright in the closely watched race and will be the first Mexican-born congresswoman. She will get to serve only until January, but Republicans heralded her win as a shot of momentum in their new South Texas offensive.

With all precincts reporting Tuesday night, Flores had 50.98% of the vote and Sanchez had 43.33%. There were two other, lesser-known candidates — Democrat Rene Coronado and Republican Juana “Janie” Cantu-Cabrera — in the race.

Sanchez is a Harlingen lawyer and former Cameron County commissioner, while Flores, a respiratory therapist, is the Republican nominee for the seat in November.

[…]

Sanchez conceded in a statement that pointed the finger at national Democrats for not doing enough to defend the seat. They had argued the race was not worth the investment.

“Based on the results, we came up short tonight despite being outspent by millions of dollars from out of state interests and the entire Republican machine,” he said. “Too many factors were against us, including little to no support from the National Democratic Party and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.”

The special election was called to finish the term of former U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela, D-Brownsville, who resigned in March to work for the lobbying firm Akin Gump.

See here for some background. I don’t want to overreact or underreact to this result. Obviously, it’s not great – a longtime Dem seat, making the existing Dem margin that much smaller, furthering a lot of bad narratives about Dems and the 2022 election, etc etc etc. It’s also the case that this election was created in a lab to be friendly to Republicans, who had a ready-made candidate in place with money and an existing infrastructure, while Dems had to go looking for someone to run specifically as a temp. I was hoping to get this to a runoff, but nope. It is what it is, and what it is basically sucks.

It is true that Dems have done rather poorly in special elections in purple Latino districts in recent years, with HD118 in 2016 and SD19 in 2018 as Exhibits A and B. The SD19 result was for a brief minute seen as a bad sign for Dems in 2018, and we know how that turned out. Dems retook those seats, in 2020 in both cases. The new lines for CD34 are considerably more Dem-leaning than the old ones (CD15 took the brunt of that exchange), so Rep. Flores is probably also going to be a temp. Probably. It would have been nice to get some evidence of that in this race. We seem to like playing with matches, for some reason.

Not much else to say except to say once again that this is all because Filemon Vela couldn’t wait a couple of months to glom onto that cushy lobbyist gig he now has. If he had resigned in August instead of April, this election would have been in November and no one would have cared about it. He is forever invited to kiss my ass. The Observer has more.

Precinct analysis: The new Senate map

Mar 22nd, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Previously: New State House map, New Congressional map, new SBOE map.

The good news is that all 31 Senate seats will be on the ballot this year, as it is a post-redistricting year. The bad news is that the only seat likely to flip is the maybe-illegal-but-still-in-effect SD10; the second most likely is SD27, the one now held by Sen. Eddie Lucio. That will be a gain if the Dems hold it, which I think they probably will, but will put the Senate back at 20-11 for the Republicans otherwise. There are some potential opportunities for Dems going forward, but nothing likely to happen this year.

As before, I’m tracking how things changed over the course of the past decade, this time using the new data. You can find the 2012 election results for the new map here and the 2020 results here. I didn’t use the 2016 results in my analysis below, but that data is here if you want to see it.


Dist   Obama   Romney Obama%Romney%     Biden    Trump Biden% Trump%
====================================================================
06   105,626   52,984  65.8%  33.0%   145,880   72,715  66.1%  32.7%
13   187,437   43,220  80.5%  18.6%   226,746   60,286  78.1%  20.8%
14   191,555  103,810  62.4%  33.8%   345,920  108,857  74.4%  23.4%
15   142,022  106,550  56.2%  42.2%   230,947  119,685  64.9%  33.6%
16   119,834   97,550  54.4%  44.2%   187,870   99,542  64.4%  34.1%
19   109,976   83,451  56.1%  42.5%   175,552  134,463  55.8%  42.7%
20   110,074   71,399  59.9%  38.9%   144,904  118,940  54.3%  44.6%
21   117,376   71,625  60.8%  37.1%   174,822  123,149  57.7%  40.7%
23   204,165   61,090  76.3%  22.8%   264,146   72,143  77.5%  21.2%
26   139,600   92,037  59.2%  39.1%   212,130  109,171  64.9%  33.4%
27   111,764   70,555  60.6%  38.3%   136,710  124,352  51.7%  47.1%
29   120,466   64,673  64.1%  34.4%   185,726   94,771  65.2%  33.3%


Dist   Obama   Romney Obama%Romney%     Biden    Trump Biden% Trump%
====================================================================
02    94,149  177,976  34.1%  64.5%   161,107  220,682  41.6%  57.0%
05    82,888  160,877  33.3%  64.6%   156,179  228,271  39.8%  58.2%
07    79,567  188,133  29.3%  69.4%   168,148  233,850  41.2%  57.4%
08    88,143  185,954  31.6%  66.7%   191,671  245,415  43.1%  55.1%
09    90,737  172,539  33.9%  64.5%   165,645  216,751  42.6%  55.7%
10   110,253  175,089  38.1%  60.6%   155,339  214,676  41.4%  57.2%
11    93,575  181,599  33.5%  65.1%   159,989  228,246  40.6%  57.9%
12   100,021  216,120  31.2%  67.3%   199,086  253,764  43.3%  55.2%
17    86,387  190,448  30.8%  67.9%   159,728  227,577  40.7%  57.9%
18    92,022  166,546  35.2%  63.7%   154,983  232,105  39.5%  59.2%
22    95,398  182,516  33.8%  64.7%   147,821  232,500  38.3%  60.2%
24    91,044  176,436  33.4%  64.7%   156,584  233,635  39.4%  58.7%
25    93,417  215,045  29.7%  68.5%   199,751  290,020  40.1%  58.3%


Dist   Obama   Romney Obama%Romney%     Biden    Trump Biden% Trump%
====================================================================
01    87,651  239,661  26.5%  72.5%    98,697  292,767  24.9%  73.9%
03    96,180  229,714  29.2%  69.7%   102,401  286,961  26.0%  72.9%
04    75,007  202,881  26.7%  72.1%   136,167  260,866  33.8%  64.8%
28    69,681  214,055  24.2%  74.4%    90,616  255,182  25.8%  72.7%
30    73,532  181,183  28.4%  69.9%   159,983  258,982  37.6%  60.8%
31    48,092  193,082  19.7%  79.0%    62,274  239,238  20.4%  78.2%

My analysis for the 2020 election under the old map is here, and my look at the decade shift under the old map is here. You can see the new map in the District viewer, and you might find the District population by county useful.

I split the districts into three groups: Dem seats, which is to say the seats that I’d expect Dems to win in 2022 (in other words, not counting the likely doomed SD10), seats Dems could reasonably think about targeting in a future cycle, and Republican seats. For the first group, SD27 is as discussed a potential problem, in future elections if the trend in 2020 holds, though as previously noted it was more Democratic downballot. I’m actually a little surprised the Republicans didn’t go after SD19, but at least by the numbers they left it more or less as it was. SD20 is mostly Hidalgo and Nueces counties, so I don’t expect too much more movement based on past history, but we’ll keep an eye on it anyway.

The middle group contains a few districts that are mostly optical illusions, where the net voter deficit hasn’t really changed but the percentages have shifted towards the mean, because that’s how math works. It also contains some districts that legitimately moved quite a bit in the Dem direction over the past decade – SDs 02, 07, 08, 09, 12, and 17, with 08 and 12 being on the far outer fringes of competitiveness now. These are all mostly urban/suburban districts, so one would expect the trends to continue, though whether that can happen fast enough to matter is the key. I grouped these together because it’s kind of impressive to see how tightly they cluster in that 55-60% range. We talked several times pre-redistricting about what level of risk the Republicans were willing to tolerate this time around, as they were now dealing with a state that had far fewer surplus Republican voters to slosh around. All of the maps we’ve looked at have had similar clusters, of similar sizes, so I guess we have an answer to that question now.

That leaves a small number of deep red districts, and even that is a tiny bit of a misnomer, as SD30 had a modest net gain in Dem voters. Obviously, Republicans needed to have more not-so-dark-red districts to maximize their membership, but some places are just geographically inclined to be that intensely crimson. I note that SD30 went from being about one-third comprised of pieces of Denton and Collin counties to a bit more than half made up of Denton and Collin. Unlikely to be enough to make it long-term competitive, but it won’t shock me if its topline Republican percentage falls below 60 at some point.

That’s all there is for this series. The next step is to see how the 2022 numbers stack up against 2018 and 2020, and see what trends emerge, continue, and end. The single most likely outcome of this new map is that SD10 flips as it is designed to do, but what to expect after that is up in the air.

Precinct analysis: State House districts 2020, part 1

Jun 1st, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

Introduction
Congressional districts
State Rep districts
Commissioners Court/JP precincts
Comparing 2012 and 2016
Statewide judicial
Other jurisdictions
Appellate courts, Part 1
Appellate courts, Part 2
Judicial averages
Other cities
District Attorney
County Attorney
Sheriff
Tax Assessor
County Clerk
HCDE
Fort Bend, part 1
Fort Bend, part 2
Fort Bend, part 3
Brazoria County
Harris County State Senate comparisons
State Senate districts 2020
State Senate district comparisons

Joe Biden carried 74 State House districts in 2020. That’s seven more than were won by Democratic candidates, but two fewer than Beto in 2018. Eight districts won by Biden were held by Republican incumbents, and there were two that were flipped one way or the other:


Dist    Biden    Trump   Biden%   Trump%
========================================
026    45,192   42,349    50.9%    47.7%
066    47,844   39,729    53.7%    44.6%
067    52,872   43,876    53.6%    44.5%
096    44,828   43,538    50.0%    48.6%
108    57,513   43,250    56.2%    42.3%
112    37,369   31,167    53.6%    44.7%
121    49,034   46,430    50.6%    47.9%
132    51,737   50,223    50.0%    48.5%
134    67,814   42,523    60.6%    38.0%
138    34,079   31,171    51.5%    47.1%

For comparison, here’s the analysis from 2018. The one Republican-held district that Beto won but Biden didn’t is HD64, which I’ll get to next. Biden won HD96, which Beto did not win. I have no idea how Morgan Meyer held on in HD108 with that strong a wind blowing against him, but you have to tip your cap. You also have to wonder how much longer he can do this – yes, I know, redistricting is coming, but Dallas is getting close to being Travis County at this point, and you just have to wonder how many seats winnable by Republicans there are if current trends continue. Note that Sarah Davis faced nearly the same conditions in 2020 as she had in 2018, except for having a stronger opponent. Meyer had the same opponent (Joanna Cattanach) as in 2018, and she raised good money, but he managed to win anyway.

I still don’t feel like we have a good understanding of why there were so many Biden/Republican voters. There’s been a lot done to try to explain why Republicans did better with Latino voters in 2020, while everyone is more or less taking it for granted that the stampede of former Republicans who are now voting Democratic is just part of the landscape. I look at these numbers and I am reminded of the same kind of splits we saw in 2016, when there were tons of people who voted for Hillary Clinton but then mostly voted Republican otherwise. I was skeptical of the optimism we had (at least initially) for CDs 07 and 32 and other districts because of those gaps, and then 2018 came along and erased those concerns. So what do we make of this? A last gasp of anti-Trump energy from people who still think of themselves (and vote like) Republicans, or a leading indicator of more to come in 2022? I wish I knew, and I wish there were people actively trying to find out. Note that doesn’t necessarily bring us closer to winning statewide, as Beto had a smaller margin than Biden did, but it does meant that the battle for the Legislature and Congress will continue to be heated, even with new maps.

Next up are the near misses, and the farther-out-but-still-within-sight districts that I had been keeping an eye on following 2018. Most of these are familiar:


Dist    Biden    Trump   Biden%   Trump%
========================================
014    30,188   33,690    45.9%    51.3%
028    60,101   63,906    47.8%    50.8%
029    45,951   51,494    46.5%    52.1%
054    35,995   36,093    48.9%    49.0%
064    42,908   46,093    47.2%    50.7%
092    39,262   39,386    49.0%    49.2%
093    40,679   43,897    47.3%    51.0%
094    37,375   38,724    48.3%    50.1%
097    41,007   42,494    48.2%    50.0%
122    57,972   68,621    45.2%    53.5%
126    36,031   38,651    47.6%    51.1%
133    43,263   47,038    47.3%    51.4%

032    31,699   38,011    44.7%    53.6%
070    53,870   75,198    40.9%    57.1%
084    24,928   34,575    41.1%    57.1%
085    34,743   43,818    43.6%    55.0%
089    45,410   55,914    44.0%    54.1%
106    59,024   70,752    44.8%    53.7%
129    38,941   47,389    44.4%    54.0%
150    42,933   55,261    43.1%    55.5%

Generally speaking, Beto did better in these districts than Biden did, which is consistent with Beto scoring higher overall, but not everywhere. Biden outpaced him in some more urban areas, like HDs 133, 122, and the aforementioned HD96. Usually where Beto did better it wasn’t by much, less than a point or so, but with bigger differences in less urban areas like HDs 14, 32, and 84. It may be that there was less-than-expected Republican turnout in 2018, so it’s hard to extrapolate to 2022, but it’s important to remember that the trend from 2016 is strongly Democratic in all of these places. And it’s happening in places you haven’t been paying attention to as well. HD70 may not look competitive, and I didn’t include it in the 2018 analysis (Beto got 40.4% there compared to 58.8% for Cruz), but in 2016 it was carried by Trump by a 61.6 to 32.2 margin. This district in northern Collin County used to be a landslide for Republicans, and now it’s on the long-range sensors for Democrats, in the same way that HDs 126 and 133 and 150 are.

Not everything is rainbows and puppies. There were two districts that Beto won and Biden lost. You can probably guess what kind of districts they were. Here they are, along with the other close and longer-term-something-to-think-about districts.


Dist    Biden    Trump   Biden%   Trump%
========================================
031    25,315   33,101    42.9%    56.1%
074    23,478   27,319    45.6%    53.1%

034    29,226   26,606    51.7%    47.0%
035    24,991   21,049    53.8%    45.3%
080    26,251   22,543    53.3%    45.8%

038    29,116   21,573    56.8%    42.1%
041    31,956   25,187    55.5%    43.7%
117    53,983   39,495    56.8%    41.6%
118    34,228   25,848    56.2%    42.4%
144    17,365   14,599    53.6%    45.0%

If you’ve been wondering why Reps like Ryan Guillen and Eddie Morales were voting for permitless carry and the bills to restrict cities’ ability to reduce police funding, that right there is the likely answer. Guillen has been around forever and likely was pretty safe even with that Trump surge, but Morales was defending an open seat. I don’t want to think about how much more obnoxious the media narrative of the 2020 election in Texas would have been had the Republicans flipped this one.

The three “near miss” districts, HDs 34, 35, and 80, look worrisome and will no doubt give the Republicans some ideas about what the 2022 map should look like, but keep two things in mind: One, as you will see in the next post, this was more of a Trump thing than anything else. Republicans did not do nearly as well farther down on the ballot. And two, nine of the Democratic “near miss” districts were closer than the 4.7 point margin in HD34. If the current map were to stay in place, we’d have more targets than they would.

The five longer-range districts don’t concern me much, especially the two Bexar County districts, where Biden had a higher percentage than Clinton in each and a bigger margin in HD117 (Clinton carried HD118 by a 55.1-40.0 margin). They were both closer than they were in 2018, but the overall trend in Bexar County is bluer.

Finally, here are the seats that the Democrats picked up in either 2016 (HD107) or 1028:


Dist    Biden    Trump   Biden%   Trump%
========================================
045    61,435   53,123    52.6%    45.5%
047    76,336   61,983    54.1%    43.9%
052    55,056   44,664    53.9%    43.7%
065    44,884   36,126    54.5%    43.9%
102    41,123   27,279    59.1%    39.2%
105    33,634   23,879    57.6%    40.9%
107    36,691   24,880    58.6%    39.8%
113    38,175   30,600    54.8%    43.9%
114    47,215   32,340    58.5%    40.1%
115    42,618   29,510    58.1%    40.3%
135    39,657   36,114    51.6%    47.0%
136    59,654   43,190    56.6%    40.9%

As we know, the narrative from the 2020 election is that Democrats went big trying to take over the State House and win a bunch of Congressional seats, but failed to do any of that and so the year was a big success for the Republicans. I don’t dispute the basic premise, but I feel like it’s only part of the story. Democrats did regain that State Senate seat they lost in the 2019 special election debacle, they won a State Board of Education seat for the first time in my memory, they won more appellate court benches, and they completed the flip of Fort Bend County. None of that gained much notice. More to the point, the Republicans had big plans to win back what they had lost in 2018, the year that they claimed was a huge fluke driven by Betomania and anti-Trump fervor. Yet they failed to retake CDs 07 and 32, and they only took back one of the 12 State House seats they had lost, which was balanced out by their loss of HD134, but somehow that’s never mentioned. They spent a ton of money on these races, Dave Carney was predicting they would gains seats overall, and they had expressed confidence in their ability to hold SD19. They not only failed broadly on all this, but Biden did better overall in the seats Beto carried in 2018, as the new Dem incumbents mostly cruised. Sometimes I wonder what the story would have been if Dems had won only six or seven seats in 2018, then picked up the others last year. Would we still think of 2020 as a failure that way? I have no idea.

So this is how things looked from a Presidential perspective. As we know, Biden ran ahead of the other Democrats on the statewide ballot, so you may be wondering how this looked from that viewpoint. The next entry in this series will be the State House districts for the Senate and Railroad Commissioner races. Tune in next time for the exciting followup to this very special episode.

Precinct analysis: State Senate district comparisons

May 24th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

6 comments

Let me start with some Twitter:

.
A lot of press has focused on Democratic losses among Hispanics, but important to look at the other side of the coin too (especially given that, uh, Biden won?). But R losses among whites amounted to far more votes, since they are a larger share of the electorate.

— G. Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) 1:10 PM – 14 May 2021

.
Rs managed to find a marginally winning message with Latinos last year. It may have been Trump-specific, maybe not, but “Ds are socialists and we’ll give you jobs” only pushed Trump to 36% of the vote anyhow. They will have to adjust their message for a new generation.

— G. Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) 1:21 PM – 14 May 2021

There’s more to the thread, but those are the bits I wanted to highlight. It’s true, as noted in the previous post, that Dems lost some ground in the Latino districts in 2020. You’ll see that here in a minute. But it’s also very much true that they gained a lot of votes elsewhere, in the more white districts. Some of those are the ones that flipped in 2018 or might have flipped in 2020 had they been on the ballot. Some were in places where Dems were already strong. Some were in districts that actually look to be competitive now, having not been so even four years ago. Why don’t I just show you the data?


Dist   1216R   1216D    1620R   1620D   1220R     1220D	Dem net
===============================================================
14    -9,951  56,887   26,677  97,954   16,726  154,841  138,115
08    -7,593  38,270   32,030  82,158   24,437  120,428   95,991
16   -22,137  35,202   21,611  58,302     -526   93,504   94,030
17   -19,619  38,114   34,892  56,566   15,273   94,680   79,407
25     3,422  37,037   65,613  95,402   69,035  132,439   63,404
07    -6,676  33,604   42,494  60,489   35,818   94,093   58,275
15    -6,708  27,545   28,163  48,882   21,455   76,427   54,972
10    -8,347  13,076   23,099  54,113   14,752   67,189   52,437
26    -2,174  20,179   20,009  44,154   17,835   64,333   46,498
09       -60  17,910   24,193  48,973   24,133   66,883   42,750
12    13,859  30,860   59,095  84,527   72,954  115,387   42,433
23    -3,003   3,751   13,010  43,679   10,007   47,430   37,423
29    -1,674  34,889   29,559  30,398   27,885   65,287   37,402
05    14,069  25,990   54,548  74,087   68,617  100,077   31,460
11     1,957  20,541   46,098  46,384   48,055   66,925   18,870
06    -4,554  20,223   21,712  13,637   17,158   33,860   16,702
13    -2,928      72   16,907  30,419   13,979   30,491   16,512
19    10,638  16,958   45,127  42,821   55,765   59,779    4,014
02    11,532  10,026   35,894  38,391   47,426   48,417      991

As discussed before, the columns represent the difference in vote total for the given period and party, so “1216” means 2012 to 2016, “1620” means 2016 to 2020, and “1220” means 2012 to 2020. Each column has a D or an R in it, so “1216R” means the difference between 2016 Donald Trump and 2012 Mitt Romney for the Presidential table, and so forth. In each case, I subtract the earlier year’s total from the later year’s total, so the “-9,951” for SD114 in the “1216R” column means that Donald Trump got 9,951 fewer votes in 2016 in SD14 than Mitt Romney got, and the “56,887” for SD14 in the “1216D” column means that Hillary Clinton got 56,887 more votes than Barack Obama got. “Dem net” at the end just subtracts the “1220R” total from the “1220D” total, which is the total number of votes that Biden netted over Obama. Clear? I hope so.

These are the districts where Dems gained over the course of these three elections. Lots of Republican turf in there, including the two D flips from 2018 and the two districts that both Biden and Beto carried but didn’t flip in 2018 (SDs 08 and 17), but the big gainer is that Democratic stronghold of SD14, where demography plus population growth plus a heavy duty turnout game led to a vast gain. Really, we Dems don’t appreciate Travis County enough. SD15, my district, has a nice showing as well, while SD26 is there to remind us that not all Latino districts went the way of the Valley.

We have the two 2018 flip districts, SDs 16, now practically a D powerhouse, and 10, which didn’t shift quite as much but was the most Dem-leaning Romney district from 2012 – you may recall, Wendy Davis won re-election there despite it going only 45% for Obama – and we have the two Biden-won Republican in 08 – who knew this one would shift so radically left – and 17. We’ve discussed SD07 before, and how it’s now teetering on swing status and won’t be of much use to the Republicans when they try to shore themselves up, but look at SD25, a district that has moved strongly left despite encompassing Comal County, the I-35 version of Montgomery. Look at the shifts in SD12, which is still not competitive but also not as big a GOP stronghold, and SD05, which has moved along with Williamson County. The key takeaway here is that more of the Senate is going to have to be centered on the Houston-San Antonio-D/FW triangle, and that part of the state is much more Democratic than it was a decade ago. This is the big problem Republicans have to solve.

Dems have some room to improve as well. I discussed SD13 in the Harris County reviews, and I believe there’s untapped potential in this district. It’s 80% Democratic to begin with, so improvements in turnout and voter registration are going to pay off in a big way. SD23 was more like 13 in 2016, but acquitted itself nicely in 2020. I suspect there are a lot of voters here who will need more contact and engagement in 2022. I know there were votes left on the table in 2018, and we need to be conscious of that.

Finally, there are three other Latino districts besides SD26 in this list. We’ve discussed SD06 before, which had a big uptick in Democrats while seeing fewer Republicans in 2016, then saw more Republicans turn out in 2020. In the end, the Dem percentage was basically the same in 2020 as in 2012, with a larger net margin, but the trend needs watching. SD19, which Dems took back in 2020 after that embarrassing special election loss, had a similar pattern as with SD06 except with a smaller net Republican gain in 2020. This district has a lot of border turf, which trended red in 2020, but it also has a good chunk of Bexar County, which got bluer and likely mitigated the overall shift. I feel like this district is more likely to drift in a Republican direction than SD06 is, but that will depend to some extent on how it’s redrawn. SD29, anchored in El Paso, had the same big Dem shift in 2016, then saw roughly equivalent gains by both parties in 2020. I think it’s more likely to get bluer over time, and there’s always room for Dem growth in El Paso, though as with SDs 13 and 23, it will require engagement.

Overall, these 19 districts represent a net gain of over 900K votes for Dems. Joe Biden collected about 600K more votes than 2012 Obama did, so there’s votes going the other way as well. Here are those districts:


Dist   1216R   1216D    1620R   1620D   1220R     1220D	Dem net
===============================================================
18    15,109  19,337   58,614  49,787   73,723   69,124  -4,599
04    10,564  14,667   54,680  39,023   65,244   53,690 -11,554
24    11,125   7,102   51,143  42,472   62,268   49,574 -12,694
21     9,828  13,573   43,738  26,297   53,566   39,870 -13,696
20     7,675  17,839   42,214  18,130   49,889   35,969 -13,920
22    17,969   6,092   48,183  37,910   66,152   44,002 -22,150
27     7,486  15,779   37,504   6,942   44,990   22,721 -22,269
28     6,727  -2,691   33,163  17,453   39,890   14,762 -25,128
31     6,956   3,954   36,050  10,696   43,006   14,650 -28,356
01    11,123  -6,966   34,452  17,623   45,575   10,657 -34,918
30    30,275   7,133   75,839  47,839  106,114   54,972 -51,142
03    20,610  -6,936   48,423  14,385   69,033    7,449 -61,584

Here’s the current Senate map, to remind you of where these districts are. SDs 22 and 24 have the most turf inside the big population triangle, while SD04 has most of its people there. SD22 currently includes Johnson and Ellis Counties, and it’s not too hard to imagine them beginning to trend blue over the next decade, while SD24 includes Bell and Coryell, which also have that potential.

I’m actually a little surprised to see that SDs 04 and 18 got a little bluer in 2016, before snapping back in 2020. I’ll have to take a closer look at them, on a county by county basis, to see what the big factors were. Fort Bend is going our way, and I have hope that we can make progress in Montgomery, and that’s going to be a big key to this decade.

The big Republican gainers, as noted in the last post, are mostly in East Texas and West Texas/the Panhandle, with SD03 including the north part of Montgomery. The main question will be how much of these districts will have to include the faster-growing parts of the state. That’s a calculation that won’t be very friendly to the incumbents, one way or another.

Finally, there are the three Latino districts, SDs 20, 21, and 27. All three followed the same pattern of a Dem gain in 2016 followed by a bigger Republican gain in 2020. SD27 remained solidly Democratic, while 20 and 21 are much closer to swing status though as noted in the previous post the incumbents all ran comfortably ahead of the pack. Republicans could certainly try to make a district more amenable to them out of this part of the state. How that would affect their other priorities, and how much of what we saw in 2020 continues past that year are the big questions. All other Dems carried these three districts as well, more or less at the same level as Biden. The good news for the Republicans then is that the new voters that Trump brought in were there for more than just him.

As you can see, there are fewer districts in which Dems lost ground, and the total number of votes they ceded is about a third of what they picked up elsewhere. You can see how G. Elliott Morris’ tweet thread applies here. As was the case with the State House and Congress, the Republican gerrymander of the State Senate in 2011 was very effective, until it wasn’t. It’s the same story here as it is for the other chambers, which is how do they assess the risk of a strategy that aims to gain them seats versus one that just aims to hold on to what they’ve got.

Next up will be a look at the State House district results from 2020. When the 2020 data for Congress and the SBOE finally show up, I’ll do the same for them as well. Let me know what you think.

Precinct analysis: State Senate districts 2020

May 17th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

5 comments

Hey, look, we now have some 2020 district data. I found it all on the new Texas Legislative Council redistricting landing page. As of last week, when I went digging, only the State Senate and State House have 2020 data, so I’m going to spend a little time with them.

The 2020 State Senate election results by district are here. The first thing you need to know is that Joe Biden carried 15 of the 31 Senate districts. Here they are, in descending order of Biden’s percentage:


Dist    Biden    Trump   Biden%   Trump%
========================================
23    237,533   52,415    80.9%    17.8%
13    208,895   46,896    80.8%    18.1%
14    347,953  132,727    70.8%    27.0%
29    180,899   87,022    66.5%    32.0%
26    191,570   92,307    66.4%    32.0%
06    123,709   61,089    66.1%    32.6%
15    208,552  110,485    64.5%    34.1%
27    125,040   90,758    57.3%    41.6%
16    210,107  159,233    56.0%    42.5%
19    176,256  149,924    53.3%    45.3%
21    155,987  132,733    53.2%    45.3%
10    199,896  170,688    53.1%    45.4%
20    143,598  128,363    52.2%    46.6%
17    212,242  193,514    51.6%    47.0%
08    231,252  211,190    51.3%    46.9%

For the record, Beto carried the same fifteen districts in 2018. I’ll do a separate post on comparisons with other years, but I figured that was a thought many of you might have, so let’s address it here.

Only Biden carried the two Republican districts, SD08 and SD17. The range for other Democrats in SD08 was 46.4% (Chrysta Castaneda) to 48.1% (Elizabeth Frizell), and in SD17 from 46.5% (Gisela Triana) to 49.0% (Tina Clinton). Every Democrat got over 50% in each of the 13 Dem-held districts. This is consistent with what we’ve seen in Harris and Fort Bend Counties, where Biden outperformed the rest of the ticket by three or four points. For what it’s worth, we saw a very similar pattern in 2016, when Hillary Clinton ran ahead of other Dems, in some cases by quite a bit more. I’m thinking specifically of CDs 07 and 32, but there are other examples. My big question all throughout the 2018 cycle was whether those voters who voted for Clinton but otherwise generally voted Republican downballot would be inclined to vote for more Democrats that year, and judging by the results I’d say the answer was mostly Yes. We’ll have to see what happens this time around.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the lower-than-expected percentages in the Latino districts. SD20 is Chuy Hinojosa, and he won re-election by a 58.5% to 48.5% margin. SD21 is Judith Zaffirini, and she cruised 60.1% to 39.9%, while our old friend Eddie Lucio took SD27 64.8% to 35.2%. You may recall that in an earlier post on the Latino vote in 2020, one factor put forward for Trump’s better-than-expected performance was incumbency. As you can see, these incumbent Dems all ran comfortably ahead of Joe Biden. Now take a look at SD19, where Roland Gutierrez knocked out incumbent Pete Flores with a seemingly unimpressive 49.9% to 46.7% score. However much stock you put in the overall hypothesis, I’d say Flores’ incumbency helped him here. Not enough, thankfully. As for the two urban districts, SDs 06, 26, and 29, I’ve discussed SD06 before, so I’ll skip it. SD26 is basically on par with 2016, while SD29 slipped a bit from then but improved by a little bit over 2012. Again, I’ll get into more detail in a subsequent post.

Where Democrats really improved is in the whiter urban and suburban districts. SD14 was always a Democratic stronghold, but it really punched above its weight in 2020. No Republican district generated as many votes for Trump as SD14 did for Biden, and only one Republican district had a wider margin for Trump. We Dems maybe don’t appreciate Travis County as much as we should. I’ve discussed SD15 and how it went from a solid Dem district to a powerhouse in 2020. Look at SD16, which was a Dem takeover in 2018, and marvel at how Mitt Romney won it in 2012 with 57% of the vote. This is the kind of voting behavior shift that should have Republicans worried, and as you’ll see there’s more where that came from. Similar story at a lesser scale in SD10, which Trump carried in 2016 by a fraction of a point.

And then we have the two Republican districts that Biden carried. Both were battlegrounds in 2018, and I think the closeness of the race in SD08 was a genuine surprise to a lot of people, myself included. That’s a district that has shifted enormously, but it’s got more company than you might think. To understand that better, let’s look at the districts that Trump won, as above sorted by the percentage that Biden got.


Dist    Biden    Trump   Biden%   Trump%
========================================
09    161,000  166,632    48.3%    50.0%
25    256,178  302,919    45.1%    53.3%
07    188,150  232,201    44.1%    54.5%
05    199,253  250,002    43.4%    54.5%
12    211,292  270,287    43.2%    55.2%
11    161,818  232,156    40.4%    58.0%
02    138,917  208,774    39.4%    59.2%
18    161,933  271,898    36.8%    61.9%
22    128,415  253,102    33.2%    65.4%
04    142,522  281,331    33.2%    65.5%
24    126,340  257,861    32.3%    65.9%
30    121,646  329,601    26.5%    71.9%
01     92,593  265,715    25.5%    73.3%
28     76,925  222,872    25.3%    73.3%
03     77,364  294,559    20.6%    78.4%
31     59,684  229,768    20.3%    78.2%

Biden came within less than six thousand votes of taking a 16th Senate district, which would have been a majority. SD09 was Beto’s nearest miss for a sixteenth as well, though he came a little closer. The top five here for Biden are the same for Beto, with SDs 05 and 07 flipped; indeed, all of these districts are more or less sorted in the same way for both years.

I will have more numbers in the next post to show just how much movement there’s been, but in the meantime feel free to look at the 2012 district results and see for yourself just how uncompetitive these district used to be. The 2011 Senate map gerrymander was extremely effective, until all of a sudden it wasn’t. The Republicans will have some challenges ahead of them this fall.

There is of course some spare capacity for the Republicans to use, but it’s not as simple as it looks. Here’s the current map, to illustrate. None of SDs 01, 28, or 31 is anywhere near a Democratic stronghold. SDs 03 and 30 do border on Dem areas, and of course those other three districts can be sliced and diced to siphon off some Dem support, but it’s not quite that simple. For one thing, shifting the center of gravity in these districts from their rural centers towards the urban and suburban parts of the state means that their rural constituents – the Republican base – get less attention and power. They also increase the risk of a primary challenge from an opponent in a higher population area. I think playing defense will be a more urgent priority for the Republicans – they may try to carve out a more amenable South Texas district to capitalize on the Latino shift, but it’s not clear how persistent that will be, and there are still Voting Rights Act protections in place to guard against that, however tenuously – but maybe they could take a shot at Sen. Powell in SD10. As with the Congressional map, it’s a question of their risk tolerance as well as their appetite for gain. We’ll know in a few months.

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.

Followup omnibus Election Day post

Nov 4th, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

Wanted to clear up some loose ends from the late night/early morning post and add a couple of things I’d missed the first time around. I’ll have a longer “thoughts and reactions” post probably tomorrow.

– The district results from last night appear to be the same this morning, which means: No Congressional flips, Dems flip SBOE5 and SD19, Dems flip HD134 but lose HD132, for a net one seat gain the the Senate and zero seats in the House. I don’t know how many people would have bet on no net changes to Congress and the State House.

– One other place where Dems made gains was the Courts of Appeals. Dems won the Chief Justice seats on the Third (anchored in Travis and Williamson counties) and Fourth (anchored in Bexar but containing many counties) Courts of Appeals, plus one bench on the First Court (anchored in Harris, won by Veronica Rivas-Molloy) and three on the Fifth Court (Dallas/Collin, mostly). Dems fell short on three other benches, including the Chief Justice for the 14th Court, though the other result on the First Court was really close – Amparo Guerra trails Terry Adams by 0.12%, or about 3K votes out of over 2.25 million ballots. The key to Rivas-Molloy’s win was her margin of victory in Harris County – she won Harris by 133K votes, while Guerra won Harris by 114K, Jane Robinson (Chief Justice 14th Court) won Harris by 104K, and Tamika Craft (14th Court) won Harris by 90K. With Galveston, Brazoria, and Chambers County all delivering big for the Republicans, that big lead that Rivas-Molloy got in Harris was enough to withstand the assault.

– Final turnout was 1,649,457, which was 67.84%. That fell short of the loftier projections, but it’s still over 300K more votes than were cast in 2016. The new Election Night returns format at harrisvotes.com does not give the full turnout breakdown by vote type, but the PDF they sent out, which you can see here, does have it. The breakdown: 174,753 mail ballots, 1,272,319 in person early ballots, 202,835 Election Day ballots. Note that these are unofficial and un-canvassed numbers, and will change by some amount when the vote is certified, as some late overseas and military ballots arrive and some provisional ballots are cured.

– Another way to put this: 10.6% of all ballots were mail, 77.1% were early in person, and 12.3% were cast on Election Day. Just the early in person votes is a higher percentage of “before Election Day” tallies than any previous year. Will this be a new normal, at least for high-turnout even-year elections? I have no idea. Those extra days of early voting, plus all of the sense of urgency, surely contributed to that total. I don’t know that we’ll match this level going forward, but it won’t surprise me if the standard is now more than 80% of all votes are cast before Election Day (again, in even-year elections; who knows what will happen in the odd years).

– For what it’s worth, the closest countywide race was decided by about 76K votes; the next closest by about 90K, and the rest over over 100K. What that means is that if somehow all 127K of those votes cast at drive-through locations during the early voting period were suddenly thrown out, it’s highly unlikely to affect any of those races. I suppose it could tip a close non-countywide race like HD135, and it could reduce Veronica Rivas-Molloy’s margin in Harris County to the point that she’d lose her seat on the First Court of Appeals. I can’t see that happening, but I wanted to state this for the record anyway.

I’ll have more thoughts tomorrow.

UPDATE: The SOS Election Night Returns site now shows Amparo Guerra leading by about 1,500 votes, or 0.06 points, in the First Court of Appeals, Place 5 race. Not sure where the late votes came from, but they helped her, and they helped Jane Robinson, who is still trailing but by less than 5,000 votes, or 0.18 points.

Omnibus Election Day post

Nov 4th, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

16 comments

I was up really late last night, and there’s still a lot of votes to be counted. The SOS website was mostly trash, but a lot of county election sites took their sweet, sweet time even reporting any Election Day results. So here’s what I know right now, and I’ll have more tomorrow.

– The Presidential race is still unsettled as a lot of votes are to be counted. That may take a few days, but indications are decent for Biden at this point.

– Not in Texas, though. Biden was approaching five million votes as I write this, but he was trailing by six percent. The other Dems running statewide were losing by nine or ten. Still a fair number of Republicans who didn’t vote for Trump, and that made things redder downballot than you might have expected from the topline result. In a sense, 2020 was like 2018, in that the top Dem outperformed the others running statewide, but the gap at the top was wider.

– As of this writing, Dems appear to be on track to picking up one SBOE seat (SBOE5), reclaiming SD19, and likely sweeping the Appeals Court races that are anchored in Harris County; I have not checked the other Appeals Court races. Ann Johnson has knocked off Sarah Davis in HD134, and Gina Calanni is losing in HD132. Jon Rosenthal has a slim lead in HD135, while the two remaining Dallas County Republicans (Morgan Meyer in HD108 and Angie Chen Button in HD112) are hanging in, though Button’s lead is slimmer than Rosenthal’s. All other State House incumbents are winning, and all of the open seats are being held by the same party, which means that if all these races remain as they are…the composition of the Lege will be exactly as it is now, 83-67. Not what we were expecting, to say the least.

– Also not what we were expecting: As I write this, no Congressional seats appear poised to flip. Reps. Lizzie Fletcher and Colin Allred were re-elected, and Republicans have held onto all of their imperiled districts. Chalk that up to Trump and the rest of the statewide Rs doing better than the polls had suggested. One unexpectedly close race is in CD15, where Rep. Vicente Gonzalez was only leading by 6K votes as I write this. That said, none of the Election Day results from Hidalgo County were in for that race – all other counties except tiny Wilson were fully reported – so I would expect Gonzalez to win by a larger margin in the end.

(I should note that there’s a dispute in CD23, because of course there is.)

– Which leads to the uncomfortable fact that Trump did a lot better in the predominantly Latino counties in the Valley. I’m not going to get into that at this time – I guarantee, there are already a thousand thinkpieces about it – but the pollsters that showed him doing better and Biden lagging Clinton from 2016 were the winners of that argument. There will be many questions to be answered about that.

– Nothing terribly interesting in Harris County. Dems won all the countywide seats, but as noted lost in HD132 and HD138, and also lost in County Commissioners Court Precinct 3, so the Court remains 3-2 Dem. Note that Commissioners Court does its own redistricting, and after the 2010 election the Republican majority made CC2 a bit redder. I fully expect CC3 to shift in the Dem direction in the next map – it too was made redder after 2010 – but we’ll see how much of a difference it makes. Tom Ramsey has his work cut out for him. One change way downballot was Democrat Israel Garcia winning in the Justice of the Peace Precinct 5 race, knocking off longtime incumbent Russ Ridgway. Precinct 5 Constable Ted Heap managed to hang on.

– With 683 of 797 voting centers reporting, there were 1,595,065 votes cast in the Presidential race. Way down at the bottom of the ballot, in the two HCDE Trustee At Large races, there were 1,516,025 and 1,513,125 votes cast, a dropoff of about five percent. I think that should settle the straight-ticket voting question, at least for now.

– Fort Bend County completed its transition to Democratic. All Democratic countywide candidates won, with Eric Fagan becoming the first Black Sheriff in that county. Congratulations to all the winners.

I’ll have much more to say soon, but this is where we are very early on Wednesday morning. Good night and try to remain calm.

Please don’t screw up SD19 this time

Oct 25th, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Here’s hoping.

Rep. Roland Gutierrez

If elected to the Texas Senate, Roland Gutierrez promises not to end his tenure in federal prison. During a September phone call, the six-term state House rep assured me: “I’ve led my life as a responsible person; my parents raised me right.”

It’s a low bar. But Democrats in state Senate District 19—a sprawling district rooted in San Antonio that sweeps down to Eagle Pass and all the way out to far West Texas—have to start somewhere. The last liberal to hold the seat, Carlos Uresti, stepped down in 2018 just before being sentenced to 12 years’ incarceration for fraud and bribery. Now, after cinching the Democratic nomination in July, it’s up to Gutierrez to carry the torch of noncriminal progressive governance in SD-19.

The race won’t make the marquee this November. In Texas, the big-ticket fights are over the presidency, the U.S. Senate, and the state House. But a Gutierrez win would reassert Democratic control of a historically blue stronghold. It could also force a battle at the Capitol over the state Senate’s supermajority voting rules. And lastly—forgive me, reader, for mixing hope and Texas politics—it could even get the ball rolling on legal marijuana.

Standing in Gutierrez’s way: The Republican who’s held the seat the last two years, a former game warden by the name of Pete Flores—the bespectacled, cowboy hat-wearing embodiment of one of the Democrats’ worst electoral blunders in recent years.

I will pull one small piece of consolation out of the debacle that was the SD19 special election from 2018: After Flores’ stunning victory, I read more than one story, and many more than one quote from Republican elected officials like Dan Patrick, that were somewhere between skeptical and openly contemptuous of the idea that there was going to be a “blue wave” in Texas that year. I think we all know how that turned out, and it served as yet another reminder that weird low-turnout special election results just aren’t terribly predictive of anything.

All we really need to happen here is for 2020 to be a normal year, more or less, for Gutierrez to win and fix this error. In 2016, and again in 2018, SD19 was basically a ten-point Democratic district, with some variation on both ends. Carlos Uresti won it by 16 points in 2016. Gutierrez likely won’t do quite that well, as being the incumbent ought to help Flores a bit, but 2020 ought to be a pretty good year for Dems overall, with Bexar County giving Gutierrez a boost. I admit to being a little concerned about Gutierrez’s mediocre fundraising, but again, all we really need is typical performance from this district. Losing SD19 in the 2018 special election was upsetting, but in the end you could see how it happened. Losing it again this year would be inexcusable. Let’s not let that happen, mmmkay?

30 Day 2020 campaign finance reports: State races, part 1

Oct 13th, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

Time once again to look at campaign finance reports. I don’t usually review the 30-day reports but this is a special year, and there’s a lot of money sloshing around, so let’s keep an eye on it. As before, I will split these into four parts. Part one will be statewide, SBOE, and State Senate, part two will be State House races from the Houston area, part three will be State House races from elsewhere in the state, and part four will be for Democratic incumbents that may be targeted. I’m not going to be doing every race of course, just the ones of interest. January reports for statewide candidates can be found here, January reports for various SBOE and State Senate races can be found here, and the July reports for the candidates in this post are here.

Chrysta Castaneda, RRC
Jim Wright, RRC

Amy Clark Meachum, Supreme Court, Chief Justice
Nathan Hecht, Supreme Court, Chief Justice

Gisela Triana, Supreme Court, Place 8
Brett Busby, Supreme Court, Place 8

Kathy Cheng, Supreme Court, Place 6
Jane Bland, Supreme Court, Place 6

Staci Williams, Supreme Court, Place 7
Jeff Boyd, Supreme Court, Place 7

Rebecca Bell-Metereau, SBOE5
Lani Popp, SBOE5

Michelle Palmer, SBOE6
Will Hickman, SBOE6

Marsha Webster, SBOE10
Tom Maynard, SBOE10

Susan Criss, SD11
Larry Taylor, SD11

Roland Gutierrez, SD19
Pete Flores, SD19


Candidate   Office    Raised     Spent     Loan     On Hand
===========================================================
Castaneda      RRC   310,709   161,145   27,166     103,934
Wright         RRC   243,765   452,473   45,000     169,761

Meachum      SCOTX   103,704    27,920        0     200,072
Hecht        SCOTX   176,761   806,375        0     105,298

Triana       SCOTX    37,075    19,945        0     134,736
Busby        SCOTX   314,946   580,588        0     342,010

Cheng        SCOTX    17,901     5,196   90,174      80,371
Bland        SCOTX   167,487   490,849        0     132,174

Williams     SCOTX   127,667    69,733    1,000      78,572
Boyd         SCOTX   128,500   168,373        0     466,196

BellMetereau SBOE5    63,473    18,316    2,250      66,834
Popp         SBOE5    64,012    22,713   60,000      50,637

Palmer       SBOE6    17,395     8,251        0      12,982
Hickman      SBOE6     2,660       819    2,500       2,887

Webster     SBOE10     4,195     3,200       25       4,523
Maynard     SBOE10     4,332    14,797    4,000         848

Criss         SD11    18,137    29,403        0       5,048
Taylor        SD11    47,775   138,166        0   1,054,841

Gutierrez     SD19   199,270    50,785        0      11,309
Flores        SD19   627,919   531,779        0     606,589

I didn’t have a whole lot to say about these reports last time, and I don’t have much to add now. Chrysta Castaneda raised a few bucks and has done a bit of TV advertising, but there’s not a whole lot you can do statewide with less than a million bucks as an opening bid. She has done well with earned media, and I think Democrats may be more aware of this race than they usually are, which could have an effect on the margins if it keeps the third-party vote level low. To be sure, the Presidential race is by far the single biggest factor here. The hope is that Castaneda can outpace Biden, even by a little, and if so then she just needs it to be close at the top.

The same is true for the Supreme Court, where Dems at least are fired up by the rulings relating to mail ballots. I think the potential for crossovers is lower than in the RRC race, where Jim Wright is so obviously conflicted, but just retaining a sufficient portion of the Presidential vote would mean a lot. I know people like to talk about the lack of straight ticket voting, but 1) these races are all near the top of the ballot, following the three federal contests, and 2) the message about voting out Republicans at all levels has been pounded all over the place. How much will it matter? I have no idea. All this may be little more than a social media mirage. It’s just what I’ve observed.

I am a little surprised that Roland Gutierrez hasn’t raised more money, and it’s equally odd to me that Pete Flores has outspent him by that much. But like everywhere else, the top of the ticket will drive this result more than anything else. In the context of 2016, this was basically a 10-12 point Dem district. Flores has to convince a lot of people to cross over in order to win. That’s the challenge he faces.

More of these to come. Let me know what you think.

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.

A slightly less rosy view of Democratic prospects

Aug 1st, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Here’s the latest race ratings from Texas Elects:

Texas Election Source has updated 27 race ratings based on the latest polling, July campaign finance reports and primary runoff results. Twenty of those races moved one column toward the Democrats’ advantage. Our complete ratings are located here. Thirteen Republican-held seats in the legislature or congressional delegation are rated Toss-up or Lean Democratic. No Democrat-held seat is rated below Lean Democratic after several seats formerly in the Toss-up column were shifted into the Lean Democratic column.

The most significant impact of the new ratings on our projections is in the Texas House. Democrats need a net of nine seats to retake a majority in the chamber. We project they will get six, up three from our April ratings, which would cut the Republicans’ advantage to 77-73 entering the 2021 legislative session. Seven more Republican-held seats are projected to be within 1.5 percentage points of the range we consider a toss-up race. Only two Democrat-held seats are projected to be within 1.5 percentage points of a toss-up.

Four Republican-held seats are rated Lean Democratic, listed from greatest to least lean:

HD134 – Rep. Sarah Davis (R-Houston) vs. Ann Johnson (D)

HD138 open – Lacey Hull (R) vs. Akilah Bacy (D)

HD108 – Rep. Morgan Meyer (R-Dallas) vs. Joanna Cattanach (D); and

HD66 – Rep. Matt Shaheen (R-Plano) vs. Sharon Hirsch (D).

Since 2010, the four House seats on the list have drifted an average of 7.3 percentage points bluer, relative to the state as a whole. Two seats in other chambers – CD23 and SD19 – are also rated Lean Democratic. They have gotten relatively redder but remained 3.9 and 9.1 percentage points bluer than the state as a whole in 2018. We are projecting SD19 to get another 1.4 percentage points redder, but even that keeps it just .07% from being labeled as Likely Democratic.

Incidentally, HD134 would rate as Likely Democratic but for Davis’s consistent over-performance of other Republicans in the district. In 2018, the average Democrat received 55% of the vote in her district measured head-to-head against the Republican, but Davis survived thanks to ticket-splitting voters. Longtime political observers will remember former Rep. Jim McReynolds (D-Lufkin) who held onto his district by finishing as much as 19 points better than the rest of the Democratic slate. He was overwhelmed by rising Republican leanings in 2010 but still over-performed the rest of the ticket by 12 points. We project Davis’s ability to win over ticket-splitting voters will not be enough this year.

Dallas Co. was the epicenter of the Democratic surge in 2018. Only two Republicans represent the county in the state House currently, and we project that number will be zero after November. Tarrant Co., home to five races rated Toss-up or Lean Republican, and Fort Bend Co., with three seats in the Lean and Likely Republican columns, are expected to be the chief battleground counties in the House this year.

There’s more, so go read the rest. Texas Elects has a lot of premium content, but the free stuff is worth checking regularly.

Unlike the exuberant Capitol Inside projections, Texas Elects has the Dems falling short of a majority in the House, though it does expect three Congressional seats and SD19 to flip, and it has all of the statewide races as “Lean Republican”. You might be wondering about the inclusion of some Dem-held seats on the table, but as noted before, HDs 31, 34, and 74 are three of the four most purple districts out there that were held by Dems prior to 2018. They could be vulnerable in a bad year for Dems, though I don’t think this is that kind of year. As for HD41 and HD144, I can’t say I’m worried about them.

As that Capitol Inside projection was ebullient for Dems, this one is more sober. It sounds a little crazy to say when you think of the decade in total, but a six-seat pickup by Dems in the Lege would feel disappointing. It’s well within the range of possibility, and if all we ever think about is the best case scenario we’re not being honest with ourselves. All projections are art as well as science, in that you have to decide which factors are the most important and by how much. Individual candidates and fundraising prowess mean a lot, but so does the national environment, and so do demographic trends.

As far as candidates mattering goes, read that analysis of the HD134 race carefully. I come back to this a lot, but the key thing that happened in HD134, and in CD07 (which includes almost all of HD134) is exactly that the Democratic shift from 2016 to 2018 went much deeper than the top of the ticket. The average Republican judicial candidate won CD07 by thirteen points in 2016, and won HD134 by eight. In 2018, the average Republican judicial candidate barely won CD07. I didn’t do the exact same analysis for the State House districts, because I spent so much time talking about straight tickets and undervoting, but in service of that analysis I did this sample of judicial races, and as you can see each Dem was over fifty percent in HD134, by varying amounts. The point is, the fundamental nature of HD134 has shifted from “a Republican district that will sometimes support specific Democrats” to “a Democratic district that has – at least till now – supported Sarah Davis”. That’s what she’s up against this year, not just her November opponent but the baggage of the entire Republican Party and the prospect of a Democratic Speaker. She could hang on, and for sure she should not be underestimated, but this year, for the first time, she’s the underdog.

Anyway. I love this kind of analysis because it makes me think about my own assumptions and expectations for the year. Go take a look and see what you think.

July 2020 campaign finance reports: State races, part 1

Jul 31st, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

I’m going to take a look at the July finance reports from the various state races, which I will split into three parts. Part one will be statewide, SBOE, and State Senate, part two will be State House races from the Houston area, and part three will be State House races from elsewhere in the state. I’m not going to be doing every race of course, just the ones of interest. January reports for statewide candidates can be found here, and January reports for various SBOE and State Senate races can be found here.

Chrysta Castaneda, RRC
Jim Wright, RRC

Amy Clark Meachum, Supreme Court, Chief Justice
Nathan Hecht, Supreme Court, Chief Justice

Gisela Triana, Supreme Court, Place 8
Brett Busby, Supreme Court, Place 8

Kathy Cheng, Supreme Court, Place 6
Jane Bland, Supreme Court, Place 6

Staci Williams, Supreme Court, Place 7
Jeff Boyd, Supreme Court, Place 7

Rebecca Bell-Metereau, SBOE5
Lani Popp, SBOE5

Michelle Palmer, SBOE6
Will Hickman, SBOE6

Marsha Webster, SBOE10
Tom Maynard, SBOE10

Susan Criss, SD11
Larry Taylor, SD11

Roland Gutierrez, SD19
Pete Flores, SD19


Candidate   Office    Raised     Spent     Loan     On Hand
===========================================================
Castaneda      RRC    43,072    38,785   27,166      16,043
Wright         RRC   384,282    90,680   45,000     350,856

Meachum      SCOTX    51,093    44,271        0     132,303
Hecht        SCOTX   312,030   106,598        0     727,648

Triana       SCOTX    17,592     9,781        0     113,567
Busby        SCOTX   207,080   116,130        0     611,700

Cheng        SCOTX     7,637     4,033   90,174       9,292
Bland        SCOTX   264,370   106,000        0     417,335

Williams     SCOTX    14,135    47,262        0       7,466
Boyd         SCOTX   104,743   171,002        0     492,183

BellMetereau SBOE5    27,439     8,027    2,250      20,935
Popp         SBOE5    22,930    98,185   10,000      25,354

Palmer       SBOE6     6,873     9,134        0       6,076
Hickman      SBOE6     1,800     2,225    2,500       1,047

Webster     SBOE10     2,480     1,589       25       3,529
Maynard     SBOE10     3,170     1,103    5,000       4,216

Criss         SD11    22,586    14,071        0      13,644
Taylor        SD11    64,150   116,848        0   1,129,009

Gutierrez     SD19    60,074    99,208        0      11,309
Flores        SD19   295,760    65,577        0     563,459

I skipped the Court of Criminal Appeals races because no one raises any money in them. Jim Wright is the no-name Republican challenger who ousted incumbent Ryan Sitton in the GOP Railroad Commissioner primary, in an upset no one saw coming. He had $12K on hand in his eight-day report for the March primary. You can see where he is now, thanks to the Republican money machine including Tim Dunn (evil rich guy behind Empower Texans, $20K) and a slew of PACs. Ryan Sitton had $2.5 million in his account at the time of his defeat (all of which he can now donate to other campaigns, if he wants), so Wright isn’t in that league yet, but the point is that Wright wasn’t a no-name nobody for long. The establishment just moved over to his camp and did their thing. The Republican Party of Texas is currently a dumpster fire, and many of its county parties (see, in particular, Harris and Bexar) are even worse off, but the real power structure is still operating at peak efficiency.

The larger point I would make here, as we begin to see Joe Biden and Donald Trump ads on TV – I saw one of each while watching the Yankees-Nationals game on Saturday night – is that there’s more than one way to do a statewide campaign in Texas. For a million bucks or so, you could probably blanket local and cable TV in many of the media markets with ads for Chrysta Castaneda and the statewide Democratic judicial slate. I have seen my share of “vote for Republican judges” ads on my teevee, as recently as 2016 and 2018. Our Congressional candidates have shown there’s plenty of financial support out there for Democratic contenders, even those in odds-against races. There are many people who know enough to create a PAC, get some dough in the door, then cut an ad and buy some time for it. The numbers say this is the best chance we’ve had in a quarter century to win statewide. What are we going to do about that?

As for the Senate races, SD11 isn’t really competitive. It’s on the list of “races that may end up being closer than you might have thought because of prevailing conditions and recent political shifts”, but it’s too far out of reach to expect more than that. The thing I’d ponder is if the likes of Larry Taylor, and other Republican Senators in safe districts or not on the ballot this year, will put some of their spare cash towards helping their fellow partymates who are in tough races. I’m sure we can all think of a few of them. As for SD19, I’m not too worried about the current gap between Roland Gutierrez’s and Pete Flores’ cash on hand. I fully expect Gutierrez, the one Dem running in a truly flippable district, to have the resources he needs. But I’ll still check the 30-day report, because SD19 officially makes me nervous after the 2018 special election fiasco.

Nobody ever raises money in the SBOE races. It would have been fascinating to see what might have happened had cartoon character/performance artist Robert Morrow won that primary runoff, but alas. It’s just another boring contest between two normal people. Which, given the history of the SBOE, is actually quite comforting.

2020 primary runoff results: SBOE, Senate, House

Jul 15th, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Again, bullet points. Get used to it.

SBOE6 Dem: Michelle Palmer had a 65-35 lead after early voting, and that was pretty much all there was to it.

SBOE5 GOP: It’s much more boring and sedate, but the Republican candidate who didn’t arrive in a clown car, Lani Popp, defeated performance artist and semi-professional troll Robert Morrow. This is the best pickup opportunity for Dems, but since no one pays attention to SBOE races – the district are ginormous and candidates never have any money – there would have been a chance Morrow could have won if he’d been the nominee. Having Popp carry the GOP banner lowers the Dem chances slightly, but as we know from other elections it’s never a good idea for a chaos agent to be a viable candidate in any race. Whatever happens in November, this was the better outcome.

SD14 special election: Sarah Eckhardt has been over fifty percent all night. This may change by the morning, but as I type this she appears to be headed for a victory without a runoff.

UPDATE: The final results from Travis County show Sarah Eckhardt winning with 51.1%, but I’d forgotten that Bastrop County is also in SD14, and Eckhardt is only at 31% there thanks to 38% of the vote going to Republican Don Zimmerman. It appears that is enough to keep her under 50%, which means a runoff with Rep. Eddie Rodriguez.

SD19 Dem: State Rep. Roland Gutierrez has bounced back from his second place finish in March to lead 53-47 as I write this. Seems likely he’ll hand on.

SD27 Dem: Alas, Sen. Eddie Lucio has also hung on, leading 54-46 in the later evening. I believe he said this would be his last term. We can only hope.

State House Dem Sarah DeMerchant will get her third shot at HD26 in Fort Bend County. In Harris County, Akilah Bacy crushed it in HD138, Rep. Harold Dutton eked it out in HD142, and going late into the night, Penny Shaw was leading Anna Eastman in HD148. Eastman had a sizable lead in mail ballots – her campaign worked that pretty hard – but Shaw equaled that in early votes, and had a small but growing lead on Election Day. Anna’s a friend and I’m sad for her, but Shaw appears to be the nominee. I suspect – and I’d have said this regardless of who won – there will be another hotly contested primary in HD148 in 2022. It’s a fact of life with redistricting, and there’s a high potential for the neighborhoods in and around HD148 to be swapped in and out of various districts, as was the case in 2011. (I personally was at various times that year drawn into HDs 134, 143, 146, 147, and 148, before finally landing in 145. I can hardly wait to see what happens next.)

In Dallas, Lorraine Birabil, who had won the special election in HD100 and was leading by enough early on for me to say she had won, was trailing Jasmine Crockett by about 90 votes late in the evening, with three vote centers yet to report. (Hat tip to Scott Braddock and his indefatigable Twitter feed.) Elsewhere, Liz Campos won in HD119, while Lorenzo Sanchez (HD67) had a small lead. Two Republican incumbents were ousted, Dan Flynn (HD02) and JD Sheffield (HD59). Jacey Jetton had a modest lead in HD26.

UPDATE: Birabil is still trailing Crockett in HD100, but it’s not quite final yet.

A bullish take on the State House

Jul 8th, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

From Mike Hailey of Capitol Inside:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Runoff reminder: SBOE and State Senate

Jun 15th, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Previously: Statewide and Congress.

SBOE

Michelle Palmer

Michelle Palmer was the leading candidate in the SBOE6 race, the only SBOE primary to go to a runoff, with 46.8% of the vote. Palmer has the backing of the Victory Fund, which supports LGBTQ candidates around the country, and she was the candidate endorsed by the Houston Chronicle for the March primary. She has the co-endorsement of the Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation, AFL-CIO. She’s a very active presence on Facebook, in all of the various Democratic organizing groups. My interview with Michelle Palmer from the primary is here.

Kimberly McLeod

Kimberley McLeod was second in the March primary, with 34.6% of the vote. She recently took a new job as a Dean at Texas A&M University-Commerce. As you might imagine, there’s not a lot of news out there about the SBOE6 primary runoff, but in doing my googling I came across this article in Houston Style Magazine written by her entitled “What If We Treated School Bias & Inequity Like a Virus?” As noted above, she was also co-endorsed by the Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation, AFL-CIO. My interview with Kimberley McLeod from the primary is here.

Both candidates participated in a debate moderated by the 2020 Democratic Candidate Debates group, and you can see video of that here. SBOE6 was one of three such districts carried by Beto in 2018, and is the second-most likely SBOE district to flip. Taking all three would give Dems an 8-7 advantage on the Board.

State Senate

Rep. Roland Gutierrez

There are two State Senate primary runoffs, and they are both very important in different ways. SD19 is the district formerly held by Carlos Uresti, which was won by Republican Pete Flores in an embarrassing special election victory in 2018, which softened the blow they suffered later that year when Dems flipped two seats. Back for another try is State Rep. Roland Gutierrez, who finished third in that 2018 special election. Unlike that year, Gutierrez had to give up his long-held State House seat in HD119 to make this run for the Senate. Rep. Gutierrez was endorsed by the Express Newsfighting to legalize cannabis while in the House. Like all candidates in this weird cycle, he’s been campaigning virtually. He recently participated in a NAACP Collaboration Town Hall on police reform.

Xochil Peña Rodriguez

Rep. Gutierrez is the more experienced candidate in the runoff, but he was not the leading votegetter in March. That honor belongs to Xochil Peña Rodriguez, who got 43.9% of the vote to Gutierrez’s 37.8%. She’s a first-time candidate, but she’s hardly new to politics, as she is the daughter of former Congressman Ciro Rodriguez. The elder Rodriguez is now a Justice of the Peace in Bexar County, which may be a blessing and a curse since JP Rodriguez has now twice been accused of violating state judicial canon by campaigning for her in his official capacity. Be that as it may, you can hear Xochil Peña Rodriguez speak for herself in a conversation with a friend who is an emergency nurse back in Texas after working in New York City during the COVID-19 crisis here.

SD19 is the one State Senate race to watch in November, as it’s by far the most likely to flip. It’s consistently around a 53-55% Dem district, with Beto getting over 56% in 2018; even Lupe Valdez cracked 50% there. Taking SD19 would make the partisan balance 19R to 13D, which would then force Dan Patrick to abandon the 3/5 rule and go full-on majority-rules in the State Senate. That’s a move that will benefit Patrick and the Republicans in the short term, but will redound to Democratic benefit the day after Dems are finally able to win a sixteenth seat in that body. Expect there to be a lot of money spent in this district.

Sara Stapleton-Barrera

While SD19 is the race most likely to affect the partisan balance in the State Senate, there’s another race that can definitely affect the composition of the Senate. Longtime anti-choice and anti-LGBT Senator Eddie Lucio faced the first real challenge he’s had in a long time in SD27, and though he was over fifty percent for much of the night he eventually slipped down to 49.8%. As such, he will face Sara Stapleton-Barrera, who finished second with 35.6%, in July. Because the opportunity to upgrade from Eddie Lucio is so enticing, Stapleton-Barrera has racked up a bunch of endorsements from progressive groups, including the Texas Equity PAC, the political arm of Equality Texas; the Human Rights Campaign; the Texas AFT, and Progress Texas. (Both Stapleton-Barrera and Xochil Peña Rodriguez have also been endorsed by Annie’s List.) Sen. Lucio, on the other hand, is being backed by the Koch Brothers PAC. Need I say more? Back when everyone was getting excited about Jessica Cisneros’ challenge to Rep. Henry Cuellar, I said multiple times that swapping out a bad member of the State Senate for a better one has way more potential for good than the same swap in Congress, just by the numbers – remember, the Senator in SD27 will be one of 12 or 13 total Dems, barring something unexpected. It’s way past time for Eddie Lucio to go. Sara Stapleton-Barrera is the vehicle to get him out of there.

Next time: A look at the State Rep runoffs.

Does getting to 40% make you likely to win the runoff?

Mar 15th, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Anna Eastman

I was talking with some fellow political nerds last week, and one of the topics was the forthcoming runoffs. As is usually the case, this year we have some runoffs between candidates who finished fairly close together in round one, and some in which one candidate has a clear lead based on the initial election. The consensus we had was that candidates in the latter category, especially those who topped 40% on Super Tuesday, are basically locks to win in May. The only counter-example we could think of off the tops of our heads was Borris Miles beating Al Edwards, who had been at 48%, in the 2006 runoff for HD146.

So, later on I spent a few minutes on the Secretary of State election archive pages, looking through past Democratic primary results and tracking those where the leader had more than forty percent to see who went on to win in the runoff. Here’s what I found:

2018

Winners – CD03, CD10, CD23, CD31, Governor, SD17,
Losers – CD27, HD37, HD45, HD64, HD109*, HD133*

2016

Winners – CD15, HD27
Losers – SBOE6

2014

Winners – Senate, SBOE13
Losers – HD105

2012
Winners – CD34, HD95, HD137
Losers – CD23*, SBOE2

2010
Winners – CD10, HD76*

2008
Winners – CD32, RRC

2006
Winners – Senate, Lt Gov, HD42, HD47*
Losers – HD146

In each of the cited races, the leading candidate had at least 40% of the primary vote. Races that have asterisks indicate that the runnerup also had at least 40%. As you can see, up until 2018, having forty percent or more in the primary was indeed a pretty good indicator of success in overtime. The last cycle provided quite a few counterexamples, however, including one incumbent (Rene Oliveira, who had been busted for a DWI earlier) who went down. So maybe 40% isn’t such a magical number, or maybe it’s harder now than it was before 2012. Or maybe this is just a really small sample and we should be careful about drawing broad conclusions from it.

Fortunately, we have quite a few races this year to add to this sample:

CD03 – Lulu Seikaly 44.5%, Sean McCaffity 43.8%
CD10 – Mike Siegel 44.0%, Pritesh Gandhi 33.1%
CD13 – Gus Trujillo 42.2%, Greg Sagan 34.7%
CD17 – Rick Kennedy 47.9%, David Jaramillo 35.0%
CD24 – Kim Olson 40.9%, Candace Valenzuela 30.4%
SBOE6 – Michelle Palmer 46.8%, Kimberly McLeod 34.6%
SD19 – Xochil Pena Rodriguez 43.7%, Roland Gutierrez 37.3%
SD27 – Eddie Lucio 49.8%, Sara Stapleton-Barrera 35.6%
HD119 – Liz Campos 46.1%, Jennifer Ramos 43.7%
HD138 – Akilah Bacy 46.7, Jenifer Pool 29.3%
HD142 – Harold Dutton 45.2%, Jerry Davis 25.3%
HD148 – Anna Eastman 41.6%, Penny Shaw 22.1%
138th District Court – Gabby Garcia 48.0%, Helen Delgadillo 31.0%
164th District Court – Cheryl Elliott Thornton 41.3%, Alexandra Smoots-Thomas 33.1%

I’ll be sure to do an update in May, when we can see if the leading candidates mostly held serve or not. Place your bets.

Runoff roundup

Mar 7th, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Here, as best as I can determine, are the runoffs of interest for May:

US Senate – MJ Hegar versus Royce West

CD02 – Sima Ladjevardian versus Elisa Cardnell
CD03 – Lulu Seikaly versus Sean McCaffity
CD10 – Mike Siegel versus Pritesh Gandhi
CD17 – Rick Kennedy versus David Jaramillo (D), Pete Sessions versus Renee Swann (R)
CD22 – Troy Nehls versus Kathaleen Wall (R)
CD23 – Tony Gonzales versus Raul Reyes (R)
CD24 – Kim Olson versus Candace Valenzuela
CD31 – Christine Eady Mann versus Donna Imam

Note that Wendy Davis (CD21), Sri Kulkarni (CD22), Gina Ortiz Jones (CD23), and on the Republican side Wesley Hunt (CD07) all won outright. I skipped a couple of Republican runoffs in safe D districts, because life is short.

Railroad Commissioner – Chrysta Castaneda versus Roberto Alonzo

SBOE5 – Robert Morrow versus Lani Popp (R, wackadoo versus what passes for normal)
SBOE6 – Michelle Palmer versus Kimberley McLeod

SD19 – Xochil Peña Rodriguez versus Roland Gutierrez
SD27 – Eddie Lucio versus Sara Stapleton-Barrera

Didn’t mention this yesterday, but Susan Criss prevailed in SD11.

HD02 – Dan Flynn versus Bryan Slaton (R)
HD25 – Ro’Vin Garrett versus Cody Vasut (R, this is Dennis Bonnen’s old seat)
HD26 – Suleman Lalani versus Sarah DeMerchant (D), Matt Morgan versus Jacey Jetton (R)
HD45 – Carrie Isaac versus Kent Wymore (R)
HD47 – Jennifer Fleck versus Don Zimmerman (R)
HD59 – Shelby Slawson versus JD Sheffield (R)
HD60 – Jon Francis versus Glenn Rogers (R)
HD67 – Tom Adair versus Lorenzo Sanchez
HD100 – Lorraine Birabil versus Jasmine Crockett
HD119 – Liz Campos versus Jennifer Ramos
HD138 – Akilah Bacy versus Jenifer Pool
HD142 – Harold Dutton versus Jerry Davis
HD148 – Anna Eastman versus Penny Shaw

Note that in that HD47 primary, one (1) vote separates second and third place, according to the Travis County Clerk. I assume there will be a recount, and even before then late-arriving mail ballots could change this. In the event of an actual tie, there will be a coin flip to determine who goes to the runoff. I’m rooting so hard for that outcome, you guys.

In the HD67 primary, 63 votes separate Lorenzo Sanchez and Rocio Gosewehr Hernandez, or 0.3 percentage points. I would expect a recount there as well, but with a far lesser chance of affecting the outcome.

Lorraine Birabil was the winner of the special election in HD100 to fill out the unexpired term of Eric Johnson, who is now Mayor of Dallas. Anna Eastman was the winner of the special election in HD148 to succeed Jessica Farrar.

14th Court of Appeals, Place 7 – Tamika Craft versus Cheri Thomas

164th District Court – Cheryl Elliott Thornton versus Alex Smoots-Thomas
339th Criminal Court – Te’iva Bell versus Candance White

County Commissioner, Precinct 3 – Diana Martinez Alexander versus Michael Moore

Moore was leading most of the night, but Alexander caught and passed him as final results came in. I don’t care to go through the various Constable and JP races, but the good Jerry Garcia was leading problematic incumbent Chris Diaz going into the Precinct 2 Constable runoff.

Whatever turnout there will be in the runoffs will be driven primarily by the Dem Senate race and the Congressional races on both sides. Won’t be much, but it ought to be a bit more than usual, and surely more on the D side if there were no Senate runoff.

2020 primary results: State races

Mar 4th, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

I’m going to direct you to the Texas Tribune results page, which combines both parties’ results and is a couple orders of magnitude less sucky than the revamped SOS election night results pages. Good Lord, whoever designed that “upgrade” from the lower-tech previous version should be banished to a desert island. We’re gonna do bullet points here:

– As with the Harris County judicial races, female candidates swept the statewide judicial nominations. Brandon Birmingham, who was unopposed for CCA Place 9, will be the lone Democratic dude on the statewide judicial ballot. Staci Williams was leading Brandy Voss for Supreme Court Place 7. On the Republican side, incumbent CCA Place 3 incumbent Bert Richardson was holding on against Rick Perry fangirl Gina Parker. Good grief.

– Chrysta Castaneda and former State Rep. Roberto Alonzo were headed to a runoff for Railroad Commissioner. On the Republican side, incumbent Ryan Sitton was trailing his opponent, some dude named Jim Wright. I was paying no attention to that one, so I’ll be looking for some news stories today to explain what happened there.

– Michelle Palmer and Kimberley McLeod were headed to a runoff in SBOE 6, while Marsha Burnett-Webster was cruising in SBOE 10. Rebecca Bell-Metereau was on her way to another shot at SBOE5, and, well, lookie here:

Robert Morrow is leading in the Republican primary races for the State Board of Education District 5 seat, which represents an area spanning Austin to San Antonio, according to some voting returns Tuesday night.

With about 86,000 votes counted, Morrow, a provocateur who often posts photos of women’s breasts on social media, had 39% of votes, followed by Lani Popp, a speech pathologist at the Northside school district in San Antonio, who had 36% of votes. Inga Cotton, executive director of San Antonio Charter Moms, a nonprofit that provides resources to families about charter schools, has 25% of votes. If nobody wins more than 50% of votes, the two highest vote recipients will head to a run-off election May 26.

Chairman of the Travis County GOP Matt Mackowiak was already signaling his dismay at Morrow’s lead Tuesday night.

You may recall that Morrow was for a brief time the Chair of the Travis County GOP. Have fun dealing with that shit sandwich, Matt.

– Sen. Eddie Lucio was on the knife’s edge to win in SD27. He was just over 50% when last I looked. Sara Stapleton-Barrera was in second, with about 34%. This still could go to a runoff, we’ll see. In SD19, the main pickup opportunity for Dems, Xochil Pena Rodriguez led Roland Gutierrez and would face him in the runoff. Sen. Borris Miles was around 60% of the vote in his race.

– For the State House, Natali Hurtado (HD126) and Ann Johnson (HD134) won easily. Akilah Bacy was headed to a runoff with Jenifer Pool in HD138, and Anna Eastman will have to run one more race, this time against Penny Shaw, in HD148. As of this writing, Rep. Harold Dutton was at 50.03% in his race, eight votes above the line to avoid a runoff. Needless to say, that can change. All other incumbents, in Harris and elsewhere, were headed to victory, though on the GOP side Reps. Dan Flynn and JD Sheffield were facing runoffs. Suleman Lalani and Sarah DeMerchant were leading in HD26.

Like I said, a few things are still in flux, but this is where we are with about two-thirds of the Harris County vote in. I’ll do updates as needed and will have more tomorrow.

UPDATE: In the end, both Sen. Eddie Lucio and Rep. Harold Dutton fell short of fifty percent and will be in runoffs in May.

January 2020 campaign finance reports: SBOE and State Senate

Jan 31st, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

Let’s finish off our review of state offices. This post will cover State Board of Education, District 6, and the State Senate. My two-part look at the State House was here and here, Harris County offices were here, and statewide races were here.

Debra Kerner, SBOE6
Kimberly McLeod, SBOE6
Michelle Palmer, SBOE6

Borris Miles, SD13
Richard Andrews, SD13
Milinda Morris, SD13

Eddie Lucio, SD27
Sara Stapleton-Barrera, SD27
Ruben Cortez, SD27

Audrey Spanko, SD01
Jay Stittleburg, SD04
Carol Alvarado, SD06
Susan Criss, SD11
Margarita Ruiz Johnson, SD11
Randy Daniels, SD12
Shadi Zitoon, SD12
Michael Antalan, SD18
Roland Gutierrez, SD19
Freddy Ramirez, SD19
Xochil Pena Rodriguez, SD19
Robert Vick, SD22
Clayton Tucker, SD24


Candidate     Raised     Spent     Loan     On Hand
===================================================
Kerner        10,556     2,636    3,000      16,517
McLeod         1,080     1,948        0       1,080
Palmer         6,076     1,722        0       7,394

Miles         52,650    41,355  656,943      29,950
Andrews        4,575     4,946    3,849         219
Morris           260     4,530   10,000       1,250

Lucio        609,622   750,263   34,557      31,972
Barrera        5,384   150,655  141,560           0
Cortez        78,338    27,777        0       6,126

Spanko        21,253    12,150        0       6,572
Stittleburg    4,574     1,499        0       3,147
Alvarado     204,820    39,550        0     386,687
Criss         15,920    33,063        0       9,697
Johnson
Daniels
Zitoon         3,550     2,573    2,250       3,226
Antalan            0         0        0           0
Gutierrez    188,588   201,288        0     109,337
Ramirez       17,690    11,414        0       5,576
Rodriguez     56,038    63,004  125,000     106,347
Vick           2,630     1,985      550       1,515
Tucker        24,059    12,180        0       2,129

There are three SBOE races of interest around the state, but I limited myself to SBOE6 because no one raises any money for any of them. In the general election they can ride the partisan wave – being a state office, they’re near the top of the ballot, so whatever effect the lack of straight-ticket voting there will be, it should be relatively minimal for them – but in a high turnout primary, who knows what will happen. At least all the choices are good.

There are four contested State Senate primaries. Sen. Borris Miles has two challengers, neither of whom has raised much money. I haven’t seen anything to suggest this is a race of interest. Former District Court Judge and HD23 candidate Susan Criss faces former CD22 candidate Margaret Ruiz Johnson in SD11, which is on the far outer edges of competitiveness – if SD11 turns into a close race in the fall, Democrats are having a very good year. Criss should have some name recognition. Johnson has not filed a report.

The two most interesting races are in SDs 19 and 27. SD19 is the seat Democrats coughed up in a 2018 special election following the resignation of Carlos Uresti. State Rep. Roland Gutierrez, who finished third in that special election, decided to forego running for re-election in order to take another shot at this seat. He’s raised the most money, but Xochil Pena Rodriguez has an equivalent amount of cash thanks to her loan. This is probably Gutierrez’s race to lose. Whoever does win will be counted on to take that seat back and force Dan Patrick to kill off the remnant of the two thirds rule, for his short term benefit and the Democrats’ long term gain.

Sen. Eddie Lucio has two challengers, and his finance report shows he’s taking the threat seriously. Ruben Cortez is an incumbent SBOE member, and he was recently endorsed by Texas Parent PAC, which accused Lucio of “following the lead of Lt. Governor Dan Patrick when he pushes legislation that harms public education.” To me, this is a far more consequential primary than the nasty and expensive one going on in CD28, mostly because there are a lot more Congressfolk than there are State Senators, and one rogue State Senator can be the difference in bad legislation passing or good bills dying in a way that one rogue Congressperson seldom is. Nancy Pelosi can take care of her business with or without Henry Cuellar. Carol Alvarado, the next Senate Democratic Caucus Chair, needs a much more reliable ally in SD27. Here’s hoping she gets one.

Dan Patrick makes the most predictable announcement ever

Jan 25th, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

6 comments

Really, who didn’t see this coming?

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Thursday he may further lower the threshold required to bring bills to the Senate floor if Republicans lose one or two seats in November.

Patrick made the comment at a conservative policy conference in Austin while discussing the current makeup of the upper chamber, which has 19 Republicans and 12 Democrats. Currently, 19 votes are required to put legislation on the floor for passage. But Republicans are facing the real possibility of losing at least one caucus member in 2020. Sen. Pete Flores, R-Pleasanton, is running for reelection in a solidly Democratic district after winning his seat in 2018 special election upset.

“I’m right there at that number, and if we lose one or two seats, then we might have to go to 16 next session,” Patrick said. “We might have to go to a simple majority because we will not be stopped in leading on federalism in the United States of America.”

Honestly, this is good news and we should be thankful for it. For one, this is the closest thing any Republican will come to admitting in public that they expect to lose SD19, a seat that they had the very good fortune to borrow for the 2019 session. There’s no reason Dan Patrick would voluntarily say this out loud to people who might report on it otherwise. He’s laying the groundwork. But look, while the two-thirds-that-is-now-three-fifths rule had its place in an older time, when the parties were less sorted by ideology and that rule wasn’t generally used for partisan reasons, it’s an anti-majoritarian abomination that just has no place in a democracy. Just look at the devastation that the filibuster wrought in the US Senate during the Obama presidency. You can’t be in favor of killing the filibuster and preserving the 2/3-3/5 rule. At least, I can’t.

Sure, in the short term, if Dems don’t take the House this year, losing the 3/5 rule will suck. Patrick and his cronies will get another session to shove through all the ridiculous wingnut crap they can, and may get to keep doing it even longer given that they’d be in control of redistricting. But someday, maybe even someday in the 20’s, the Dems are going to retake the Senate. Maybe it’ll happen in 2022, when all of the Senate is on the ballot, and maybe it’ll happen in conjunction with Dems winning statewide and keeping the House. Now ask yourself, in a Senate where Dems have 16 or 17 members: Do you want to let Senate Republicans control that chamber’s agenda by blocking every single bill the House passes that they don’t like? Or would you rather let those 16 or 17 Dem Senators do the job they were elected to do?

The brilliant thing is that when the Democratic Lieutenant Governor announces the Senate rules, which do not include a 2/3 or 3/5 rule, no one can cry about the vicious partisanship of it all, because Dan Patrick will have already set the precedent. He’ll get to have it first, but we’ll get it next, and we won’t have to do any work to make it happen. If you don’t see that as a golden opportunity, even if it is one whose timeline is unknown, I don’t know what to tell you.

After-deadline filing review: RRC, SBOE, Senate

Dec 13th, 2019

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Moving on to state offices that are not the State House (that’s next). See here and here for previous entries.

RRC: The only statewide non-federal office on the ballot, as is usually the case in Presidential years. There are four candidates, three of whom we’re acquainted with. I’ve previously mentioned two of the candidates, Chrysta Castañeda, whom I met at the recent CEC meeting, and Kelly Stone, whom I’ve not met but have spoken to over the phone. There’s former State Rep. Roberto Alonzo, who was defeated in the primary last year by State Rep. Jessica Gonzalez. The fourth candidate is Mark Watson, whom I cannot conclusively identify. Thankfully, Grady Yarbrough did not file.

SBOE: Late in the day, Rebecca Bell-Metereau filed for SBOE5; she has run for this office a couple of times before, including in 2016, when she lost by four points as Hillary Clinton carried the district. This would be the year to run. I still can’t find anything related to Letti Bresnahan’s campaign, not even confirmation that the person I believe to be the candidate for this office is indeed that candidate. There are two candidates for SBOE10, the third district that Beto carried but the longest reach of the three. One is Stephen Wyman, who has run a couple of times for HD20 in Williamson County, and the other is Marsha Burnett-Webster, who appears to be the wife of Cecil Webster, former Fayette County Democratic Party Chair who has run for HD13 a couple of times. Finally, the Democratic candidate in SBOE8, Sharon Berry, has dropped out.

Senate: I’m going to go through the individual races that I didn’t discuss in the Houston-area post.

Audrey Spanko is running in SD01 – here’s a news story about her. She sounds like a terrific candidate, running in a tough district.

There are two candidates running in SD12, which is the closest thing to a swing-ish district we have – it’s a bit more Republican than SD19 is Democratic, and a teensy bit bluer than SD11. If we’re seriously talking about it being competitive next year, Democrats are having an amazing cycle. Anyway, Shadi Zitoon and Randy Daniels are vying to be the nominee.

SD19 is the noisy epicenter of the otherwise quiet Senate campaign space. In the context of a Presidential year, it should be a ten-to-twelve-point Dem district, and it’s a must have. There are four candidates running, and we’re familiar with two of them, State Rep. Roland Gutierrez, and Xochil Peña Rodriguez,, daughter of former Rep. Ciro Rodriguez. The others are Freddy Ramirez, a Bexar County prosecutor, and Belinda Shvetz.

SD22 and SD24 are not competitive districts. Robert Vick and Clayton Tucker have the arduous tasks of running in them.

Sen. Eddie Lucio is finally getting the serious primary challenge he deserves in SD27. Ruben Cortez and Sara Stapleton Barrera hope to usher him out.

SD29 is open following the retirement of Sen. Jose Rordiguez. State Rep. Cesar Blanco has the field to himself.

Next up, the Lege. As always, let me know what you think.

The “Has Not Yet Filed” list

Dec 9th, 2019

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

Today is the actual, official filing deadline. Anyone who has not filed for a spot in the primary by 6 PM today is not a candidate for a Democratic nomination in 2020. A whole lot of people have already filed, and a whole lot more will file today – I’m going to have a lot to talk about with this tomorrow and for the rest of the week – but there are still a few notable absences (with the caveat that the SOS list may not be complete). So with that in mind, here are the “why aren’t they there yet?” list to ponder as the hours tick down.

US Senate: MJ Hegar is not yet listed. John Love, the Midland City Council member who announced his candidacy in October, has ended his campaign, on the grounds that he lacked the time and finances. Good for him for recognizing his situation, and I hope he looks at 2022 for another possible statewide campaign. Eleven candidates have filed so far, Hegar will make it 12 when she makes it official.

US Congress: Reps. Joaquin Castro (CD20) and Colin Allred (CD32) are not on the list as of Sunday evening. Some of the more recent entrants in CDs 03 and 31 – Tanner Do, Chris Suprun, Dan Jangigian – are not yet on the list. Much-ballyhooed CD28 challenger Jessica Cisneros is not yet on the list. Wendy Davis has CD21 to herself right now, as Jennie Leeder has not yet appeared. CDs 19, 27, and 36 do not yet have Democratic candidates. And while this has nothing to do with our side, the Republican field in CD22 is mind-bogglingly large. Good luck with that.

Railroad Commissioner: Kelly Stone had not filed as of Sunday, but she has an event on her candidate Facebook page announcing her filing at 2:30 today. Former State Rep. Robert Alonzo has joined the field.

SBOE: All positions are accounted for. Letti Bresnahan remains the only candidate in District 5, the most flippable one on the board. I still can’t find any information online about her candidacy.

State Senate: No candidates yet in SDs 12, 18, 22, or 28. Not surprising, as none are competitive, but a full slate is still nice. Sens. Borris Miles and Eddie Lucio now each have two opponents, the field in SD19 is four deep, and Rep. Cesar Blanco still has SD29 all to himself.

State House: Far as I can tell, the only incumbent who hasn’t filed yet is Rep. Rene Oliveira in HD37. Of the top targets for 2020 based on Beto’s performance, HDs 23, 43, and 84 do not yet have Democratic candidates. Those are if not the bottom three on the competitiveness scale, with the first two trending away from us, they’re close to it. If they go unfilled it will still be a waste, but about the smallest possible waste. Rep. Ron Reynolds does not have a challenger. Sean Villasana, running for the HD119 seat being vacated by Rep. Roland Gutierrez as he runs for SD19, has the field to himself so far. In all of the big counties, the only one missing a Dem right now is HD99 in Tarrant, which is not particularly competitive.

District Courts: Limiting myself to Harris County, Judges Jaclanel McFarland (133rd Civil), Ursula Hall (165th Civil), Elaine Palmer (215th Civil), and George Powell (351st Criminal) have not filed. Other candidates have filed in the 165th and 351st, as have candidates in the 337th Criminal (Herb Ritchie) and 339th Criminal (Maria Jackson) where the incumbents are known to not be running again. Alex Smoots-Thomas now has an opponent for the 164th, and I am told another may be on the way.

Harris County offices: All of the candidates I’ve tracked for District Attorney, County Attorney, Sheriff, and Tax Assessor have now filed; I’m told another candidate may be filing for Tax Assessor, but I don’t know any more than that. David Brown has not yet filed for HCDE Position 7 At Large, but he was at the CEC meeting yesterday and I expect to see him on the ballot. Luis Guajardo has not yet filed for Commissioners Court in Precinct 3. There’s still no JP candidates in Precincts 4 and 8, and no Constable in Precinct 8. And Precinct 1 Constable Alan Rosen is still missing. Could that mean something? We’ll find out today. I’ll have a report tomorrow.

Filing period preview: SBOE, Senate, House

Nov 13th, 2019

by Charles Kuffner.

8 comments

Previously: Congress, and Statewide. As before, I am using the Patrick Svitek spreadsheet as my primary reference.

Buckle up, there’s a lot to talk about here. I’m going to limit my discussion of State House races to the greater Houston area.

SBOE: There are three SBOE seats on the ballot that were carried by Beto in 2018. Winning all three would give Democrats am 8-7 majority on this famously flaky board. One of these seats in within Harris County, and that’s SBOE6, where Michelle Palmer and Debra Kerner have been in for some time.

State Senate: Unlike 2018, there’s really only one competitive district on the ballot, and that’s SD19, the seat Dems fumbled away in the special election. State Rep. Roland Gutierrez and Xochil Peña Rodriguez, daughter of former Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, are in. Despite the self-own in 2018, the district is basically 55-45 Dem, with a bit of variance on either end. Beto took it by 15 points, but even Lupe Valdez cleared fifty percent. A return to normal partisan behavior should make Pete Flores a temporary Senator.

Democratic incumbents Carol Alvarado (SD06) and Borris Miles (SD13) do not have primary opponents as yet. I tend to think someone will run against Miles after those harassment allegations against him were reported, but if so it will likely be a newcomer. One other Dem who both needs and has primary opponents is Eddie Lucio; I discussed Ruben Cortez and Sara Stapleton-Barrera, his known opponents, here. SD29 in El Paso is open following the retirement of Jose Rodriguez, with State Rep. Cesar Blanco the only contender to succeed him so far.

The two Republican-held seats in the Houston area have Dem challengers. For SD04, mostly in Montgomery County, there’s Jay Stittleburg, who ran for Montgomery County Judge in 2018. Griffin Winkworth is listed in the spreadsheet as having filed a designation of Treasurer. SD11 has two contenders: Margarita Ruiz Johnson, who was a candidate for CD22 in 2018 but did not advance to the runoff, and Susan Criss, former District Court judge in Galveston County and candidate for HD23 in 2014. Neither district is particularly competitive – Beto got 41.5% in SD11, but most Republicans carried it by 20 or more.

State House: Let’s start with the districts that don’t have Dem challengers yet. As noted, this is limited to the greater Houston area. You can peruse the spreadsheet at your leisure for other districts.

HD03 (Montgomery/Waller)
HD15 (Montgomery)
HD16 (Montgomery)
HD18 (Liberty)
HD23 (Galveston)
HD24 (Galveston)
HD29 (Brazoria)
HD85 (Fort Bend/Wharton/Jackson)
HD127 (Harris)
HD129 (Harris)
HD133 (Harris)
HD150 (Harris)

HDs 29 (which originally had a Dem who later withdrew) and 127 were the only ones in 2018 that went unchallenged. HD29 in particular is a district of interest, as it was a 47% Beto district in 2018.

Now for Republican-held districts that do have Dem challengers, at least according to the spreadsheet.

HD25 (Brazoria, the now-open Dennis Bonnen seat) – Someone named J. Patrick Henry, whom I cannot conclusively identify.
HD26 (Fort Bend) – Sarah DeMerchant, the 2018 candidate; Rish Oberoi; Suleman Lalani.
HD28 (Fort Bend) – We all know about Eliz Markowitz, right?
HD126 (Harris) – Natali Hurtado, the 2018 candidate.
HD128 (Harris) – Josh Markle, who got a nice fundraising boost from Beto after his little tiff with incumbent Briscoe Cain over automatic weapons.
HD130 (Harris) – Bryan Henry.
HD134 (Harris) – Ann Johnson, the 2012 candidate; Ruby Powers; Lanny Bose, the most recent entrant.
HD138 (Harris) – Akilah Bacy; Josh Wallenstein, who was a candidate in the primary for HCDE at large in 2018.

Two Democratic incumbents so far have primary opponents, Alma Allen in HD131 (Carey Lashley) and Garnet Coleman in HD147 (Aurelia Wagner). Both always seem to draw primary opponents, for whatever the reason. Ron Reynolds in HD26 usually draws one as well, for reasons that are more clear. I note that the spreadsheet lists Richard Bonton as a Republican opponent for Harold Dutton in HD142. Bonton ran against Dutton in the Dem primary in 2018.

We can’t end this conversation without bringing up HD148. I fully expect Anna Eastman to win the special election runoff, which is most likely be on December 14, the same day as the city of Houston runoffs. It doesn’t have to be on the 14th – Greg Abbott sets the runoff date, and he has some discretion. The last time we had a special election for a State Rep seat in an odd year was 2005 with the election in HD143, and that runoff was held on the same date as the city runoffs. Not a guarantee, but a data point. In any event, whatever happens in that race, there’s no reason to believe that some other candidates won’t file for the primary in HD148 as well. Any of the runners up may conclude that this was a wonky election, and that maybe they lost some votes to not-that-Adrian-Garcia. For sure, the primary will have a very different electorate, and Anna Eastman will not be very well known to them. I will be a little surprised if Eastman has the primary to herself.

Last but not least in this series: county races. I don’t get to lean on the spreadsheet for that one.

Roland Gutierrez running in SD19

Nov 8th, 2019

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Most of the action in Texas in 2020 is in the Congressional and State Rep races, but there’s one big State Senate pickup opportunity, and we need to close the deal on it.

Rep. Roland Gutierrez

State Rep. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio, is set to announce Saturday that he is running again for Senate District 19 after coming up short in a special election last year that ended in a Republican upset.

Gutierrez’s campaign said he will make the announcement at 2 p.m. at an event in San Antonio.

After the 2018 debacle, conditions are expected to be much more favorable for Democrats in November 2020, and they are confident they can knock off Sen. Pete Flores, R-Pleasanton. But first there will be a contested Democratic primary: San Antonio lawyer Xochil Peña Rodriguez is already running. She is the daughter of former U.S. Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, D-San Antonio.

For now, SD-19 is the only Texas Senate race expected to be competitive in the general election next year. Still, it has high stakes: If Democrats flip the seat, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick could lose the 19-member supermajority that is required to bring bills to the Senate floor without Democratic support.

That story was from Friday; Rep. Gutierrez subsequently did formally announce his candidacy. He’ll have to give up his State Rep seat to do this, but he will likely be the strongest candidate against Pete Flores. I feel like residual bad blood following the 2018 special election, in which later entrant Pete Gallego finished ahead of Gutierrez but then lost the runoff, was a part of why Dems failed to hold this seat. Having Presidential year turnout in a district that was basically 55-45 Dem in 2016 will certainly help, but having unity would be nice as well. Whoever wins the primary needs to have the support of everyone else going into November. No screwups this time, please.

HD148 update

Aug 28th, 2019

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

From TX Elects:

HD148 special: Houston physician Terah Isaacson established a campaign committee for a potential run for the seat being vacated by Rep. Jessica Farrar (D-Houston) as a Democrat.

Houston resident Lui LaRotta established a campaign committee for the race as a Republican. LaRotta chairs the Houston area chapter of the Republican Liberty Caucus.

It turns out that you can search to see who has filed a designation of Treasurer for a state office. Scrolling down to the appropriate level, we get the following, as of Tuesday morning the 27th:

83999 COH Isaacson, Terah C. 08/20/2019 State Representative Dist 148
65547 COH Yarbrough Camarena, Kendra J. 08/21/2019 State Representative Dist 148
84004 COH LaRotta, Luis Humberto 08/21/2019 State Representative Dist 148
83177 COH Mundy, Mia 11/26/2018 State Representative Dist 148
83989 COH Shaw, Penny 08/18/2019 State Representative Dist 148

The date next to the candidates’ names represents the date that the CTA was filed. Obviously, the ones from the last few days are the ones of interest, but I’ll review them all anyway. I’m skipping the CTA that outgoing Rep. Jessica Farrar has filed back in 1993. I’m also skipping Ryan McConnico, who was the Republican candidate for HD148 in 2018. He got 32% of the vote. I have to confess, I had no idea who he was till I saw his name here and looked him up. The fact that he has a Treasurer doesn’t mean he has any interest in this special election, but I’ll note his name in passing here anyway, just in case.

Terah Isaacson does not appear to have a Facebook page. This was the top Google result for her.

Lui LaRotta does have a Facebook page, and a LinkedIn page. I can’t tell you much more than that.

Mia Mundy (pronounced “Maya”, as in Maya Angelou) was a candidate in the SD06 special election earlier this year; she got 2.13% in that four-candidate race. Her Facebook page says she’s running in this special election as well.

Kendra Yarbrough Camarena and Penny Shaw, we’ve already discussed.

It also turns out that Trib reporter Patrick Svitek has been maintaining a spreadsheet of 2020 candidates, which for these purposes also includes candidates for the November 2019 special legislative elections. His list has Isaacson, LaRotta, Yarbrough Camarena, Shaw, and one more:

Anna Nunez, former Communications Coordinator for the ACLU of Texas, now a Special Programs Coordinator for the UT Health Science Center. I met her in 2015 during the fight to save HERO, and she’s pretty terrific. The voters in HD148 will have a tough decision to make, there are several really good candidates.

This campaign is very much a sprint, with the real action likely to occur in the runoff. The first job for everyone in this race is to communicate to voters that there is a special election and that they are running in it. That runoff, by the way, would be the same day as the city of Houston election runoffs as well, so given the large number of Houston elections that are sure to head to a second round, including the Mayor’s race, it won’t be much easier to get attention to this race in December than it is now.

(In case you were wondering, the last time there was a November special legislative election in the Houston area in an odd-numbered year was in 2005, for the special election in HD143 to succeed the late Joe Moreno. That runoff did coincide with the city of Houston and HISD runoffs, as would be the case this year. The main difference was that there was a small number of mostly low-turnout runoffs in 2005. That won’t be the case this year.)

One more thing, on an unrelated note:

Meant to update this over weekend: Peña Rodriguez is indeed running. #SD19 #txlege

— Patrick Svitek (@PatrickSvitek) 8:42 PM – 26 August 2019

This is one of the top Democratic priorities for 2020, after the debacle in the special election last year. With Presidential year turnout, this should be very gettable for a good Democratic candidate – it’s more Democratic than CD23, won by Carlos Uresti by a 56-40 margin in 2016. We did screw it up last year, though, so nothing for granted. I’ll comb through that Svitek spreadsheet and do a more comprehensive post later based on some of the interesting things I’ve seen there.

The battle for the Lege is gonna be lit

Jun 24th, 2019

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Fasten your seat belts.

While the Texas Senate appears safe for Republicans, Clinton’s comments underscored the emphasis that some Democrats — both in Texas and outside it — are already putting on the fight for the majority in the state House, where their party is nine seats away from control of the chamber. Views vary on just how within reach the majority is for Democrats, but few disagree that 2020 will be a frenzied cycle for House races as Democrats work to protect — and potentially build on — their recent gains. Republicans, meanwhile, are pushing to take back seats and head off the worst-case scenario: a Democratic-led House heading into the 2021 redistricting process.

The early contours of the fight are taking shape in the wake of a legislative session that saw Republicans largely eschew divisive social issues for a bread-and-butter agenda following a humbling election cycle in which they lost a dozen seats in the lower chamber. There is also a new speaker, Angleton Republican Dennis Bonnen, who appears intent on keeping the GOP in power by minimizing the kind of internecine conflict that has previously bedeviled the party.

“Everything is focused on redistricting,” state Sen. Kelly Hancock, R-North Richland Hills, said at a recent tea party meeting as he fielded questions about the demise of some controversial legislation this session. “There is nothing more important — not only to Texas, but literally the nation — than to make sure that we maintain the Texas House … going into redistricting because if you look at the nation — we lose Texas, we lose the nation. And there’s no other place to go.”

[…]

As Republicans have sought to get their own in order for 2020, state and national Democrats have been drawing up preliminary battle plans to take the House. Their path runs through a group of 18 districts — 17 where Republicans won by single digits last year as well as House District 32. That’s where Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, ran unopposed while U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, won by just 5 points.

Of course, Democrats have to simultaneously defend the 12 seats they picked up last year, some of which have already drawn serious GOP opposition.

The path is “tough but possible to flip the chamber,” said Patrick Rodenbush, a spokesman for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, the group chaired by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. “We feel like there are enough potential targets out there that nine is doable, but it is gonna take a lot of work and resources.”

The NDRC spent $560,000 in Texas last cycle, and Rodenbush called Texas “one of our top priorities for 2020.” It recently hired an Austin-based Democratic consultant, Genevieve Van Cleve, to oversee its advocacy and political efforts here as Texas state director.

Other national groups are zeroing in on Texas this cycle as a state House battleground. They include the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee and Forward Majority, a super PAC that injected $2.2 million into Texas House races in the closing days of the 2018 election.

The state Democratic Party is expanding its campaign and candidate services as part of what will ultimately be a seven-figure effort in House races. Over the past weekend in Austin, the party held a training for 55 people to become campaign managers in state House races.

[…]

Abbott’s political operation plans to go after Democratic freshmen, as do well-funded organizations such as the Associated Republicans of Texas.

“ART is focused on candidate recruitment earlier than ever this cycle,” ART’s president, Jamie McWright, said in a statement. “We are identifying qualified, knowledgeable candidates who are willing to tackle the state’s biggest issues in order to win back the seats Republicans lost in 2018.”

Republicans are particularly focused on the seven seats they lost last cycle that Abbott carried.

You can see the potential targets here. There’s really only one competitive seat in the Senate this cycle, and that’s SD19, which Dems ought to be able to win back. On the House side, the top GOP targets based on the given criteria are going to be HDs 45, 47, 52, 65, 114, 132, and 135. I’ll be surprised if they don’t expand their list beyond that, but those are the seats I’d go after first if I were them. On the Dem side, there are the nine seats Beto carried but that Republicans won, plus however many others where he came close. It’s very likely that a seat no one is worried too much about becomes more competitive than expected, thanks to changing conditions and candidate quality and other unforeseen factors. So far, no one other than Mayor-elect Eric Johnson has announced a departure, which is unusual; normally at this point in time we’ve had a couple of people say they’re not running again. Open seats are more likely to be a problem for Republicans than they will be for Democrats, but Dems don’t want to have to play defense when there are gains to be made.

At this point, the name of the game is one part candidate recruitment and one part raising money, which will be the job of the various PACs until the candidates get settled. In Harris County, we have two good candidates each for the main targets: Akilah Bacy and Josh Wallenstein (who ran for HCDE in 2018 and was the runnerup in the primary to Richard Cantu) in HD138, and Ann Johnson and Ruby Powers in HD134. In Fort Bend, Sarah DeMerchant appears to be running again in HD26, while Eliz Markowitz (candidate for SBOE7 in 2018) is aiming for HD28. We still need (or I need to do a better job searching for) candidates in HDs 29, 85, and 126, for starters. If you’re in one of those competitive Republican-held State Rep districts, find out who is or may be running for the Dems. If you’re in one of those targeted-by-the-GOP districts, be sure to help out your incumbent. Kelly Hancock is absolutely right: This is super-duper important.

Precinct analysis: 2018 State Senate

Mar 18th, 2019

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

The day I look forward to since November has finally arrived – all the data from the last election is now available on the Texas Legislative Council webpage. You know what that means: It’s statewide precinct analysis time! Let’s start where we started two years ago at this time, with the State Senate, for whom 2018 data is here. I will boil this down into the bits of greatest interest.


Dist  18 Dem    Beto    Lupe Collier  Nelson   Olson McAllen
============================================================
SD02   40.6%   41.3%   36.0%   40.1%   40.5%   39.5%   37.3%
SD05   41.5%   44.6%   38.1%   42.5%   42.8%   41.9%   39.2%
SD07   40.3%   43.9%   38.5%   42.3%   42.9%   42.5%   39.5%
SD08   48.8%   50.6%   43.0%   47.6%   48.6%   47.1%   44.3%
SD09   46.0%   48.9%   42.8%   46.0%   47.0%   46.2%   43.8%
SD10   51.7%   53.3%   47.1%   50.8%   51.6%   50.9%   48.3%
SD11      NA   41.5%   36.2%   39.9%   40.7%   40.6%   37.5%
SD12      NA   43.3%   36.5%   40.5%   41.2%   40.2%   37.3%
SD16   54.1%   55.9%   46.9%   52.6%   53.9%   52.3%   48.1%
SD17   46.8%   51.8%   44.6%   49.7%   50.7%   50.0%   45.1%
SD19      NA   56.8%   50.2%   53.7%   55.4%   55.3%   53.3%
SD25   42.3%   45.2%   38.4%   42.4%   43.6%   42.9%   39.2%

SDs 11, 12, and 19 were not on the ballot in 2018 and are thus the districts of interest for 2020. SD19, which Dems fumbled away in a special election last year, is the obvious, and realistically only target for 2020. The good news is that in a normal turnout context, it’s a sufficiently blue district to favor whoever challenges Sen. Pete Flores. No guarantees, of course, but as you can see it was more Democratic than SDs 10 or 16, the two seats that Dems won last year. A decent candidate and a November-of-an-even-year level of unity among Dems should be enough to win it back.

In SD05, it would appear that Sen. Charles Schwertner was not damaged by the sexual harassment allegations against him. He wasn’t the top performer among Republicans in his district, but he was solidly above average. The allegations, which were ultimately resolved in a non-conclusive fashion, were vague enough to let voters conclude that they didn’t really know what may have happened, and they voted accordingly.

I did not expect SD08 to be as close as it was. Looking at past data, it was a step below SDs 10, 16, and 17. The shift in suburban county politics, plus perhaps a bit of Paxton fatigue, put this one on the cusp for Dems. Might it have made a difference if more money had been dumped into Mark Phariss’ campaign. We’ll never know, but I’m going to be a little haunted by this one. It’s close enough to think that maybe it could have gone differently.

As for SD17, don’t be too mesmerized by the gaudy Dem numbers for the top candidates. SD17 contains the bulk of HD134, and that means a lot of nominal Republicans who crossed over in certain elections. It would seem that Sen. Huffman was not on their naughty list, and that enabled her to get by without too much discomfort.

One other way to look at this is to compare numbers over time. Here’s how this breaks down:


Dist  08Obama 12Obama 16Clinton 18 Beto 
=======================================
SD02   38.2%    35.5%     35.4%   41.3%
SD05   38.8%    34.5%     36.4%   44.6%
SD07   33.0%    32.0%     38.3%   43.9%
SD08   39.3%    36.6%     42.6%   50.6%
SD09   41.3%    39.2%     41.8%   48.9%
SD10   47.1%    45.4%     47.3%   53.3%
SD11   36.5%    33.5%     36.6%   41.5%
SD12   36.1%    32.2%     35.4%   43.3%
SD16   43.9%    41.6%     49.9%   55.9%
SD17   41.4%    39.2%     47.2%   51.8%
SD19   55.5%    54.6%     53.4%   56.8%
SD25   37.4%    33.9%     37.9%   45.2%

2018 had Presidential-level turnout, so I’m comparing it to previous Presidential elections. Some big shifts in there, most notably in SDs 08 and 16, but even districts that weren’t competitive in 2018 like SDs 07 and 25 moved by double digits in a Dem direction from 2012. Some of this is demographic change, but it sure seems like some of it is reaction to Trump and his brand of Republicanism. I do not believe that SD16 goes that blue without a lot of people who used to vote Republican switching sides. How long that effect lasts, in particular how long it lasts once Trump is a nightmare we’ve all woken up from and are trying to forget, is a huge question. If the shift is permanent, or at least resilient, Republicans are going to have some very tough choices to make in the 2021 redistricting process. If not – if things return more or less to what we’ve seen this past decade once a Democrat is back in the White House – then they can keep doing what they’ve been doing and dare Dems to do something about it. We won’t know till we experience it, which God willing will be 2022, a year when every Senator will be on the ballot. In the meantime, electing enough Dem Senators to force Dan Patrick to either change the three-fifths rule or get used to wooing Dems for his preferred bills is on the table for next year. I’ll have more numbers in the coming days.

On special election runoff turnout and HD125

Feb 19th, 2019

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I figured a story like this was inevitable after Round One of the HD125 special election, in which Republican Fred Rangel got 38% of the vote and four Democrats combined to take the rest, with three of them being close to each other and thus farther behind Rangel. Ray Lopez will face Rangel in the runoff, for which a date has not yet been set.

Justin Rodriguez

Democratic Party officials and Lopez’s campaign remain adamant that they are in position to win the runoff and keep the seat. The four Democrats, combined, received more than 60 percent of the vote, they point out. And District 125 hasn’t elected a Republican since it was redrawn in 1992 to include more West Side voters.

But to others, the result immediately recalled San Antonio Democrats’ not-so-sterling track record in recent special elections. Electoral history and district demographics have not protected Democrats in those runoffs over the last few years: They have lost the last three off-cycle races in San Antonio, each of which occurred in traditional party strongholds.

In early 2016, Republican John Lujan scored an upset in a South Side legislative seat over Democrats Tomás Uresti and Gabe Farias. Uresti would defeat him nine months later in the general election.

Later that year, Independent Laura Thompson won election to an East Side legislative seat after Bexar County Dean Ruth McClendon’s death, also overcoming multiple Democrats. Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins put the seat back in Democratic hands in the next general election.

And in perhaps the most painful loss for Democrats, Republican Pete Flores won a state Senate seat last year that includes much of San Antonio. Flores flipped a seat that hadn’t gone to the GOP since Reconstruction, and his victory sealed a two-thirds Republican supermajority in the Texas Senate.

That race has some conspicuous similarities to Tuesday’s election in District 125. For one, the man who engineered Flores’ upset, Matt Mackowiak, is now running Rangel’s campaign. For another, multiple Democrats split the party’s vote, allowing the Republican to plunge ahead.

[…]

“It’s a very simple game of math in a special election,” [Rep. Trey Martinez-Fischer] said. “When you’re running a race in a Democratic district you’re going to have multiple Democrats running for that position, and it’s always going to be that one Republican that has a universe of voters to himself.”

The Democrats believe that will change in a mano-a-mano, Democrat vs. Republican, runoff, and Democratic members of the Legislature are now rallying around Lopez. But they had a similar conviction — ultimately to no avail — that Flores wouldn’t prevail in what had been a Democratic district for more than a century.

Their logic isn’t reflective of the political reality of special elections, according to Mackowiak. The voters who chose Democrats Rayo-Garza or Art Reyna won’t necessarily show up again for Lopez in the runoff election.

“It’s just not transferable,” Mackowiak said. “Special elections are about motivation and enthusiasm.”

That sentiment was echoed by Larry Hufford, a professor of political science at St. Mary’s University.

“These small groups are so committed to their candidates,” Hufford said. “They say, ‘Well, my candidate didn’t win, forget it.’”

Those factors give Rangel an edge, Hufford said, especially if turnout drops in the runoff. If Rangel brings out the same number of voters, it puts him in a good position to win the majority while Lopez tries to inspire voters who backed Democrats no longer in the race, the professor added.

See here for the background. There are two claims being made here, that Bexar County Dems have had a spotty recent record in legislative special elections, and that the key to winning special election runoffs is to hold onto more of your own voters from round one than the other guy (if you’re the leader, that is) because getting new voters is too hard. Let’s take these one at a time.

First, the two special elections from 2016 are basically meaningless for these purposes. The reason why is because they were basically meaningless as special elections. They were for the purpose of serving the remainder of the 2015-2016 term, at a time when the Lege was not in session and not going to be in session. Neither John Lujan nor Laura Thompson ever filed a bill or cast a vote as State Rep, because there were no opportunities for them to do so. Tomas Uresti, who lost in that January 2016 special election runoff to John Lujan, went on to win the Democratic primary in March and the November general election, ousting Lujan before he ever did anything of note. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, the November nominee in HD120, didn’t bother running in the summer special election for it. Those special elections didn’t matter.

As for the turnout question, I would remind everyone that there were three legislative special elections plus runoffs from 2015. Here’s what they looked like:

2015 Special Election, House District 123


Melissa Aguillon  DEM   1,257   17.69%
Diego Bernal      DEM   3,372   47.46%
Roger V. Gary     LIB     103    1.45%
Paul Ingmundson   GRN      81    1.14%
Walter Martinez   DEM     780   10.98%
Nunzio Previtera  REP   1,512   21.28%

Total = 7,105

Special Runoff Election State Representative, District 123


Diego Bernal      DEM   5,170   63.67%
Nunzio Previtera  REP   2,950   36.33%

Total = 8,120

Diego Bernal got 1,798 more votes in the runoff – there had been 2,037 votes that went to other Dems in the initial election. Nunzio Previtera got 1,438 more votes in the runoff even though he’d been the only Republican initially.

2015 Special Election, Senate District 26


Trey Martinez Fischer  DEM   8,232   43.28%
Alma Perez Jackson     REP   3,892   20.46%
Jose Menendez          DEM   4,824   25.36%
Joan Pedrotti          REP   1,427    7.50%
Al Suarez              DEM     644    3.39%

Total = 19,019

Special Runoff Election State Senator, District 26


Trey Martinez Fischer  DEM   9,635   40.95%
Jose Menendez          DEM  13,891   59.05%

Total = 23,526

Remember how some idiot bloggers called for Sen. Menendez to concede rather than bother going through with the runoff, so the next special election could take place more quickly? Good times. After smoking TMF in said runoff, some other people claimed he won on the strength of Republican turnout in round two. For what it’s worth, there were 5,319 Republican votes in round one, and Menendez gained 9,067 votes overall. Make of that what you will. Also, for what it’s worth, TMF boosted his total by 1,403.

2015 Special Election, House District 124


Nathan Alonzo    DEM    467   23.81%
Delicia Herrera  DEM    555   28.30%
Ina Minjarez     DEM    828   42.22%
David L. Rosa    DEM    111    5.66%

Total = 1,961

Special Runoff Election, House District 124


Delicia Herrera  DEM  1,090   45.02%
Ina Minjarez     DEM  1,331   54.98%

Total = 2,421

The two runoff candidates combined for 1,383 votes in round one, while the two also rans got 578. Assuming all 578 voted again in the runoff, there were still another 460 people participating.

My point, in case I haven’t beaten you over the head with it enough, is that in all of these elections, there were more votes in the runoff than in the first round. That means – stay with me here, I know this is tricky – it’s possible for a candidate to win the runoff with extra votes from people who didn’t vote initially. It’s even possible for the second place finisher to win, in part by bringing in new voters. See, when not that many people vote the first time, there are actually quite a few habitual voters out there to round up. Who even knew this was a thing?

Yes, the SD19 still stands out like a turd on the sidewalk. SD19 encompasses more than just Bexar County, and there was some genuine resentment from third place candidate Roland Gutierrez, which likely hindered Pete Gallego in the runoff. (There were also many questions raised about the effectiveness of Gallego’s campaign.) Here, as it happens, third place finisher Coda Rayo-Garza has conceded after the remaining mail ballots arrived and endorsed Ray Lopez, so at least that bit of history won’t repeat itself. HD125 is more Democratic than SD19, so there’s a larger pool of dependable voters that Lopez can call on. He’s got work to do and ground to make up, and he certainly could lose if he doesn’t do a good job of it. But if we look at the history of Bexar County special legislative elections going all the way back to 2015 instead of just to 2016, we can see that the picture is a bit more nuanced than Matt Mackowiak and Larry Hufford make it out to be.

On to the runoff in HD125

Feb 13th, 2019

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

We could still have a recount, given how close the race for second place was.

Justin Rodriguez

A Republican and a Democrat are moving on to a runoff in the race to replace ex-state Rep. Justin Rodriguez, D-San Antonio, in a traditionally Democratic district.

With all precincts reporting Tuesday night, Republican Fred Rangel got 38 percent of the vote and Democrat Ray Lopez had 19 percent, according to unofficial returns. The third-place finisher, Coda Rayo-Garza, narrowly missed the runoff, coming in 22 votes behind Lopez, a former member of the San Antonio City Council.

The two other Democrats in the race, Art Reyna and Steve Huerta, netted 17 percent of the vote and 6 percent, respectively.

[…]

Rangel, a businessman and activist, was boosted in recent days by endorsements from two top Texas Republicans, first Gov. Greg Abbott and then U.S. Sen. John Cornyn. Rangel’s candidacy — and runoff berth — evokes that of Pete Flores, the Pleasanton Republican who flipped a state Senate seat last year after advancing to the overtime round of a special election.

See here for the early vote update, and here for the unofficial election night totals. Turnout was 6.05%, and a bit more than sixty percent of the vote was cast early. We’ll need to see if Coda Rayo-Garza asks for a recount, which she’d be well within her rights to do as she trails Ray Lopez by 0.36 percentage points. Assuming nothing changes – and as you know, I never expect a recount to make any difference – it will be Rangel versus Lopez in the runoff.

Let’s talk about Rangel’s significant lead over Lopez for a minute. Lopez, Rayo-Garza, and Art Reyna are all bunched together in second through fourth place, with their votes distributed very evenly. Lopez and Rayo-Garza combined to outscore Rangel; add in Reyna and the three got about 56%, with the fourth Dem getting another six and a half. On the one hand, Rangel outperformed Donald Trump in 2016 (though Hillary Clinton trails the four Dems in total by about two and a half points), and did better than Republicans other than Greg Abbott in 2018. It’s a respectable performance – better, in fact, than Pete Flores relative to the 2016 baseline. On the other hand, HD125 is more Democratic overall than SD19, so in any remotely normal turnout scenario, Lopez should win without too much difficulty. One hopes that Bexar County Dems will not want to let another winnable special election slip through their fingers. If Rayo-Garza and Reyna endorse Lopez for the runoff and no one is asleep at the wheel, Lopez should win. It’s not a slam dunk, but it’s not really any harder than a free throw. Don’t screw it up, y’all.

UPDATE: The Rivard Report has more.

The losers of 2018

Dec 31st, 2018

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Allow me to point you to the Observer’s list of six Texas political players who lost power in 2018. I’d call it five-sixths of a good list, plus one entry I don’t quite understand.

3) Bexar County Democrats

Want to understand the dysfunction and ineptitude of Texas Democrats? Look no further than Bexar County, where the local party is dead broke and mired with infighting. It’s a small miracle that Democrats were able to flip 24 county seats in November. But they still managed to bungle several other potential pickups.

After felon Carlos Uresti resigned from his San Antonio state Senate seat this year, Pete Gallego and the local party apparatus managed to lose the special election runoff, handing over a predominately Hispanic district that Democrats have held for 139 years to Republican Pete Flores. Ultimately, losing that seat allowed Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick to keep his GOP supermajority in the upper chamber, as Democrats picked up two Dallas senate districts in November.

On top of that, San Antonio native Gina Ortiz Jones narrowly lost her bid to oust “moderate maverick” Will Hurd in the 23rd Congressional District. In a blue wave year, the perennial swing district that stretches from San Antonio to the western border should have been a gimme. But Ortiz Jones ultimately lost by about 1,250 votes — a margin that a functioning local party in the most important part of the district easily could have made up.

Then there’s Julián Castro, the Alamo City’s hometown hero. Along with his twin brother, the supposed face of the Democratic Party’s future decided to sit out the most important election cycle of his career because he didn’t want to risk sullying his profile with a statewide loss in Texas. Then he watched from the sidelines as some nobody from El Paso became a political phenom and now sits atop the 2020 presidential wishlists.

Castro also wants to run for president and is scrambling to lay down his marker in a crowded Democratic primary field, as if nothing has changed since he became a party darling in the late 2000s. The thing is, political power doesn’t last if you try to bottle it up to use at the most opportune time.

My first thought is, do you mean the Bexar County Democratic Party? The Democratic voters of Bexar County? Some number of elected officials and other insider types who hail from Bexar County? Every other item on the list is either an individual or a concise and easily-defined group. I don’t know who exactly author Justin Miller is throwing rocks at, so I’m not sure how to react to it.

Then there’s also the matter of the examples cited for why this nebulous group deserves to be scorned. Miller starts out strong with the Pete Flores-Pete Gallego special election fiasco. Let us as always look at some numbers:

SD19 runoff, Bexar County – Flores 12,027, Gallego 10,259
SD19 election, Bexar County – Flores 3,301, Gallego 3,016, Gutierrez 4,272
SD19 2016 election, Bexar County – Uresti 89,034, Flores 54,989

Clearly, in two out of three elections the Bexar County part of SD19 was key to the Democrats. Carlos Uresti’s margin of victory in 2016 was about 37K votes, which as you can see came almost entirely from Bexar. The first round of the special election had the two top Dems getting nearly 70% of the vote in Bexar. It all fell apart in the runoff. You can blame Pete Gallego and his campaign for this, you can blame Roland Gutierrez for not endorsing and stumping for Gallego, you can blame the voters themselves. A little clarity, that’s all I ask.

As for the Hurd-Ortiz Jones matchup, the numbers do not bear out the accusation.

CD23 2018 election, Bexar County – Hurd 55,191, Ortiz Jones 50,517, Corvalan 2,260
CD23 2016 election, Bexar County – Hurd 59,406, Gallego 45,396, Corvalan 6,291

Gallego trailed Hurd by 14K votes in Bexar, while Ortiz Jones trailed him by less than 5K. She got five thousand more votes in Bexar than Gallego did. Hurd had a bigger margin in Medina County and did better in the multiple small counties, while Ortiz Jones didn’t do as well in El Paso and Maverick counties. They’re much more to blame, if one must find blame, for her loss than Bexar is.

As for the Castros, I don’t think there was room for both of them to join the 2018 ticket. Joaquin Castro, as I have noted before, is right now in a pretty good position as a four-term Congressperson in a Dem-majority House. I hardly see how one could say he was wrong for holding onto that, with the bet that the House would flip. Julian could have run for Governor, but doing so would have meant not running for President in 2020, and might have ended his career if he’d lost to the surprisingly popular and extremely well-funded Greg Abbott. Would Beto plus Julian have led to better results for Texas Dems than just Beto did? It’s certainly possible, though as always it’s easy to write your own adventure when playing the counterfactual game. I agree with the basic premise that political power is more ephemeral than anyone wants to admit. I think they both made reasonable and defensible decisions for themselves, and it’s not at all clear they’d be better off today if they’d chosen to jump into a 2018 race. Life is uncertain, you know?

Rep. Joe Pickett to resign

Dec 17th, 2018

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

We will now need two special House elections to get to full membership.

Rep. Joe Pickett

State Rep. Joe Pickett of El Paso will leave his post effective Jan. 4.

Pickett, a Democrat, made the announcement Saturday morning that he will step down after having served in the Texas House since 1995. He said in a statement that he learned he had cancer just before the start of the 2017 legislative session and has since sought treatment for it.

“In the last few weeks, I have learned of additional issues I must address,” Pickett said in a statement. “I could probably continue at a reduced work level while undergoing treatment, but I have been there and done that. I need to completely heal this time. I am told I am physically strong enough to hopefully make my recovery quicker than most. My body and mind need a break.”

Pickett didn’t face any general election opponents this year, winning re-election in November with 100 percent of the vote. He noted in his statement that he would return recent campaign contributions in light of his upcoming departure from the Legislature.

During the 2017 legislative session, Pickett held the 11th highest seniority in the Texas House and served as chair of the Environmental Regulation Committee. He previously chaired other House committees during his tenure including the Transportation, Defense and Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security and Public Safety Committees.

Rep. Pickett was definitely one of the more powerful members of the House thanks to his seniority. He will be missed as Democrats try to exert more influence with their largest caucus since 2009. I wish him all the best with his treatment and recovery.

We should expect Sen.-elect Carol Alvarado to submit her resignation this week, once the election results in SD06 are certified. My guess is that Greg Abbott will schedule both elections for the same day, probably in mid to late January. Assuming the need for runoffs, the new members in HDs 79 and 145 will be seated by early March or so. For the record, since I know you’re wondering, Hillary Clinton won HD79 68.0% to 26.5%, and won by 66.8% to 28.7% in HD145. Wendy Davis carried HD79 by 58.5% to 39.3%, and HD145 by 57.2% to 40.8%. I can imagine a Republican making it to a runoff in those districts, but winning would be very unlikely. And before anyone mentions SD19, Hillary Clinton carried it 53.4% to 41.9%, while Wendy Davis actually lost it, 49.1% to 49.0%. These districts are much bluer than SD19. (Beto won HD145 by a 70.9% to 28.3% clip; I don’t have the data for El Paso.)

Yes, we’re already looking ahead to 2020

Nov 24th, 2018

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Close races one year fuel speculation about the next.

Rep. Beto O’Rourke

Much of the immediate speculation about 2020 in Texas has centered on O’Rourke, who was being discussed as a potential presidential candidate even before he reached the finish line in the Senate race. While running against Cruz, he denied interest in a White House bid. Since then, he has not said what he plans to do next beyond spending more time with his family and then starting to think about what he learned from his Senate campaign. But that has not stopped the 2020 drumbeat surrounding him. A poll released last week pegged him as Democratic voters’ No. 3 pick among possible contenders, and a cryptic blog post Thursday about running — a morning jog, that is — stirred speculation anew.

If O’Rourke runs for president, he would have to contend with another Texan who has been preparing for a likely White House bid for nearly two years: Julían Castro, the former U.S. housing secretary and San Antonio mayor. People close to Castro have been saying a O’Rourke run would not change his plans, a point Castro himself made Friday to the Associated Press. Castro, who said last month he is “likely” to make a White House bid, intends to make an announcement about his plans in early 2019.

Instead of running for president in 2020, some Texas Democrats would like O’Rourke to take on U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who will be at the top of the ballot in two years. But privately, O’Rourke has not expressed interest in challenging Cornyn, according to his inner circle.

[…]

O’Rourke is not the only statewide candidate from Nov. 6 who is already coming up in 2020 conversations. Kim Olson, the fiery Democrat who finished five points behind Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, has been punctuating her post-election social media posts with the hashtag “#kim2020,” and a spokeswoman for Olson said she is “currently exploring all opportunities to determine the best way to continue serving Texas and Texans.”

At the congressional level, the next cycle is also already looming large.

Democrats picked up two seats on Nov. 6, dislodging Republican U.S. Reps. John Culberson of Houston and Pete Sessions of Dallas. But they also came surprisingly close in several districts that were once considered far out of reach, and the Democratic nominees in those races emerged as local rock stars who are already being encouraged to try again in 2020. That is even before any retirement announcements from GOP incumbents who may not be game for another competitive race in 2020.

Among the rising stars are Sri Preston Kulkarni, a former diplomat who came within five points of taking out U.S. Rep. Pete Olson, R-Sugar Land. In a message to supporters the weekend after the election, Kulkarni acknowledged that the 2020 discussion was already taking shape, saying that many people have asked him to run again for the seat but he is “not ready to commit to that yet.”

Then there is MJ Hegar, the former military pilot who gained a national fanbase taking on U.S. Rep. John Carter, R-Round Rock, and finished just 3 points behind him. In a post-election interview, she noted that even her most loyal supporters told her from the start that it would be a “two-cycle race” to win the seat.

“I’ve been approached by a lot of different people to run for a variety of different offices… and I’m still considering the best way to serve my community,” Hegar said. Running for the congressional seat again, she added, is “one of the options I’m considering.”

Farther down the ballot, Democrats are already setting their sights on capturing the state House majority in 2020 — a huge prize ahead of the next redistricting round. They made significant progress on Nov. 6, flipping a dozen seats and growing their ranks from 55 members to 67. That means Democrats are entering the 2020 cycle nine seats removed from the majority — well within reach, according to Democrats inside and outside Texas.

Dems will also have a chance to reclaim SD19, which now ranks as the one and only pickup the Republicans had this cycle. There really aren’t any other close Senate districts on the ballot in 2020 – the closest would be SDs 11 (Larry Taylor) and 12 (Jane Nelson), as they are the only ones where Trump got less than 60%. I’ll be interested to see what their numbers look like from this year, and I will be banging the drum for a good candidate to run in SD11, but it’s fair to say both of these would be a stretch.

The first order of business is figuring out who wants to run for US Senate – if Beto wants to try again, it’ll be his, and if not there ought to be some spirited jockeying for the “consensus” position. Texas Leftist suggested in my comments that Kim Olson might run for the Railroad Commission, which is the one other non-judicial statewide race on the ballot. (With the caveat that if Ken Paxton is forced to resign at some point, the replacement that Greg Abbott names might have to be there as well, depending on the timing. Imagine that for a minute.) I like that people are talking about the Congressional seats that are still available – the early start that a lot of our candidates had in this cycle gave them a leg up on fundraising.

And on it goes from there. The other thing that is encouraging about all this is that we’ve had cycles – even this one, for some races – where the question wasn’t who will run for thus-and-such seat, but will anyone run for it? I will say that we will need to make sure that if any quality candidates who sign up for a statewide race get gadfly/perennial candidate primary opponents, we will all need to step it up in the primaries to make sure they don’t get Grady Yarbroughed or Jim Hoganed. Democrats have finally gotten to the point of being taken seriously. Let’s not screw that up just yet.

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