You are harshing my buzz.
I’m not sure what this article adds to our previous understanding of the state of play here in Texas. I guess the early polling numbers? If so, I’m curious what kinds of primary voter turnout the “experts” would need to see in order to feel Texas was likely break Dem. Someone at the state level must have that info but I haven’t seen it reported on anywhere
I’ll be more worried if/when someone does a drilldown through the frenetic precinct-level activity going on and THEN makes the claim that Dems are in for the same old story.
I hear you. On the other hand, few people gave Doug Jones much of a chance back in December, either.
NPR had a nice story on O’Rourke yesterday–for him to draw a crowd of over a hundred people in a small East Texas town–and in a driving rainstorm, no less–is both anecdotal on its face and therefore is what it is, but also reason for some optimism as well.
This is a typical AP concern trolling article… and it’s premise is false from the get go. Primaries are for the parties and Democratic enthusiasm is way up. Will that translate into victories in the general? Let’s see who’s running. As the article notes, there are good chances at flipping seats in Congress even if statewide races are gerrrymandered locked. And I like Beto’s chances against Cruz in the general.
What O’Rourke is doing is a extremely retail campaign. He is visiting all 256 counties. Most of these small, remote, rural counties have never seen a national candidates visit. It is different and may work. People are funny. I think the personal wins over the ideological. We shall see.
Cruz is not terribly liked and has accomplished zero for Texas. People know he is all about himself.
The argument that only 3% of primary voters are first-time voters seems questionable to me at best. First, of course, primaries. Second, we know that plenty of people vote now and then in general elections without turning out on a regular basis. Especially true for midterms. If, for example, everyone who voted for democrats in presidential years turned out for this midterm, that would be, politely speaking, way more than a 3 percent difference.
What muddies the water in Texas is that you don’t have to vote your party affiliation in the primaries. A registered Republican can vote in the Democratic primary and vice versa. I would be curious to see if there is much crossover.
High Dem Turnout In TX May Be Enough To Make Dent In GOP Dominated State. Fixed.
“Three percent, that could make a difference in some smaller races, but in a statewide election I don’t think that’s enough to sway anything,” Ryan said. “Democrats are showing up in the primary election, does that mean more are going to show up in the general election?”
At first I was going to say “that’s the dumbest damn thing I’ve read today, though the day is young.” But actually, it would be a fair question most of the time when you’re talking about Democrats. Thing is though, this is a wave year. And in wave years, the answer is “fuck yeah, they’ll show up!” and he’s doing more of the whistling past the graveyard that the apparatchiks of the party on the wrong end of a looming wave always seems to spend a lot of their time doing.
And, in fairness, what else can you do? The glib answer is “triage,” but this is electoral politics, not an ER or a battlefield. If you’re seen doing triage, cutting some people loose to try to save others, you just make the wave worse.
The urban areas of TX are blue, rural is red as Rudolph’s reindeer nose. There is certainly a chance TX voters can send Cruz back under the rock he slithered from, so if that’s all that gets done, it’s a huge victory. The other worthless republican who may well lose is Pete Sessions; a repugnant product of pure gerrymandering. He’s so incredibly awful and in no way represents most of this district that’s around east Dallas and White Rock Lake. Sessions is a spineless coward who refuses to hold any town hall meetings because his fee-fees got hurt over health care. Boot his ass out of office, Texas!
I think we may suprize y’all this year! There are TONS of voters, that have felt disheartened and not voted, that may come out in DROVES this year! We saw what happened in Alabama, and we want some of that for ourselves!
It’s a time thing. As Trump continues his crackdown on immigrants, Texas will likely turn a light shade of purple over the next few cycles and then a brighter shade of blue. It will go the way of California when they tried denying immigrants education and health benefits. It might take a little longer in Texas, however, because even white American citizens in Texas don’t have any of those things either.
I’ve voted in the GOP primary in IL. It didn’t help, tho.
So the DSCC would rather Ted Cruz return to the Senate then support Beto O’Rourke and the DCCC openly attacks a fellow Democrat, Laura Moser, who they deem “too liberal” and are willing to throw the election to John Culberson. What are O’Rourke and Moser’s great crime? Refusing to feed all the “correct” players in the DC Consultancy Beast…
Dems have reached the tipping point at the district level, but not at the statewide level, based demographic and political changes in Texas.
The average GOP margin of victory in the last 5 Senate elections is 1.2 million votes. HRC knocked that down to 800k votes. But that’s still a big hurdle to climb. To get there, the Dems would need a turnout perfect storm, where turnout in Dem counties reach the general election average (57%) and turnout in GOP counties reaches the mid-term average (33%), and Dems gain in overall net margin across the board to eclipse that gap. That’s a tall order, and I for one am not going to be sending a lot of money to Beto and will focus on House races, where Dems have a much better shot.
In the House races, I count 13 seats that are competitive. In all of them whites represent less than 70% of the vote. The GOP is a bit tapped out on white voters, while a solid segment of white voters (mostly college educated females) are shifting Dem. These races are in the Houston/Dallas area and in the Dem friendly Southwest region. Of the 13 seats, I think Dems have a real shot to win 5-8 of them.
I think that’s an oversimplification. Dems have a better shot to flip Tennessee, Arizona and Nevada than they do TX. They also need to defend seats in Montana, North Dakota, Missouri and West Virginia, which are challenges. Beto has to close a gap of 800k-1.1 million votes. That’s a tall order. They can afford to come in at the end, but Beto has to do the work.
In the case of Moser, this district has 3 far better candidates than her. She is sucking up a lot of money and a lot of attention when she is a flawed candidate with real baggage. Lizzie Pannill Fletcher and Jason Weston would beat Culberson easily. GOP would have a field day with Moser. DCCC has not handled the Moser situation effectively, but I do agree with them that Moser is not a good candidate.
Care to delineate why?
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She has a bad ‘carpetbagger’ problem that will hurt her in the general. She is a recent transplant to TX, and Culberson is licking his chops to exploit that and all of her anti-TX rhetoric. She has said things about TX that a native just would never say.
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Her prior writings will be exploited to show that she is not particularly POC friendly or woke. One paragraph she wrote in particular about a drug addicted neighbor while living in the inner city already has POC voters in the district skeptical. She’ll have a tough time rallying that vote.
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Her husband has been accused of workplace harassment. GOP will make that a big issue.
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She brings too much drama and not enough focus on problem solving. Voters will figure that out.
If the Democrats can pick up 2 of the 3 contested seats in November I will be more than happy.