text:
Knowledge Is Good
2018 Legislative
2018 judicial
2018 Congressional
2018 Harris County
Precinct analysis: The new SBOE map
by Charles Kuffner.
Previously: New State House map, New Congressional map
I probably care more about the SBOE than most normal people do. It's not that powerful an entity, there are only 15 seats on it, and their elections go largely under the radar. But the potential for shenanigans is high, and Democrats had about as good a shot at achieving a majority on that board as they did in the State House in 2020. Didn't work out, and the new map is typically inhospitable, but we must keep trying. And if this nerdy political blog doesn't care about the SBOE, then what's even the point?
You can find the 2012 election results 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%
01   247,686  187,075  56.2%  42.4%   378,468  283,822  56.3%  42.2%
You can see the new map here, so you can visualize where these districts are. The current and soon-to-be-obsolete map is here, and my analysis of the 2020 election under that map is here.
You might note that none of the new districts look all that crazy. For the most part, the districts encompass entire counties. It's mostly a matter of which counties are joined together. A good example of that is SBOE12, which used to be Collin County plus a slice of Dallas. In the days when Collin was deep red, that was more than enough for it to be safe Republican, but now that Collin is trending heavily Democratic – SBOE12 was a four-point win for Joe Biden last year – that won't do. Now SBOE12 is a sprawling district that still has all of Collin but now a smaller piece of Dallas, the top end of Denton, and a bunch of smaller North Texas counties that had previously been in districts 09 and 15. In return, the formerly all-rural district 9 picks up about a quarter of Dallas, in a mirror of the strategy we've seen in the other maps to put heavily Democratic urban areas in with deeply Republican rural ones, to neutralize the former. District 11, which had previously been pieces of Dallas and Tarrant plus all of Parker and is now all of that plus Hood and Somervell and part of Johnson counties, is another example.
The other strategy that we see echoes of here is the more careful placement of dark red suburban counties. SBOE6, which used to be entirely within Harris County, is now hiked up a bit north to include a generous piece of Montgomery County, much as was done with CD02 and SD07, to flip it from being a Biden district back to a Trump district. Ironically, this has the effect of making SBOE8, which used to have all of Montgomery plus a lot of the counties east of Harris, more Democratic as it now wears both the eastern and western ends of Harris like earflaps. (Mutton chops also come to mind as I look at the map.) SBOE8 also picks up a piece of bright blue Fort Bend County, which had previously been in district 7. Meanwhile, over in Central Texas, SBOE5 jettisoned Comal County after it could no longer keep that district red; Comal wound up in district 10, which excised all of its Travis County population in return.
As far as the numbers go, there's not much to say. Whether Democrats can win five or six districts will depend in the short term on whether they can hold district 2, which is actually a bit more Democratic in this alignment. In the longer term, districts 6, 8, 11, and 12 could all become competitive. District 3 is no more Democratic than any of those are Republican, but as you can see it trended a bit more blue over the decade, and it's anchored in Bexar County, which should keep it from falling. 2022 is the one year when every district is up for re-election, and that will tell us something about how the trends we saw in 2020 are going. Maybe we'll need to re-evaluate the prospects for change in this map, or as we've said before, maybe we'll end up cursing the evil genius of it all. I mean, even as SBOE6 moved strongly towards Dems, the deficit to make up is still 100K votes. Nothing is going to come easy, if it comes at all.
Beto and South Texas
Brace yourself for a lot of stories like this in the coming months.
In the first days of his campaign for governor, Beto O'Rourke made a beeline to this southernmost corner of the state, saying it was no mistake he was choosing to start his run in a part of Texas where Democrats have their work cut out for them after the 2020 election.
His supporters know it, too.
"We are being attacked at all ends," Amanda Elise Salas said as she introduced him here Wednesday night. "This is a Democratic area, and there is no way we are gonna let Republicans come in here and take over."
"They're knocking at our door," Mario Saenz, a Democratic precinct chair from Brownsville, said afterward. "We cannot let them in."
A lot of Democratic hopes are riding on O'Rourke this election cycle, but few may be more consequential to the party's future in Texas than his ability to stave off a strong GOP offensive in South Texas. Emboldened by President Joe Biden's underwhelming performance throughout the predominantly Hispanic region last year, Republicans have been pushing hard to make new inroads there, and O'Rourke faces an incumbent in Gov. Greg Abbott who has been working for years to win Hispanic voters.
But it is not just about halting the GOP's post-2020 march in South Texas. O'Rourke, who is facing an uphill battle in the governor's race, has ground to make up after his own less-than-stellar performance with voters there in 2018 when he ran for U.S. Senate — and turning out more Latino voters has long been key to Democratic hopes statewide.
O'Rourke has been candid about the problem. Days after the 2020 election, which cemented Republican dominance across Texas, he told supporters that the fact that the border region "has been ignored for years by the national party, and even many statewide Democratic candidates, hurt us badly." Last week, he began his campaign for governor with a swing through the region, calling the early itinerary "very intentional" and vowing to return frequently.
"If the great sin committed by Republicans historically has been to disenfranchise voters, including those in the Rio Grande Valley, then that committed by Democrats has been to take those same voters for granted in the past," O'Rourke told reporters in San Antonio, before heading south to Laredo and the Valley.
O'Rourke got a wake-up call in South Texas during the 2018 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, losing many counties in the region to a little-known and little-funded opponent, Sema Hernandez. While it was not the first time a candidate with a Hispanic surname beat expectations in a statewide Democratic primary, O'Rourke acknowledged afterward that he needed to do more outreach.
Months later, in the general election, O'Rourke failed to make significant gains in South Texas compared to his party's 2016 presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, which would have been key to defeating U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz. In the largest South Texas county outside San Antonio — Hidalgo — O'Rourke barely improved on Clinton's vote share there, getting 68.8% after she got 68.5%.
Then came 2020, when Biden carried South Texas — and the Rio Grande Valley in particular — by a much narrower margin than Clinton did. He outright lost Zapata County, a longtime Democratic stronghold just north of the Valley.
Beyond any issue, though, South Texas Democrats say O'Rourke needs to show up, especially after a presidential election that left them wanting. Biden never visited Texas, let alone anywhere in South Texas, during the general election, and his running mate, Kamala Harris, visited McAllen only in the final days of the race.
To that end, South Texas Democrats are not particularly concerned about O'Rourke, who is known for his relentless campaigning. He toured all 254 counties during his 2018 race, which included a bus tour specifically focused on the border.
"We're the poorest region of Texas, maybe one of the poorest regions in the nation, and you know, it was a huge letdown that Kamala and Biden didn't make a prolonged appearance here in the Valley, but Beto, you know, he's been recurringly focusing his presence here, especially in his past campaigns," said Sebastian Bonilla, a 25-year-old from the Valley who came to see O'Rourke speak in McAllen.
Abbott has put an emphasis on South Texas since his first gubernatorial campaign in 2014, and he has been increasingly traveling there in recent months, both in his official capacity and for political appearances.
You get the idea. This kind of story is going to be the "Trump voters in diners" lodestar of 2022.
Because I tend to zero in on any actual numbers that show up in this kind of "collect a bunch of quotes and anecdotes" piece, I wondered about that Hidalgo County comparison. Just for grins, I went back and checked to see what was the best Democratic performance in Hidalgo in recent years:
2004 – JR Molina, 64.08%. For comparison, John Kerry got 54.86% against George W. Bush.
2006 – Bill Moody, 62.54%.
2008 – Linda Yanez, 73.63%.
2010 – Hector Uribe, 67.14%. That sure correlated with good Democratic performance elsewhere, eh?
2012 – Michelle Petty, 70.69%. Barack Obama got 70.40%, an improvement over the 69.02% he got in 2008.
2014 – Leticia van de Putte, 67.57%.
2016 – Dori Garza, 70.98%. Hillary Clinton got 68.50%, as noted in the story.
2018 – Steve Kirkland, 69.34%, with Beto's 68.81% right behind. Kirkland was in a two-candidate race, while Beto and Ted Cruz also had a Libertarian in their race. Cruz's 30.64% was actually a tiny bit behind Jimmy Blacklock's 30.66%, though several other Republicans failed to get to 30% in their three-way races.
Latino Dems, and candidates for statewide judicial positions, were generally the high scorers. Looking at the numbers, I agree with the basic premise that Beto could have done better in South Texas than he did in 2018, and he will need to do better than Joe Biden did in 2020. The new SOS elections result website is trash and doesn't give you a county-by-county view like it did before, so I went and found the Hidalgo County Elections page, which informed me that Biden got 58.04% in 2020, with Elizabeth Frizell being the high scorer at 61.51%; yes, another judicial candidate.
One could also point out, of course, that Biden came closer to winning Texas than Clinton did, despite doing worse in South Texas. Beto himself came as close as he did mostly by making huge gains in urban and suburban counties – to pick one example, he got 46.53% in Collin County, losing it by 22K votes, after Clinton got 38.91% and lost if by 61K votes. Beto did net 12K fewer votes in Hidalgo than Clinton did (Biden netted 32K fewer than Clinton), and he lost another 10K in Cameron County – that does add up in such a close race, though it wouldn't have been enough to fully close the gap he still had. Ideally, he'd do better in South Texas and in the big urban and suburban counties. At least we all feel confident he'll do the work.
Precinct analysis: The new Congressional map
Previously: New State House map
We will now take a look at how the districts of interest in the new Congressional map have changed over the past decade. Same basic idea, looking at the closer districts from 2020 to see how they got there. You can find all of the data relating to the new Congressional map here, and the zoomable map here.
I'm not going to tally how many seats were won by each side in each year, for the simple reason that there just wasn't any real movement like there was in the State House. You can browse the middle years, I'm just going to focus on 2012 and 2020.
03    67,799  153,969  30.1%  68.3%   152,288  204,514  41.9%  56.3%
07   101,379   82,810  54.1%  44.2%   179,334   96,259  64.2%  34.4%
15    82,049   64,589  55.3%  43.6%   109,172  115,719  48.1%  50.9%
28   103,701   66,693  60.1%  38.7%   131,699  114,156  52.8%  45.8%
34    95,897   42,597  68.5%  30.4%   116,930   85,231  57.2%  41.7%
I'm going to sort these into three groups. The first is the "don't pay too much attention to the vote percentage gains" group. I explained what I mean by that, with the help of a sports analogy, here. I'd put districts 21, 23, and 31 as canonical examples of this, with districts 10, 12, and 31 being slightly less extreme. All of them saw a net decrease in the Republican margin of victory from 2012 to 2020, but the rate is so slow that there's no reason to believe that any continuation of trends would make them competitive in this decade. (With the possible exception of 23, which is reasonably close to begin with but always finds a way to disappoint.) Maybe things will look different after the 2022 election – these districts do still include places with a lot of Democratic growth – but they're not the top priorities.
The next group is, or should be, the top priorities, at least from an offensive perspective, because they did have real movement in a Democratic direction. I'd put CDs 24, 03, 22, 38, and 26 in this group, in that order. This of course assumes that trends we have seen since 2016 will continue more or less as before, which we won't really know until 2022 and beyond, but those numbers do stand out. I know the DCCC is targeting both CD23 and CD24, at least so far in this cycle, but I'd make CD24 more likely to be truly competitive this year. CD03 now includes Hunt County while a big strip of Collin County was put into CD04, so it will take more than just turning Collin blue to make CD03 flippable, but it will help. CD38 is if nothing else the biggest non-Commissioners Court prize on the board for Harris County Democrats.
Finally, there are the districts Dems need to worry about. CD15 is already going to be a tough hold, and even if Dems manage to keep it in 2022, there's no reason to think it will get any easier, and may well get harder. If that happens, then CD28 could well be in peril as well. As noted before, it's more like a 10-12 point district downballot, and whatever you think of him Henry Cuellar has shown the ability to outperform that level. Who knows how long those things can last if the trends continue? CD34 is almost as blue now as CD38 is red, but it was also almost as blue as CD38 was red in 2012. Again, I don't like that trend. The main difference here is that the 2020 election was the sole data point in the new direction, whereas the trending-blue districts have been doing so since 2016. But the numbers are what they are, and until we see evidence that the trend isn't continuing, we have to be prepared for the possibility that it will. Don't take any of this for granted.
The bottom line is that right now, only a couple of districts look competitive. That was the case in 2012 as well, and we saw what happened there after a couple of cycles. That said, the reason for the big change was only partly about changing demography – the Trump effect and efforts to register voters, by Dems at first and by Republicans later, all played roles as well. We can extrapolate from existing trends, but it's hard to know how much that will continue, and it's really hard to know what exogenous factors may arise. And for all of the movement that the 2011/2013 Congressional districts saw, in the end only three districts were held by the opposite party in 2020 than in 2012 – don't forget, Dems won CD23 in 2012, but only held it that one term. As much as that map looked like it could be a disaster for the Republicans at the end of the decade, it mostly held to form for them. Would it be a big surprise if the same thing happens this decade? Obviously, I don't want that to happen, but the GOP built itself some big cushions into this map. Overcoming all that isn't going to be easy, if indeed it is possible. We have a lot of work to do.
The growing field for Land Commissioner
Nov 21st, 2021
We have some interesting candidates on our side.
Jay Kleberg
A member of a South Texas family that owns one of the largest ranches in the country is seeking the Democratic nomination for Texas land commissioner, the statewide office overseeing the Alamo's operations and the state's natural disaster recovery efforts.
The seat will be open during the 2022 election as Republican incumbent George P. Bush runs for attorney general.
Jay Kleberg, an Austin-based conservationist whose family owns the sprawling King Ranch in Kingsville, said in an interview with The Texas Tribune on Wednesday that his campaign will focus on fighting climate change, managing the state's disaster recovery and improving benefits for veterans.
"It's the responsibility of the land commissioner to combat climate change and it seems like a bold statement in Texas politics right now, but we've gotta follow the science," Kleberg said.
The Texas General Land Office manages 13 million acres of public lands and mineral rights across the state. As a result, Kleberg said the office has the "ability to diversify its portfolio of renewables" and "lead the state toward a low-emission future."
Kleberg formerly served as associate director of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation, the nonprofit partner of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
Kleberg said he is optimistic, pointing to his experience with the responsibilities of the office and saying conservation brings a "lot of people together." And he suggested his bid would be well-funded, noting he has been able to raise over $100 million for conservation efforts.
This will not be Kleberg's first bid for public office. In 2010, Kleberg ran as a Republican for the El Paso-area Texas House District 78, which is currently represented by state Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso. But Kleberg fell short in the three-way GOP primary that year to Dee Margo, who unseated Moody in the November general election.
Kleberg, asked Wednesday about his party switch, said that while he considers himself "a Texan first" he feels "strong about running as a Democrat" and is looking forward to the race.
"Texas deserves a representation that believes in combating climate change and bringing people together — not dividing them," he said.
That's Jay Kleberg of Kleberg County, where the King Ranch is. Fair to say, he's a bit atypical for a Texas Democrat. You can see his announcement video here. He joins a field that according to the Patrick Svitek spreadsheet has four Republicans and four Democrats so far. The latter group includes Jinny Suh and two dudes I've not heard of.
The fact that Kleberg once ran for office as a Republican doesn't bother me. It should be clear by now that there are a significant number of former Republicans out there, and anyone who is going to put fighting climate change at the top of their agenda is going to get a full hearing from Democratic voters. The fact that he'd be another white guy on the Democratic ballot is not a problem of his making, but as he'd have to defeat a woman of color to get there, it's a question he'll have to address. I think we know by now that anything can happen in these lower-profile downballot statewide primaries – for all we know, one of those other guys may win the nomination and have to answer those questions.
Of interest to me is that Kleberg County is one of the places that moved towards Trump in 2020. Obama won it 53.4% to 45.6% in 2012, Hillary won it 49.6% to 45.9% in 2016, and Beto took it 51.8% to 47.5% in 2018, but Trump carried it 50.3% to 48.6% in 2020. I should note that Kleberg split tickets in every year I looked – Republican State Rep. JM Lozano won it every year, Greg Abbott beat Wendy Davis in 2014 by a hair and Lupe Valdez by double digits in 2018, while Leticia van de Putte and Mike Collier won it in those years. Eva Guzman won it in 2016, while Chrysta Castaneda and several of the statewide Democratic judicial candidates took it in 2020. Maybe Kleberg can move the needle a bit in his home county – which by itself doesn't mean much, as there were just under 11K votes cast there last year – and more importantly in other counties like it. I have no idea if this may be the case, or if he'd do better than Jinny Suh or one of the other dudes. It's just the sort of thing I think about when doing posts like this. The main takeaway for you should be to pay attention to this race, the choice you make matters.
Precinct analysis: The new State House map
Like it or not, we have new State House districts. We may as well acquaint ourselves with them. The coverage we've had so far has focused on the 2020 election numbers to say whether a district will be red or blue or (in a limited number of cases) purple. I think that we need to see more data than that to get a full picture. I've spent a bunch of time on this site looking at how districts changed over the course of the past decade. This post will do the same for the new State House districts. I may do the same for the other types of districts – we'll see how busy things get once filing season opens – but for now let's look at how things are here.
We now have a full set of election data for the new districts. All of the data for the new State House districts can be found here. I am using election data for these years in this post: 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020
If you want to remind yourself of what the map looks like, use the district viewer, which allows you to zoom in all the way to street level. What would have happened in the last decade if we had had this map in place following the 2011 session?
2012 – 59 seats won by Obama
2014 – 51 seats won by Davis
2016 – 64 seats won by Clinton
2018 – 66 seats won by Beto
2020 – 65 seats won by Biden
This shows a couple of things. One is just how bad a year 2014 was. Two, how effective the 2011/2013 map was for the conditions that existed at the time. Note that with this map, the big shift towards the Democrats happened in 2016, not 2018. I have to wonder how things might have played out in 2018 and 2020 if that had been our experience. After that, it gets a lot more static. I'll tell you which districts were won by Beto but not Clinton, and which district was won by Beto but not Biden, later in this post.
Enough setup. You're ready for some numbers, right? I know you are. I've broken this down more or less by region, and am including districts that are within 20 points in the 2020 results.
Dist  Obama  Romney Obama%Romney%    Biden   Trump Biden% Trump%
014  14,134  29,676  31.5%  66.1%   30,840  38,146  43.5%  53.8%
Call this the "Central" region – HD14 is Brazos County, HDs 20 and 52 are Williamson, HD45 is Hays, HDs 54 and 55 are the infamous "donut" districts of Bell County, and the other three are Bexar. Couple things to note, as these themes will recur. One is that if there's a district you think might belong but which isn't listed, it's probably because it just doesn't qualify as a "swing" district any more. A great example is HD47 in Travis County, which was a 52-47 district for Mitt Romney in 2012. In 2020, however, it was won by Joe Biden by a 61-36 margin. HD45 is more or less the same, but I included it here as a borderline case.
Looking at the shifts, it's not too hard to imagine the two Williamson districts moving into (back into, in the case of HD52) the Dem column, in a future election if not this year. Note also that HD118 was once a red district. It's one of the two that Beto flipped and which Biden held. Sure, it's accurately described in all of the coverage of the special election runoff as being more Republican than the current HD118, but one should be aware of the direction that it has traveled. I won't be surprised if it outperforms the 2020 number for Dems in 2022. (No, the result of this special election runoff doesn't change my thinking on that. It's not the first time that Republicans have won a special election in HD118.)
Not all districts moved so dramatically – that parsing of Bell County looks like it will be durable for the GOP, at least at this time. The other two Bexar districts were a lot more Democratic at the Presidential level than they were downballot, so one has to wonder if the splits we see here are entirely about Trump, or if they will be the leading edge for Dems as the 2016 Trump numbers were in places like CD07 and all of the Dallas House districts that Republicans once held.
035  19,519   5,678  76.7%  22.3%   22,629  16,478  57.3%  41.7%
Here we have South Texas and the Valley, where things are not so good for the Dems. Again, the districts you don't see here are the ones that are not swing districts; check out the linked numbers to see for yourself. HD41 was pretty stable, and I will note that the current version of HD74 was carried by Trump, so the new map is a bit friendlier to the Dems, at least for now. HD80 is the Beto district that Biden lost, and as with every other Latino district we're just going to have to see how it performs in a non-Trump year. If State Rep. Alex Dominguez, the incumbent in HD37, does indeed primary Sen. Eddie Lucio, that puts another Dem seat squarely in the danger zone. (Modulo the pending litigation, of course.)
So much action in the Multiplex. HD33 is Rockwall and a piece of Collin. HDs 61 and 70 are Collin, HD57 is Denton. I have lumped HD84 in here as well, even though it's Lubbock and it remains on the fringe, but I don't care. We will make a race out of that district yet! HDs 108 and 112 in Dallas are also much more Republican downballot than they were at the top, and while I think they will eventually fall, it's unlikely to be in 2022. HD70, by the way, is the other district that flipped Dem in 2018.
Everywhere else I look, I see districts that are about as competitive as the formerly Republican-held districts of Dallas County were circa 2012. (Note how none of them have made an appearance in this post.) Look at how huge those splits were a decade ago. A decade in the future, either we're going to be grimly hailing the evil genius of this gerrymander, or we're going to be chuckling about Republican hubris and how if they'd maybe thrown another district or two to the Dems they could have saved themselves a bucketful of losses.
Finally, the Houston area. HDs 25 and 29 are Brazoria County, HDs 26 and 28 are Fort Bend. The now-in-Fort-Bend HD76 slides in here as another former swing district, going from 51-48 for Romney to 61-38 for Biden. I threw HD134 in here even though it's obviously not a swing district by any reasonable measure in part because it was once the epitome of a swing district, and because damn, just look at how far that district shifted towards Dems. The open HD133 is unfortunately another one of those redder-downballot districts, so even though it's an open seat don't get your hopes up too much for this cycle. Maybe later on, we'll see.
I'm fascinated by HD144, which like HD74 is now slightly more Dem than it was under the existing map. I guess Republicans had other priorities in the area. As for HD148, it's a little jarring to see it as a genuine swing district from 2012, though it barely qualifies as of 2020. Rep. Penny Morales Shaw has complained about the changes made to her district, not just geographically but also by reducing that Latino CVAP by almost ten points. Finally, I will note that while the GOP shored up HD138, it's another district that used to be a lot redder than it is now. Again, we'll just have to see how resilient that is. That "genius/hubris" divide will largely come down to places like that.
I hope this helped shed some light on what these districts may be going forward. As always, let me know what you think.
CM Travis resigns to run for HD133
Did not see that coming.
Greg Travis
City Councilmember Greg Travis on Wednesday announced he is running for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives, effectively resigning his District G post at City Hall.
Travis told supporters at a River Oaks fundraiser and in an email Wednesday evening that he would seek the Republican nomination for House District 133 in west Houston.
The Texas Constitution forbids council members serving four-year terms from actively campaigning for another office while they hold their seats, and Travis' announcement automatically triggers his resignation.
"I am torn between representing you at Council or representing you at the State House in Austin," Travis wrote to his constituents. "I have chosen the latter as I feel I can do more for our families, this District, and Houston in general as a State Representative."
At the fundraiser, Travis told his supporters he would have continued in his council seat if the law allowed.
The city will have to call a special election to replace Travis on City Council within 120 days, according to the Texas Constitution.
One of Travis' District G predecessors, Bert Keller, also has announced a campaign for the seat. Keller served on City Council from 1999 to 2003. Republican attorneys Mano DeAyala and Shelley Barineau are running as well. It does not appear any Democrats have joined the race yet. The primary elections are March 1, and the general election will be Nov. 8, 2022.
HD-133 has been solidly red, but this year's redistricting process might have made it slightly more competitive. Former President Trump carried the previous boundaries of the district by 4.1 percentage points. He would have won the newly-drawn district by less than 1 percentage point. Sen. Ted Cruz, though, carried the new district by 7 percentage points in 2018.
You can see the State House electoral data for 2020 here. That actually shows Trump winning it by two points, 50.3 to 48.4, but that's a bit misleading, as Republicans did a lot better downballot. John Cornyn won it by almost 12 points, for example, and some of the statewide judicial candidates did better than that. That said, the district as constituted shifted pretty strongly over the decade, as Mitt Romney won it by 35 points in 2012. It should be Republican in 2022, but they won't be able to take it for granted. (The same was true for the old version of HD133.)
I fully expect Dems to have a decent candidate for this district – the lines on the new maps are barely dry, so we're still very much in the exploratory phase. They'll be the underdog, but they should be able to get the support they need. With the Democratic boosts given to HDs 134 and 135, and with HD132 a bit more remote, HDs 133 and 138 are the closest House districts on the menu. We should start seeing candidacy announcements (including, one hopes, from a certain former member of Congress from El Paso) soon.
As for the special election in District G, while the city has to call it within 120 days, I would expect it will still fall on a uniform election date. That means next May, barring anything unforeseen, with a June runoff. Those of you in that district, get ready for that.
2021 Day Seven EV report: After the weekend
Let's get right to it: These are the early voting totals for the 2021 election after Sunday:
Mail ballots: 36,517
In person: 19,901
You can see the full Day Seven report here. The "voters by type" breakdown on the last page only goes through Saturday, so I don't have the most up to date numbers on drive through voting, but it's a pretty small fraction of the total.
The thing that I noticed when I looked at the numbers was that Saturday was not the biggest day of in person voting, as I had expected it to be. My first thought was that this was an outlier, and that there had to be some reason for it that I would need to speculate on. Turns out, this is the new normal, at least for odd-numbered years. Look at the EV daily totals for 2019, 2017, 2015, and a few elections before then, and you'll see that Saturday is a good day for turnout, but generally only the second best day. It's the Friday that leads the pack, and that has been true for odd-numbered years going all the way back to 2009, the last year in which Saturday led the first week's totals.
Odd years continue to be unlike the even-numbered years in that early voting is a much smaller piece of the pie. I consider the year 2008 to be an inflection point in voter behavior, in that it was the first year of any in which more than half of the total vote was cast before Election Day. That very much persists in even-year races, with nearly 88% of the vote in 2020 being cast early. Looking at previous Presidential years, 2016 followed this year's pattern of Saturday not being the biggest day of the first week, but in 2012 and 2008 Saturday led the way. 2020 was a different kind of outlier because of the extra week of early voting and the supercharged early energy, but there you can see that there was a significant dropoff on Saturday after that frenzied first week.
So what has happened? Two things, I would guess. One is just that we are all used to voting early, even those of us who persist in waiting until Election Day. And two, because early voting is such a part of the fabric now, it's more common for people to do it as part of their workday routine. I have voted during my lunch hour most years, and I think that's pretty common. Whatever the reason, Saturday is not the huge narrative-setting day that it used to be in the EV process.
The rest of this week, if previous patterns hold, will wind up exceeding the first five days. I kind of think that won't be the case, because of the large number of mail ballots, but we'll see. In any event, the norm is for the first two to four days of this week to be similar to last week, with Friday being the biggest day of the whole period. I don't know if that's what we'll get this time, but we'll see. Have you voted yet?
Precinct analysis: Congress, part 2
State Rep districts
Commissioners Court/JP precincts
Comparing 2012 and 2016
Statewide judicial
Appellate courts, Part 1
Judicial averages
HCDE
Fort Bend, part 1
Harris County State Senate comparisons
State Senate districts 2020
State Senate district comparisons
State House districts 2020, part 1
Median districts
State House district changes by demography
State House district changes by county
SBOE
Congress, part 1
I didn't want to leave the Congressional district analysis without looking at some downballot races, since I mentioned them in the first part. To keep this simple, I'm just going to compare 2020 to 2012, to give a bookends look at things. I've got the Senate race (there was no Senate race in 2016, another reason to skip that year), the Railroad Commissioner race, and the Supreme Court race with Nathan Hecht.
Dist   Hegar   Cornyn  Hegar% Cornyn%
01    79,626  217,942  26.30%  71.90%
02   157,925  180,504  45.50%  52.00%
09   168,796   54,801  73.50%  23.90%
29    99,415   51,044  64.00%  32.80%
Dist   Casta   Wright  Casta% Wright%
Dist Meachum    HechtMeachum%  Hecht%
Dist  Sadler     Cruz Sadler%   Cruz%
Dist   Henry    Cradd  Henry%  Cradd%
Dist   Petty    Hecht  Petty%  Hecht%
There are two things that jump out at me when I look over these numbers. The first actually has to do with the statewide totals. Joe Biden cut the deficit at the Presidential level nearly in half from 2012 – where Barack Obama trailed Mitt Romney by 1.26 million votes, Biden trailed Trump by 631K. The gains were not as dramatic in the Senate and RRC races, but there was progress. Ted Cruz beat Paul Sadler by 1.246 million votes, while John Cornyn beat MJ Hegar by 1.074 million; for RRC, Christi Craddock topped Dale Henry by 1.279 million and Jim Wright bested Chrysta Castaneda by 1.039 million. Not nearly as much progress, but we're going in the right direction. At the judicial level, however, that progress wasn't there. Nathan Hecht, then running for Supreme Court Place 6, won in 2012 by 908K votes, and he won in 2020 by 934K. That's a little misleading, because in the only other contested statewide judicial race in 2012, Sharon Keller beat Keith Hampton for CCA by 1.094 million votes, and five out of the seven Dems running in 2020 did better than that. Still, the point remains, the judicial races were our weakest spot. If we really want to turn Texas blue, we will need more of an investment in these races as well.
One explanation for this is that Dem statewide judicial candidates didn't do as well in at least some of the trending-blue places. Hegar and Castaneda both carried CD07, but only two of the Dem judicial candidates did, Staci Williams and Tina Clinton. All of them carried CD32, but none of them by more than two points, while Biden took it by ten; to be fair, Hegar won it by less than two, and Castaneda had the best performance with a 2.6 point margin. Maybe these folks were motivated by Trump more than anything else, and they didn't see the judicial races in those terms. I have noted before that Dem judicial candidates did better in CD07 in 2018 than in 2020, so maybe the higher turnout included more less-likely Republicans than one might have expected. Or maybe these folks are in the process of becoming Democratic, but aren't all the way there yet. Just something to think about.
On the flip side of that, while Hegar underperformed in the three closer-than-expected Latino Democratic districts CD15, CD28, and CD34 – Cornyn actually carried CD15 by a smidge – everyone else did better, and indeed outperformed Biden in those districts. The judicial candidates all carried CDs 28 and 34 by at least six points, with most in the 8-9 range and a couple topping ten, and all but two carried CD15 by a wider margin that Biden's 1.9 points, with them in the three-to-five range. Still a disconcerting step back from 2012 and 2016, but at least for CDs 28 and 34 it's still a reasonably comfortable margin. Maye this is the mirror image of the results in CDs 07 and 32, where the Presidential race was the main motivator and people were more likely to fall back on old patterns elsewhere. As with CDs 07 and 32, we'll have to see where those trends go from here.
After however many entries in this series, I don't have a whole lot more to say. We'll be getting new maps soon, and we'll have a better idea of what the immediate future looks like. I think the last two decades has shown us that there's only so far out in the future that redistricting will be predictive in such a dynamic and growing state as Texas, but we have seen the winds shift more than once, so let's not get too comfortable with any one idea. Whatever we get in this session is not etched in stone, and we still have some hope for federal legislation. For now, this is what we're up against.
In addition to the SBOE data, we finally have 2020 election results for the Congressional districts as well. With the redistricting special session about to start, let's look at where things were in the last election.
Dist   Biden    Trump  Biden%  Trump%
01    83,221  218,689   27.2%   71.5%
02   170,430  174,980   48.6%   49.9%
09   178,908   54,944   75.7%   23.2%
Joe Biden carried 14 of the 36 Congressional districts, the 13 that Democratic candidates won plus CD24. He came close in a lot of others – within two points in CDs 02, 03, 10, 22, and 23, and within five in CDs 06, 21, and 31 – but the Congressional map gets the award for most effecting gerrymandering, as the Presidential results most closely matched the number of districts won.
Generally speaking, Biden did a little worse than Beto in 2018, which isn't a big surprise given that Beto lost by two and a half points while Biden lost by five and a half. Among the competitive districts, Biden topped Beto in CDs 03 (48.6 to 47.9), 07 (53.6 to 53.3), and 24 (51.9 to 51.6), and fell short elsewhere. He lost the most ground compared to Beto in the Latino districts, which is a subject we have covered in much detail. I only focused on the closer districts in my 2018 analysis, but you can see the full 2018 data here. Biden's numbers are far more comparable to Hillary Clinton's in 2016 – I'll get into that in more detail in a subsequent post.
As we have also seen elsewhere, Biden's underperformance in the Latino districts – specifically, CDs 15, 28, and 34 – was generally not replicated by other candidates down the ballot. Again, I'll get to this in more detail later, but with the exception of John Cornyn nipping MJ Hegar in CD15, Democrats other than Biden generally carried those districts by five to ten points, still closer than in 2016 but not as dire looking as they were at the top. Interestingly, where Biden really overperformed compared to the rest of the Democratic ticket was with the judicial races – Republicans carried all but one of the statewide judicial races in CD07, for example. We discussed that way back when in the earlier analyses, but it's been awhile so this is a reminder. That's also not too surprising given the wider spread in the judicial races than the Presidential race, and it's also a place where one can be optimistic (we still have room to grow!) or pessimistic (we're farther away than we thought!) as one sees fit.
I don't have a lot more to say here that I haven't already said in one or more ways before. The main thing to think about is that redistricting is necessarily different for the Congressional map simply because there will be two more districts. (We should think about adding legislative districts, especially Senate districts, but that's a whole 'nother thing.) I have to assume that Republicans will try to give themselves two more districts, one way or another, but I suppose it's possible they could just seek to hold serve, if going for the gusto means cutting it too close in too many places. I figure we'll see a starter map pretty soon, and from there it will be a matter of what alternate realities get proposed and by whom. For sure, the future plaintiffs in redistricting litigation will have their own maps to show off.
For comparison, as I did in other posts, here are the Congressional numbers from 2016 and 2012:
Dist Clinton    TrumpClinton%  Trump%
1     66,389  189,596  25.09%  71.67%
2    119,659  145,530  42.75%  52.00%
9    151,559   34,447  79.14%  17.99%
Dist   Obama   Romney  Obama% Romney%
Looking at the 2016 numbers, you can begin to see the outlines of future competitiveness. That's more a function of Trump's weak showing in the familiar places than anything else, but Democrats got their numbers up enough to make it a reality. Looking back at 2012 and you're reminded again of just how far we've come. Maybe we'll reset to that kind of position in 2022, I don't know, but that's a little harder to imagine when you remember that Mitt Romney won the state by ten more points than Trump did. We'll be going down that rabbit hole soon enough. As always, let me know what you think.
Precinct analysis: SBOE
Sep 7th, 2021
Hey, guess what? The 2020 election data is finally on the Texas Redistricting page for Congress and the State Board of Education. It had been there for awhile for the State House and State Senate, which is why I was able to do those most recent Precinct Analysis piece. Now I can fill in the missing pieces, and I will start here with the State Board of Education, which has a current composition of nine Republicans and six Democrats following the Dem flip in SBOE5. Here's what the 2020 results looked like for these districts:
Before we dive into the numbers, you're probably wondering where these districts are. I know I don't have a mental map of the SBOE like I do for the legislative districts. Here is the SBOE statewide map, and the District Viewer, which you can zoom in on to the street level. That will be your best friend for when the new maps are coming out.
So the numbers. As you can see, Joe Biden carried seven of the fifteen districts, falling just short in district 10 for a majority but carrying Republican-held districts 6 and 12. The bad news is that he did not carry district 2, which is a Democratic district held by Ruben Cortez, who was not on the ballot after winning re-election in 2018 by seven points. District 2 has been purple through the decade but it was on the blue side of purple before 2020. Beto carried SBOE2 in 2018, but only by 4.5 points; Greg Abbott won it by a wider margin, with Glenn Hegar and George P Bush also carrying it. Based on this I think Cortez would have held it had it been on the ballot last year, but I feel confident they'll make a stronger push for it next year.
Here's my look at the 2018 results for these districts, for which Beto won nine districts, carrying SBOE2 and 10 where Biden fell short. As you know, District 5 has been on my radar since 2016 when Hillary Clinton carried it, and it came through as I expected. District 10 was the longest-shot of the potential takeovers, with districts 12 and 6 being in between. If we went into the 2022 elections with the same districts, I'd feel like Democratic SBOE candidates would win between five and seven districts (remember, everyone is on the ballot in the first post-redistricting year), with 2 and 12 being the main variables. I see 6 and 10 as tougher nuts to crack, with 10 having more Republican turf in it, and 6 starting from a redder place and thus just taking longer to get where I think it would be going.
Obviously, all of this will be affected by redistricting, and not only is there a greater degree of freedom for the GOP given the small number of districts, there's been little to no attention paid to SBOE districts. The SBOE map was never part of any voting rights litigation in the 2011 cycle. I have no idea how much attention it will get this time, but as SBOE5 was one of the few Democratic pickups from 2020, I have to think that people will care a little more about it, on both sides.
As we know, Biden tended to run ahead of the rest of the Democratic ticket. It's pretty straightforward here, in that the rest of the ticket carried five districts, with everyone winning SBOE5 but falling short in 2, 6, 10, and 12. Consistent with what we have seen in the House and Senate districts, Biden's number in SBOE2 was about the same as everyone else's, which you can interpret optimistically (it didn't get any worse!) or pessimistically (Republicans overall improved, it wasn't just Trump!) as you see fit.
For comparison, here are the numbers from 2016 and 2012:
As noted, Hillary Clinton carried six districts, while Barack Obama carried five. The thing that always interests me is the shift over time, and you can see how dramatic it was in the districts that we've been talking about. Mitt Romney won districts 5, 6, 10, and 12 by double digits, with 6 and 12 being 20-point wins for him. Again, we have seen this in the previous posts, these districts are anchored in the big urban and suburban districts that have trended hard blue recently, this is just another way of looking at it. I like having the different views, you can always pick up some nuances when you have different angles.
I'm working on the Congressional data next. As always, let me know what you think.
Precinct analysis: State House district changes by county
One more look at how state house districts have changed over the decade. For this exercise, I'm going to look at some key counties and the State Rep districts within them.
Bexar:
Dist  12-16R  12-16D  16-20R  16-20D  12-20R  12-20D Dem net
122   -1,304  10,628  12,204  21,091  10,900  31,719  20,819
121   -4,020   6,534   6,059  15,078   2,039  21,612  19,573
116     -583   6,014   3,546  10,281   2,963  16,295  13,332
117    4,532   8,828  14,927  22,921  19,459  31,749  12,290
123   -1,427   5,225   3,742   9,272   2,315  14,497  12,182
124      330   5,077   5,877  11,756   6,207  16,833  10,626
120     -184     863   4,503  10,856   4,319  11,719   7,400
119    1,062   3,428   6,041  10,507   7,103  13,935   6,832
118    1,391   3,719   6,633   7,790   8,024  11,509   3,485
Bexar County doesn't get the props it deserves for contributing to the Democratic cause. Each of its ten districts became more Democratic in each of the two Presidential cycles. Where Bexar had gone 51.56% to 47.04% in 2012 for Obama, it went 58.20% to 40.05% for Biden. Obama had a net 23K votes in Bexar, while it was +140K votes for Biden. The two districts that shifted the most heavily towards Dems are the two Republican districts (HD117 went Republican in 2014, then flipped back in 2016), with Biden carrying HD121 as Beto had done in 2018, and HD122 coming into focus as a potential long-term pickup (modulo redistricting, of course). Both HDs 121 and 122 were over 60% for Romney, with HD122 at almost 68% for him. Both can and surely will be shored up in the next round of mapmaking, but the long term trends don't look good for the Republicans holding them both.
Tarrant:
094   -3,344   2,238   2,655  10,231    -689  12,469  13,158
101     -734   3,487   4,523   9,808   3,789  13,295   9,506
093    2,751   5,180   9,984  15,697  12,735  20,877   8,142
091      401   2,489   5,437   8,897   5,838  11,386   5,548
090     -180   2,391   3,170   5,496   2,990   7,887   4,897
095     -613  -2,745   2,727   7,752   2,114   5,007   2,893
I know everyone sees Tarrant County as a disappointment in 2020. Beto broke through in 2018, we had a bunch of close districts to target, and the Republicans held them all even as Biden also carried Tarrant. The point here is that Democrats made progress in every district, in each cycle (the dip in predominantly Black and heavily Democratic HD95 in 2016 notwithstanding). That includes the strong Republican districts (HDs 91, 98, and 99), the strong D districts (HDs 90, 95, and 101), and the five swing districts. Tarrant will be another challenge for Republicans in redistricting because like in Harris they have mostly lost their deep red reserves. HD98 went from being a 75% Romney district to a 62% Trump district last year. They can spread things out a bit, but remember what happened in Dallas County in the 2010s when they got too aggressive. I'm not saying that's what will happen in Tarrant, but you can see where the numbers are.
Collin:
089    1,038   6,667   9,980  17,338  11,018  24,005  12,987
033    4,656   8,268  18,234  20,233  22,890  28,501   5,611
Denton:
106    8,757  11,138  21,190  29,280  29,947  40,418  10,471
I'm grouping these two together because they have a lot in common. Both shifted hugely Democratic over the decade, in each case across all their districts. Both contain a district that was added to their county in the 2011 redistricting. HDs 33 (72-26 for Romney in 2012, 60-38 for Trump in 2020) and 106 (68-31 for Romney in 2012, 54-45 for Trump in 2020) were supposed to be super-red, but didn't stay that way. I might have thought that the southernmost districts in each county – i.e., the ones closest to Dallas and Tarrant – would be the bluest, but that is not quite the case. HD65 is in southeast Denton, where it is almost entirely adjacent to HD115, but HD63 is the reddest district in Denton (61-37 Trump) and it is the other district on Denton's south border, though it aligns almost perfectly with HD98, the reddest district in Tarrant. HD64 is the next most Dem district in Denton, and it's in the northwest quadrant, catty-corner to HD65. I have to assume this is a function of development more than who its closest neighbors are; I'm sure someone who knows Denton better than I can comment on that.
In Collin, HDs 66 and 67 are on the southern end of that county, but so is HD89, where it abuts Rockwall County more than it does Dallas. HD70 is north of 67 and 89, and HD33 (which contains all of Rockwall County) is the outer edge of the county to the west, north, and east, dipping down into Rockwall from there. Both counties continue their massive growth, and I expect them to have at least one more district in them next decade. Republicans have more room to slosh voters around, but as above, the trends are not in their favor.
There are of course other counties that are growing a lot and not in a way that favors Republicans. Here are two more of them.
Williamson:
136       52  10,901   7,842  22,330   7,894  33,231  25,337
020    7,373   2,895  20,820  14,926  28,193  17,821 -10,372
Fort Bend:
HD20 also includes Milam and Burnet counties, and I suspect that's where most of the Republican growth is. HD85 also includes Jackson and Wharton counties. The previous version of HD52 had flipped Dem in 2008, the first such incursion into the formerly all-red suburbs, before flipping back in 2010, but neither it (55-42 for Romney) nor the newcomer HD136 (55-41 Romney) were ever all that red. There were some maps drawn in the 2011 redistricting process (not by Republicans, of course) that carved HD26 out as a heavily Asian swing district (it went 63-36 for Romney as drawn), but it just needed time for the "swing" part to happen. Of the various targets from 2018 and 2020, it's one that I feel got away, and I wish I understood that better.
Brazoria:
029      496   8,084  10,828  15,387  11,324  23,471  12,147
025    1,759     215   8,293   3,874  10,052   4,089  -5,963
Galveston:
024    2,403   3,959  13,045   8,928  15,448  12,887  -2,561
023    3,847     346  11,123   7,296  14,970   7,642  -7,328
015   -1,563   7,905  13,226  15,512  11,663  23,417  11,754
016    7,437   2,437  16,088   7,160  23,525   9,597 -13,928
003    7,758   1,807  17,456   8,286  25,214  10,093 -15,121
We've looked at these counties before, this is just a more fine-grained approach. Note that HD03 includes all of Waller County, HD25 includes all of Matagorda County, and HD23 includes all of Chambers County. HD23 was already Republican in 2012 when Craig Eiland still held it (Romney carried it 54.6 to 44.2) and while it has gotten more so since then (Trump won it 57.5 to 41.0), that has mostly been fueled by the Republican growth in Chambers. I did a quick calculation on the data from the Galveston County election results page, and Biden carried the Galveston part of HD23 by a slim margin, 29,019 to 28,896. (Republican rep Mayes Middleton won that part of the district 29,497 to 27,632, so this tracks.) The rest of Galveston, the northern part that's all Houston suburb, is much more Republican, but like with these other two counties one can see a path forward from here. What to do about the likes of Chambers County, that's another question.
HD29 in Brazoria should have been a target in 2018 but the Dem who won the primary dropped out of the race, and there was no traction that I could see there in 2020. I expect that district to get a little redder, but the same story as elsewhere applies in that the geographic trends are a force that won't be stopped by boundary lines. As for Montgomery, there are your signs of progress right there. HD15 is still very red, but as I've said before, the first goal is to bend the curve, and we're on the right track there. HD15 is basically the Woodlands and Shenandoah, just north of HD150, while HD03 wraps around it and HD16 is the north end of the county.
Lubbock:
084     -474     873   4,124   6,975   3,650   7,848   4,198
083    3,359     242  12,224   5,141  15,583   5,383 -10,200
Smith:
006       67     938   6,922   6,208   6,989   7,146     157
005    4,565  -1,293   9,646   2,832  14,211   1,539 -12,672
These two districts, on opposite ends of the state, may seem odd to be paired together, but they have a couple of things in common. Both contain one district that is entirely within its borders (HD06 in Smith, HD84 in Lubbock) and one district that contains the rest of their population plus several smaller neighboring counties (HD05 also contains Wood and Rains counties, while HD83 contains six other counties). Both have a city that is the bulk of of its population (the city of Lubbock has over 90% of the population of Lubbock County, while a bit less than half of Smith County is in the city of Tyler). And both provide a bit of evidence for my oft-stated thesis that these smaller cities in Texas, which are often in otherwise fairly rural and very Republican areas, provide the same kind of growth opportunity for Democrats that the bigger cities have provided.
Both HDs 06 and 84 were less red than Smith and Lubbock counties overall: Smith County was 69-30 for Trump, HD06 was 68-32 for Matt Schaefer; Lubbock County was 65-33 for Trump, and HD84 was 61-39 for John Frullo. I didn't go into the precinct details to calculate the Trump/Biden numbers in those districts, but given everything we've seen I'd say we could add another point or two into the Dem column for each. HD84 shows a clear Democratic trend while HD06 is more of a mixed bag, but it's still a slight net positive over the decade and a damn sight better than HD05. HD06 is not close to being competitive while HD84 is on the far outer fringes, but that's not the main point. It's the potential for Democratic growth, for which we will need every little contribution we can get, that I want to shout from the rooftops. The big cities and big growing suburbs are our top tier, but we'd be fools to ignore the places like Lubbock and Tyler.
UT/Trib poll: Abbott has the best of a bunch of weak approval numbers
Same story, new chapter,
Texas voters are split over whether they approve of Gov. Greg Abbott's job performance, though he remains popular with Republicans and more popular among Texans than President Joe Biden, according to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.
The June 2021 poll shows that 44% of Texans approve of Abbott's job as governor, while 44% disapprove. That leaves him with an overall approval rating from Texas voters that's better than those of Biden, U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Attorney General Ken Paxton and House Speaker Dade Phelan. Abbott enjoys the approval of 77% of his own party's voters, with 43% of Republicans saying they "strongly approve" of his performance.
Democratic disapproval for Abbott remains potent. Eighty-two percent of Democrats disapprove of Abbott, with 75% of those Democrats saying they "strongly disapprove" of his performance.
"What we're seeing now is that Democrats are registering as much disapproval with him as they are with really any kind of national Republican figure," said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project.
Abbott earned higher marks among Texas voters regarding his COVID-19 response at the start of the pandemic, Blank pointed out. In April 2020, 56% of Texans approved of Abbott's response to the pandemic, but that slipped to 44% in the latest June poll.
"One of the things that benefited Greg Abbott was Donald Trump," Blank said. "So Donald Trump's inability to appear to be seriously dealing with the pandemic made Abbott's attempts early on — even if they were criticized — much much more serious-looking, both to Republicans and Democrats, and I think that's why his numbers were so high."
As the pandemic drew on, Democratic disapproval of Abbott increased steadily. In the last poll, 81% of Democrats disapproved of Abbott's COVID-19 response, with 67% saying they strongly disagree. Meanwhile, 74% of Republicans approve and 45% strongly approve.
Biden's ratings have remained steady among both Democrats and Republicans since the February UT/TT Poll. His overall job approval with Texan voters is at 43% who approve and 47% who disapprove. When filtered by partisanship, 88% of Democrats approve of the job he's doing, including 53% who strongly approve. As for Republicans, 84% disapprove of the job he's doing with 77% strongly disapproving.
Texans see Biden's COVID-19 response as a strength, while border security remains a weak point.
Overall, 49% of Texas voters approved of the president's COVID-19 response, while 36% disapprove. Of those, 91% of Democrats approve, while 64% of Republicans disapprove.
See here for the February UT/Trib poll, which had Biden at 45 approve, 44 disapprove. There was also a May end-of-session poll that had him at 44/46. While it is true (and we have discussed before) that Abbott's approval numbers had been bolstered in the past to some extent by him not being completely despised by Democrats, that moment has passed. It's hard to compare his numbers to almost anyone else in the state because the "don't know" response for them is so much higher – Ken Paxton has 32/36 approval, for instance, and for Dan Patrick it's 36/37. My tentative conclusion is that there will likely be less of a gap between Abbott's numbers next November and those of Patrick and Paxton (if he's on the ballot), but that's not set in stone. Who the Dems get to pick matters, too.
In reading this story, I got curious about how Biden was comparing to President Obama in Texas. I have mentioned that a decent approval rating for Biden next year would help Democrats on the ballot, and while it's still early and the overall political environment is different, I thought it might be useful to have a bit of context. So I poked around in the UT Politics polling archive, and this is what I came up with:
June 2009 – 43 approve, 46 disapprove
October 2009 – 41 approve, 52 disapprove
February 2010 – 41 approve, 50 disapprove
May 2010 – 35 approve, 58 disapprove
September 2010 – 34 approve, 58 disapprove
Obama was pretty much in the same place at this point in 2009, and boy howdy did it go south from there. I'm pretty sure his overall approval numbers were better than Biden's are now – again, the overall climate is much different – but the infamous Rick Santelli "tea party" rant had already occurred, and we know what happened next. Note that other than an outlier in June of 2013, the numbers were pretty stable and generally lousy through the first two years of each term. I included the May 2012 numbers because I came across them in my own post, but as you can see they still fit the pattern.
Obviously, if Biden is sporting similar approval numbers next year, we're almost certainly doomed. I don't think that will happen, but I don't have anything solid to go on for that, so all we can do is watch and see. At least we have something to compare Biden to now.
Precinct analysis: State House district changes by demography
I return once again to doing cycle-over-cycle comparisons in vote turnout, in this case for State House districts. There are a lot of them, and I'm not going to do them all but I am going to do enough of them that I will split this into two parts. Part One, this post, will group districts by demographic groups. Part Two, to come later, will be to group them by counties of interest.
First up, just to ease ourselves in, are the four big urban districts that are Anglo, wealthy, highly college-educated, and swung hard towards the Democrats since 2012:
134  -10,943  15,312   6,540  17,771  -4,403  33,083  37,486
108   -5,942  12,553   8,628  17,929   2,686  30,482  27,796
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. Got it? Good.
Despite the large swings, only the top two are now Dem-held. HD108 managed to remain in the hands of Rep. Morgan Meyer despite being carried by statewide Dems all the way down the ballot, while HD121 still remains somewhat Republican-leaning. I don't know what magic Republicans have in mind for redistricting, but their hold on these voters is slipping away rapidly. I can't emphasize enough that Mitt Romney got 60% of the vote in HD134 in 2012, and look at where it is now.
I've written plenty about these districts, and I could have included more of them in this table. Most of those you will see later. There's not much to add except to say that this particular demographic shift has been a huge driver in the overall blue-ing of Texas, and especially of its most populated areas. I don't know what the future holds, but I don't see that changing in the near term.
When I mentioned that this post was a look at the districts by demographic groups, I assume your first thought was that I'd take a closer look at Latino districts. Well, here you go:
051      425  10,783   4,422  19,073   4,847  29,856  25,009
102   -4,430   5,333   2,511  10,832  -1,919  16,165  18,084
107   -3,023   4,566     718   7,532  -2,305  12,098  14,403
103      -96   7,314   3,535  10,357   3,439  17,671  14,232
105   -2,249   4,377   2,900   8,547     651  12,924  12,273
075    1,734  11,011   9,747   8,599  11,481  19,610   8,129
077   -1,530   5,080   3,539   3,936   2,009   9,016   7,007
145   -1,306   5,575   5,291   5,038   3,985  10,613   6,628
041    1,664   6,820   8,617   5,201  10,281  12,021   1,740
022   -1,261  -2,280   1,510   2,254     249     -26    -275
034      620     799   6,012   3,759   6,632   4,558  -2,074
038    1,533   4,706   9,344   2,945  10,877   7,651  -3,226
037      969   3,764   7,324      36   8,293   3,800  -4,493
036    1,482   5,527   9,847    -480  11,329   5,047  -6,282
039    2,071   3,256   8,411     836  10,482   4,092  -6,390
042      882   2,195   7,908    -323   8,790   1,872  -6,918
074    1,127   2,708   9,454  -2,185  10,581     523 -10,058
031    3,017  -1,816  13,479    -412  16,496  -2,228 -18,724
A couple of notes here. Defining "Latino district" is subjective, and I make no claim that my way is optimal. What you see above is almost all of the districts that are represented by a Latino member, plus HD80, which despite being majority Latino is still represented by Democrat Tracy King. I skipped HDs 49 (Gina Hinojosa) and 50 (Celia Israel) because the're much more Anglo than Latino. HDs 102, 105, and 107 were held by non-Latino Republicans before being flipped by Democrats in 2016 and 2018. HD43 is held by the one Latino Republican in the House, JM Lozano, who won originally as a Democrat in 2008 and then changed parties after the 2010 election. HDs 79 and 90 were held by Anglo Democrats in 2012; Lon Burnam was primaried out by Rep. Ramon Romero in 2014, and Joe Pickett resigned following the 2018 election due to health challenges.
There's a lot of data here, and I'll try to keep this manageable. All the districts that showed a net gain for Dems over both elections are in Bexar, Dallas, El Paso, Harris, Travis (HD51), and Tarrant (HD90), plus HD41 in Hidalgo County. In Bexar, Dallas, and Tarrant, there were net gains in each cycle. In El Paso, there were big gains in 2016 and more modest gains in 2020, with the exception of HD75, which had a slight gain for Republicans in 2020. HD75 is the easternmost and thus most rural of the El Paso districts. It also still voted 66.5% to 31.9% for Biden in 2020, just for some perspective.
In Harris, all five districts gained in 2016, but only HD148 also gained in 2020. HD145 came close to breaking even, while HDs 140, 143, and 144 all moved towards Republicans; we saw this when we looked at the Harris County Senate districts and talked about SD06. This is the first of several places where I will shrug my shoulders and say "we'll see what happens in 2022". Honestly, I don't know what to expect. We've discussed this topic numerous times, and as there are forces moving urban and college-educated voters towards Democrats, the same forces are moving rural and non-college voters towards Republicans. The biggest of those forces is Donald Trump, whose presence on the ballot helped Republicans in 2016 and 2020 but whose absence hurt them in 2018. We just don't know yet what 2022 will bring.
Of the districts that had net Republican gains, HD22 is in Jefferson County (basically, it's Beaumont; Dade Phelan's HD21 has the rest of JeffCo plus Orange County) and HD34 is in Nueces County. Jefferson County has been slowly losing population over time, and I think that was a big driver of what happened with HD22. It's also much more Black than Latino, and thus maybe is a better fit with the next data set, but it has long been represented by Rep. Joe Deshtotel, and this is the decision I made. Nueces County also has the Republican-held HD32 in it, and it showed a net Democratic gain of 1,576 votes over the two cycles, with most of that in 2016 but still a small Dem net in 2020. Its Latino voting age population is about 46%, nearly identical to its Anglo VAP. HD34 was one of the tighter districts even before 2020, and I figure it's on the target list for Republicans in redistricting.
Most of the other districts are in Cameron, Hidalgo, and Webb counties, and while 2020 was a better year for Republicans in all of them, I don't think that will necessarily be the case in 2022, a belief driven in part by the incumbency theory and in part by my own wishfulness. That said, as noted before the shifts were more muted downballot, with Trump outperforming other Republicans in those districts. I had my doubts about the durability of Democratic gains in 2016 because of the disparity between the Hillary numbers and the rest of the numbers, and I think it's fair to have those same doubts here. We do know how it went in 2018, but as before Trump is not on the ballot in 2022. Which force is stronger? Have the underlying conditions changed? I don't know and neither does anyone else at this time.
HDs 31, 74, and 80 are all cobbled out of smaller counties, and I have much less hope for them, but who knows what the combined effects of the freeze and the Abbott Wall will have. The main thing I took away from analyzing this data is that there was already a Republican shift in 31 and 74 in 2016 with a near miss in 80, though they all rebounded in a Democratic direction in 2018. How much of this was caused by new voters, and how much by swapping allegiances, those are big questions to ponder.
Let's move on. These are the predominantly Black districts:
109     -914    -500   1,853  11,161     939  10,661   9,722
111   -1,449  -1,155   1,627   8,981     178   7,826   7,648
100     -840    -537   2,107   7,799   1,267   7,262   5,995
146   -1,653    -923   2,438   6,798     785   5,875   5,090
141      218    -721   2,594   4,405   2,812   3,684     872
110     -101  -3,010   1,820   3,362   1,719     352  -1,367
HD27 is in Fort Bend, HD46 is in Travis (it's also much more Latino than Black but has long been represented by a Black legislator, with Dawnna Dukes preceding Sheryl Cole; it is the inverse of HD22 in that way), HD95 is in Tarrant, and HD120 is in Bexar. HD101 in Tarrant County has a higher Black percentage of its population than either HDs 46 or 120, but it's held by the Anglo Dem Chris Turner, so I skipped it. All the rest are in Harris and Dallas. The range of outcomes here is fascinating. I think what we see in the 2016 results, at least in some of these districts, is a bit of a letdown in enthusiasm from Obama to Clinton, with perhaps a bit of the campaign to dampen turnout among Black Democrats finding some success. Some districts in Harris County like HD141 have had pretty modest growth in population and voter registration as well. I don't know what the story may have been in HD110, but if one of my Dallas readers would like to offer a few words, I'd be interested in hearing them.
There was some evidence around the country of Trump making modest gains with Black voters, mostly Black men, in 2020. I do see a case for that here, because even as Dems had net gains in 2020 – significant gains, in some of these districts – their share of the total new turnout is smaller than you'd otherwise expect. For example, HD131 voted 80.6% to 18.5% for Biden, but only 60.8% of the extra voters in 2020 voted for Biden. HD131 had voted 84.1% to 13.3% for Hillary in 2016, meaning that Trump cut almost ten points off of his deficit from 2016. This is your reminder that a shift in vote share towards one party is not the same as a shift in total votes towards one party. We've had this conversation about Democrats making percentage point gains in some heavily Republican areas while still falling farther behind, and this is that same conversation from the other side.
Finally, here are the four districts represented by Asian American legislators:
This grouping is even more tenuous than the Latino districts, mostly because there's no such thing as a plurality Asian district. Indeed, only HDs 26 and 149, which are the two most Asian districts in the state, are in the top five; HDs 66, 28, and 67 are the next three in line. They will all be covered in the next post in this series. HD137 is mostly Latino and HD112 is mostly Anglo. Like I said, these are the decisions I made. HD26 is in Fort Bend and was won in 2020 by Republican Jacey Jetton, after years of being held by Rick Miller. It was carried by Biden in 2020 and as you can see it has moved pretty heavily Democratic, but it was still Republican enough to be held by them in an open seat race. HD112 is in Dallas and is held by Angie Chen Button, and like HD108 it was otherwise Democratic in 2020. Good luck with redistricting, that's all I can say. The other two are in Harris County, with HD137 being held by Gene Wu since 2012. It was 63-34 for Obama in 2012 and 67-31 for Biden in 2020. The most curious case for me is HD149, which as you can see followed a pattern similar to the Latino districts in Harris County; I noted this before when I did the Harris County numbers way back when. I'm not quite sure what to make of those totals, but they don't keep me awake at night. As with the rest, we'll see what 2022 has in store for us.
Next time, a closer look at some counties of interest. Let me know what you think.
Everyone's waiting on Beto
Pardon me while I brew myself a cup of tea and stare meaningfully out the window.
Texas' Republican statewide primaries are heating up as challengers emerged in recent weeks for both Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton. But for all the Republican maneuvering, Democrats are remaining quiet about primary plans.
Texas Democrats are in a holding pattern as they plan for the 2022 cycle for two main reasons. First, the party establishment is waiting on former U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke to announce whether he will run for governor.
Secondly, and crucially, incumbents and potential candidates across the state are awaiting the release this fall of new district maps to decide whether they'll retire, run for reelection or consider a statewide bid. The new maps will come from the decennial redistricting process where lawmakers redraw the boundaries of the state's congressional, legislative and State Board of Education districts.
"There's a lot of planning and strategizing behind the scenes," said Royce Brooks, the executive director of Annie's List, the Texas Democratic women-in-politics group. "Whatever Beto decides to do is the domino that affects everybody."
Beyond O'Rourke, there is some chatter that former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro or U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro might make a run for governor. Otherwise, the field of potential candidates are a mix of current and former state legislators.
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo remains a much pined-for candidate, particularly among female Democratic operatives, but so far she has not expressed interest in running statewide next year.
And there are some Democrats who have announced runs for statewide offices, but few are well-funded. Two candidates that have earned the most notice are Mike Collier, who ran for lieutenant governor two years ago and is making another run, and former Galveston Mayor Joe Jaworski, who is running for attorney general.
In a traditional election cycle, candidates tend to roll out their campaigns over the spring and summer of the off-year, but this year potential candidates are still watching and waiting for the new district maps.
The entire Texas election calendar could also be moved back, due to the delayed census amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the ripple effect on reapportionment and the Texas Legislature's ability to draw maps.
Some statewide Democratic candidates could emerge after the maps are finished. If a Democratic incumbent finds themselves in a carved up district where he or she has no chance at reelection, the notion of running statewide — still an incredible challenge for Democrats — actually could be an easier lift than reelection.
See here for the previous update. I would say that one race has "heated up" on the Republican side, and that's the race for Attorney General, where the opportunity to challenge a guy who's been indicted by the state, is being investigated by the FBI and sued by several former top staffers who accuse him of being a crook, and also facing a State Bar complaint for filing a frivolous and batshit crazy lawsuit to overturn the Presidential election, would normally be seen as an obvious thing for anyone with ambition to do. The entry of a low-wattage one-term former State Senator into the gubernatorial primary is in my mind no different than Steve Stockman's 2014 primary challenge to Sen. John Cornyn, but your mileage may vary.
I'm as big a fan of Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo as anyone, but I say there's a zero percent chance she runs statewide in 2022. There's no evidence to suggest that this is something she wants to do. My personal belief is that she wants to finish the job she started as County Judge, and only then will she consider something different (which may be retiring from politics). I could be wrong, and if Democrats do break through in 2022 and President Biden carries Texas in 2024 then it's certainly possible Judge Hidalgo could be one of presumably many Dems to throw a hat in for 2026, but the very composition of this sentence should be acting to cool your jets. I will be extremely surprised if she does something other than run for re-election in 2022.
The prospect of someone who loses out in redistricting running for something statewide is one I hadn't really considered before. It didn't happen in 2012, mostly because there wasn't anyone for the Republicans to screw out of a seat that year, given how they beat anyone who was beatable in 2010. Republicans will have more targets this time, though they are also operating on much tighter margins, but I could see a legislator who gets left without a winnable district deciding to run for something statewide. If nothing else, it's a good way to build name ID and a donor base, and puts you in the conversation for next time. It's all too vague and theoretical now to toss out any names, but this is something to keep an eye on.
Oh, and before I forget: Please don't make us wait too long, Beto.
Guzman to run for AG
Certainly makes that primary more interesting.
Eva Guzman
Eva Guzman, the former justice on the Texas Supreme Court, has filed paperwork to run for state attorney general.
On Friday, Guzman, a Republican, filed what is known as a campaign treasurer appointment form with the Texas Ethics Commission, saying she is seeking the office of attorney general, according to a copy of the form obtained by The Texas Tribune. Her treasurer is Orlando Salazar of Dallas, the vice chair of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly.
"Eva Guzman has served Texas for over 22 years honorably," Guzman's political consultant, Justin Dudley, said in a statement to the Tribune. "She looks forward to putting her experience and know-how to work in a new role. The campaign will have a formal announcement soon."
A Guzman run would complicate the Republican primary already underway between incumbent Ken Paxton and Land Commissioner George P. Bush.
Bush announced his campaign for attorney general on June 2, sharply criticizing Paxton over his legal troubles. The attorney general has been fighting securities fraud charges for most of his time in office, and he more recently came under FBI investigation for claims he abused his office to help a wealthy donor. He has denied wrongdoing in both cases.
It remains to be seen if Guzman's candidacy would change former President Donald Trump's plans to get involved in the primary. Before Bush launched his challenge to Paxton, Trump issued a statement saying he likes "them both very much" and that he would make an endorsement "in the not-so-distant future."
See here for the background. As you know, I doubt Guzman's viability in a primary that features two prominent Trump humpers, but we'll see if I'm right about that. Guzman does have the benefit of not being either a crook or a dilettante, and in a normal meritocratic world that would be a big asset. In a 2022 Republican primary in Texas, that remains to be seen.
For what it's worth, of the three candidates Paxton has probably had the hardest primary race, when he first ran for AG in 2014 and faced Dan Branch and Barry Smitherman for the nomination, eventually beating Branch in a runoff. He was unopposed in the 2018 primary. Guzman easily dispatched Rose Vela in 2010, and had a closer race in 2016 against a Some Dude named Joe Pool, who had a previous Supreme Court primary challenge to incumbent Jeff Brown in 2014, and finished third in 2012 against John Devine and David Medina. I don't get the sense that either of those races was particularly taxing, but they were both contested. Bush had a token opponent (I will give you one dollar right now if you can name this person without looking it up), and thus has had the easiest path. Don't know if any of this previous experience matters – whatever else one may say, we're in a different environment now – but there it is.
Precinct analysis: The median districts
This is a straightforward post, with a simple answer to an important question. We know that Joe Biden carried 74 State House districts and 15 State Senate districts. How much better did he need to do to get a majority in each chamber? Daily Kos calls this the "median district". In this context, that means the data for the 76th-most Democratic House district, and the 16th-most Democratic Senate district. The idea is to see how far off the Dems were from being able to win those districts and thus claim a majority in each chamber.
We'll start with the State House. The table below gives the data for the median district in each of the last three Presidential elections for the Presidential race, the Senate race (2012 and 2020 only), and the Railroad Commissioner race:
Year    Dist      Dem      GOP   Tot D
2012   HD138   39.29%   59.16%      54
2016    HD54   43.58%   50.50%      65
In 2012, the 76th-most Democratic district was HD138, in which Barack Obama received 39.29% of the vote to Mitt Romney's 59.16%. This is a polite way of saying that the 2011 gerrymander was super effective, and the Democrats weren't within hailing distance of winning half the chamber. The last column shows the total number of districts carried by the Democratic Presidential candidate. In 2012, this closely mirrored the total number of seats that the Dems actually won, which was 55. One Democratic-held seat was carried by Romney – HD23, the Galveston-based district won that year (and for the final time, as he declined to run again) by Craig Eiland. As you may recall from previous analyses, that district has trended away from the Dems ever since – in 2016, it was won 56-41 by Trump, and in 2020 it was 57-41 for Trump. Obama carried zero Republican-won seats – the closest he came was a 52-47 loss in HD43, another district that has moved farther away from Dems over the decade. He came within six points in three Dallas districts that Democrats now hold – HDs 113, 107, and 105. Like I said, an extremely effective gerrymander. Also a consistent one, as Paul Sadler and Dale Henry won the same districts Obama did, no more and no less.
Until it wasn't, of course. The cracks began to show in 2016, when Hillary Clinton carried 65 districts, though Dems still only won 55 of them overall. HD23 fell to the Republicans in 2014, but Dems earned their first flip of the decade (*) by taking HD107, which as noted above was one of the closer misses in 2012. The nine GOP-won districts that Hillary Clinton carried were HDs 113, 105, 115, 102, 112, 114, 138, 134, and 108. Seven of those are now Democratic districts, with six flipping in 2018 and one (HD134) flipping in 2020.
Note how Clinton ran ahead of other Dems as well. Perennial candidate Grady Yarbrough picked up only HD105, and that by a 45.9 to 44.6 margin (there was a lot of third-party voting in that extremely unappealing race), and it was the same at the judicial level. You may recall this is why I was more guarded in my optimism about 2018 initially – I had some doubts about what the Clinton/GOP voters would do their next time out.
We know how that turned out, and we know how Biden did, as well as how MJ Hegar and Chrysta Castaneda did in 2020. Look at how the median district shifted over time. In 2012, the 76th district was more Republican than the Presidential race was, at each level. In 2016, the median district looked a lot like the Presidential race, and to be honest a lot like the RRC race as well; Wayne Christian defeated Grady Yarbrough 53.1 to 38.4, a bit closer than the median but not far off. In 2020, at all levels, the median district was closer than the statewide race was. Republicans outperformed their baseline in the House, and they needed to because by this point their vaunted gerrymander had completely failed them. I have to think this is something they're giving serious thought to for this time around.
Here's the same data for the State Senate districts:
2012    SD08   36.60%   61.67%      11
It's a similar pattern as above. In 2012, Mitt Romney carried SD10, which Wendy Davis won in a hard-fought race. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried SD16 by a 49.9 to 45.3 margin, and just missed in SD10, losing it 47.9 to 47.3; she also came within a point of SD17. The median district was a little friendlier to the GOP in 2016, but in 2020 as with the House it was closer than the corresponding statewide race. Again, the once-solid gerrymander buckled at the knees, aided in large part by the suburban shift. Dems also managed to hold onto all of the red-shifting Latino districts, while Biden dropped two of them in the House.
What does any of this mean going forward? I have no idea. I'm seeing map proposals for Congress that are pretty brutal, but who knows what we'll get in 2022, and who knows how population growth and the shifts in suburban and (mostly rural) Latino areas will affect things. Texas is a more challenging state than the likes of Wisconsin or Michigan to control over an entire decade precisely because it changes so much in that time. Republicans will have some opportunities for gain in 2022, but they also have a lot of vulnerabilities, and their best defense may be to just try to shore up everything they now have. The choices they make, based to some degree on their level of risk tolerance, will be fascinating to see.
Precinct analysis: State Senate district comparisons
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.
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
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
11     1,957  20,541   46,098  46,384   48,055   66,925   18,870
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:
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
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
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%
14    347,953  132,727    70.8%    27.0%
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.
01     92,593  265,715    25.5%    73.3%
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.
Bill to delay primaries passes Senate
As expected.
Sen. Joan Huffman
The 2022 primary elections in Texas could be pushed back to April or May under a bill moving through the state Legislature.
Because of delays in U.S. Census Bureau data needed to redraw the state's congressional and legislative districts, the Texas Senate passed a bill on Thursday that could push the state's primary to April 5, or if the delays persist, to May 24.
State Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican, said at this point Texas might not have the needed census data until deep into the summer. If they get the maps drawn up and passed into law fast enough, the March 1 primary would go on as planned. But if the maps aren't put into law until after Nov. 22, the primary would shift to April 5.
If the maps are not done until after Jan. 3, the primary would shift to May 24.
Huffman said she's trying to put the Legislature in the best position possible in light of the census data delays.
"The bill will serve as a signal that the Legislature fully intends to complete the redistricting task once the census data is received," she said.
We've known about the need for this for months, due to issues with receiving the Census data. It was just a question of how far back the primaries would need to be pushed. Sen. Huffman's bill is SB1822, and I expect it will easily pass the House and be signed with no fuss.
Why North Texas?
Apr 5th, 2021
The Trib reprints a WaPo story about a cluster of Capitol insurrectionists in the Dallas suburbs, and it's something.
Hope for Trump's return is fervent in Frisco and across the northern Dallas suburbs, an area of rapid growth and rapidly increasing diversity. Nineteen local residents have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to federal authorities, one of the largest numbers in any place in the country.
Many of the rioters came from the "mainstream of society," according to the FBI's Dallas field office, including three real estate agents, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, an oilman and an actor who once appeared on the popular television show "Friday Night Lights." They were driven by a "salad bowl of grievances," the FBI said, including anger over the presidential election, white-supremacist ideology and the discredited extremist ideology QAnon, which holds that Trump will save the world from a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles.
Their groundless claims are being fed by conservative politicians and from the pulpits of large, powerful evangelical churches with teachings that verge on white nationalism, both motivated by fear that they are losing a largely white, conservative enclave that views these changes with suspicion.
More arrests are coming, and North Texas remains a focus for investigators who expect to charge as many as 400 people from across the country in the attack on the Capitol.
Over the past two decades, Collin County, north of Dallas, more than doubled its population to 1 million, according to census data, with newcomers drawn by the mild weather, good schools, low taxes and the arrival of several big employers and new corporate headquarters, including Toyota, Liberty Mutual and the Dallas Cowboys. The rapid expansion created an air of Disney World built on the clay soil of the Texas plains, one Frisco consultant noted, where everything is new and planned. The median household income is $97,000, well above the U.S. median of $69,000.
But this utopia on the Dallas North Tollway has its fissures, which have deepened in the last year, with debate over pandemic restrictions, the country's racial reckoning and the divisive 2020 presidential election that pitted neighbor against neighbor and continues to divide. Unlike many other suburban counties in the country that helped sway the election for Biden, Collin County stayed red, with 51% voting for Trump and 46% for Biden.
The county's rapid growth has increased its diversity — with the Latino and Asian American populations growing, and the white population in decline — causing tensions, some residents say. In 2017, Plano Mayor Harry LaRosiliere was challenged by an opponent who promised to "keep Plano suburban," which LaRosiliere, who is Black, said was a "dog whistle" for residents wanting to keep the town white and affluent. LaRosiliere won the four-way nonpartisan race with 52% of the votes, but his "keep Plano suburban" opponent won 42%. This year, Plano City Coucil member Shelby Williams came under fire when he said in a post-riot blog post that "things could be much worse . . . People in many parts of the Muslim world are still slaughtering one another today."
Frisco Realtor Hava Johnston said some residents feel the area has become "too diverse."
"They created this perfect little bubble of the way they wanted things … now we've got true diversity, and those Christian nationalists are afraid of losing their power," said Johnston, a Democratic activist and one of the internet sleuths who helped unmask local residents who participated in the Capitol riots. "These are the very people who would do things like have Trump parades every weekend and take a private jet to a riot."
There's a lot here, and I'll get to one specific criticism in a moment, but I personally object to the "Collin County stayed red" line, not because it's untrue but because it really misstate what has happened in Collin County this past decade. I mean:
2012 – Romney 65.0%, Obama 33.5%
2016 – Trump 55.6%, Clinton 38.9%
2020 – Trump 51.4%, Biden 47.0%
You can say "Collin County stayed red", as if it were some act of defiance against the prevailing political winds, but come on. Collin County shifted a net 27 points in the Democrats' direction, at least at the Presidential level, since 2012. That's a seismic change, and very much in line with what was happening nationally. Collin County didn't quite make it to blue county status in 2020, but boy howdy has it come a long way.
D Magazine had other complaints, starting with the charge that non-Texan authors who parachute in for this kind of analysis often fail to understand what's actually happening and miss details that make locals scratch their heads. I have some sympathy with this, though I do think there's some value in getting an outside perspective sometimes. Honestly, my main beef with this article was more along the lines of "oh God, are we still doing entire stories on the feelings of Trump voters? Make it stop already." I guess the question of why there were so many insurrectionists from this part of the world is an interesting one, but please give me many more articles about the newly activated and energized Democrats of Collin County to balance it out, thanks. In the meantime, please feel free to blow a raspberry at that blonde realtor from Frisco who may well be the poster child for this whole story.
Precinct analysis: State Senate comparisons
No, I had not planned to do any more of these, at least not until we got the statewide numbers. But then I got an email from Marc Campos on behalf of Sen. Carol Alvarado, who had seen the earlier comparison posts and wanted to know if I had those numbers for SD06. I didn't at the time, but I do now thanks to getting the full jurisdiction data, so I went back and filled in the blanks. And so here we are.
Dist   Romney    Obama Johnson  Stein
SD04   44,973   12,531     502    165
SD06   43,852   89,584   1,004    537
SD07  196,017   93,774   2,844    816
SD13   26,894  144,882   1,041    524
SD18    7,161    3,804      97     25
Dist    Trump  Clinton Johnson  Stein
SD06   39,310  109,820   3,666  1,770
SD07  189,451  127,414  10,887  2,632
SD18    8,780    6,017     476    119
Dist    Trump    Biden     Lib    Grn
SD07  232,201  188,150   4,746  1,216
SD17  110,788  140,986   2,706    720
SD18   15,118   12,735     331     91
SD04   77.31%   21.54%   0.86%  0.28%
I've limited the comparisons to the Presidential numbers from 2012 through 2020, which you see above, and the Senate numbers for 2012 and 2020, which I'll present next. There wasn't much difference between the Senate numbers and the RRC numbers, so I made this a little easier on myself. There's nothing in this data that we haven't seen and talked about before, but it's worth taking a minute and reviewing it all again.
If we look at SD06, which is a heavily Latino district, you can see the increase in support for Trump from 2016 to 2020, which has been the story everyone has been talking about. I think it's instructive to include the 2012 numbers, because the net change over the eight year period is basically zero from a percentage perspective – Obama carried SD06 by a 66-32 margin, while Biden carried it 66-33 – the vote gap increased by over 16K in the Dems' favor. It's true that Biden won SD06 by fewer votes than Hillary Clinton did, and that Trump closed the gap from 2016 by eight thousand votes, but the overall trend for this period is one that I find as a Democrat to be satisfactory. The overall direction is what I want, even if it's not as fast as I'd like it to be. What happens next is the argument we're all having, and there's data to support either position. We'll just have to see how it goes.
The flip side of that is what happened in SD07, Dan Patrick's former district and one of the redder places in the state in 2012. Here, the trend is unmistakably in one direction. Mitt Romney's SD07 was as Republican as SD06 was Democratic. Hillary Clinton shaved 41K off of the Dem deficit in 2016, and Joe Biden shrunk it by another 18K. In 2020, SD07 was only a ten-point GOP district. It would not be crazy to view it as a swing district, at least at the Presidential level, in 2024. I don't know what the Republican redistricting plan is, but they're not going to have a lot of spare capacity to borrow from in SD07. Just take a look at SD17 – which includes a lot of turf outside Harris County – to see why this make them a little nervous.
Finally, a few words about a couple of districts I don't usually think about in these analyses, SD13 and SD15. The total number of votes in SD13 didn't increase very much from 2012 to 2020 – indeed, it's the one place I see where both Trump and Clinton got fewer votes than their counterparts in 2012 – and that is something I'd like to understand better. (For what it's worth, Borris Miles got about 40K votes in Fort Bend in 2020, while Rodney Ellis got 32K in 2012. That's a slightly higher growth rate than in Harris, but still kind of slow compared to other districts.) Trump 2020 snipped a couple of percentage points off Romney's deficit, from down 68 to down 62, but that's still a net 10K votes for Dems. As for SD15, it's an example of a strong Democratic district that really stepped it up over the past eight years, performing in that way much like a lot of formerly dark red areas. Biden gained 55K net votes over Obama, as SD15 went from a 19 point Dem district to a 30 point Dem district. We're going to need more like this around the state as we go forward.
Dist     Cruz   Sadler   MyersCollins
SD06   45,066   84,671   1,701  1,364
SD07  194,269   90,258   4,579  2,116
SD18    7,135    3,637     175     78
Dist   Cornyn    Hegar     Lib    Grn
Dist	Cornyn   Hegar     Lib    Grn
The Senate numbers don't tell us a whole lot that we didn't already know, but do note that MJ Hegar slightly increased the percentage point gap in SD06, where it had shrunk by a point for Biden. That may be more a reflection of Paul Sadler's candidacy than anything else, but I wanted to point it out. Hegar's overall numbers are lesser than Biden's, as we knew, but the same trends exist in the districts. If you never had the 2016 data for the Presidential race and only knew how things changed from 2012 to 2020 as you do with the Senate races, I wonder how people's perceptions would differ.
This time I really mean it when I say that's all she wrote. When we have the full numbers from the Texas Legislative Council I'll have more to say, and then the real fun will begin when redistricting gets underway. (And by "fun" I mean "existential horror", but you get the idea.) Let me know what you think.
Rep. Vela not running for re-election
Mar 23rd, 2021
We have our first interesting Congressional race of 2022.
Rep. Filemon Vela
U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela, a Brownsville Democrat, announced Monday he is retiring from Congress at the end of this term.
Vela was first elected in 2012 and represents much of the South Texas Gulf Coast. News of his retirement was first reported by Axios.
"It has been an honor to represent the citizens of the 34th District of Texas in the United States House of Representatives for the last eight years," he said in a text to The Texas Tribune. "I will not be seeking reelection to the House of Representatives in 2022. I will continue to focus on maintaining a Democratic House and Senate Majority in my capacity as a member of Congress and Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee, while working diligently for the people I am so grateful to represent.
"It is now time to allow other residents of South Texas the opportunity to fulfill this wonderful privilege for which I will be forever grateful," he added.
Jose Borjon, a former senior adviser to Vela and a longtime confidant, said Vela never meant to overstay his time in Congress and felt now was the time to move on.
"Filemon was extremely dedicated to the people of South Texas during the time he has served in Congress," Borjon added. "I will expect he will continue to do that as he closes out his term. … Whoever replaces him has big shoes to fill."
Vela won reelection in 2020 by nearly 14 percentage points in a district that has generally been considered safe for Democrats. But national Republicans identified him as a target in 2022 after the GOP performed surprisingly well along the Texas-Mexico border in 2020, and this year's redistricting process gives the party an opportunity to redraw the district in a more favorable manner for the party.
Moreover, the district saw a dramatic swing on the presidential ballot. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton carried the district by a 22-point margin. Four years later, President Joe Biden won the seat by 4 points.
Rep. Vela was the first person elected to CD34 in 2012, so whoever succeeds him will be the second person ever to hold that seat. As the story notes, he is now a Vice Chair of the DNC, so it's not like he's stepping away from politics. As noted, CD34 moved towards Trump in 2020, and Republicans have their eye on it, with redistricting still to come. The first post-redistricting year always features a few retirements like this, and sometimes they make a seat more of a challenge to hold. It's obviously very early in the cycle, but we'll have to keep an eye on developments in CD34. I wish Rep. Vela well with whatever comes next for him.
Precinct analysis: Brazoria County
Once more around the block, this time in Brazoria County. Let's just dive in:
Dist    Trump    Biden     Lib     Grn
CD14   44,480   19,715     823     160
CD22   45,953   42,513   1,037     257
HD25   38,939   16,277     727     132
HD29   51,494   45,951   1,133     285
CC1    19,383    8,439     407      72
CC2    22,456   17,024     494     106
Dist   Cornyn    Hegar     Lib     Grn
CC1    19,080    7,985     687     182
Dist   Wright    Casta     Lib     Grn
HD29   51,097   42,256   2,165   1,063
CD14   68.24%   30.25%   1.26%   0.25%
HD25   69.44%   29.03%   1.30%   0.24%
CC1    68.49%   29.82%   1.44%   0.25%
As an extra point of comparison, here are the numbers from the four district races:
Weber     45,245  70.76%
Bell      18,700  29.24%
Nehls     44,332  50.51%
Kulkarni  38,962  44.39%
LeBlanc    4,477   5.10%
Vasut     38,936  71.38%
Henry     15,613  28.62%
Thompson  54,594  56.69%
Boldt     41,712  43.31%
Not really a whole lot to remark upon. Brazoria County has slowly shifted blue since 2012, but not by that much. There's still a lot of work to be done there, and in the short term the most likely place where any effect would be felt is in the appellate courts. HD29 was a dark horse swing district following the 2018 election, but as you can see Rep. Ed Thompson punches above his weight, so it's going to take more than some demography to seriously challenge him, and that's assuming the Republicans don't touch up his district a bit later on this year. I have no idea what Congressional districts will have a piece of Brazoria County going forward, but I'd bet that at least at the beginning they're all some shade of red.
The main opportunity for Dems here is at the local level, where Commissioners Court Precinct 4 is pretty close to even. None of the county offices – Commissioners Court, Constable, Justice of the Peace – were challenged in 2020, so there's the starting point to improve things on the ground and begin construction on a bench. That may change with redistricting as well, of course, but county elections can see change happen quickly under the right circumstances. My wish for Brazoria County is for there to be more activity at this level, starting next year.
We're not going to be able to have our primaries in March
That's the obvious conclusion from this.
Texas lawmakers will almost certainly be back for a rare special legislative session in the fall now that the U.S. Census Bureau has set a September deadline for releasing the 2020 census results.
Facing significant holdups in finalizing the decennial count, the bureau announced Friday that the detailed population numbers needed to redraw legislative and congressional districts to reflect the state's growth in the last decade will be delivered by Sept. 30, a monthslong delay that could upend the next set of elections for seats from Congress down to local offices.
The bureau's original plan was to get the data in lawmakers' hands as soon as this month, giving them time to rejigger district boundaries and decipher Texans' representation during the regular 2021 legislative session. But the census' typical timeline was repeatedly upended by the coronavirus pandemic and interference from the Trump administration.
"If this were a typical decade, we would be on the verge of delivering the first round of redistricting data from the 2020 Census," James Whitehorne, chief of the bureau's redistricting and voting rights data office, said in a statement. "Our original plan was to deliver the data in state groupings starting Feb. 18, 2021 and finishing by March 31, 2021. However, COVID-19 delayed census operations significantly."
Instead, the bureau is still working to release the population numbers that determine how many congressional seats are apportioned to each state by April 30 — blowing past the legal deadline for those numbers by many months. Census officials previously indicated the second set of more detailed numbers needed for redistricting wouldn't be available until after July.
The current timetable puts the data delivery far past the end of the 2021 legislative session on May 31, meaning Gov. Greg Abbott would need to call lawmakers back for legislative overtime in the fall.
See here and here for the background. I've been operating under the assumption that there would be a special session for redistricting all along, but this puts to rest any doubt. Given the fact that our statutory deadline for filing for the primaries is December 13, and given the certainty of litigation over the new maps, there's no way we can have something in place in time for the normal 2022 calendar. Expect the primaries next year to be in May, like they were in 2012, and hope it doesn't need to be any later than that.
Precinct analysis: Fort Bend County, part 1
I've finally run out of Harris County races from 2020 to analyze, so let's move over to Fort Bend County. I've said before that while Fort Bend provides downloadable Excel files on their county elections page, they format these results in a way that makes it harder for me to do the same analysis I do with Harris County. Basically, Harris County puts all the results on one worksheet, with the totals for every candidate given in each precinct. For district races, that means a blank in the results when the precinct in question is not in that district, but the cell for that district is there. That makes it super easy for me to use Excel functions to add up the vote totals for, say, the Presidential candidates in the precincts where, say, the HD134 voters are. I can do practically every race in a matter of an hour or two, and indeed I spend more time formatting the blog posts than I do the calculations.
Fort Bend, on the other hand, separates each race into its own worksheet, which is fine in and of itself, except that for district races they only include the precincts for that race on the worksheet in question. That completely nullifies the formulas I use for Harris County, and when I went and looked to see how I did it in 2016, I saw that I manually added the relevant cells for each of the countywide races, an approach that is inelegant, labor intensive, and prone to error. But it was the best I could do, so I did it again that way here. I can tell you that my results are not fully accurate, and I know this because the subtotals don't add up correctly, but they're close enough to suffice. The one exception is for the County Commissioner precincts, which are fully grouped together in Fort Bend – each precinct number is four digits, with the first digit being a one, two, three, or four, and that first digit is the Commissioner precinct. So those at least are easy to add up correctly. The rest is messy, but I did the best I could. When the official state reports come out in March and they're off from mine, you'll know why.
Anyway. That's a lot of minutia, so let's get to the numbers.
Dist    Trump    Biden    Lib    Grn
CD09   15,527   52,998    414    292
CD22  142,191  142,554  2,614    799
HD26   42,389   45,097    743    283
HD28   65,043   61,103  1,212    313
CC1    37,765   40,253    699    261
CC3    61,437   49,976  1,120    247
Dist   Trump%   Biden%   Lib%   Grn%
CD09   22.43%   76.55%  0.60%  0.42%
HD26   47.89%   50.95%  0.84%  0.32%
CC1    47.82%   50.97%  0.89%  0.33%
Dist   Cornyn    Hegar    Lib    Grn
CD09   15,345   49,730  1,082    639
CD22  145,632  129,254  4,277  1,473
Dist  Cornyn%   Hegar%   Lib%   Grn%
Dist   Wright    Casta    Lib    Grn
HD28   65,253   54,232  2,115  1,011
Dist  Wright%   Casta%   Lib%	Grn%
The first number to consider is not about any of the districts. It's simply this: John Cornyn received 3K more votes in Fort Bend County than Donald Trump did, but MJ Hegar got over 16K fewer votes than Joe Biden. Jim Wright got about as many votes as Trump did, but Chrysta Castaneda got 19K fewer votes than Biden. That trend continued in the district races as well. Troy Nehls got 2K more votes than Trump did in CD22, while Sri Kulkarni got 19K fewer votes. Jacey Jetton got a thousand more votes than Trump did in HD26, while Sarah DeMerchant got 4,500 fewer votes than Biden did. Biden clearly got a few Republican crossover votes, but by far the difference between his performance and everyone else's on the ballot was that there was a significant number of people who voted for Joe Biden and then didn't vote in other races. That was just not so on the Republican side.
I don't have a single explanation for this. It's a near reverse of what happened in Harris County in 2004, when George Bush clearly got some Democratic crossovers, but by and large there were a lot of Bush-only voters, while the folks who showed up for John Kerry generally stuck around and voted for the other Dems. I don't think what happened here in Fort Bend is a function of straight ticket voting, or its removal in this case, because there's a world of difference between someone who picks and chooses what races to vote in and someone who votes for President and then goes home – I just don't believe that latter person would have selected the "straight Democratic" choice if it had been there. In 2004, my theory was that Bush was a brand name candidate who drew out more casual voters who didn't really care about the other races, while Kerry voters were more hardcore. I don't buy that here because if anything I would have expected the Trump voters to be more likely to be one and done. It's a mystery to me, but it's one that state and Fort Bend Democrats need to try to figure out. At the very least, we could have won HD26, and we could have elected Jane Robinson to the 14th Court of Appeals if we'd done a better job downballot here.
One other possibility I will mention: Sri Kulkarni wrote an article in the Texas Signal that analyzed his loss and cited a large disinformation campaign against him that contributed to his defeat. That may be a reason why the Libertarian candidate did as well as he did in that race. I don't doubt Kulkarni's account of his own race, but I hesitate to fully accept this explanation. Dems had a larger dropoff of the vote in CD09 as well – about 3K fewer votes for Hegar and Castaneda, less than 1K fewer for Cornyn and Wright – and the dropoff in CD22 was pretty consistent for other Dems as well, though Kulkarni did generally worse. It may have moved the needle somewhat against him, but it doesn't explain what happened with other Dems. Again, someone with more time and resources available to them – the TDP, in particular – should do a deeper dive on this. I do believe that disinformation was an issue for Dems last year, and will be an increasing problem going forward, and we need to get our arms around that. I just believe there were other causes as well, and we need to understand those, too.
One more thing: Kulkarni ran a lot closer to the Biden standard in Harris County than he did in Fort Bend. Biden and Trump were virtually tied in CD22 in Harris County, with the vote going 21,912 for Trump to 21,720 for Biden; Nehls defeated Kulkarni 20,953 to 19,743 in Harris. That's the kind of result that one can easily attribute to Biden crossovers, and doesn't raise any flags about the level of undervoting. I haven't looked at Brazoria County yet, but my point here is just that Fort Bend County was very different in its behavior than Harris County was. And again, for the Nth time, we need to understand why. That is the point I'm trying to sledgehammer home.
Moving on, HD28 was a steeper hill to climb than perhaps we thought it would be. Eliz Markowitz got about 1,500 fewer votes than MJ Hegar did, and about 300 fewer than Castanada, while Gary Gates outperformed both Jim Wright and John Cornyn. It should be noted that while Dems in general lost HD28 by 20 points or so in 2016, Markowitz and other Dems were losing it by ten or eleven points in 2020. In total vote terms, a gap of 16-18K votes in 2016 was reduced to 12-13K votes in 2020. The shift is real, and even if it didn't net us any extra seats, it's still there.
The other way that shift manifested was in the County Commissioner precincts. In 2016, Republicans won three of the four precincts, with two-term Democrat Richard Morrison in Precinct 1 finally getting unseated after he had won against badly tainted opponents in previous years. There was a lot of movement in the Dem direction in Precinct 4, however, and that came to fruition in 2018 when Ken DeMerchant (yes, Sarah's husband) flipped that seat. As you can see, there was no retreat in CC4 in 2020, and it probably wouldn't take too much tinkering to make Precinct 1 a fifty-fifty or better proposition for Dems. It didn't happen in either county this year, but in 2024, aided by demography and maybe a bit of gerrymandering, both Harris and Fort Bend counties can have 4-1 Democratic majorities on their Commissioners Courts.
I do have totals for the other Fort Bend races, though they're not dramatically different from what you see here. I will put them together in a future post just to have it on the record. As always, let me know what you think.
It'll be awhile before redistricting happens
They're waiting on Census data.
The U.S. Census Bureau has again pushed back the release of the 2020 census results — a delay that will almost certainly force Texas lawmakers into legislative overtime this summer to redraw the state's political maps.
During an online presentation Wednesday, a bureau official revealed that the population numbers that determine how many congressional seats are apportioned to each state are expected to be released by April 30. The bureau has not finalized a timeline for the release of more detailed census results lawmakers need to actually redraw districts so they're roughly equal in population, but the data likely won't be available until after July.
"We hope to have a date in the near future that we can provide for when the redistricting data will come out. I cannot see that it would be before July 30 is how I would put this," said Kathleen Styles, the bureau's chief for decennial communications and stakeholder relations.
The 2021 legislative session ends May 31, but congressional and state House and Senate districts will need to be reconfigured ahead of the 2022 elections. Under the Census Bureau's projected timeline, Gov. Greg Abbott would need to call lawmakers back for a special legislative session in the summer.
However, the delay announced Wednesday is likely to further fan questions among some Democrats over whether the redrawing of legislative maps can legally begin in a special session.
The state Constitution says state House and Senate seats must be redrawn by the Legislature during the first regular legislative session after the census is published. If they "fail" to do so, the Legislative Redistricting Board — a panel made up by the lieutenant governor, the Speaker of the House, the attorney general, the state comptroller and the state land commissioner — takes over the drawing.
With Republicans in control of both chambers, the delay in census data could provide a legal opening for Democrats to try to kick the legislative redistricting work out of Republicans' hands and into the courts.
See here for the background. As I said, I figured this was going to be late, so I'm not surprised. The question of whether redistricting can begin in a special session is a legal technicality, and I'm not qualified to answer it. I am qualified to observe that a lot of the questions that were litigated in Texas during the 2020 election hinged on various technicalities, and overwhelmingly the courts ruled in favor of the state of Texas on those questions. Let's just say that while I'm fine with pursuing a strategy of getting at least the Congressional map-drawing into the hands of federal judges (who by and large would rather gargle antifreeze than draw Congressional districts), I would not put a lot of hope and faith into the outcome of that strategy. To be fair, the outcome of having the Legislature do the map-drawing ain't gonna be great either. I'm just trying to provide some perspective here.
An ancillary question is whether the delay in drawing the districts could force the primaries to be moved back as well. This is what happened in 2012, you may recall. The filing deadline for the 2022 primaries is December 15, and filing opens on November 15. I presume everyone will want a little time to figure out their options before filing for anything, so there's likely to be a break between when the maps are ratified and when filing opens. Let's say another 30 days for that, so that makes October 15 a functional deadline for getting them done without affecting the primary schedule. If the data is received on August 1 or so as suggested, then there's probably enough time, though it will be close. In this DMN article, Speaker Dade Phelan says the special session could be called "as early as September". That doesn't leave a lot of time to get it done before filing season begins. Slip even a little, and I'd begin to assume we'll have May primaries like we did in 2012. Let's hope there isn't another Ted Cruz out there to take advantage of that. NPR and the Brennan Center have more.
Precinct analysis: Presidential results by Congressional district
From Daily Kos Elections, the breakdown of how Presidential voting went in each of Texas' 36 Congressional districts:
Two districts did in fact flip on the presidential level: Trump lost the 24th District in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs while recapturing the 23rd District along the border with Mexico. Biden, however, made major gains in a number of other suburban districts and nearly won no fewer than seven of them. Trump, meanwhile, surged in many heavily Latino areas and likewise came close to capturing three, but except for the 24th, every Trump seat is in GOP hands and every Biden seat is represented by Democrats. The 24th, which includes the suburbs north of Dallas and Fort Worth, is a good place to start because it saw one of the largest shifts between 2016 and 2020. The district began the decade as heavily Republican turf—it backed Mitt Romney 60-38—but Trump carried it by a substantially smaller 51-44 margin four years later.
Biden continued the trend and racked up a 52-46 win this time, but the area remained just red enough downballot to allow Republican Beth Van Duyne to manage a 49-47 victory in an expensive open-seat race against Democrat Candace Valenzuela.
Biden fell just short of winning seven other historically red suburban seats: the 2nd, 3rd, 6th, 10th, 21st, 22nd, and 31st, where Trump's margins ranged from just one to three points and where the swings from 2016 ranged from seven points in the 22nd all the way to 13 points in the 3rd, the biggest shift in the state. However, as in the 24th, Biden's surge did not come with sufficient coattails, as Republicans ran well ahead of Trump in all of these seats. (You can check out our guide for more information about each district.)
Two seats that Democrats flipped in 2018 and stayed blue last year also saw large improvements for Biden. The 7th District in west Houston, parts of which were once represented by none other than George H.W. Bush from 1967 to 1971, had swung from 60-39 Romney to 48-47 Clinton, and Biden carried it 54-45 in 2020. Democratic Rep. Lizzie Fletcher won by a smaller 51-47 spread against Wesley Hunt, who was one of the House GOP's best fundraisers. The 32nd District in the Dallas area, likewise, had gone from 57-41 Romney to 49-47 Clinton. This time, Biden took it 54-44 as Democratic Rep. Colin Allred prevailed 52-46.
Biden's major gains in the suburbs, though, came at the same time that Trump made serious inroads in predominantly Latino areas on or near the southern border with Mexico. That rightward shift may have cost Team Blue the chance to flip the open 23rd District, which stretches from San Antonio west to the outskirts of the El Paso area.
A full breakdown by county and district is here, and a comparison of percentages from 2016 and 2020 is here. CD23 went from being a Romney district to a Clinton district to a Trump district, though in all cases it was close. The red flags are in CDs 15, 28, and 34. In CD15, incumbent Vicente Gonzalez won by only three points, in a district Biden carried by one point, a huge drop from Clinton's 57-40 win in 2016. Everyone's least favorite Democrat Henry Cuellar had an easy 19-point win, but Biden only carried CD28 by four points, down from Clinton's 20-point margin. It's not crazy to think that Jessica Cisneros could have lost that race, though of course we'll never know. This wasn't the scenario I had in mind when I griped that CD28 was not a "safe" district, but it does clearly illustrate what I meant. And Filemon Vela, now a DNC Vice Chair, also had a relatively easy 55-42 win, but in a district Biden carried 52-48 after Clinton had carried it 59-38. Not great, Bob.
We don't have the full downballot results – we'll probably get them in March from the Texas Legislative Council – but the Harris County experience suggests there will be some variance, and that other Dems may do a little better in those districts. How much of this was Trump-specific and how much is long-term is of course the big question. The Georgia Senate runoffs, coupled with the 2018 results, suggest that having Trump on the ballot was better for Republicans than not having him on the ballot. On the other hand, 2022 will be a Democratic midterm year, and the last couple of them did not go well. On the other other hand, Trump is leaving office in complete disgrace and with approval levels now in the low 30s thanks to the armed insurrection at the Capitol, and for all the damage he did to the economy and the COVID mitigation effort, Biden is in a position to make big progress in short order. It's just too early to say what any of this means, but suffice it to say that both Ds and Rs have challenges and opportunities ahead of them.
There are some very early third-party efforts at drawing new Congressional districts – see here and here for a couple I've come across. We still need the actual Census numbers, and as I've said before, the Republicans will have to make decisions about how much risk they want to expose themselves to. The way these maps are drawn suggests to me that "pack" rather than "crack" could be the strategy, but again this is all very early. There is also the possibility that the Democratic Congress can push through voting rights reform that includes how redistricting can be done, though the clock and potentially the Supreme Court will be factors. And if there's one thing we should have learned over the last 20 years, it's that due to Texas' rapid growth, the districts you draw at the beginning of the decade may look quite a bit different by the end of the decade. We're at the very start of a ten-year journey. A lot is going to happen, and the farther out we get the harder it is to see the possibilities.
Precinct analysis: Appellate courts, part 1
My next two posts in this series will focus on the 1st and 14th Courts of Appeals. These courts are a little strange electorally, as the elections cover ten counties in all, and over the past few elections they have proven to be pretty darned balanced. As we know, turnout in Harris County has gone up a lot in recent years, and the county has gone from evenly split to strongly blue, yet the balance in these ten counties persists. In this post, I'm going to do a bit of a historical review, to look at the trends and see if we can spot the underlying metrics.
2008 - 1st CoA Pl 3 (50.58%)
County   Tot Votes   Share  DemVotes    Dem%
Harris   1,111,642  70.74%   585,249  52.65%
Others     459,704  29.26%   209,510  45.57%
2012 - 14th CoA Pl 3 (47.74%)
2020 - 14th CoA Chief Justice (49.97%)
A couple of points of explanation here. For 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2018, I picked the top Democratic performer among the appellate court candidates. For 2008, that meant the one Democratic winner. In 2018, as every Dem won their race, I went with the candidate with the narrowest victory, since what I'm most interested in is the threshold needed to win. For 2020, I included all four candidates.
In each table, I separated out the total votes cast in that race from Harris County, and from all the other counties. "Share" is the share of the vote that came from Harris County, so in the 2008 race 70.74% of the total vote came from Harris County. "DemVotes" is the total number of votes the Democratic candidate got, in Harris and in the other counties, and "Dem%" is the percentage of the vote that Democratic candidate got.
We see that the share of the vote from Harris County has dropped every year, from over 70% in 2008 to a bit more than 68% this year. That doesn't appear to be predictive of anything, as Dems swept these races in 2018 and won two out of four this year, with the lowest-performing Dem having (by a tiny amount) the largest Harris County vote share. The rise of Fort Bend County as a Democratic bastion has no doubt mitigated the shrinking contribution from Harris, but that points out again the importance of counties around Harris, as the reddening of Galveston and the smaller counties has kept these races competitive. One thing I hadn't realized till I went through this exercise was that Waller County was quite close to even in 2008, but gave Republicans a 7K vote edge in 2020. Indeed, Dem candidates in Waller in 2020 were getting about the same number of votes as Dem candidates in Waller in 2008, after two cycles of failing to meet the 2008 number, as the Republican vote steadily climbed. As we have discussed before, Jane Robinson lost her race by 0.06 percentage points, or a bit more than a thousand votes out of over 1.5 million votes cast. In a race that close, you can point to many, many ways in which a small difference would have changed the outcome.
That's one reason why these races interest me so much. For one, the appellate courts were a place where Dems made numerous pickups in 2020, yet still fell a bit short of expectations – I at least thought we'd win all four of these, given how well we'd done in 2018. But as you can see, it wasn't quite to be. I don't want to downplay the races we did win – Veronica Rivas Molloy and Amparo Guerra are both terrific candidates, and they are now the only Latinas on that court – I'm just greedy enough to have wanted more.
What's frustrating to me is that I can't tell what I think is the magic formula here. The difference between Guerra, who won by four thousand votes and 0.20 percentage points, and Robinson is tiny enough to be rounding error. The main difference is that Guerra won Harris County by ten thousand votes more than Robinson did, while Robinson did five thousand votes better in the other counties than Guerra did (she lost them by 421K while Guerra lost them by 426K). We know that Latinx candidates generally did better in Harris County this year than their peers, but that wasn't the case outside Harris County. And even if it was, that's not much of a lesson to learn. It was a game of inches, and we won one and lost one.
Ultimately, I think the path here is the same as the path I've described in the various "key counties" posts. We're starting to move in the right direction in Brazoria County, and if we can keep that going that could be enough to tip the scales to the blue side on a longer-term basis. Basically, if we keep doing what we're doing we'll likely be at least competitive in these races, and if we can step it up a bit, especially but not exclusively in Brazoria, we can do better than that. Maybe not the deepest insight you'll ever read, but it's what I've got.
(Assuming that the judicial districts don't get redrawn, which I suppose they could. In 2004, the First and Fourteenth districts included Burleson, Trinity, and Walker Counties plus the current ten. We'd have zero chance of winning these races if those three were added back in. I have no idea what the process or criteria for defining the judicial districts is. I'm just saying that if Republicans decided to do something about this, they probably could.)
Next up, I'll do the district breakdown for these four races in Harris County. After that, more judicial races and then on to the other county races. As always, let me know what you think.
Precinct analysis: Other jurisdictions
Dec 21st, 2020
You may be wondering "Hey, how come you haven't reported on data from SBOE and State Senate districts?" Well, I'll tell you, since the SBOE and Senate serve four-year terms with only half of the races up for election outside of redistricting years, the results in the districts that aren't on the ballot are not discernable to me. But! I was eventually able to get a spreadsheet that defined all of the relevant districts for each individual precinct, and that allowed me to go back and fill in the empty values. And now here I present them to you. Oh, and as a special bonus, I merged the data from the 2012 city of Houston bond elections into this year's totals and pulled out the numbers for the city of Houston for the top races. So here you have it:
Dist     Trump    Biden    Lib    Grn  Trump%  Biden%   Lib%   Grn%
SBOE4  110,192  350,258  3,530  1,787  23.66%  75.20%  0.76%  0.38%
SD04    55,426   25,561    936    145  67.54%  31.15%  1.14%  0.18%
SD06    61,089  123,708  1,577    770  32.64%  66.10%  0.84%  0.41%
SD07   232,201  188,150  4,746  1,216  54.47%  44.13%  1.11%  0.29%
SD11    77,325   51,561  1,605    389  59.08%  39.40%  1.23%  0.30%
SD17   110,788  140,986  2,706    720  43.41%  55.25%  1.06%  0.28%
SD18    15,118   12,735	   331     91  53.47%  45.04%  1.17%  0.32%
Hou    285,379  535,713  8,222  2,704  34.30%  64.39%  0.99%  0.32%
Harris 415,251  382,480  8,597  2,425  51.34%  47.29%  1.06%  0.30%
Dist    Cornyn    Hegar    Lib    Grn Cornyn%  Hegar%   Lib%   Grn%
SBOE6  387,726  359,196 13,130  4,964  50.68%  46.95%  1.72%  0.65%
SD06    59,310  115,620  3,609  2,257  32.80%  63.95%  2.00%  1.25%
Hou    297,735  498,078 14,537  7,021  36.43%  60.94%  1.78%  0.86%
Harris 420,493  356,080 14,680  5,868  52.75%  44.67%  1.84%  0.74%
Dist    Wright    Casta    Lib    Grn Wright%  Casta%   Lib%   Grn%
SD11    75,580   47,284  2,906  1,454  59.41%  37.17%  2.28%  1.14%
Hou    286,759  491,191 16,625 11,553  34.47%  59.04%  2.00%  1.39%
Dist     Hecht  Meachum    Lib  Hecht% Meachum%  Lib%
SBOE4  104,675  334,600 10,745  23.26%  74.35%  2.39%
SBOE8  217,760  164,210  9,466  55.63%  41.95%  2.42%
SD04    55,773   22,920  1,721  69.36%  28.50%  2.14%
SD06    56,313  117,884  4,832  31.45%  65.85%  2.70%
SD07   235,317  172,232  9,800  56.38%  41.27%  2.35%
SD18    15,108   11,836    675  54.70%  42.85%  2.44%
Dist      Boyd   Will's    Lib   Boyd% Will's%   Lib%
Dist     Busby   Triana    Lib  Busby% Triana%   Lib%
Dist    Bland    Cheng  Bland%   Cheng%
SBOE4  112,465  336,620  25.04%  74.96%
SD04    57,378   22,793  71.57%  28.43%
SD06    60,243  118,418  33.72%  66.28%
SD07   243,089  172,941  58.43%  41.57%
Dist     BertR  Frizell  BertR% Frizell%
Dist     Yeary  Clinton  Yeary%Clinton%
Dist    Newell    Birm  Newell%   Birm%
To be clear, "Harris" refers to everything that is not the city of Houston. It includes the other cities, like Pasadena and Deer Park and so forth, as well as unincorporated Harris County. There are some municipal results in the 2020 canvass, and maybe I'll take a closer look at them later – I generally haven't done that for non-Houston cities in the past, but this year, we'll see. Please note also that there are some precincts that include a piece of Houston but are not entirely Houston – the boundaries don't coincide. Basically, I skipped precincts that had ten or fewer votes in them for the highest-turnout 2012 referendum, and added up the rest. So those values are approximate, but close enough for these purposes. I don't have city of Houston results for most elections, but I do have them for a few. In 2008, Barack Obama got 61.0% in Houston and 39.5% in non-Houston Harris County. In 2012< he dropped a bit to 60.7% in Houston and 38.5% in Harris. That same year, Sheriff Adrian Garcia got 64.3% in Houston and 42.6% in Harris as he ran for re-election. Both were the high scores for that year. Finally, in 2018, Beto reached a new height with 65.4% in Houston; that calculation was done by a reader, and unfortunately he didn't do the corresponding total for Harris County. Joe Biden's 64.39% fits in just ahead of Adrian Garcia in 2012, and about a point behind Beto. Not too bad.
SBOE4 is a mostly Black district primarily in Harris County with a piece in Fort Bend as well; Lawrence Allen, son of State Rep. Alma Allen and an unsuccessful candidate for HD26 in the Dem primary this year, is its incumbent. SBOE8 is a heavily Republican district with about half of its voters in Harris County and about a third in Montgomery County. It was won this year by Audrey Young over a Libertarian opponent, succeeding Barbara Cargill. Cargill was unopposed in 2016 and beat a Dem candidate in 2012 by a 71-29 margin, getting about 66% of the vote in Harris County. Like just about everywhere else, that part of the county is a lot less red than it used to be. SBOE6 was of course the focus of attention after Beto carried it in 2018. Biden fell a tad short of Beto's mark, though Trump also fell short of Ted Cruz. No other Dem managed to win the vote there, with the range being about four to seven points for the Republicans, which does represent an improvement over 2018. Michelle Palmer lost by two points here, getting 47.38% of the vote (there was a Libertarian candidate as well; the victorious Republican got 49.76%), as the Dems won one of the three targeted, Beto-carried seats, in SBOE5. I presume the Republicans will have a plan to make the SBOE a 10-5 split in their favor again, but for now the one gain Dems made in a districted office was there.
I don't think I've ever done a full accounting of State Senate districts in previous precinct analyses. Only three of the eight districts that include a piece of Harris County are entirely within Harris (SDs 06, 07, and 15; 13 extends into Fort Bend), and only SD17 is competitive. Beto and a couple of others carried SD17 in 2018 – I don't have the full numbers for it now, but Rita Lucido won the Harris County portion of SD17 by a 49.4-48.8 margin in 2018, and every Dem except Kathy Cheng won SD17 this year, with everyone else except Gisela Triana exceeding Lucido's total or margin or both. An awful lot of HD134 is in SD17, so this is just another illustration of HD134's Democratic shift.
The other interesting district here is SD07, which Dan Patrick won by a 68.4-31.6 margin in 2012, and Paul Bettencourt won by a 57.8-40.3 margin in 2018. Every Dem had a smaller gap than that this year, with most of them bettering David Romero's percentage from 2018, and Biden losing by just over ten points. It would be really interesting to see how this district trended over the next decade if we just kept the same lines as we have now, but we will get new lines, so the question becomes "do the Republicans try to shore up SD07", and if so how? SD17 is clearly the higher priority, and while you could probably leave SD07 close to what it is now, with just a population adjustment, it doesn't have much spare capacity. If there's a lesson for Republicans from the 2011 redistricting experience, it's that they have to think in ten-year terms, and that's a very hard thing to do. We'll see how they approach it.
Precinct analysis: Comparing to 2012 and 2016
I had meant to get to this last week, but SeditionPalooza took up too much of my time, so here we are. The intent of this post is to compare vote totals in each of the State Rep districts from 2012 to 2016, from 2016 to 2020, and from 2012 to 2020. The vote totals compared are from the Presidential and Railroad Commissioner races for each of these years, and for the Senate races from 2012 and 2020, as there was no Senate race in 2016.
Dist   12-16 R   12-16D   16-20R   16-20D   12-20R   12-20D
HD126   -3,207    5,285    6,100    9,611    2,893   14,896
HD127     -931    6,042    8,547   12,707    7,616   18,749
HD128      124    2,272    8,728    6,208    8,852    8,480
HD129   -3,226    5,992    8,844   11,033    5,618   17,025
HD130    2,216    6,749   14,229   13,325   16,445   20,074
HD131     -649    2,707    4,306    6,683    3,657    9,390
HD132    3,065   10,267   15,786   20,304   18,851   30,571
HD133   -7,791    8,688    5,592   12,018   -2,199   20,706
HD134  -10,938   15,346    6,692   17,904   -4,246   33,250
HD139   -1,294    1,187    4,847    6,854    3,553    8,041
HD141      222     -681    2,604    4,453    2,826    3,772
HD142      290    2,084    4,703    8,880    4,993   10,964
HD146   -1,633     -884    2,459    6,864      826    5,980
HD150      503    8,228   10,180   15,037   10,683   23,265
Total  -39,906  121,025  155,672  211,724  115,766  332,749
Dist    12-20R   12-20D
HD126    3,705   13,479
HD128    8,999    7,330
HD130   18,113   17,564
Total  137,031  291,210
HD127    1,006    4,180    6,933   13,217    7,939   17,397
HD133   -4,382    3,417    5,039   14,285      657   17,702
HD139     -551      -83    3,837    7,033    3,286    6,950
HD145     -531    3,369    3,983    7,142    3,452   10,511
HD146   -1,047   -2,256    1,853    7,402      806    5,146
HD147      104      536    3,510   11,837    3,614   12,373
HD148      665    4,416    4,945   12,352    5,610   16,768
HD150    2,552    6,010    8,826   14,942   11,378   20,952
Total   -7,265   68,667  129,422  233,507  122,157  302,174
The columns represent the difference in vote total for the given period and party, so "12-16" means 2012 to 2016, "16-20" means 2016 to 2020, and "12-20" means 2012 to 2020. Each column has a D or an R in it, so "12-16R" 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 "-3,207" for HD126 in the "12-16R" column for President means that Donald Trump got 3,207 fewer votes in HD126 than Mitt Romney got, and the "5,285" for HD126 in the "12-16D" column for President means that Hillary Clinton got 5,285 more votes than Barack Obama got. Clear? I hope so.
Note that there were 130K more votes cast in Harris County as a whole in 2016 than there were in 2012, and 320K more votes cast in the county in 2020 over 2016, which makes a grand total of 450K more votes in 2020 than 2012. Some districts grow faster than others, but as a general rule given the overall totals you should expect increases in each district to some extent.
I have left percentages and third party totals out of this discussion. As I have shown before, tracking changes in vote percentages can give a misleading view of whether the actual gap is growing or narrowing, and by how much. I also want to emphasize that in 2012, Harris County was very much a 50-50 proposition, and now it is very much not. Doing it this way help illustrate how and where that has happened, and by how much.
And yet, with all that said, I'm going to start with an observation about percentages. In 2012, Mitt Romney got 60% or more of the vote in eight State Rep districts – HDs 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 133, 138, and 150. Ted Cruz, running for Senate against Paul Sadler, got 60% or more of the vote in ten State Rep districts, the same eight as Romney plus HDs 132 and 135 – yes, the same 132 and 135 that Dems won in 2018. I didn't publish an analysis of the RRC race from that year, but a review of the spreadsheet that I created at the time confirmed that Christi Craddick, running against Dale Henry, got 60% or more of the vote in eleven State Rep districts, the same ten as Cruz plus HD134. In other words, every single Republican-held State Rep district in Harris County in 2012 was at least a 60% Republican district in the Railroad Commissioner race. Mitt Romney, it should be noted, just missed getting to 60% in HDs 132 and 135, and was over 57% in HD134, as was Cruz. (Let's just say Cruz fell way short of that mark in 2018.)
You can see how much the vote totals shifted at the Presidential level from 2012 to 2016. Trump got nearly 40K fewer votes than Romney, a combination of crossovers, third-party and write-in voting, and just the gentle degradation of the Republican brand, as you can see by Wayne Christian's reduced vote totals from Christie Craddick. Still, in 2016, Donald Trump scored 60% or more of the vote in three State Rep districts: HDs 127, 128, and 130. In 2016, Wayne Christian, running for RRC against Grady Yarbrough, scored 60% or more of the vote in four State Rep districts: the three that Trump got plus HD150. And finally, in 2016, Eva Guzman, running for State Supreme Court, scored 60% or more of the vote in six State Rep districts: the four Christian got plus HDs 129 and 133. HDs 132 and 135 were clearly competitive at the Presidential level – Trump won 132 by four points and 135 by two points; he also lost HD138 by a hair. He lost votes compared to Romney in 18 of 24 districts.
It is certainly true that Republicans in general and Donald Trump in particular did better in 2020 than most people expected them to do – surely, they did better than I expected them to do. Trump gained 155K votes over his 2016 total, which put 2020 Trump more than 100K votes ahead of Mitt Romney. Even though Joe Biden gained 211K votes over Hillary Clinton, for a net gain of 56K, Trump had net gains on Biden in seven districts – HDs 128, 130, 140, 143, 144, 145, and 149, with the latter five being Democratic districts and four of the five being Latino. Still, Dems had a net gain from 2012 to 2020 in every district except HD128, and some of those gains were truly huge – just look at 133 and 134, for starters. And Trump's gains in the Dem districts largely melted away by the time you got to the RRC race, with Chrysta Castaneda coming close to matching Jim Wright's increases in 140, 143, and 144, and far exceeding him in 145. It's hard to say from this what if any staying power the Trump gains may have, though Dems should be paying close attention to what happened there regardless.
Anyway, back to the percentages: In 2020, Donald Trump, John Cornyn, and Jim Wright scored 60% or more of the vote in two State Rep districts: HDs 128 and 130. The only statewide Republicans to score 60% or more in a third State Rep district were the statewide judicial candidates who did not have a Libertarian opponent – Jane Bland, Bert Richardson, Kevin Patrick, and David Newell – who also reached that level in HD127. I haven't published the statewide judicial race analysis yet so you'll have to take my word for it for now, but in any event I trust you see the pattern. This is what I mean when I say that Republicans just don't have any spare capacity in Harris County, and that will present problems for them in redistricting. Look at the numbers in districts like 126 and 129 and 133 and 150 in 2020, and compare them to the numbers in 132 and 135 and 138 in 2012. Where do you think things are going to be in another couple of cycles?
I've thrown a lot of words and numbers at you, so I'll wrap it up here. I hope this helps illustrate what I've been saying, about how Dem gains have largely come from huge steps forward in formerly Republican turf, and how there's still very much room for Dems to improve in their strongholds. We need to keep building on our gains from this past decade as we proceed into the 20s. I'll have a look at the statewide judicial races next. Let me know what you think.
2020 precinct analysis: Introduction and overview
So I finally got a full canvass of the 2020 election in a nice and convenient spreadsheet form. I spent a fair amount of the Thanksgiving week doing what I usually do with it, to generate totals for all of the political districts. I also managed to find the spreadsheets I had done in 2012 and 2016, and generated some year-over-year comparisons. I also used the city proposition data from 2012 to separate out city of Houston returns from non-Houston Harris County for 2020.
There's a lot of data here, is what I'm saying. Generating it is actually the easy part. I've been doing this for a long time – in this format, since at least 2008 – and it's just a matter of lining everything up and applying the same Excel formulas as before. (I make heavy use of the "sumif" function, if you're curious.) The challenge for me is in how to present what I generate. Well, the first challenge is in trying to figure out what it means, what is interesting or notable, what will make for a readable blog post, and then I have to figure out how to present it.
Again, the challenge here is not technical – I've done this before, many times – but philosophical. What pieces belong together? What comparisons do I want to make? What's worth my time and effort, and yours?
You can judge for yourself how well I answer those questions. Here's a list of the topics I intend to cover, in something approximating the order in which I'll present them:
– Results by Congressional district, for President, Senate, and Railroad Commissioner. I'm using those three races in part because they're the top of the ticket, in part because they're the races most affected by the presence of third-party candidates, and in part because they offer some interesting points of comparison with 2012 and 2016. I will do separate posts on the judicial races, separating out the statewide, appellate, and district/county court races. I've often used the averages of local judicial races to measure partisan levels in various districts, but I want to see what differences exist when we look at the other types of judicial races.
I've always done Congressional district results in the past, but they were more ornamentation than substance. In part that's because there wasn't much to say about the Congressional districts before 2016, as none of them were drawn to be competitive, and in part because only some of them are fully within Harris County. With CDs 02 and 07 becoming multi-million dollar battlegrounds (also true for CDs 10 and 22, though as noted we only have partial data for these), and with redistricting on the horizon, I wanted to take a closer look at these districts.
– Results by State Rep districts, by Commissioners Court precincts, and by JP/Constable precincts. Same as above in terms of format and intent. The State Rep districts are my main currency in these analyses, because they are entirely contained within Harris County (something I hope will still be true post-redistricting) and because there have been some massive changes in them over time. I already know I'll have a lot to say here.
– Judicial races as noted above, by type (state, appellate, local), and for all district types. While I use the local judicial averages as my overall expression for a given district's partisan numbers, there's some real variance in these races, and I want to examine that in some detail.
– Comparisons with 2012 and 2016. I've talked about this some before, but if the only point of comparison we emphasize this year is with 2018, we're missing a lot of the forest for the trees. I can't stress enough how much things have changed since 2012, but I'm going to try to show you. I will focus most of this on the State Rep districts, but will include some Congressional comparisons to highlight where the redistricting challenges will be.
– Whatever else comes up along the way. I've got city/county numbers, which will get its own post. I've looked at undervoting and third-party voting in the past, and may do something on that. I always find things I didn't notice at first when I really dig into the data. If there's something you'd like me to try to analyze, please let me know.
That's what I've got so far. This will be several weeks' worth of posts, so sit back and relax, it's going to take some time. Let me know what you think.
Counties of interest, part seven: West Texas
Part 1 – Counties around Harris
Part 2 – Counties around Dallas/Tarrant
Part 3 – Counties around Travis
Part 4 – Counties around Bexar
Part 5 – East Texas
Part 6 – Central Texas
Last entry in this series, and like the East Texas entry, there's a whole lot of negative numbers to look at.
County       Romney    Obama    Trump  Clinton    Trump    Biden    Shift
Ector        24,010    8,118   25,020   10,249   32,586   11,310   -5,384
Jones         4,262    1,226    4,819      936    5,621      989   -1,596
Kerr         17,274    4,338   17,727    4,681   20,858    6,510   -1,412
Lubbock      63,469   26,271   65,651   28,023   78,560   39,757   -1,605
Midland      35,689    8,286   36,973   10,025   45,463   12,258   -5,802
Potter       18,918    7,126   19,630    7,657   22,732    9,867   -1,073
Randall      41,447    7,574   43,462    7,657   50,597   12,750   -3,974
Taylor       32,904    9,750   33,250   10,085   39,439   14,489   -1,796
Tom Green    26,878    9,294   27,494    9,173   32,129   12,106   -2,439
Wichita      29,812   10,525   27,631    8,770   31,930   13,024      381
Just as a reminder, Ector County is Odessa, Jones and Taylor are Abilene, Potter and Randall are Amarillo, Tom Green is San Angelo, Kerr is Kerrville, and Wichita is Wichita Falls. Lubbock and Midland, I think you can figure out.
It's important to keep in mind that these are some decent-sized metropolitan areas, with some fairly populous cities. Lubbock has over 250K people, Amarillo has 200K, Abilene 170K, and all of the others except Kerrville have over 100K. I obsess over this fact because I believe that we can make progress in this part of the state by working on these mid-sized urban areas. I tend to focus more on Lubbock because it's the biggest city, with a big public university in it, and there's already the beginning of a Democratic-friendly State Rep district in it, but I don't believe it ends there.
Of course, the numbers themselves put a damper on my enthusiasm. Midland and Ector had big increases for Trump after moving closer to Dems in 2016. Maybe that was an oilpatch thing, it's as good an explanation as any. Most other counties had decent increases for Biden over Clinton, they just had larger increases for Trump the second time around. It's a start, and I'll take it where I can find it. If you had forced me to pick one, I would not have guessed that Wichita would be the one county to move in a Democratic direction 2012, however modestly.
I don't have any bright ideas to add to what I've been saying over the course of this series. Each part of the state is different, and they all have their challenges and opportunities. This part has reasonably populous metro areas, and I have to believe that if we can eventually flip Tarrant County, we can begin to make progress in at least some of these counties. That's going to take resources, it's going to take investment in local races (which the TDP has begun doing in recent years), and it's going to take messaging and strategy. I'm just trying to get the conversation started. As I've said many times, either we figure out a way to bend the curve outside of the big metro areas, or we make the task in those big metro areas that much harder. The rest is up to us. I hope this series has been useful. As always, let me know what you think.
Counties of interest, part six: Central Texas
We move on now to counties in Central Texas, which for these purposes will include a number of places along I-35, but also a couple of places that aren't East Texas or West Texas. Try not to take these designations too seriously and just go with it.
Bell         49,574   35,512   51,998   37,801   67,113   56,032    2,981
Brazos       37,209   17,477   38,738   23,121   47,436   35,242    7,538
Coryell      11,220    5,158   12,225    5,064   15,397    7,542   -1,793
Grayson      30,936   10,670   35,325   10,301   43,776   14,223   -9,287
Hood         18,409    3,843   21,382    4,008   26,243    5,605   -6,072
McLennan     47,903   25,694   48,260   27,063   59,432   36,550     -673
Nueces       48,966   45,772   50,766   49,198   64,467   60,749     -524
Victoria     19,692    8,802   21,275    8,866   23,244   10,271   -2,083
There's some clear good news here. Bell County, home of Killeen, Temple, and Belton, is part of that I-35 Corridor success story. Brazos County isn't on I-35, but it's an even bigger mover. Bell is 21.5% Black and has been the center of a deep-cut Dem opportunity district for some time – there were a couple of maps drawn in 2011 that would have created a Democratic State Rep district, and the current HD54 has been a potential target for a couple of cycles. Brazos, home of Bryan and College Station, was more of a surprise to me and has gone from being a fairly deep red county to a moderately purple one. I'm guessing the presence of Texas A&M is the driver of that, but I'm guessing.
McLennan County is Waco, and while it looks to have more or less held steady since 2012, it had improved in 2016 and then fell back in 2020, which is not a good sign. You know how I feel about building up Dem infrastructure in cities, including and especially the medium and smaller cities that have not yet been a key component of the resurgence. Coryell is next door and moving a little farther in the wrong direction.
The tough nuts to crack here are Grayson (home of Sherman) and Hood (home of Granbury). Both are on the outskirts of the Metroplex, with Grayson north of Collin and Denton, and Hood south and west of Parker and Johnson. They're not close enough to the blue parts of the Metroplex to benefit from spillover. I don't have an answer here, just noting the problem.
Nueces County is of course Corpus Christi, and it's been more or less what it is for some time. Like McLennan, it moved towards blue in 2016, then slid back in 2020. As with McLennan, we need to figure that out and get it back on track. I included Victoria County in this collection mostly because it's a population center and it's a geographic fit, but it's kind of an island, its own MSA on the way from Houston to Corpus.
Counties of interest, part five: East Texas
The next three entries in this series will look at regions, and counties of interest within them. For the sake of simplicity, I've labeled these regions East Texas, Central Texas, and West Texas, though in a strict sense some of the counties I'm including in them would be called something else – Jefferson County, for example, is usually considered Southeast Texas. Try not to take that too seriously, and just assume I've split the state into three vertical sections.
Within those sections I've identified counties that have enough voters in them to be worthwhile. Again, this is all arbitrary, but I've generally aimed for places with cities or other features of interest. We begin with East Texas:
Angelina     20,303    7,834   21,668    7,538   25,070    9,136   -3,465
Bowie        24,869   10,196   24,924    8,838   27,053   10,692   -1,688
Gregg        28,742   12,398   28,764   11,677   32,352   14,657   -1,351
Hardin       17,746    3,359   19,606    2,780   23,806    3,449   -5,970
Harrison     17,512    8,456   18,749    7,151   21,318    7,812   -4,450
Henderson    21,231    6,106   23,650    5,669   28,816    7,048   -6,643
Hunt         21,011    6,671   23,910    6,396   29,135    8,879   -5,916
Jefferson    43,242   44,668   42,862   42,443   47,535   46,022   -2,959
Nacogdoches  13,925    6,465   14,771    6,846   17,359    8,989     -910
Orange       23,366    6,800   25,513    5,735   29,170    6,354   -6,250
Smith        57,331   21,456   58,930   22,300   68,546   29,343   -3,328
Van Zandt    15,794    3,084   18,473    2,799   22,126    3,419   -5,997
Walker       12,140    6,252   12,884    6,091   15,368    7,875   -1,605
As you might imagine this is not friendly territory for Democrats, and it's getting less so as we go along. These counties are pretty small for the most part, but they contribute a lot of votes to the Republicans' bottom line. Just since 2012, that gap has grown by more than 50K in the GOP direction. This is the point I've been trying to make lately, because while it may seem easy to write off this part of the state, these counties collectively pack a real punch. Look again at that Michael Li chart I embedded in this post about where the vote comes from in Texas. We can either do something to reduce the growing gap we face in the smaller counties, or we can accept the fact that the hill we're pushing this boulder up gets steeper every cycle.
Let me remind you, there are cities and metro areas in these counties. You know that Jefferson County is home to Beaumont, and Smith County is Tyler. Other cities include:
Angelina County – Lufkin
Bowie County – Texarkana
Gregg County – Longview
Harrison County – Marshall
Nacogdoches County – Nacogdoches, home of Stephen F. Austin State University
Walker County – Huntsville, home of Sam Houston State University
I see three avenues to improve performance in this part of the state. One is as I've noted several times an effort to organize and build infrastructure in the smaller cities in Texas. We know what we can do in the big urban areas, and the formerly-small towns that are now part of big urban areas – think of places like Katy and Sugar Land – are increasingly strong for Dems. I believe the potential exists in the smaller cities that are not proximate to the big urban areas, and that more effort needs to be made, and more resources provided, to help them reach that potential. It has to be organic to these cities – surely, a helicopter drop of volunteers and/or paid staffers from Houston and Austin would not be received very well. I know the TDP has done some work along these lines, I'm just saying we need to continue it.
Second, there are as noted above universities in some of these towns. Anything we can do to grow the Democratic student groups and help them register and turn out voters is well worth it.
Finally, we can take a page from Stacy Abrams' playbook and recognize that there's a substantial Black population in some of these counties, and get to registering and organizing and empowering them in local and state politics. To wit:
Jefferson – 33.7% Black
Harrison – 24.0% Black
Walker – 23.9% Black
Bowie – 23.4% Black
Gregg – 19.9% Black
Smith – 17.9% Black
Nacogdoches – 16.7% Black
Angelina – 14.2% Black
All that is from those Wikipedia pages I linked above. I will freely admit here that I don't know what is already in place in these counties – maybe we're already doing all we can. I kind of doubt it, though.
Again, my bottom line is that we make an effort to narrow the gap in these places, or at least keep that gap from growing ever wider, or we make the task we're already working on in the big counties that much harder. I'm not saying any of this will be easy, but I am saying we can't shrug it off because it might be hard. This is the choice we face.
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