Posted on 11/03/2020 2:25:31 PM PST by Kaslin
Yes, Texas saw record early voter turnout last week. But a majority of those early voters appear to be Republicans.
Texas made national headlines last week when news broke that turnout for early voting surpassed total voting turnout in 2016. When early voting ended on Friday, about 9.7 million Texans had voted compared to about 9 million total who voted four years ago.
This is a big deal for the Lone Star State, where traditionally voter turnout has been among the lowest in the country. It’s also a big deal for Texas Democrats and mainstream media pundits, who assume that high voter turnout in Texas will hurt President Trump and benefit former Vice President Joe Biden and down-ballot Democrats.
They point to tightening polls in Texas, not just in the presidential race but also in the U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent John Cornyn and Democratic challenger M.J. Hegar, as well as a number of other congressional races. This could be the long-awaited year, they say, that Texas turns blue.
But the conventional wisdom that higher turnout will help Democrats doesn’t quite square with the data we have about early voting. TargetSmart, a Democratic data and polling firm, modeled party affiliation for early voting in Texas and found that turnout was actually higher among Republicans than Democrats, 50.9 points to 39. More importantly, the analysis found that compared to 2016 early voting, Republican turnout increased 0.6 percent this cycle while Democrat turnout declined by 1.7 percent.
Of course, just because more Republicans than Democrats are coming out for early voting doesn’t mean we know how they’re going to vote. Four years ago, millions of registered Democrats voted for Trump in Midwest battleground states, propelling him to victory. And certainly, higher overall turnout in Texas means more young voters, who lean heavily Democratic. So far, more than 1 million Texans under the age of 30 have cast their ballots in early voting, far surpassing early youth voter turnout in 2016.
But we also know that party loyalty looms large in this presidential election. The Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas pegged Trump’s approval rating among self-identified Republicans at 90 percent in October, while 75 percent of self-identified Texas Democrats reported being favorable or somewhat favorable to Biden in a June survey. As Chuck DeVore noted last week at Forbes, “If Texas voters adhere to their party affiliations, the early voting there could indicate that President Trump is on track to meet or exceed his 9 point win over Hillary Clinton in 2016, meaning the polls are understating support for Trump by an average of about 7%.”
This of course would once again crush progressives’ thus far quixotic quest to turn Texas blue. Democrats haven’t won a statewide race in Texas since 1994. They had high hopes in 2014 when Wendy Davis attracted national attention in her bid for governor, which she then lost to Greg Abbott by 20 points. Two years later, when Trump won just 52 percent of the Texas vote, underperforming Mitt Romney’s 2012 margin by more than five points, Democrats took heart. In 2018, they were convinced Beto O’Rourke would unseat Sen. Ted Cruz.
None of that is to say Democrats aren’t gaining ground in Texas or that they won’t eventually win back the state. Democrats only need to flip nine seats in the state House to take control of that chamber, which Republicans have controlled since 2003. The key to flipping Texas might not be a polarizing presidential election but the inexorable process of urbanization in the state. All the major cities in Texas are Democratic now, and their rapidly-growing suburbs are trending blue.
If Trump performs as well in Texas this time around as he did in 2016, it will likely be thanks to gains among Hispanic voters off-setting GOP voter attrition in the suburbs. The place where you’re more likely to see Democratic gains isn’t at the top of the ticket, though, but in congressional races. Republican congressional candidates outperformed Trump by five points in 2016. If those margins are closer to Trump’s this time around, it’s a sign that Democrats are gaining ground in the right places.
But don’t put too much stock in record early voting as a sign that Texas is turning blue. If anything, what we know about early voting so far indicates that Trump might well be ahead going into Election Day. And because Republicans are more likely than Democrats to vote in-person on Election Day, Trump might well see a huge surge, once again upending Democrats’ expectations of a blue wave.
A much larger reason that Dallas judgeships are in Dem hands is because the local GOP lets many positions run unopposed. On my ballot today were at least FOUR unopposed Democrats running for election or re-election as a judge.
I am talking about the difference between the 2004 election and 2006.
Go dig out the sample ballots for 04-06. You will see an alarming number of judgeships left to run unopposed.
I was shocked to see *only* four running unopposed this year. There have been years in the past 20 where the local GOP let ten to twenty contests go unopposed.
Note to political pundits -— never assume. All of my employees and I voted early this year because wild horses couldn’t make us wait any longer to be “heard” at the ballot box. We cast a lot of REPUBLICAN votes, too, by the way.
Making predictions costs nothing. That’s why they are so popular with scammers.
That is funny stuff. You are right.
If you notice this 2000 election map Dallas County was red. That was because we in the Dallas County Republican
Party, worked pretty hard to not only get Bush elected but also to also get all of the down ballots races in the solid
Republican camp.
In 2005, we had an influx into Dallas County of Katrina refugees. I had a number of them in my precinct and they
all voted democrat. Other precinct judges said the same thing.
The left may have been able to turn the big cities blue but it will be VERY difficult to turn the entire state blue.
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