I’m not going to stay up late and wait till every last vote has been counted in CD06. You can see the latest report from the SOS here. As of when I drafted this, Susan Wright and Jake Ellzey were leading, with Jana Sanchez just a bit behind Ellzey. If that holds, it will be an all-GOP runoff, which is not great but not terribly surprising. It wasn’t just that the three Dems who raised the most money split the vote, it was also the no-name, no-money Dems who collected votes. I have no idea who Tammy Allison is, but she was actually the third-best Dem in the race, with over five percent of the vote. Multi-candidate special elections are weird, man.
The takes I saw last night on Twitter were scorching hot, but honestly things wouldn’t be all that much different if Sanchez had collected a couple hundred more votes (as of when I last checked) and slipped ahead of Ellzey and into the runoff. Having three viable Dems, plus one who perhaps benefitted from being the first name on the ballot in Tarrant County, was a heavy lift to overcome. It’s what I was worried about from the beginning. I don’t have anything more insightful than that to say.
Just terrible. Looks I will be undervoting in the runoff.
Jungle primaries like this don’t really seem fair. Yes, it benefited me in Texas, but it benefits leftists in other places. Since these are almost certainly going to result in a runoff anyway, why not just treat situations like this as a primary vote, let each side pick their candidate, then have a general election on the date that a runoff would be scheduled?
Also, it’s not surprising that the top vote getter is the widow. Isn’t that what happened with John Lewis? Seems to be common for voters to elect widows.