It’s about 10:30 PM as I write this, and I don’t care to stay up any longer. The national situation looks dicey, but it’s not yet clear what will happen. I’ll put that off for now.
It was bad here in Texas. One of the national story lines is that the polls that predicted a tight tossup Presidential race were accurate. Except here in Texas, where the polls that suggested fairly close statewide races were badly wrong. As I write this, Trump is leading statewide with Mitt-Romney-in-2012 numbers. No poll I saw suggested anything like that. There’s a lot of the Election Day vote to be counted, and I suppose it could be that Dems did more of their voting on Tuesday, because they sure didn’t do it early. But this was a lot less competitive than we had any reason to think, and it really sets things back.
It also means that not only were there no pickups to be had, Dems are right now losing three seats in the House and one in the Senate and SBOE, with several South Texas races not having reported anything yet. (Not even the early vote on the SOS page.) Even Rep. Vicente Gonzalez in CD34 was trailing, which would be a big loss and would make it that much harder for Dems to take the House, which was still a possibility. Just a disaster, top to bottom.
Here in Harris County, Kamala Harris was leading Trump 52-46, with Colin Allred up over Ted Cruz 54-44. At least the polls got that Allred was outperforming Harris. The Democratic candidates for executive countywide offices were all leading, though only Sheriff Ed Gonzalez could be called comfortably ahead. Several judges were trailing, with all of the Appellate Court incumbents on their way to defeat. Some of this could be salvaged if Dems carry Election Day. If not, it could get worse.
The Harris County Flood Control District proposition was narrowly ahead, while the two HISD bonds were going down by a 60-40 margin. That at least was no surprise to me.
The one bit of good news is that the city of Amarillo soundly defeated the abortion travel ban referendum. I don’t know how much that will matter given the bigger picture, but it’s a nice win anyway and a testament to the hard work the organizers did there. Kudos to them all.
I don’t have the energy to write anything more at this time. I’ll update this post as needed and will have more to say later. For now, take care of yourself. It’s going to be a rough ride, whatever happens next.
UPDATE: Overnight, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez came back to win in CD34 and Dems won the SBOE seat they had trailed in, but Sen. Morgan LaMantia lost in SD27. Dems lost two seats in the House. Overall turnout was 11,255,951, a tiny bit less than it was in 2020.
In Harris County, it was a bit like 2022 in that Dems held on to all of the executive offices but lost some judges. Election Day was modestly Democratic, with turnout of just over 300K, for about 1.44 million overall. Republicans basically hit their 2020 turnout marks, Dems fell short of theirs. Just a lousy day.
It got worse.
The GOP flat out promised to tank the economy (with mass deportations and tariffs and billionaire tax cuts and Elon’s austerity measures) and people signed up for it.
IMHO, I think progressives have pushed the Democratic Party too far to the left. Transgenders in women sports, open borders, defund the police, soft-on-crime policies, etc. While racism may have also played a part, I don’t think racism was the biggest factor in Harris’ defeat – Obama won twice, remember. Democrats have just lost touch with mainstream voters.
Locally, Democratic judges greatly underperformed Harris and Allred. There’s a message there – citizens don’t want career criminals running loose on bond.
Well, now it’s time to display how true Americans respond to an election defeat. As Democrats, we congratulate the winners, learn from the experience, and prepare for the next election cycle. We don’t storm the capital and act like extremist nuts.
Greg, that may be true here in Harris County, but not everywhere. Trump ran on one issue: deportation, deportation, deportation. Undoubtedly, that will be one of the first things he does. Here in Texas, they added Transgender.
Harris will win the popular vote, so you are not right unless the majority of Americans are not mainstream.