There’s an older gentleman who rides his bike around the neighborhood. I see him pretty regularly when I’m out walking the dog. We always wave hello as we pass by. On Sunday he pulled his bike over to the curb as I was out with Dexter, to talk to me about the election. We’d never engaged beyond a smile and wave before then, but I presume he’d heard from other neighbors that I was a Politics Guy and he was feeling understandably anxious and wanted to know what I thought. I told him I was feeling optimistic because I was, and I think he felt some reassurance after we were done.
And so now I feel guilty about that. He wasn’t the only person who had expressed similar feelings to me in recent weeks – I mean, we all felt that way to varying degrees – and I would respond with my generally positive vibe because that’s who I am and that’s how I felt. To say the least, I don’t feel that way right now.
There are lots of obvious reasons to feel upset and more right now, but one of them for me is that I didn’t see what happened in Texas coming. For all the discourse about polling, the national polls were reasonably accurate. It was a close race that ultimately tipped one way. But the polls here were way off. We had every reason to expect something in the range of the 2020 election, with Trump carrying the state by five or six points. Maybe at one end it’s like the Hillary result in 2016, down nine, and maybe at the other it’s like Beto in 2018, down two or three. There was nothing in the polls, statewide or the polls we got of Harris and Bexar Counties, to suggest a 14-point margin. Or that any Democratic countywide candidate here had anything to worry about.
The shock of that, on top of everything else, has me reeling. I thought I knew some things, I thought I understood some things, but I was a fool. At some point I’ll be able to study the numbers, but I don’t know how much that will help. Everything I thought I knew was wrong.
I don’t know where we go from here, and I don’t know how much I can offer on that. Maybe I’ll feel differently when the shock wears off, or when we’re forced into defensive mode. For now I’m just trying to find my footing.
I will make two observations for now. One is that the Republicans did what they did this year by more or less hitting their vote marks from 2020. Jane Bland was the high scorer in 2020 for the GOP with 740K votes. Four statewide judicial candidates plus one appellate court candidate got between 744K and 752K this year, with David Schenck getting the top tally. The downballot Republican judicial candidates did a little better overall than in 2020 but with numbers that wouldn’t have come close to winning that year. The Dems on the other hand lost around 100K votes from 2020, which unsurprisingly roughly matches the drop in overall turnout from 2020 – 1,656,686 four years ago, 1,558,304 this year (that figure is likely to increase as provisional ballots get cured). Whatever there is to understand about what happened this year, that’s where to begin. Colin Allred was the top votegetter with 835,445, which would have been on the lower end of the 2020 scale. Kamala Harris just nosed above 800K – she’s now at 803K – but no one else got there. The low score in 2020 was 814K. There’s your problem.
And on the subject of judicial races, remember the celebration of “Black Girl Magic” in 2018, as a historic number of Black women were elected to the bench in Harris County? Whatever the opposite of that is, it’s what we got: Of the ten Democratic district or county court judges who lost on Tuesday, seven of them were Black women; the others were Nicole Perdue, Allison Mathis, and Robert Johnson. Make of that what you will. (The incumbents who lost were previously elected in 2020 and possibly 2016, so they’re not the same as the class of 2018.)
(Note: As of the 8 PM update last night, Nicole Perdue trails by 1,261 and Elaine Palmer trails by 2,342. It’s at least possible that provisional ballots could have an effect on their races.)
I’m going to be posting at a slower rate for the next few days at least. I’ve got a few drafts from before Tuesday that I’ll get to, and I’ll get back into the news-watching stuff eventually. Thank you for sticking around as we get through this.
Well, when a horrible, incorrigible, incompetent, convicted felon like Trump defeats you (again), the first step in corrective action is to look in the mirror and figure out why. Beyond Trump, why the red wave across the nation?
To start, Democrats need to find out why we are losing so much of the Hispanic vote. If we don’t address that problem, Texas will never turn Blue. Anyway, to fix a problem, you first have to acknowledge that you have a problem. I hope the Democratic Party is willing to make the changes necessary to appeal to more voters and win future elections.
This is a good read:
https://www.popehat.com/p/and-yet-it-moves?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark
You’ve earned a break and you’re nobody’s fool. Grateful to read your analysis anytime you’re ready to share it. It sucks so bad right now, but we will have a chance to reflect later.