It’s mostly about one legislative race in particular, but that’s okay.
Marisa Yvette Garcia-Utley
When he worked in the oil industry, Thomas Benavidez traveled to drilling sites across Texas and northern Mexico. The work was exciting, and the pay was good. He rarely paid attention to politics.
But after being laid off two years ago, the 24-year-old South Texas native moved back to the public housing complex where his parents live in Alice. He has been working as a roofer. And he’s been paying attention to the presidential election, especially to Donald Trump.
“I haven’t ever voted before, but I really don’t want him to be president,” Benavidez said. “It’s the way he acts and talks about other races. I think he’s a racist.”
Benavidez said he doesn’t know who his local representatives are but plans to vote for Democrats up and down the ballot in November.
Voters like Benavidez likely won’t make a difference for Trump, who is expected to win deep-red Texas. But they mean a lot to state Rep. J.M. Lozano, a Republican who represents Alice, Kingsville, Portland and part of Corpus Christi.
[…]
[Lozano’s] opponent, Marisa Yvette Garcia-Utley, said that Trump’s candidacy is a “perfect storm” for Democratic challengers in districts with large numbers of Hispanic and black voters.
“With Trump really ticking (Latinos) off, all I hear is they’re coming out full-swing, and they’re voting straight ticket,” said Garcia-Utley, who owns a women’s fitness center. “It’s to my advantage. I need 25,000 (votes) to win this district, and I feel like that is going to happen because of Trump — and because of my hard work, but Trump is really helping me.”
Twenty-five thousand votes is a good estimate – Lozano won with 24,074 votes in 2012. What should concern Lozano is that Democrats swept HD43 in 2008 (outside of the Presidential race, as there were a fair number of crossover votes for John McCain in heavily Latino districts that year), with every Dem except one reaching that 25,000 vote threshold, with the one who missed it falling only 39 votes short. Personally, Lozano’s party switch before the 2011 session began after he had won a contentious Democratic primary really pissed me off, and I’ve been rooting for him to lose ever since. Here’s Marisa Yvette Garcia-Utley’s Facebook page if you want to learn more about her.
The rest of the story touches on a couple of other races, including HD144, which Dems won in 2012 by a five-point margin without any help from an albatross Republican Presidential candidate, and HD134, which could end up as a district carried by Hillary Clinton but no other Democrat. There’s an embedded chart pointing out some other races, including (weirdly) two Democratic-held seats: HD78, which President Obama carried 54.3 to 44.0 in 2012, and HD149, carried by Obama 58.8 to 40.1 that year. Go figure. Mentioned in passing but deserving of more exploration is a sentence about how “local Democrats are hoping an anti-Trump wave allows David Holmes to unseat Gerald Daugherty, the only Republican on the Travis County Commissioners Court”. I figure there are quite a few more races for county offices that could be swung to Democrats this year thanks to Trump, but those are a lot less sexy and harder to report on. Maybe we’ll learn after the election how many such offices there were this year.