Karl Rove would like you to think so.
At the House level, Democrats hope to win three districts won by Hillary Clinton and now held by Republican incumbents, as well as some of the six seats opened up by GOP retirements. Here again, the primary results are not heartening for Democrats.
In two Clinton-GOP congressional districts—the Seventh, in Houston, represented by Rep. John Culberson, and the 32nd, in Dallas, held by Rep. Pete Sessions—more Republicans voted than Democrats: 38,032 Republicans to 33,176 Democrats in the Seventh and 41,359 Republicans to 40,084 Democrats in the 32nd. Mrs. Clinton carried both districts by less than 2 percentage points in 2016.
Moreover, no Democrat won a majority in either district’s primary, forcing runoffs in May. In the Seventh, journalist Laura Moser —endorsed by the Bernie Sanders-connected “Our Revolution”—is pitted against Clinton loyalist and attorney Lizzie Pannill Fletcher. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee targeted Ms. Moser with an opposition-research dump arguing she was too liberal to win in the fall. The attack backfired: Ms. Moser was trailing Ms. Fletcher in early voting before the DCCC assault but won more votes among those who turned out on election day.
Democrats outvoted Republicans in a GOP-held seat that Mrs. Clinton carried by 3.4 percentage points—the massive 23rd Congressional District, which sweeps across West Texas. This year, after Democratic candidates spent a combined $1.1 million, 44,320 voted in their primary to 30,951 Republicans. Still, that is 5,000 more Republicans than voted in the 2014 primary, which launched Will Hurd into Congress. A former undercover CIA officer, Rep. Hurd is one of the GOP’s most effective campaigners. His “DQ Townhalls” at Dairy Queens across his largely Hispanic district helped him hold the district by 1.3 points in 2016 even as Mr. Trump lost by more than 3 points.
Democratic aspirations to take some of the six open Republican congressional districts also appear slim: Republicans turned out more voters in all six, with the GOP’s margins ranging from roughly 16,000 to 22,000 votes.
If we’re talking about CD23, I can tell you that the Democratic candidates have received more votes than the Republican candidates in each primary since 2012, which includes one year that Pete Gallego won and two years that Will Hurd won. As such, I’m not sure how predictive that is.
More to the point, I am always suspicious when a data point is presented in a vacuum as being indicative of something. We’ve had primary elections before. How often is it the case that the party who collects the most primry votes in a given race goes on to win that race in November? Putting it another way, if one party draws fewer votes in the primary, does that mean they can’t win in November? Let’s step into the wayback machine and visit some primaries to the past to see.
2004
CD17 - GOP CD17 - Dem
McIntyre 10,681 Edwards 17,754
Snyder 11,568
Wohlgemuth 15,627
Total 37,876 Total 17,754
November result - Edwards 125,309 Wohlgemuth 116,049
HD134 - GOP HD134 - Dem
Wong 4,927 Barclay 771
Daugherty 4,193
Total 4,927 Total 4,964
November result - Wong 36,021 Daugherty 29,806
HD137 - GOP HD137 - Dem
Witt 1,291 Amadi 376
Zieben 970 Hochberg 1,012
Total 2,261 Total 1,388
November result - Hochberg 10,565 Witt 8,095
HD149 - GOP HD149 - Dem
Heflin 2,526 Vo 1,800
November result - Vo 20,695 Heflin 20,662
2006
HD47 - GOP HD47 - Dem
Welch 2,349 Bolton 1,569
Four others 3,743 Three others 2,071
Total 6,092 Total 3,640
November result - Bolton 26,975 Welch 24,447
HD50 - GOP HD50 - Dem
Fleece 1,441 Strama 2,466
Wheeler 294
Zimmerman 1,344
Total 3,079 Total 2,466
November result - Strama 25,098 Fleece 13,681
HD107 - GOP HD107 - Dem
Keffer 3,054 Smith 724
Vaught 1,169
Total 3,054 Total 1,893
November result - Vaught 16,254 Keffer 15,145
HD134 - GOP HD134 - Dem
Wong 3,725 Cohen 2,196
November result - Cohen 25,219 Wong 20,005
2010
HD48 - GOP HD48 - Dem
Neil 9,136 Howard 6,239
November result - Howard 25,023 Neil 25,011
2012
SD10 - GOP SD10 - GOP
Cooper 6,709 Davis 17,230
Shelton 28,249
Total 34,958 Total 17,230
November result - Davis 147,103 Shelton 140,656
HD144 - GOP HD144 - Dem
Pena 1,030 Perez 1,149
Pineda 1,437 Risner 462
Ybarra 591
Total 2,467 Total 2,022
November result - Perez 12,446 Pineda 10,885
2014
SD15 - GOP SD15 - Dem
Hale 13,563 LaCroix 3,239
Whitmire 9,766
Total 13,563 Total 13,005
November result - Whitmire 74,192 Hale 48,249
2016
HD107 GOP HD107 - Dem
Sheets 10,371 Neave 6,317
November result - Neave 27,922 Sheets 27,086
Some points to note here. One, I’m cherry-picking just as Rove had done. There were plenty of examples of one party outvoting the other in a given primary race, then winning that race in November. That’s why I don’t have an example to cite from 2008, for instance. It’s also why I concentrated on the legislative races, since outside of CD23 there haven’t been many competitive Congressional races. Two, as you can see most of the examples are from last decade. That’s largely a function of how brutally efficient the 2011 gerrymander was. Three, these are actual votes cast, not turnout, as that data doesn’t exist on the SOS page and I was not going to trawl through multiple county election sites for this. It could be in some of the closer examples that adding in the undervotes would have flipped which party led the way.
All that out of the way, as you can see there are plenty of examples of parties trailing the primary votes but winning when it mattered. In some cases, the March tallies weren’t close, like with SD10 in 2012. In some other cases, it was the November races that weren’t close, like HD50 in 2006 and SD15 in 2014. The point I would make here is simply that this doesn’t look like a reliable metric to me. If you want to make the case that these Congressional races will be tough for Democrats to win regardless of the atmosphere and the demographic trends and the relative level of enthusiasm in the two parties, I’d agree. The weight of the evidence says that despite the positive indicators for 2018, we’re still underdogs in these districts. Our odds are better than they’ve been, but that doesn’t mean they’re great. I don’t think you need to use questionable statistics to make that case.
One more thing to consider: There was an effort, mostly driven by educators, to show up in the Republican primary and vote against Dan Patrick. It didn’t work in the sense that he won easily, but some 367K people did vote against him. I’m sure some number of those people are reliable Republicans, but some of them were likely new to the primary process. This probably had an effect on overall Republican turnout. A small effect, to be sure, but if it’s a little more than half of the anti-Patrick vote then we’re talking about 200K people. Take them out of the pool and the Republicans are back down at 2014 turnout levels.
I have no idea how much this effect might be. It’s certainly small, and I doubt you could measure it without some polling. But we know it’s there, and so it’s worth keeping in mind.
March elections is like which friend do you like best, in November the enemy appears with an R in front, the ones that promote men to assault women, to hate anyone that is not white, to work with the Russians. In November true Americans will come out to vote against the Rs.
Karl doesn’t mention that in CD32 you have some significant overlap with SD8 (Richardson, Sachse, Wylie) where both GOP candidates spent 10 million combined and tv ads were saturating the Dallas market. Only Meier ran tv ads in 32.
Dems have a good shot at picking up all three congressional targets, plus SD10 and SD16. Don’t think we will win CD21 or CD31 but the Dem performance will shock the chattering class.
Looks like Hurd, Sessions and Culberson and just received the Karl Rove kiss of death.
Seriously, few pundits are as consistently wrong as Rove.
Ellen Cohen won by 5,000 votes in 2006. DAMN!