Introduction
Congressional districts
State Rep districts
Commissioners Court/JP precincts
Comparing 2012 and 2016
Statewide judicial
Other jurisdictions
Appellate courts, Part 1
Appellate courts, Part 2
Judicial averages
Other cities
District Attorney
County Attorney
Sheriff
Tax Assessor
County Clerk
HCDE
I’ve finally run out of Harris County races from 2020 to analyze, so let’s move over to Fort Bend County. I’ve said before that while Fort Bend provides downloadable Excel files on their county elections page, they format these results in a way that makes it harder for me to do the same analysis I do with Harris County. Basically, Harris County puts all the results on one worksheet, with the totals for every candidate given in each precinct. For district races, that means a blank in the results when the precinct in question is not in that district, but the cell for that district is there. That makes it super easy for me to use Excel functions to add up the vote totals for, say, the Presidential candidates in the precincts where, say, the HD134 voters are. I can do practically every race in a matter of an hour or two, and indeed I spend more time formatting the blog posts than I do the calculations.
Fort Bend, on the other hand, separates each race into its own worksheet, which is fine in and of itself, except that for district races they only include the precincts for that race on the worksheet in question. That completely nullifies the formulas I use for Harris County, and when I went and looked to see how I did it in 2016, I saw that I manually added the relevant cells for each of the countywide races, an approach that is inelegant, labor intensive, and prone to error. But it was the best I could do, so I did it again that way here. I can tell you that my results are not fully accurate, and I know this because the subtotals don’t add up correctly, but they’re close enough to suffice. The one exception is for the County Commissioner precincts, which are fully grouped together in Fort Bend – each precinct number is four digits, with the first digit being a one, two, three, or four, and that first digit is the Commissioner precinct. So those at least are easy to add up correctly. The rest is messy, but I did the best I could. When the official state reports come out in March and they’re off from mine, you’ll know why.
Anyway. That’s a lot of minutia, so let’s get to the numbers.
Dist Trump Biden Lib Grn
====================================
CD09 15,527 52,998 414 292
CD22 142,191 142,554 2,614 799
HD26 42,389 45,097 743 283
HD27 24,191 59,921 576 296
HD28 65,043 61,103 1,212 313
HD85 26,661 29,016 503 197
CC1 37,765 40,253 699 261
CC2 18,054 52,525 441 307
CC3 61,437 49,976 1,120 247
CC4 40,460 52,798 768 276
Dist Trump% Biden% Lib% Grn%
====================================
CD09 22.43% 76.55% 0.60% 0.42%
CD22 49.34% 49.47% 0.91% 0.28%
HD26 47.89% 50.95% 0.84% 0.32%
HD27 28.47% 70.51% 0.68% 0.35%
HD28 50.95% 47.86% 0.95% 0.25%
HD85 47.29% 51.47% 0.89% 0.35%
CC1 47.82% 50.97% 0.89% 0.33%
CC2 25.31% 73.64% 0.62% 0.43%
CC3 54.48% 44.31% 0.99% 0.22%
CC4 42.90% 55.99% 0.81% 0.29%
Dist Cornyn Hegar Lib Grn
====================================
CD09 15,345 49,730 1,082 639
CD22 145,632 129,254 4,277 1,473
HD26 43,650 40,478 1,264 506
HD27 24,695 55,984 1,308 672
HD28 66,532 55,483 1,859 580
HD85 26,653 26,678 949 355
CC1 38,088 37,124 1,318 447
CC2 17,948 49,130 1,123 626
CC3 63,061 45,045 1,614 489
CC4 41,877 47,685 1,304 550
Dist Cornyn% Hegar% Lib% Grn%
====================================
CD09 22.97% 74.45% 1.62% 0.96%
CD22 51.89% 46.06% 1.52% 0.52%
HD26 50.82% 47.12% 1.47% 0.59%
HD27 29.88% 67.73% 1.58% 0.81%
HD28 53.46% 44.58% 1.49% 0.47%
HD85 48.78% 48.83% 1.74% 0.65%
CC1 49.48% 48.23% 1.71% 0.58%
CC2 26.08% 71.38% 1.63% 0.91%
CC3 57.22% 40.87% 1.46% 0.44%
CC4 45.81% 52.16% 1.43% 0.60%
Dist Wright Casta Lib Grn
====================================
CD09 14,727 50,118 923 769
CD22 142,842 125,932 4,794 2,479
HD26 42,848 39,268 1,367 860
HD27 23,874 55,827 1,267 850
HD28 65,253 54,232 2,115 1,011
HD85 26,165 26,418 968 521
CC1 37,302 36,877 1,341 640
CC2 17,328 49,299 984 776
CC3 61,909 43,760 1,924 863
CC4 41,027 46,114 1,468 969
Dist Wright% Casta% Lib% Grn%
====================================
CD09 22.13% 75.32% 1.39% 1.16%
CD22 51.75% 45.62% 1.74% 0.90%
HD26 50.80% 46.56% 1.62% 1.02%
HD27 29.18% 68.23% 1.55% 1.04%
HD28 53.22% 44.23% 1.72% 0.82%
HD85 48.39% 48.86% 1.79% 0.96%
CC1 48.98% 48.42% 1.76% 0.84%
CC2 25.34% 72.09% 1.44% 1.13%
CC3 57.08% 40.35% 1.77% 0.80%
CC4 45.80% 51.48% 1.64% 1.08%
The first number to consider is not about any of the districts. It’s simply this: John Cornyn received 3K more votes in Fort Bend County than Donald Trump did, but MJ Hegar got over 16K fewer votes than Joe Biden. Jim Wright got about as many votes as Trump did, but Chrysta Castaneda got 19K fewer votes than Biden. That trend continued in the district races as well. Troy Nehls got 2K more votes than Trump did in CD22, while Sri Kulkarni got 19K fewer votes. Jacey Jetton got a thousand more votes than Trump did in HD26, while Sarah DeMerchant got 4,500 fewer votes than Biden did. Biden clearly got a few Republican crossover votes, but by far the difference between his performance and everyone else’s on the ballot was that there was a significant number of people who voted for Joe Biden and then didn’t vote in other races. That was just not so on the Republican side.
I don’t have a single explanation for this. It’s a near reverse of what happened in Harris County in 2004, when George Bush clearly got some Democratic crossovers, but by and large there were a lot of Bush-only voters, while the folks who showed up for John Kerry generally stuck around and voted for the other Dems. I don’t think what happened here in Fort Bend is a function of straight ticket voting, or its removal in this case, because there’s a world of difference between someone who picks and chooses what races to vote in and someone who votes for President and then goes home – I just don’t believe that latter person would have selected the “straight Democratic” choice if it had been there. In 2004, my theory was that Bush was a brand name candidate who drew out more casual voters who didn’t really care about the other races, while Kerry voters were more hardcore. I don’t buy that here because if anything I would have expected the Trump voters to be more likely to be one and done. It’s a mystery to me, but it’s one that state and Fort Bend Democrats need to try to figure out. At the very least, we could have won HD26, and we could have elected Jane Robinson to the 14th Court of Appeals if we’d done a better job downballot here.
One other possibility I will mention: Sri Kulkarni wrote an article in the Texas Signal that analyzed his loss and cited a large disinformation campaign against him that contributed to his defeat. That may be a reason why the Libertarian candidate did as well as he did in that race. I don’t doubt Kulkarni’s account of his own race, but I hesitate to fully accept this explanation. Dems had a larger dropoff of the vote in CD09 as well – about 3K fewer votes for Hegar and Castaneda, less than 1K fewer for Cornyn and Wright – and the dropoff in CD22 was pretty consistent for other Dems as well, though Kulkarni did generally worse. It may have moved the needle somewhat against him, but it doesn’t explain what happened with other Dems. Again, someone with more time and resources available to them – the TDP, in particular – should do a deeper dive on this. I do believe that disinformation was an issue for Dems last year, and will be an increasing problem going forward, and we need to get our arms around that. I just believe there were other causes as well, and we need to understand those, too.
One more thing: Kulkarni ran a lot closer to the Biden standard in Harris County than he did in Fort Bend. Biden and Trump were virtually tied in CD22 in Harris County, with the vote going 21,912 for Trump to 21,720 for Biden; Nehls defeated Kulkarni 20,953 to 19,743 in Harris. That’s the kind of result that one can easily attribute to Biden crossovers, and doesn’t raise any flags about the level of undervoting. I haven’t looked at Brazoria County yet, but my point here is just that Fort Bend County was very different in its behavior than Harris County was. And again, for the Nth time, we need to understand why. That is the point I’m trying to sledgehammer home.
Moving on, HD28 was a steeper hill to climb than perhaps we thought it would be. Eliz Markowitz got about 1,500 fewer votes than MJ Hegar did, and about 300 fewer than Castanada, while Gary Gates outperformed both Jim Wright and John Cornyn. It should be noted that while Dems in general lost HD28 by 20 points or so in 2016, Markowitz and other Dems were losing it by ten or eleven points in 2020. In total vote terms, a gap of 16-18K votes in 2016 was reduced to 12-13K votes in 2020. The shift is real, and even if it didn’t net us any extra seats, it’s still there.
The other way that shift manifested was in the County Commissioner precincts. In 2016, Republicans won three of the four precincts, with two-term Democrat Richard Morrison in Precinct 1 finally getting unseated after he had won against badly tainted opponents in previous years. There was a lot of movement in the Dem direction in Precinct 4, however, and that came to fruition in 2018 when Ken DeMerchant (yes, Sarah’s husband) flipped that seat. As you can see, there was no retreat in CC4 in 2020, and it probably wouldn’t take too much tinkering to make Precinct 1 a fifty-fifty or better proposition for Dems. It didn’t happen in either county this year, but in 2024, aided by demography and maybe a bit of gerrymandering, both Harris and Fort Bend counties can have 4-1 Democratic majorities on their Commissioners Courts.
I do have totals for the other Fort Bend races, though they’re not dramatically different from what you see here. I will put them together in a future post just to have it on the record. As always, let me know what you think.