Rep. Ron Wright
So, this is the part where I say the take I’ve had in my head since the seat opened up – Joe Biden should have won the district, and it was a fairly pathetic result to lose by 3. The district – a diverse, socially liberal seat without too many whites without a degree should have gone blue. What we can’t say with certainty, but I feel very confident about, is that Biden’s numbers with white voters and Beto’s numbers with Hispanics would have left the seat as a dead tie, because Beto outran Biden by 14% with Hispanics, and correcting that would move the seat left by about 3%. If Biden had managed to actually meaningfully advance off 2018 with college whites, the district is his, and honestly, it would be so fairly easily. That inability to convert those voters at the pace or speed that many expected, led by polls that just entirely missed reality, was a shock.
Given my prior beliefs – that rural whites and low propensity Hispanics won’t turn out like they did in 2020 – I feel pretty good in saying that the electorate that will vote on special election day (and in the weeks before) will be an electorate that would have voted for Joe Biden. I expect Tarrant to cast a greater share of votes this year than 2020, I expect the % of the electorate with a college degree to rise, and I expect Black voters in the district to be motivated to continue the arduous work of bailing out white America, because that seems to be the life that white America demands of them. That said, I don’t think Democrats are favoured – after all, the GOP did outrun Biden/Trump by 5% downballot.
There are three wrinkles in this conversation, which all matter. The first is that the widow is running, which could engender some sympathy from voters, making this election a harder data point to extrapolate from, and the second is a related point, which is that I have no idea who the Democratic nominee will be. I can’t pretend to be too eager to run the guy who managed to underrun Joe Biden by 5% again, but I’m not sure who would be better. Neither of those issues radically change my assessment of this race.
My first thought, from the moment the race unfortunately triggered, was that we would get a result better for Democrats than November 2020 and not good enough to credibly contend, in other words, a 3-5% loss with a couple of tied internals that gets certain parts of Twitter excited. That remains my prediction – something between the Presidential result and the House result, one that is good news for Democrats but not great news, or inarguably good for them. Again, I expect the GOP to win this seat. But I won’t be surprised if they lose it, because of the third wrinkle this race has seen.
The third wrinkle to this race – don’t worry, I hadn’t forgotten about it – is the song of fire and ice that Texas had to live with (and, in many places, is still living with). Or, maybe better, the song of ice and ice. The cold snap has exposed the state as woefully unprepared for huge amounts of snow, which leads to debatable positions on how southern states should prepare for freak snowstorms. That Texans got absolutely fucked by ERCOT, and are staring at 5 figure power bills that are a fucking disgrace, is not up for similar debate. This debacle – and the way that Democrats from AOC to Beto have stepped up to the plate, while Ted Cruz cut and run to Cancun – has the potential to sour people on the Texas GOP, especially if the threat of people actually having to pay those sorts of expenses is still hanging in the air on voting day.
Emphasis in the original, and see here and here for some background. Stephen Daniel, the 2020 candidate alluded to above, is not running, but 2018 candidate Jana Sanchez, who trailed Beto by about three points in 2018, is running. I agree that probably doesn’t matter that much, but for what it’s worth, I think it’s more that Ron Wright, who had previously been the Tax Assessor/Collector in Tarrant County, ran ahead of the GOP pack more than Daniel and Sanchez ran behind. That advantage likely transfers to Susan Wright, but it may vanish if she finishes out of the money. The filing deadline is today, so we’ll see how big and potentially chaotic this field will be.