Texas voters elect to stay the course

                   By Ross Ramsey

                    November 6, 2020

       Nothing happened in Texas this week, if you’re looking for an answer to the question, “How did Texas voters change the state’s power structure?”

      Maybe that’s the wrong question.

      In the 2020 general election, Texans voted to stay the course. The returns are still unofficial, but the overall effect is clear: The state’s congressional delegation will have the same mix of Republicans and Democrats next year as it has today. The Texas Senate will have one more Democrat than it has now, but Republicans still have the majority. The Texas House, if the numbers hold, will still have 83 Republicans and 67 Democrats, along with a new Republican speaker. All of the statewide executive and judicial branch offices remain in Republican hands, as they have for more than 20 years.

      The Republican wins blew up a favorite Texas Democratic slogan: “Texas is not a Republican state, it’s a low-voting state.” That might be pretty good spin, but it turned out to be wrong. Texas voted, heavily. And it’s still a Republican state. Turnout hasn’t been this high, on a percentage basis, since 1992, when two Texans — George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot — topped the ballot in the presidential race.

      2020 was not 2018. The Ted Cruz-Beto O’Rourke spectacular, with two enormous political personalities, millions of dollars in spending and bottomless news coverage, drove turnout to a high point for a non-presidential election and ended with a 2.6-percentage-point victory for Cruz.

      That’s a narrow win, especially in Republican Texas, and it did a lot to fuel what turned out to be Democratic over-exuberance about winning a majority in the Texas House and flipping a handful of Republican seats in the congressional delegation.

      Turnout this year was big: More Texans voted than ever before, and the percentage of registered voters who turned out was the highest in almost 30 years. But there wasn’t a race on the ballot that had both party’s voters revved up the same way as that Senate race two years ago.

      President Donald Trump won in Texas, but didn’t do as well as the rest of the Republicans on the statewide ballot. He finished 5.8 percentage points ahead of Joe Biden. In the next race, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn finished 9.8 percentage points ahead of Democrat MJ Hegar. Cornyn’s advantage held through the rest of the statewide races — for Railroad Commission, four seats on the Texas Supreme Court and three more on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals — where the smallest margin was 7.9 percentage points and the largest was 10.8 percentage points.

      Lots of Texans didn’t make it all the way from the presidential race to the last of the statewide races — for a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals seat. In the top race, 11.2 million Texans voted; 425,361 of them didn’t make it down to that last court race, a drop of 3.8%. That dissipation started right away: 171,523 Texans who voted in the race for president didn’t vote in the next race, for U.S. Senate.

      The biggest prize of the day wasn’t even on the ballot. Based on their wins this week, the Republicans will start 2021 with control of the House, the Senate, the governor’s office and all of the seats on the relatively obscure Legislative Redistricting Board. They’ll control every phase of the process of drawing new political maps for the state’s congressional delegation, the state Senate and House, and the State Board of Education.

      If the House, Senate and governor can’t agree, legislative maps will go to the LRB, made up of five Republican officials including the lieutenant governor, the speaker of the House, the attorney general, the comptroller and the land commissioner.

      The maps almost always end up in court, but federal judges have a history of working from the Legislature’s work whenever they can, and Democrats won’t have a strong hand in drawing those maps.

      Timing is everything. Those maps, or variations of them, will be in effect for the next 10 years — the next five election cycles. The party that controls the maps gets to build its partisan advantage into the state’s political geography, improving its chances of holding on to power until another set of maps is drawn. Republicans drew the current maps; look who’s been in charge for 10 years. The maps aren’t the only reason for that, but they’re a significant one. In the wildest dreams of the contestants, only about 20% of the seats in the Texas House were considered competitive in this year’s general election; in the Senate, just one.

      Another group that could have a hard time in 2021 is the bipartisan class of rookies in the congressional delegation and the state Legislature. Incumbents have an edge over the newbies when it’s time to draw maps. Redistricting is often characterized as the time when elected officials choose their voters, and there is a lot of truth in that.

      And in this: The big dogs, incumbent and powerful, choose first. That doesn’t mean everybody in the freshman class is going to be a loser in the new maps, just that they're in the weakest position.

      That group includes — and this is based on unofficial vote counts — seven members of the congressional delegation, two new Democrats and one new Republican (to be chosen in a special election next month) in the Texas Senate, and 16 members of the Texas House.

                     "Analysis: Texas voters elect to stay the course" was first published at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/11/06/texas-election-republicans/ by The Texas Tribune. The Texas Tribune is proud to celebrate 10 years of exceptional journalism for an exceptional state.

Democrats' hopes of flipping Texas again fall short as Republicans dominate the state's 2020 elections

                    By Emma Platoff

                    November 4, 2020

      Some thought it might happen as early as 2014 — and then 2016, and, of course, in 2018.

      When all those elections proved disappointing, Texas Democrats said 2020 would be the year, given record voter turnout, a once-in-a-century pandemic that grew out of control under Republican leadership and a highly controversial president.

      But 2020 proved another disappointment for the state’s minority party as Republicans remained dominant in Texas, appearing poised to maintain victories in all statewide offices and both chambers of the Legislature. In what has become a familiar refrain, Texas Democrats pointed to 2020’s narrow losses as symbolic victories — signs that the state will one day change in their favor.

      Though the margins in the presidential race were narrower than they have been in years, Democrats underperformed the high expectations they had set for themselves, particularly in a hotly contested battle for dominance in the Texas House. And a number of potential pickups for Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives seemed increasingly unlikely as the night wore on.

      With his reelection still uncertain, Donald Trump carried Texas on Tuesday. The last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state was Jimmy Carter in 1976.

      Republican John Cornyn handily won reelection to his seat in the U.S. Senate, soaring past combat veteran MJ Hegar to notch a victory despite a late Democratic spending blitz on her behalf. Republicans held big leads in other statewide races for Railroad Commission, Texas Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeals.

      And the contest some in-state operatives had focused on as Democrats’ best hope — the battle for a majority in the Texas House — appeared to end with a narrow victory for Republicans, leaving intact the party’s advantage in the chamber.

      As has become habit, Texas Democrats described their losses on Tuesday not as disappointments but as hopeful omens for next time.

      “With every election, we're getting one step closer to that change,” said Ed Espinoza, executive director of Progress Texas.

      “Although we came up short,” Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa said of the U.S. Senate race, “I am hopeful because we are marching towards victory.”

      “The work we did will move our state forward for years to come,” Hegar said.

      Republicans, meanwhile, were not shy about celebrating their wins.

      Gov. Greg Abbott, who was not on the ballot himself but had been deeply involved in Texas House races, even knocking on doors over the last few weeks, celebrated on Twitter: “Texas DID stay Red.”

      Earlier this week, he had made a prescient, if provocative statement: “Democrats’ dreams will be crushed again.”

      Abbott’s top political strategist, Dave Carney, was blunter in an interview late Tuesday night. He said Democrats were massively underperforming expectations because “they buy their own bullshit.”

      “Here’s the best standard operating procedure for any campaign: Stop bragging, do your work and then you can gloat afterward,” Carney said, contrasting that approach with “bragging about what’s gonna happen in the future and being embarrassed.”

      “Why anybody would believe what these liars would say to them again is beyond belief,” Carney added. “How many cycles in a row” do they claim Texas will turn blue? “It’s crazy.”

      Cornyn, speaking to media after declaring victory Tuesday night, dismissed Democratic spending in Texas, saying Democrats "had more money than they knew what to do with, so they ended up investing in a long shot in places like Texas."

      Days before the election, polls showed a close race between Biden and Trump here — though neither candidate campaigned as if Texas were a battleground. Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, made a last-minute swing through the state late last week, but neither presidential candidate had been in Texas in months.

      The results Tuesday night showed a close presidential contest in Texas. Trump’s lead in Texas was in the mid-single-digits early Wednesday morning, according to Decision Desk HQ — smaller than his 9-point 2016 margin, and about a third of Mitt Romney’s 16-point victory here in 2012.

      Even as Biden performed well in large suburban counties that used to be reliably Republican, he failed to notch wide margins of victory in some critical Democratic strongholds, massively underperforming Hillary Clinton in the mostly Hispanic Rio Grande Valley. For example, Trump was leading in unofficial results in Zapata County — where Clinton won with 66% of the vote in 2016.

      Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, an assistant dean and politics expert at the University of Texas' Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, pointed to two major reasons for Biden’s relative underperformance in the Valley: lower name ID compared with Clinton and limited door-to-door campaigning due to the coronavirus pandemic.

      “The Valley is old school, and you need that grassroots mobilization,” she said. “And there wasn’t grassroots work, at least on the Democratic side, because of the pandemic. And arguably the GOP did have at least a bit more grassroots work because they had a different vision of public health.”

      “That to me explains the Biden underperformance: He really wasn’t known, and then he didn’t have the time to make it up,” she added.

      Trump, meanwhile, launched a Latino outreach initiative for his 2020 bid, she noted.

      Republicans had hoped their willingness to knock on doors during the pandemic would give them an edge over Democrats, some of whom leaned on remote campaigning methods.

     As expected, lesser-known — and less controversial — Republicans did better than Trump on the statewide ballot in Texas. Republicans running for seats on the state’s two high courts, and the board that regulates oil and gas, each looked poised to win by a healthy margin. For the first time in years, Democrats had run contested primaries for most statewide races, including a crowded 12-candidate primary for the U.S. Senate race and competition for the nomination for nearly every judicial seat.

      Democrats were also falling far short of expectations in U.S. House races. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had targeted 10 GOP-held seats this fall in Texas, though by midnight, they had no pickups to tout.

      In one race — to replace retiring Rep. Will Hurd, R-Helotes — Democratic party leaders had started the cycle brimming with confidence that the seat would flip to them, especially after Republicans had to go through a seemingly endless nomination process. But before the night was over, the campaign of the Republican nominee, Tony Gonzales, was declaring victory.

      “Not only did they underestimate me, I think they underestimated the district,” Gonzales said in an interview late Tuesday night. “District 23 is just different — it is. You have to work your tail off to win the trust of the constituents and you have to work your tail off to keep that trust. TV ads, blanketing the airwaves, isn’t enough.”

      But perhaps the most striking rebuke to Democrats’ hopes on Tuesday night was their failure to regain a majority — or even move the needle much — in the 150-member Texas House, where they needed to pick up nine seats.

        Even before the chamber’s majority party had been determined, optimistic Democrats had declared their candidacy to lead it as speaker.

      "Before the day is done, Democrats will take the Texas House,” one candidate, El Paso Democrat Joe Moody, said Tuesday morning. By early Wednesday morning, it seemed clear they would not.

         Democrats will get another chance to test their hopes in 2022, when statewide offices like governor and attorney general will appear on the ballot. It remains to be seen whether they can increase their power in the state.

      “Is Texas on the route to becoming blue, or is Texas on the road to becoming a perennial battleground? That’s a question I don’t know the answer to,” DeFrancesco Soto said. “But I do feel confident saying we are moving in the purple direction, and we may just stay stuck at purple.”

      Patrick Svitek contributed reporting.

                    "Democrats' hopes of flipping Texas again fall short as Republicans dominate the state's 2020 elections" was first published at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/11/04/texas-republicans-election-results/ by The Texas Tribune. The Texas Tribune is proud to celebrate 10 years of exceptional journalism for an exceptional state.

Coronavirus splits Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and his own party

                    By Ross Ramsey

                    September 25, 2020

      Gov. Greg Abbott’s most exasperating allies sure chose an awkward time to act up.

      In the face of a momentous election, with an array of issues that includes the pandemic, the recession, climate change, racial justice, law enforcement and the next appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, the chairman of the Texas GOP and a gang of lawmakers and activists have instead picked a fight with Abbott, who isn’t even on the ballot, over his response to the pandemic.

      On the surface, they’re asking the courts to tell the governor that adding six more days of early voting to the calendar was outside of his powers. Abbott made the move under emergency powers he has claimed during the pandemic — the same powers he has used at various times to shut down schools, limit crowd sizes and limit how many customers businesses can serve at a time, or in some cases, to close businesses altogether.

      The timing is connected to the Nov. 3 general election; even with the arguments over emergency powers, opponents of the governor’s action would be expected to grab for a remedy before early voting starts on Oct. 13. One might say the same about other lawsuits challenging the governor’s orders — that they’re tied not to politics, but to current events. Bar owners want to open their bars, for instance, and are not in the financial condition or the mood to stay closed until after the elections just to make the current set of incumbents look good.

      What’s unusual is to see so many prominent Republican names on the top of a lawsuit against the Republican governor of Texas this close to an election.

      In a gentler time, that might be called unseemly or distracting. Speaking ill of another Republican was considered out of bounds for a while there. Those days are over. What’s happening in Texas illustrates how the pandemic, the economy and other issues have shaken political norms.

      Shelley Luther is one of six people running in a special election to replace state Sen. Pat Fallon, a Prosper Republican who gave up his statehouse perch for a shot at a congressional seat. Abbott doesn’t have a hand in the race, but his name is being invoked. Luther is the Dallas-area salon owner who was briefly jailed this year after defying Abbott’s orders closing businesses like hers that were officially deemed “nonessential.” So maybe it’s not a surprise that she campaigns as a candidate who’s independent of her party leader.

      She started the game playing the renegade card and has stuck with it. But she’s not alone out there. Some of the state’s most conservative Republicans — part of Abbott’s base of support over his decades in state government — are taking the governor to task. State Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, has disowned Abbott, saying he can no longer follow the GOP’s leading state official.

      "What started as 15 days to flatten the curve has turned into six months of misery to the small business owners of House District 15,” Toth wrote in a letter to Abbott that he later posted on social media. He said Abbott had demonstrated an “appalling lack of consistency, leadership, and concern” for small businesses.

      That’s the kind of chippy note from one politician to another that you’d expect to read in the last few weeks before a big election. But this election has no direct bearing on either of these politicians.

      Toth is running as a Republican in a House district where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 37.2 percentage points and where Ted Cruz beat Beto O’Rourke by 29.8 percentage points. It’s safe to say he’s safe in the general election, unless he steps into an open manhole crossing the street. Abbott, elected to a second term in 2018, isn’t on the ballot this year.

      The election is near. Unless the courts change it, early voting starts in less than three weeks. Democrats and Republicans are shouting at each other, as the season demands. In a normal presidential election year, a Texas governor who isn’t on the ballot would be leading the partisan charge, helping lesser and greater figures rally their voters in the state.

      Abbott isn’t ignoring the political fights of the season. But there is an extra one this year — in his own political family.

                    "Analysis: Coronavirus splits Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and his own party" was first published at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/25/gov-greg-abbott-republicans-fight-coronavirus/ by The Texas Tribune. The Texas Tribune is proud to celebrate 10 years of exceptional journalism for an exceptional state.

The Texas Legislature can meet for up to 140 days. The pandemic raises a question: Should it?

                    By Ross Ramsey

                    August 5, 2020

      Clear plexiglass shields have been installed in some places in the Texas Capitol, like the big room where the House Appropriations Committee writes budgets. Lawmakers who write the state’s budget will have the same protection from their colleagues and staffers that up to now has been used mostly to shield buffet salads and deli meats.

      Sneeze screens.

      Conversations about how to legislate during a pandemic have animated lawmakers since the new coronavirus reared its head in Texas earlier this year.

      The budgets they churn out are on the must-do list. Money makes the wheels turn, keeping the government going for the next three years or so. The census is expected to be late, and that’s needed for the redrawing of the state’s political districts, another must-do item for the 87th Legislature.

      That’s why Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said last week that he’s telling senators not to plan any vacations next year before the end of September. He’s saying there will be special sessions on redistricting and that they could take all summer. Under non-pandemic conditions, he and other state leaders would at least be pretending new political maps could be turned out during the regular session.

      There are always a few things — not as many as campaigning politicians promise — that have to be done right away. But other normal and regular functions of the Legislature — most of them, honestly — can probably wait.

      The Sunset Advisory Commission, which conducts life-and-death reviews of state agencies, spent most of its meeting on Tuesday deciding whether public testimony should be in-person or virtual, all under the working idea that the commission’s work is absolutely critical. It’s important. But there is also a “safety net bill” every session to keep alive the agencies that would be shuttered — sunsetted — without legislation. That’s just one of many ways a government can push things to later dates.

      And there’s nothing in the laws or the rules that says the Legislature has to work for 140 days; the law says that’s the maximum length of a regular session, not the minimum.

      In a normal 140-day regular session, the Legislature considers thousands of bills and passes fewer than one in four of them. According to statistics compiled by the Legislative Reference Library, lawmakers filed an average of 6,212 bills in each of the last 10 sessions and passed 1,409 — a pass rate of 22.7%.

      It doesn’t mean they must do that, just that it’s the norm.

      If you were dispatched to make the same kinds of decisions about Texas lawmakers that state and local government officials right now are making about public school children, you’d talk about the same things the folks in Austin are considering.

      Screens between lawmakers. Forests of sanitizer stands all over the Capitol. Rules about when virtual meetings are safer than in-person ones. Constant testing. Shortened schedules.

      Lawmakers could be at great risk. A quarter of them are at least 60 years old. More than half are older than 50. As social as these people are, any politician worth the title is probably qualified, if unrestrained, to be a super-spreader.

      So why not limit their exposure?

      The budget has to be done. State Comptroller Glenn Hegar estimates a $4.6 billion shortfall for the current two -year budget that runs through August 2021. Lawmakers have to fill that hole and then write a budget for the two years after that based on whatever glum revenue forecast Hegar conjures up at the start of the year.

      Redistricting has to be done. As soon as the census is complete and delivered to lawmakers, they have to draw new political maps for the Texas congressional delegation, the Texas Legislature and the State Board of Education. If they don’t, the courts will do it for them.

      Expect a dozen or so other must-dos to come out of 2020’s stew of pandemic, recession, an anxiety-ridden presidential election and rising clamor against racial injustice and police violence.

      State government is tuned to a two-year cycle. The budget lasts that long. The Legislature only meets in odd-numbered years, unless a governor calls a 30-day special session to work out an issue that just can’t wait.

      Important debates are held. Laws are passed. It’s a regularly scheduled civil fight over the rules and laws we abide by.

      Some of it can wait. And if the coronavirus is thriving in January anything like it’s thriving now, lawmakers will be faced then — like educators and parents and students are faced today — with decisions about what’s safe and what’s right.

      And they’re going to have some explaining to do if what they do for themselves is much different from what they prescribe for the rest of us.

                    "Analysis: The Texas Legislature can meet for up to 140 days. The pandemic raises a question: Should it?" was first published at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/08/05/pandemic-texas-legislature/ by The Texas Tribune. The Texas Tribune is proud to celebrate 10 years of exceptional journalism for an exceptional state.

Gov. Greg Abbott warns if spread of COVID-19 doesn’t slow, “the next step would have to be a lockdown”

                    By Alex Samuels

                    July 10, 2020

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With Texas continuing to break records for new coronavirus deaths and hospitalizations this week, Gov. Greg Abbott reiterated Friday afternoon that things will continue to get worse. And if people keep flouting his new statewide mask mandate, he said, the next step could be another economic lockdown.

“Things will get worse, and let me explain why,” he told KLBK TV in Lubbock. “The deaths that we’re seeing announced today and yesterday — which are now over 100 — those are people who likely contracted COVID-19 in late May.

“The worst is yet to come as we work our way through that massive increase in people testing positive.”

Texans will also likely see an increase in cases next week, Abbott said, and people abiding by his face mask requirement might be the only thing standing between businesses remaining open and another shutdown.

“The public needs to understand this was a very tough decision for me to make,” Abbott told KLBK of his face mask mandate. “I made clear that I made this tough decision for one reason: It was our last best effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. If we do not slow the spread of COVID-19 … the next step would have to be a lockdown.”

Abbott has pushed that message repeatedly in television interviews this week. But he emphasized Friday that another shutdown was not imminent and he pointed to steps he has taken so far to scale back reopening in an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus, including the mask order and a requirement that bars, once again, close their doors. He has also tightened restaurant capacity limits.

Texas reported 100 more coronavirus deaths on Thursday, another record.

In three live television appearances Friday afternoon, Abbott acknowledged that his mask order — that Texans in counties with more than 20 cases wear masks in public — was neither popular nor convenient, but said it was important for everyone to join in the effort. His plea to Texans comes as nearly 80 Texas counties have opted out of the order order, while others are refusing to enforce it.

“It’s disappointing,” Abbott told CBS Tyler of government entities who defy his mandate.

“I realize that a murderer or rapist or robber is far more serious to concentrate on. However, I know this also: If we do not all join together and unite in this one cause for a short period of time of adopting the masks, it will lead to the necessity of having to close Texas back down,” he said. “That should be the last thing that any government wants.”

As of Thursday afternoon, 2,918 Texas had died of COVID-19. The state also reported nearly another 10,000 new cases of the disease.

Nearly 9,700 people were in Texas hospitals on Thursday, too, the highest number since the pandemic began.

With cases of the virus and related hospitalizations rising at alarming rates, Abbott expanded his ban on elective medical procedures Thursday to cover more than 100 counties across much of the state. On Friday afternoon, he also extended his disaster declaration for all Texas counties in response to COVID-19.

“If we can get people across the state … to wear face masks, we will be able to keep the state open,” Abbott said in an interview with KSAT. “We will be able to reduce hospitalizations. But if this is not encouraged, if people do not adopt the best practice of wearing a face covering, it will lead to an increase in this rapid spread of COVID-19.”

In a statement following Abbott’s interviews, the Texas Democratic Party said any further shutdowns would be Abbott’s fault.

“By reopening Texas prematurely, Abbott put all of us at risk for rising cases and a second shutdown,” said spokesman Abhi Rahman. “That’s exactly what has happened so far. Abbott’s mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis has made Texas one of the most dangerous states to live in, completely tanked our economy, and shown the entire world just how incompetent Trump and Abbott are.”

                    "Gov. Greg Abbott warns if spread of COVID-19 doesn’t slow, “the next step would have to be a lockdown”" was first published at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/10/greg-abbott-shutdown-texas-mask-order/ by The Texas Tribune. The Texas Tribune is proud to celebrate 10 years of exceptional journalism for an exceptional state.