2016 Sucked. A LOT. But from the Texas standpoint, we do have some hope.
Did we win TX-23? Nope. And that hurt. But when we look at the state overall...let’s go in and do that.
2012
In 2012, the Presidential result was 57.2 Romney, 41.4 Obama. The vote margin? 1.26M votes. As you can see, we JUST won Dallas County and Harris County...by a hair. We’re really strong in the Rio Grande, and have the urban centers...but are weak everywhere else. Of course, TX is gerrymandered enough that we have 1/3 representation in the Congressional delegation, but that’s a different subject.
President Obama was running for his second term, and won the popular vote and electoral college by a large margin. On the other hand, 2008 was only a bit better. Sen McCain won 55.4% of the vote to Pres Obama’s 43.6%...with a 1 M vote margin. In both cases, there were 8M voters.
2016
Donald Trump took 52.4% of the vote to Sec. Clinton’s 43.3%. More importantly, the overall margin was only 815K votes. Pres-elect Trump (sigh) won 4.68M votes, and Sec Clinton won 3.87M. We won Ft Bend County, one of the fastest-growing in the Houston area (SE Texas — that nice blue spot). More than that, we made inroads into the rest of the Rio Grande (even if we didn’t win it), AND significant inroads into the collar counties around San Antonio...and more, Austin and Dallas. While Williamson and Bell counties (Round Rock) still went red, they are a lighter shade...and Hays County (S of Austin) almost flipped blue. Even the collar counties around Dallas are a much lighter shade.
What does this mean going forward? First thing to realize here is just how many voted 3rd party. In 2008, with a regional Republican candidate and the most gifted politician and speaker of his generation as the Dem, there were only about 80K votes for 3rd parties. In 2016, there were 370K. Trump wasn’t liked — the majority went to Ron Johnson. However, TX is growing, especially the cities and collar counties: that’s where most of the population is. And it’s GROWING. More importantly, we’re starting to see the votes. In both 2008 and 2012, we had about 8M votes cast...with somewhere between 12 and 13M voters. In 2016, we had 9M votes cast, with 15.1M voters. Voter turnout was 59.13%. Even with the massive increase in registration, we still improved total voter turnout.
Second, in Ft Bend County, Sec. Clinton won at the top of the ticket...and we still lost the race for US Rep. We have work to do to support down-ballot: in TX, everyone was simply ignored outside TX-23.
Our 15 largest counties are:
- Harris (Houston)
- Dallas
- Tarrant (W DFW)
- Bexar (San Antonio)
- Travis (Austin)
- Collin (NE DFW)
- Denton (Plano) — NW DFW
- El Paso
- Ft. Bend (SW Houston)
- Hidalgo (S tip)
- Montgomery (N Houston)
- Williamson (Round Rock)
- Galveston (Gulf Coast)
- Nueces (Gulf coast — near the S)
- Cameron (S tip)
Do you want to know what’s interesting about these 15 counties? ALL of them went more blue than in 2012, with the exception of Hidalgo and Cameron...and those stayed blue. More than that, out of the 15M voters in the state, over 9M are in these counties. Most of the rest of the population is in the nearby collar counties: Hays, Brazoria, Webb, etc. Some of these counties had more votes, too... Cameron only had 90K votes: Bell County had the same, Jefferson County (which went blue) had 85K and Lubbock had 98K votes.
Our challenge: Most of the populous areas outside the blue bubble voted about 70% for Trump.
Congressional Results
Once again, these weren’t great — but did show promise. Looking back at the primer, there were 11 possible seats to contest from our side. The balance was 23/11, and remained that way. We now see a number of seats coming into range: of the 11 seats, we saw TX-23 go against us by 13K votes (and lose because of it), saw 4 show strong movement toward us and 4 stay roughly the same...while only one moved away. And then, we saw TX-32 go strongly GOP because we didn’t compete in the closest GOP winning race from 2012.
- TX-23 was a heartbreak: at 48/47, we lost by less than 4K votes.
- TX-6 was 58/39, so stayed the same as 2012.
- We lost TX-7...but at 56/44, it was almost the same result as Presidential, and improved from 61/36. We cut a 57K vote lead to a 32K lead. THIS ONE IS REACHABLE.
- TX-10 was 57/38, so closer by 5 points.
- TX-14 went 62/48, so moved further away.
- TX-21 was 57/36, 4 points closer than in 2012.
- District 22 (mostly Ft Bend), we were at 55.5/44.5, so even closer. Damn gerrymandering — this one should have been ours.
- TX-24 came in at 56/39, a MUCH better result than the 61/36 margin of 2012.
- TX-25 was 58/38, almost the same as 2012.
- TX-31 came in at 58/36, which is still 3 points better than 2012’s 61/35.
- TX-32 was a blowout at 71/19...BECAUSE WE DIDN’T COMPETE. The 19% was for a Green party candidate.
Where do we go from here?
2018 has some important races: Statewide, the statehouse for grabs, as is Ted Cruz’ senate seat (assuming he doesn’t run and hide in a Trump administration). In 2014, the total vote was 4.7M. The BEST results were for Gov: with only 2.8M votes. In other words, Gov Abbot won 1M votes less than Sec Clinton.
We as Democrats need to change our focus from Presidential elections to ALL elections...and from the top of the ticket to the ticket. TX has party-line voting: there should be NO reason for a Congressional candidate to get fewer votes than the Presidential candidate.
In TX, we HAVE to recruit good people, and support them, and COMPETE. We have Ted Cruz, most hated man in the Senate, to run against. That will be worth something. We have to have a strong Senate candidate, a strong Governor, a strong Attorney General. And then, we have to recruit legitimate challengers across the board. IF we push GOTV like a presidential year (and Trump’s overreach might make this possible...or at least close), we can make progress. It'll be a slog, but worth it. TX is insulated from some of the crazy: it’s one of the few states in the South with a good economy, but it’s still energy-based. It’s also a state with a strong populist streak (if strange), strongly urban, and majority-minority. We can take advantage of the ‘deport everyone’ policies of Trump to push registration — and voting. There are a handful of House seats that are potentially competitive, if we put in money and support...and TX is still growing. Redistricting will likely put Texas up to 40 EVs after 2020 — if we put in the effort now and take the statehouse, we can control that effort.