It may seem like I’m stating the obvious with that headline but the fact of the matter is that the last year of having a straight ticket voting option in Texas isn’t what caused the massive defeat of Harris County Republicans. The “causes” for the beatdown can be boiled down to President Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke. Saying that straight ticket voting was the reason is an excuse, not an analysis of the election.
Let’s break down the vote totals:
| Total Harris County Voters | 1,217,471 | |||
| Total Straight Ticket Voters | 930,784 | 76.45% | ||
| Straight Ticket Voting | % of Straight Vote Difference | |||
| Republican | 410,060 | 10% | 10,470 | |
| Democratic | 514,758 | 15% | 15,705 | |
| 20% | 20,940 | |||
| Difference | (104,698) | 25% | 26,175 | |
| 30% | 31,409 | |||
| 35% | 36,644 | |||
| 40% | 41,879 | |||
Now let’s look at a few of the races in Harris County. These are listed in ballot order, with the highest vote totals for the district judges, county courts and county executives.
| District Judge, 183rd | |
| Vanessa Velasquez | 546,718 |
| Chuck Silverman | 635,353 |
| Difference | (88,635) |
| County Judge | |
| Ed Emmett | 575,101 |
| Lina Hidalgo | 593,946 |
| Difference | (18,845) |
| County Civil Court at Law No. 3 | |
| Linda Storey | 536,665 |
| LaShawn A. Williams | 641,699 |
| Difference | (105,034) |
| County Treasurer | |
| Orlando Sanchez | 542,991 |
| Dylan Osborne | 642,565 |
| Difference | (99,574) |
When you look at the actual numbers, you can see why I say that straight ticket voting is not the problem. Only County Judge Ed Emmett can reasonably make the claim that straight ticket voting was the cause of his defeat and only then if he truly thinks that the undervote would be close to 20%. There is no evidence to suggest that the undervote would be close to that number. I’ll stipulate that it would be higher than the 3-5% that it was but 20% is a long way from there and I doubt it would happen. There is simply no reasonable claim that any other Republican on the countywide ballot can make in regards to straight ticket voting. It is of course possible that straight ticket voting could have influenced district races but those numbers aren’t out yet as far as I know.
So if it wasn’t dumb, illiterate straight ticket voters that crushed Harris County Republicans what was it? Oh, and if straight ticket voters are really dumb and illiterate, why were Republicans pushing for voters to vote straight Republican? Hmm.
It starts with President Trump, just like it did in 2016. No matter what you think of his policies, his rhetoric simply doesn’t play well in diverse, multi-ethnic communities. And guess what? Harris County is a diverse, multi-ethnic community. This ain’t rocket science.
Then it goes to Ted Cruz. Like it or not, the perception is that he is a shameless, self-centered creature of the swamp, not someone that wants to drain it. And that perception is not just among Democrats, it is also among independents and traditional Republicans. And soccer moms. And golf dads. Ted needs to work on issues that deal with Texas for the next four or five years and perhaps he can change that perception before his next presidential run.
And then there is Beto O’Rourke. Republicans aren’t giving him the credit that he deserves. He was able to inspire voters above and beyond a simple hatred of Trump and Cruz with a campaign of hope and a vision of bipartisanship. Republicans might want to try that someday.
I’ll tell you who and what is not to blame for the beatdown: Paul Simpson and the Harris County Republican Party. But the chair is the chair and people are already yelling for him to resign. I had to laugh when I saw a former opponent of Paul’s predicting on Tuesday afternoon that Harris County Republicans would sweep the county by 6-6.5%. I said to someone that the guy must be nuts. He must have been impressed by the party’s activities to make such a prediction, right? Of course, by 8:30 pm, the same guy was calling on Paul to resign. The foundation that Paul and his team laid was solid. We cannot credibly blame him for the losses on Tuesday.
It’s natural to be angry when you lose. But reactionary temper tantrums aren’t going to change the future. As Temo said, we need to rethink our position on immigration. I’ll add that we need to rethink our positions on many other issues. But positions on issues alone aren’t going to change the political direction of Harris County. Republicans need to rethink how they act and how they treat people. Maybe then, voters will buy what we are selling.
Well thought out and spot on.
Well thought and well-reasoned but most of the Republicans I meet are reactionaries who don’t give a sh** how they treat people and what they sound like. And they don’t like immigrants.
Right on straight ticket voting but equally shallow to that excuse on Trump and Cruz.
“Republicans need to rethink how they act and how they treat people.” …. (Do I even need to say:) EXACTLY!!!!! This concept is so very, very simple, yet to so many it is extremely difficult to perceive …..
David: You are spot on but I want to add a few thoughts.
I’ve been a Texas Republican since the 1960s. But i’ve seen the party change from one of hope and adding to our numbers to one of fear. We once proposed reasonable laws and we welcomed people to our party.
Things have changed.
Now all that anybody cares about is cutting taxes without cutting spending and a generally fictional view of immigrants. The Legislature is cutting some spending, like education, thereby pushing taxation on to local schools through property taxes, then complaining about high property taxes. We’ve cut appropriations for higher education to the extent that a private law school in Houston, South Texas College of Law, charges a lower tuition rate than the University of Houston for in-state students
Tens of thousands of people like me got to go to college because our parents and others like them taxed themselves to keep tuition low. Now, tuition is so high that the private South Texas College of Law Houston charges lower tuition than the University of Houston law school. Public schools were well funded by the Legislature and local taxes. Education was viewed as an investment in the future.
We have the lowest health insurance rate in the nation. Yes, Obamacare hasn’t worked as well as it was advertised. But what solution has the Republican Party put forward? One liked by about 10 percent of the population.
Then in the middle of the midterm campaign, the Senate majority leader gets on TV and tells people how Congress is going to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to pay for tax cuts which gave only a pittance to the middle class but gave huge cuts to the highest earners. That was a great idea.
My only surprise is the Democrats didn’t have that clip on TV everywhere during the campaign.
As for immigration, yes, illegal immigration is wrong. But without either a rational immigration system and some sort of guest worker program, who would build our houses, pick our produce and do dozens of other jobs?
Do you want to stop illegal immigration? Easy. Target the employers. Require every employer to have a system to ensure that only citizens and legal immigrants get jobs and slap on stiff criminal penalties for violations. It wouldn’t take too many Fortune 500 CEOs going off to Club Fed for a few years before no one would hire illegal aliens.
And, most immigrants — legal and illegal — are hardworking, law abiding people. They don’t want interaction with government, be it welfare or criminal justice. Daryl Gates, the longtime Los Angeles chief of police, was the guy who came up with the idea that police shouldn’t ask witnesses and victims about their citizenship. He decided that solving murders, rapes and robberies with cooperation from civilians was more important than local police enforcing immigration laws.
We need to change our party from a party of negativism to hope and from exclusion to inclusion. We should be coming up with ways to make peoples’ lives better, better health care for everyone, better education fairer law enforcement.
And, we need to be a big-tent party. For example, gays. A lot of gays are middle or upper middle class and would be perfect fits for the Republican Party. So what does the party to? It says we don’t want you. What kind of message does it send to a large number of gays when the Log Cabin Republicans can’t rent a booth as the Republican state convention? The message is go see the Democrats.
Ray Hill, one of the founders of the Gay Political Caucus here, is dying. I’ve noted that once upon a time, in the 1980s, the GPC judicial endorsements were both bipartisan and reasonable. Ray once got his caucus to endorse a county criminal court at law judge who was a bigot and asshole. The reason: Ray told his peers that the judges treated gays like everyone else: just like dirt. Now, the re-named GPC endorses only Democrats and there are thousands of people who vote in a block based on those endorsements.
If you listened to President Trump’s speeches in 2016, they sounded inclusive. Enough people overlooked his obvious flaws to elect him because he promised good health insurance, protection of programs like Social Security, a stronger defense and a lot of other things that were popular in the middle class suburbs. He didn’t deliver and in fact, many people think he wasn’t there to drain the swamp but to wallow in it.
What happened Tuesday is the result of that as much as anything else.
If the Republican Party doesn’t become a party of hope and inclusion, it’s going to be worse in 2020 when a large class of Republican senators are up for re-election. And the party will continue relying on a declining voter base.
Dan Patrick got only 51.3 percent of the vote against a non-funded Democrat. What would have happened if Mike Collier had a few million to spend? The most powerful post in Texas would have gone to the Democrats. With the exception of Gov. Abbot, Republican statewide candidates got somewhere between 51 and 53 percent of the vote. That’s not the results Texas Republicans are used to.
What the party is going both in Harris County and statewide is a recipe for long-term disaster.
I think you just said publicly funded college is a failure and private institutions can do it better and more efficiently.
I agree. We need to stop public funding colleges and let free market and private funding and competition run its course.
Ditto for health insurance. Govt has no place in funding or mandating health insurance policies. Allow tax free HSAs. Allow employers to fund HSAs as they see fit to compensate their employees, and let employees find their own insurance, and pay for their own doctors and health care as they see fit. Get the govt out of the insurance game and the doctors’ offices.
PS: end school recapture, and keep schools funded with local property tax dollars. People in ElPaso shouldn’t get 38% of my ISD property tax revenue without my consent.
Thanks
Shut down public universities, come on Evan. If you’re hiring would you want soAmeone who graduated from a private, for profit college like the University of Phoenix or the
University of Texas (where I went), or even a Texas Aggie.
As for health care, we all pay for health care for the insured and uninsured. As the president pointed out in the 2016 campaign, we don’t let people die in the streets. They end up in emergency rooms and if they can’t or won’t pay, guess what, my bill goes up and my insurance pays for it. In the US, we spend 20 percent of the GDP health care. In most European countries, it’s about half that and they have better outcomes. Ever wonder why? In most of those countries, everybody pays either through compulsory insurance of taxes.
As for funding public education, Republican controlled supreme courts of Texas have ruled for years that the Texas Constitution requires an efficient public school system. The way the Legislature has chosen to fund it is to take from the richer districts — those with lots of industry and large office complexes — and give it to districts that don’t have enough of a tax base to fund a decent school system. In some districts like Austin, half of the land is not on the tax rills because it is owned by government or churches. Ask your Tea Party member of the Lege.
“And, most immigrants — legal and illegal — are hardworking, law abiding people.”
By definition, an illegal immigrant cannot be law-abiding. This is an immutable fact.
Thank you….
Correct, not straight ticket voting in these races outlined here. I tend to disagree that the reason is Trump because really not many Harris County Republicans have embraced Trump
David and Tom, you’re both absolutely right. And Tim, I agree with you that most immigrants — legal and illegal — are hardworking, law abiding people.
As for Harris County, I doubt the Republicans will retake Harris County in the foreseeable future. Predictions are that there will be a lot more Hispanics moving here so that they will constitute an absolute majority in Houston and Harris County. If the Republicans brought out Jesus to campaign for them and called for open borders, that would not get Hispanics to vote for them. To change that the Republicans will have to look more appealing to the Hispanics than the Democrats do now.
There is another factor. When more and more young college educated Anglos turn out to vote, they will likely vote for liberal candidates. You cannot underestimate the influence left-wing professors have on their students.
I’m gobsmacked. As a local Democrat I drop in here from time to time to take the temperature of local Republicans. The sentiments in the article and almost all the comments are completely consistent with the animating principles of most local Democrats. Earlier this year, a Big Jolly guest writer listed the common elements in Texas Democratic and Republican platforms and asked why we aren’t at least working together to put those policies into effect; I spread that column far and wide in my circles and it was well received. You’re right that Beto’s approach and his reception reflect a hunger for a more united Texas.
The question I’m left with, then, is why can’t we make real strides toward this approach to governing our large, energetic and diverse state? Both sides fear a slippery slope in a bipartisan approach. We all have tales to tell of egregious overreach by the other party. What — or who — can rein in our fears and mobilize the central 60% of the populace? I hope we can come up with some answers, for the sake of Texas.
I think the times call for a Rebrand the GOP Meetup. Anyone interested?
Call me at 713-224-4144.
Barry Klein
Excellent article David. There is a group of Republicans led by Dan Patrick and the now defeated St. Rep. Ron Simmons who pushed to get rid of straight ticket voting – even though it provided a 450,000-600,000 vote cushion statewide for lower ballot state candidates, especially judges where drop-off could be significant and the candidates are unknown.
What will be their excuse in 2020 when straight ticket voting is gone? When down-ballot contests will become more expensive and voters will choose on the basis of name familiarity and popularity, ethnicity, and other irrelevant factors?
The Texas GOP lost two congressional seats (hopefully, not a third in CD23), two state senators, and twelve state representatives in addition to a slew of county offfices.
By the way, might be relevant to see how Sarah Davis managed to win in this environment in a district that otherwise might well have voted Democratic. Perhaps, inclusion, outreach, case work, and a moderate stance really does help provide victory!
I agree with the article and most of the posts. Wayne nailed it when he pointed out the Sarah Davis result. We must find a different way of campaigning and it would be good to pool a bunch of the Campaign directors into a forum. Add candidates for comment Throw it on the table. stir vigorously and develop a plan. By the way, the Democrats seem to have a lot of this figured out.
You cant beat free stuff which is what most of the demcrats offer.
BTW, Did the republicans cap property tax yet? That was big Dan Patricks pitch fourteen years ago.
I think the Republican Party is on it’s last gasp. The greatest generation is almost gone. Socialist ideas have taken root with Millennials and the race divide is has become worse because of the Obama years.
I’m not one to preach gloom and doom, but demographics have changed. The urban (liberal) areas will carry entire states. The rural (conservative) areas will have no voice in government.
It has become so pronounced in some states that citizens with no voice want to divide the states. California and Colorado for example.