Before I start offering up the promised solutions to the 2016 Harris County Republican Party election disaster, I want to throw in a few more data points from the election. Many of the people I have talked to shrug their shoulders and ask me why I’m bothering to do this, telling me that it is time to admit that the county has changed from red to purple and now blue. Accept it and move on.

Not a chance!

First off, you don’t give up after losing. You figure out why you lost and work to overcome the obstacles. Second, the idea that Harris County is now a “blue” county is simply not true if you look at the data. Which is why I’ve given you a ton of data and will give you more today. Losing the straight ticket vote does not mean that Harris County as a whole is “blue”. Let’s take a look at straight ticket voting from 2006 – 2016.

In general, more Democrats vote straight ticket in Presidential years, more Republicans vote straight ticket in gubernatorial years. Nothing new there except perhaps the sheer number of Democratic votes this year. Concerning? Sure. Game changer? Highly doubtful when you dig a little deeper into the numbers. Here are a few of the factors that contributed to that increase (and an actual decrease in Straight R votes), in order of impact on the election.

1. Donald Trump
2. Devon Anderson
3. The lack of unity by Harris County Republicans

We’ll talk more about each of those factors in the near future, especially the last one, which is really the only one we can actually do something about. Suffice to say for now that if we had been able to address #3 in August or September, I think that we could have had results similar to 2012 and a whole bunch of Republican judges would still be on the bench.

To get a better feel for what is happening in Harris County politics, we need to look at the local county wide judicial races. Very few people go to the polls to vote for specific judicial candidates, so we can use that to see if the county is truly turning blue. We can also look deeper into specific areas, such as County Commissioner Precincts.

First off, let’s take a look at the median {997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} of votes that Republican judicial candidates received between 2006 and 2016:

As you can see, 2016 had the lowest median {997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} for Republican judicial candidates for the past six elections. Notice also that it was a full 2{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} drop from the 2012 presidential election. That is concerning, no question. But not as concerning as some people are making it out to be because if we remove the straight ticket votes from both parties, we get a very different picture.

In terms of contested Harris County only judicial races, this is what the totals look like over the past 6 elections:

As we all know by now, a wipeout this year. On the other hand, how would you like to be a Democrat in a gubernatorial year? Let’s remove the straight ticket voting from both parties for 2016 and see what we have:

Now let’s compare the median and average non-straight ticket voting ballots for 2012 and 2016:

While the overall results show a 2{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} decrease in median votes for R judicial candidates, the non-straight ticket numbers show a gain of 2{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986}. Obviously a lot of Republican judges would be thrilled if straight ticket voting went away. Fortunately for Republicans, all of the county benches are up in gubernatorial elections. As well as all but one Family District court and about half of the rest of the district courts. So Republicans still dominate the county judiciary and there is no reason to think that is going to change anytime soon. Maybe someone can explain to me why the Civil District Court benches would have been 50/50.

We could drop down into each Congressional or State District but what we will see is predictable based upon the gerrymandering that the legislature put into place. You get yours, we get ours, everyone is happy. But since it appears that the Democrats are going to make a major push for County Commissioner Precinct 2 Jack Morman’s seat, let’s take a look at that.

As I said earlier, if that is the best that the Democrats can do in a presidential year in Precinct 2, their prospects for beating Morman in a gubernatorial year are dim, barring major changes in the picture.

Okay, that’s probably enough on the data side. It is time to start talking about what went wrong and what went right with the Harris County Republican Party’s performance. The data clearly show that the combination of Trump and Anderson did bring the ticket down but what did the party do, if anything, to try and negate that? As you can see, it wouldn’t have taken much to get a good number of our judges reelected.

Although many of us wanted a change in the DA’s office for a host of reasons, why did Devon Anderson run such a poor campaign? It certainly wasn’t for a lack of money. Regardless of what I think about her, she should have done better, which would have helped the party as a whole.

There are a lot of Republicans in Harris County demanding a change in leadership of the party. They are, predictably, angry at the results. And those on the ballot in 2018 are letting their emotions affect their judgment. But before casting aside the leadership, we need to think long and hard about what we want the future to look like.

• What will the party do to increase straight ticket R voting?
• Do we want short term gains at the expense of long term losses?
• Is there a path that will allow us to win in the short term without hurting the long term prospects?
• What can be done to build the party on the East side without losing our NW/West side base?
• Does the sheer size and diversity of Harris County lend itself to a grassroots approach or a top down approach?
• What can we do to get our State Reps to become more involved with the party?
• Should we run candidates in all races or pick only those races that are ‘ours’?
• Do we stay with an ‘engagement’ model or do we move to a principles model?

If the current leadership cannot answer these questions, then we do need to make a change. And we need to do it in the 2018 primary so that we can reclaim the county in 2020. But before we go down that path, we should give the current leadership room to make the changes necessary.

We’ve already established that the 2016 General Election was a disaster for the Harris County Republican Party. Okay, we didn’t really have to establish that, all we had to do was look at the results. As in zero candidates winning. That’s pretty bad, right?

Frankly, I don’t think that the Republicans in Harris County that I talk to understand how bad it was. Of course, most of those people are ‘insiders’ and their real goal is to protect their turf. Or reputation. By making excuses for the outcome. Or, in a few cases, blaming the leadership of the party. Or, in a lot of cases, blaming the top of the ticket, as in President-elect Donald Trump for the poor showing.

It is interesting to me that most of the ‘man or woman on the street’ types that I talk to (i.e. those people that have lives and don’t worry about this stuff) don’t care at all the Harris County Republican Party. All they know is that Trump won (yippee!) or Trump won (yikes my life is over!). There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground between the two extremes. But that is probably a subject for later.

For now, we still need to figure out why the HCRP got wiped out. And the only way to do that objectively is to look at the data from the election. You can’t simply say ‘Never bet against Trump!‘ if you want to change the results for Republicans in Harris County.

The more I review the data, the more the answer becomes clear. If you go back and read the previous posts about the outcome, I’d bet that most of you see what I see. Instead of pointing it out, all I’m going to do is give you data from the official canvass report. If you are new to Harris County or new to thinking about political results in general, it might be harder for you to see but hang in there, the answers are clear. As well as the solution. Never present a problem without a solution, right? So look for it and then we’ll compare notes later.

Let’s start with the results in Harris County by Congressional District. Harris County has a total of 9 Congressional districts but only 4 of them are wholly in the county (CD2 – Ted Poe, CD7 – John Culberson, CD18 – Sheila Jackson Lee, and CD29 – Gene Green). Red for Republicans, blue for Democrats.

Let’s sort it by turnout percentage:

Some of you will no doubt notice that the Democrats have the lowest turnout percentage but their margins for Clinton are so large that they carried the day. Think about that for a bit and what it means for the future.

But hey, those are Congressional Districts! What about something closer to home like State Representatives? Surely Republicans can find some positives there. Harris County has 24 State Rep districts. Prior to the election, they were split 50/50. With Gilbert Pena’s loss, the Democrats now have a 13-11 advantage. For these purposes, Pena will be in highlighted in red because he is the incumbent.

Let’s take a look at those same districts sorted by margin of victory for Clinton.

Even though the split is 12-12 prior to the election, Clinton won 15 of the districts. And Clinton fared better in vote difference in Republican Sarah Davis’ district than she did in three Democratic strongholds. Interesting.

Let’s look the same dataset by turnout:

Only one Democratic State Rep district had a turnout percentage greater than 60%, Jessica Farrar in SRD148. What does this mean for the future? Let’s look at the growth potential for the districts:

A couple of things stand out. First, let’s get on the same page. The VAP is the Voting Age Population for the district. The R% is the percentage of the VAP that is registered to vote. The table is sorted by R%, lowest to highest. Lots of blue in those low R% areas (I gave you a hint for a solution).

The most striking example that I found when reviewing the data was what happened in the vote by County Commissioner Precinct. Let’s take a look at how Trump did by CC Precinct.

Rodney Ellis’ Precinct 1 vote in favor of Clinton swallowed the other commissioners whole. Jack Morman’s Precinct 2 went for Clinton. Steve Radack’s Precinct 3 was basically a wash. Only Jack Cagle’s Precinct 4 delivered for Trump.

But, but, Trump sucked as a candidate you say! I hear you, so I did the same chart for the District Attorney’s race. I like that race because only a die-hard Republican would vote for Devon Anderson.

Again, Precinct 1 swallows the Republican precincts. Think about that, I promise it will come up in a test later. If you want the actual numbers, here you go, including the Tax Assessor Collector race:

Even in the Tax Assessor Collector race, Precinct 1 wins the day. Why?

One last bit of data for you to ponder. What about new voters? Where were they?

Are you seeing what I’m seeing? What path should the HCRP take going forward?