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That’s All, Folks
Ben Rowen, 11:15 p.m.
Thanks for following along with our live blog. While the presidential race has yet to be called nationally, we have a pretty good handle on the major Texas results.
Donald Trump won Texas handily, as expected.
Ted Cruz sailed to victory over Democratic Congressman Colin Allred, who Democrats had grown convinced would run a tight race. With an estimated 84 percent of the vote in, it has proven to be anything but: Cruz leads by a million votes and ten percentage points.
Republicans improved their vote shares significantly in South Texas’s heavily Latino counties. The incumbents in three South Texas congressional races all lead their challengers, but the two Democrats’ margins have thinned relative to 2022.
Greg Abbott looks to have solidified a pro–school voucher majority in the Texas House, the lone impediment to his proposal to use taxpayer money to fund private school education.
In the coming days, we’ll dive further into the results and what they mean for Texas. Until then!
Democrats Have No Answers in Texas Again
Christopher Hooks, 11:05 p.m.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, because it’s been the primary takeaway for most elections in Texas in the last two decades, but the main theme of tonight’s election: This was a very bad night for the Texas Democratic Party. There’s still plenty of votes outstanding in blue counties and the margins will likely narrow, but Colin Allred didn’t get anywhere close to unseating Ted Cruz and Donald Trump’s margin seems likely to be significantly better in the state than it was in 2020. With about 76 percent of the vote reported, Trump is ahead more than fourteen percentage points, and Cruz is ahead ten points.
Down the ballot, the results are more worrying for Democrats. They failed to make any kind of a dent in the Texas House, either in leafy urban areas where they hoped to unseat moderate Republicans or in more rural predominantly Hispanic districts where they continued to lose ground. Along the border, where Democrats have been in retreat for several election cycles, they continued to lose ground, with Trump and Republicans making considerable inroads into Laredo and Webb County up the border and Cameron County at the very southern tip of Texas.
The Cameron County numbers should be particularly demoralizing for Democrats. In 2016, Trump lost Cameron, the most populous county in the Rio Grande Valley, by 32 percentage points. In 2020, he lost it by 13. This year he is winning it by 5 with 86 percent of the vote counted. The party’s longtime chairman Gilberto Hinojosa served as judge of the county from 1995 to 2006. Since 2012 he has led the state party. Led it, it turns out, further into ruin. The party needs a radically different approach to move forward, and it’s unclear, at the moment, what that will be.
Houston Thumbs Its Nose at HISD Superintendent by Voting Down $4.4 Billion Bond
Forrest Wilder, 10:55 p.m.
Houstonians upset with the state takeover of Houston ISD made their views known by handily defeating a proposed $4.4 billion school bond. The vote is a rebuke of Superintendent Mike Miles, the handpicked leader of the state’s largest school district whose authoritarian leadership style has alienated parents, students, and community members. The bond—the largest in state history—would have paid for renovating and rebuilding new facilities, among other much-needed upgrades. The fact that voters were willing to push off those improvements speaks to the animosity toward Miles and the Texas Education Agency.
How Did Abortion Politics Play for Dems in Texas? Not Well Enough.
Allegra Hobbs, 10:39 p.m.
If Democrats hoped the extremeness of Texas’s antiabortion laws—and the many stories of women in the state suffering medical emergencies as a result of them—may have pushed voters away from Republican candidates, they were wrong. Representing the Austin suburbs of Williamson County, Republican incumbent Caroline Harris Davila coauthored a bill last session to make it a criminal offense to distribute abortion-inducing drugs. With 87 percent of the votes in, she has a nearly twelve percentage point lead over Democratic challenger Jennie Birkholz, who ran on “reproductive freedom.”
John Lujan, who represents a portion of San Antonio in the Texas House, made headlines a month before early voting began when he said he would, hypothetically, make his daughter bear the child of her rapist. With 76 percent of the votes counted, he’s beating Democratic pro–abortion rights challenger Kristian Carranza by four points.
Much has been made about the unpopularity of Texas’s abortion ban—but election outcomes show consistently that abortion rights are not a silver bullet to winning races in the state. There are some lines being drawn, however: Amarillo voted against adopting a “Sanctuary City for the Unborn” ordinance that would have banned travel on county roads to obtain the procedure.
Ted Cruz Wins the U.S. Senate Race
Ben Rowen, 9:44 p.m.
Joe Raedle/Getty
Most of the networks have called the U.S. Senate race for Ted Cruz over Democratic challenger Colin Allred. Early this summer Democrats were energized by a poll that found the race essentially tied and threw nearly $80 million at deposing the incumbent, who only won reelection six years ago by 2.5 points. With an estimated 76 percent of the vote in, Cruz enjoys a nine point lead. Texas remains, as ever, a red state, not a secret blue or burgeoning purple one.
Harris County Is Deep Blue. Why Is the DA’s Race So Close?
Michael Hardy, 9:38 p.m.
The race for Harris County District Attorney is surprisingly close, at least in early voting, with Democrat Sean Teare leading Republican Dan Simons by 1.2 points. No Republican has won a countywide race in Harris County since 2014, and President Biden thrashed Donald Trump here by 13 points in 2020. The DA’s office has been a lightning rod for controversy under Democrat Kim Ogg, whose autocratic style made her a pariah within her own party. She was ousted in the Democratic primary earlier this year by Teare, one of her former prosecutors, who promised to restore integrity and competence to the office.
Neither Teare nor Simons is particularly well-known in the Houston area, which may account for the closeness of the race. Or perhaps the Harris County GOP’s longstanding crusade against “soft-on-crime” Democratic officials—a crusade in which they made common cause with Ogg—is finally paying off. Harris County is notoriously slow at counting votes, so we may not know who won until tomorrow. If Simons manages to pull off the upset, it will be a landmark victory for local Republicans after a decade in the political wilderness.
Another Border County Trending Republican
Christopher Hooks, 9:30 p.m.
Could Democrats Lose Their Stronghold in the Rio Grande Valley?
Forrest Wilder, 8:57 p.m.
Voting signs at a polling place at the Brownsville Public Library on November 5.Michael Gonzalez/Getty
One of the big questions coming into this election: Would Democrats see further erosion of the Hispanic vote in the Rio Grande Valley? We don’t have a lot of information just yet, but in Cameron County—the southmost tip of Texas, home to Brownsville and 90 percent Latino—things don’t look great as of now for the party. With an estimated 75 percent of votes reporting there, Trump is winning 51 percent of the vote to Harris’s 48 percent. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 65 percent of the vote. In 2020, Joe Biden won with 56 percent. Again, there are votes to be counted, but if the Valley ends up being fifty-fifty proposition, that’s a big win for the GOP. And it may spell trouble for state Senator Morgan LaMantia, who is currently neck and neck with second-time challenger Adam Hinojosa.
Republicans Have Carried Uvalde for Years. They Might Be Gaining There Now.
Christopher Hooks, 8:37 p.m.
Gun violence played a small role in this election, but when it came up, it was often in reference to the massacre at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, where nineteen students and two teachers were killed by a deranged shooter. Parents of the deceased spoke at the Democratic National Convention for Harris: Uvalde was the largest issue in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate this year.
But Uvalde is, and remains, a very Republican place. In 2020 Trump won the county by 20 percentage points. With only about half the vote in this year, at the moment Trump leads by 30 points. There are just a few votes reported in the state House race in the county, where the moderate Democrat Tracy O. King retired, offering an opportunity for Republicans to pick up a seat. Their candidate in the race is Don McLaughlin Jr., the mayor of Uvalde when the shooting happened and an outspoken ally of state officials in the aftermath. There are many votes outstanding, but at the moment he leads by more than 31 points. This might be the election in which the political life of the Uvalde massacre ends.
Republicans Are Ahead in Contested Texas House Races—With One Exception
Christopher Hooks, 8:21 p.m.
With just the early vote in—again, we’ll need to start seeing Election Day results to make real assessments—Democrats are behind in every Texas House race that they’ve been contesting except one, the Collin County district represented by incumbent Mihaela Plesa. In that race, Democrat Plesa is ahead by 3.3 percentage points with about 80 percent of the vote in.
In every other contested race that is reporting some results—nine others—Democrats are behind, narrowly or by a significant amount. The most interesting of these races is in Bexar County, where Republican Marc LaHood is currently beating Democrat Laurel Jordan Swift by about four points. This is the race in which LaHood unseated incumbent Republican Steve Allison, who then turned around and endorsed the Democrat. The early vote numbers are close enough that a decisive election day result could flip it.
Other Democrats are not so lucky. Moderate Republicans and Speaker Dade Phelan allies Angie Chen Button and Morgan Meyer, up in the Metroplex, are cruising to election by 8 and 17 points, respectively.
Donald Trump Wins Texas, as Expected
Forrest Wilder, 8:07 p.m.
At This Point, Nothing Is Certain—Except Maybe That Many Republican Voters Dislike Ted Cruz
Christopher Hooks, 7:58 p.m.
We’re starting to get early vote numbers in from some of the most populous counties in Texas. As scattershot results filter in, Allred has at times been ahead of Cruz in the count. Trump’s lead over Harris is slim. This doesn’t mean much, as we mentioned before. It will be another hour or two before we get election day results and can really start to assess the state of the race here. But you can start to draw some broad inferences, and we’re all about broad inferences.
In the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, for example, where the four most populous counties have reported the early vote, Ted Cruz is underperforming Trump by about four points. This roughly matches recent poll results, though those polls have differed widely as to where the two candidates are going to end up. In Dallas, the most populous county, Harris is ahead 23 points and Allred 27; in Tarrant, Trump is up 6 and Cruz 2; in Collin, Trump is up 11 and Allred 7; and in Denton Trump is up 14 and Allred 10.
These numbers overall are weak for Democrats, who will be hoping that election day results are much more friendly. But they point to Cruz’s known weaknesses as a candidate.
Alarm Bells for Harris in Fort Bend County
Michael Hardy, 7:47 p.m.
Fort Bend County, southwest of Houston, is one of the fastest-growing and most diverse areas in the United States. It’s also a political barometer: From 1968 to 2012 the county, whose biggest city is Sugar Land, voted Republican in every presidential election. But in 2016 it went for Hillary Clinton by seven points, and in 2020 it went for Biden by eleven percentage points—a demonstration of the Democratic Party’s growing suburban strength. But with an estimated 86 percent of ballots counted, Kamala Harris is currently leading in Fort Bend by fewer than two points. Things are looking a lot better for Colin Allred, who leads Ted Cruz by 6. But Harris’s weakness in this key county is a big warning sign for state and national Democrats.
How Will Ted Cruz Fare Relative to Donald Trump?
Forrest Wilder, 7:39 p.m.
Can Colin Allred outrun Donald Trump in Texas? He’ll probably need to in order to beat Ted Cruz. The 538 polling average indicates that the Dallas Democrat is trailing Cruz by about 4 percentage points while Kamala Harris trails Trump by 8. That may suggest that there are a fair number of Trump-Allred voters, which would not be surprising, given well, the number of Texans who just don’t seem to like Cruz. In 2018 Beto O’Rourke’s nearly offed Cruz, while Greg Abbott cruised to victory across the ticket. Still, it’s hard to see enough ticket-splitting for Allred to prevail if Trump maintains, or improves upon, his performance in 2020 against Joe Biden. Cruz has certainly been running as if the race is close, trying to stick a very awkward pivot from a burn-it-all-down conservative warrior to a bipartisan fella who just wants to get things done. It’s early, but so far, statewide, Trump is up 4.4 percentage points to Cruz’s 0.5.
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz takes a photo with a supporter before the arrival Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Austin on October 25, 2024.Sergio Flores/AFP via Getty
One other thing: I’m curious to see if Allred’s cautious, low-drama campaign—almost diametrically opposed to Beto’s skateboards-Whataburger-and-F-bombs effort—will yield a better, or worse, outcome against Texas’s junior senator.
In a Historically Blue Border County, Folks Turn Out for Trump
Sasha von Oldershaushen, 7:27 p.m.
“The machines are rigged!” a man wearing a Vietnam veterans baseball cap shouted to me as he exited the Presidio Activity Center, one of the three polling locations in the rural West Texas border town of Presidio. “I’m Republican,” said 77-year-old Ernesto Madrid, “I put my paper in there but I bet you all my votes are gonna come out for Democrats.”
Madrid may have been unusually enthusiastic, but politically, he was in the majority of voters I spoke to earlier today. Presidio is historically a blue town within a blue county, though some 30 percent of voters cast their ballot for Trump in 2020. Trump gained just a few points, compared to 2016, but it resisted the red wave seen in other border counties, several of which flipped in Trump’s favor. Zapata County did so after a century of consistently voting blue. Others narrowed Biden’s margin of victory by a startling amount. It remains to be seen if Presidio County will trend in Trump’s direction.
Resident Luz María Urias felt compelled to vote for Trump despite the fact that “there’s more racism than ever,” she said, because of a lack of jobs and Presidio’s reliance on the oil and gas industry in nearby Midland and Odessa. “There are no jobs here in Presidio,” said Urias. “So a lot of people go to the Permian Basin for employment.” She added, “I think they feel that if [Trump] doesn’t win, they might stop drilling. And I guess they’re scared that a 2008 [recession] is going to happen again.”
Stella Urias, an elderly care worker, who also voted for Trump, echoed Urias’s concerns. “There’s a lot of people that are not working lately here in Presidio,” she said, and felt that Trump would do more for job growth. Her other major concern, she added, was over having a woman leading the country—a concern she saw echoed among the elderly clients she cares for. “Now we have one in Mexico but she’s very prepared,” said Urias, referring to Claudia Sheinbaum, who was sworn in as Mexico’s president last month. “I don’t know about Kamala.”
Liz Hernandez, on the other hand, was excited for the prospect of two women presidents working in tandem over the border region. Her partner, Edgar Sotelo added, “Women are capable of more than ever.”
Don’t Put Too Much Stock in the First Results From Around Texas
Christopher Hooks, 7: 13 p.m.
If you’re used to following national elections and contested races in other states, you may be familiar with a certain pattern. In Georgia, for example, the early results may look pretty good for Republicans, as red counties snap into place—but the galactic population center of metro Atlanta, which counts votes long into the night, could eventually tip the state to Democrats.
It is perhaps important to note, in case statewide races in Texas are close, that it doesn’t necessarily work the same way here. In 2018, when Beto O’Rourke came within three points of defeating Ted Cruz, O’Rourke had an early lead. Cruz’s consultants, at his HQ, had to come onstage and tell his worried fans that the number would correct themselves in time.
Texas counties are allowed to start counting their early votes before the polls close on Election Day—the largest counties are allowed to start counting them days before. That means Democratic counties like Harris or Dallas may drop large batches of votes early in the night that are not necessarily representative of the eventual result. In 2018, over the course of the night, as numbers trickled in from red counties and the Election Day tallies in cities and populous suburbs, the state got redder, not bluer.
The voting patterns this year appear to be very different than they did mid-pandemic in 2020. We can’t say quite yet what the early vote will show us relative to the Election Day vote. But if you tune in shortly after the polls close to see Allred or Harris in the lead, know that this doesn’t mean much. We’ll all have to wait for the results together.
Why High Turnout in Texas Isn’t Usually a Good Sign for Democrats
Ben Rowen, 6:58 p.m.
After every Democratic loss in our state—and they have a three-decade-long streak of statewide losses—coping liberals trot out an aphorism: Texas is not a red state; it’s a nonvoting state.
The last half of that palliative is true. Texas consistently ranks among the lowest-turnout states in the country, and in every recent election, nonvoters outnumbered those who supported the highest vote earner (often dwarfing the combined total of those who supported the highest vote earners in both parties). But the assumption that if more Texans voted, the state would go blue is built on flawed logic. Take the 2018 race for the Senate between Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz. While writing about the partisan leanings of low-propensity voters in our state, I heard an anecdote that on election night that year, Republican operatives let out sighs of relief when they saw that more than eight million voters had gone to the polls—then an unprecedented number for a midterm election. There was no way, they felt, that Democrats had found four million–plus voters. (O’Rourke ended up surpassing four million votes, in fact, but still lost.)
Maria Rivera, an election clerk, hands a voter a ballot in Houston on November 5.Danielle Villasana/Getty
2018 wasn’t a one-off. Texas’s low-propensity voters, as a group, are not nearly as Democratic-inclined as they might seem to those relying on crude demographic analyses. What’s more, not all of those who typically don’t cast ballots are equally likely to change their minds and go to the polls: Some aren’t even registered, some are but never exercise the franchise, and some vote only occasionally. And the low-propensity folks most likely to actually come to the polls for a given election have historically cast ballots in favor of the GOP, which has a strong get-out-the-vote operation. Ahead of the 2020 elections, Democrats poured resources into registering folks in the state, getting 150,000 more Texans added to the rolls than did their Republican counterparts. But the GOP got 26,000 more new registrants to actually vote for its candidates.
Will high turnout again benefit Republicans this year? We’ll have to see how many voters cast ballots on Election Day to be certain, but this will likely turn out to be a relatively high-participation election for Texas: early voting already nearly eclipsed 50 percent, and preliminary reports are that turnout today was also strong in many urban counties. Those early vote numbers suggest far more Republicans are voting than Democrats. Among early voters, those who had previously voted in GOP primaries outnumbered those who had previously voted in Democratic ones by 866,000, according to an analysis by Republican data guru Derek Ryan. While it’s possible many one-time Republicans have decided to switch over and vote Democratic, or that large flocks of Democrats are simply waiting to vote on Election Day, what’s likelier is that the GOP has once again tapped deep reservoirs of the electorate. Texas looks to be less of a nonvoting state, in other words, but just as red as ever.
Are the Texas Suburbs Turning Blue, or Are They Just Anti-Trump?
Christopher Hooks, 6:36 p.m.
Barring a shocking upset in our one interesting statewide race—Cruz versus Allred—perhaps the most interesting thing tonight is seeing where our suburban counties fall in the presidential and U.S. Senate races. Inside baseball, maybe, if the outcomes aren’t affected. But understanding the suburban vote is crucially important for predicting future elections and assessing how competitive Texas is politically.
In 2020 Trump won Collin County, north of Dallas, the largest suburban county in Texas, by only about 51 percent—Biden pulled a little less than 47 percent. This was a real shock. If Democrats win Collin this year, the county will be another domino to fall. Fort Bend, Houston’s largest suburban county and a reliable Republican stronghold until a decade ago, went for Biden by a ten-point margin last time—while Williamson, Austin’s largest suburban county, voted for Biden by a one-point margin. Winning these counties outright is less important than chipping away at the overall support for the opposition, of course. In 2020, the Democratic margin in Fort Bend effectively canceled out 37,000 Republican votes in rural counties—a little less than half of the number El Paso County, a traditional Democratic stronghold, absorbed. If you keep ratcheting those numbers up, eventually you’ll get a majority.
How Gerrymandered Is Texas?
Dan Solomon, 6:18 p.m.
If you’re looking for suspense in any of Texas’s congressional races, you won’t find much: Only the race in South Texas’s Thirty-Fourth Congressional District, between Democratic incumbent Vicente Gonzalez and Republican challenger Mayra Flores, who looks to reclaim a seat she lost to Gonzalez in 2022, is particularly competitive. (Should this turn out to be a “wave election,” it’s possible that one of two other South Texas districts—Democrat Henry Cuellar’s Twenty-Eighth and Republican Monica De La Cruz’s Fifteenth—could flip, depending what color the wave is.)
How Undemocratic Is Gerrymandering? Look at How Blue Texas Could Be if Democrats Drew the Maps.
Why is this the case, when the state had as many as ten races for the House of Representatives worth watching just four years ago? Republicans redrew the maps in 2021—part of the standard once-a-decade process of redistricting—and gerrymandered the state to render 35 of the 38 seats in our congressional delegation noncompetitive. In 2022, those races were won by an average of 44 points, which more or less defines a safe seat. Things aren’t much better in the Texas Legislature, either: only 10 of the 150 seats in the Texas House are competitive, along with just 1 of the 11 contested Senate seats that are up this cycle (the South Texas seat currently held by Democrat Morgan LaMantia).
There may be some drama on election night—there are local ballot initiatives across the state, mayoral elections in Austin and El Paso, and a competitive race between Colin Allred and Ted Cruz—but you won’t find it in most of the districts redrawn by the Lege in 2021.
The Two Texan-Led Think Tanks Exporting Our Policies to Trump
Christopher Hooks, 5:59 p.m.
“Texas has always been the national laboratory for bad government,” as Molly Ivins put it—a place governed poorly that exports poor ideas elsewhere. That’s never been more true than this year, during which Texas-educated ideologues in state and national think tanks have provided the wattage to illuminate Trump’s suspiciously policy-free campaign.
There’s so much wattage, in fact, that there are two national Republican think tanks run by Texans. The Heritage Foundation, which provided movement conservatives with white papers during the Reagan years, has gotten considerably more comfortable with the fringe in recent times: It’s currently run by Kevin Roberts, former CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The America First Policy Institute, a new think tank founded to provide a home to Trump term-one vets, meanwhile, is led by Brooke Rollins. She is also the former CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, or TPPF.
It’s no surprise that both think tanks have TPPF ties. The Texas think tank has successfully turned gobs of donor money into policies that favor its donors. Trump doesn’t care about policy at all, and Texas Thinkers and donors are happy to try to fill that void. But the path to power has been treacherous.
AFPI was an ambitious attempt to start a new think tank along TPPF’s lines from the ground up, and it secured the allegiance of Trump favorites such as former cabinet secretary and pro-wrestling queen Linda McMahon and Trump’s rich-guy buddy Larry Kudlow. But Heritage, with its long history and clout, made some important Trump-world hires and pulled ahead. Full of hubris, the new hires began planning for the second Trump term in nitty-gritty detail with something they called Project 2025, full of alienating proposals (ban porn!) and alarming ones (replace many federal bureaucrats with political appointees to allow Trump to fire them at will, greatly expand presidential power, and remove equal-rights protections in the name of fighting the specter of “affirmative discrimination”—what others call antiwhite racism). The fallout stung Trump so bad he ultimately disavowed Project 2025.
This has led AFPI, in some observers’ estimations, to pull ahead again, putting Rollins and the group’s Texans—among them Rick Perry and Midland billionaire Tim Dunn, who sits on the board—back in the running. If Trump loses, the Texans at Heritage will bear some blame. If he wins, the Texans at AFPI might be running the country.
Weed, Abortion, and Democracy: At the Local Level, Some Texans Will Get a Say on Hot-Button Issues
Forrest Wilder, 5:42 p.m.
Texas makes it virtually impossible for citizens to place statewide propositions on the ballot. That’s why, unlike residents of other right-leaning states such as Ohio and Kansas, Texans are unlikely to get a chance in the foreseeable future to weigh in on abortion rights or marijuana reform. But at the local level, voters in a few cities have some interesting, and potentially game-changing, propositions in front of them. In Dallas, the electorate will decide whether to decriminalize weed. Proposition R would amend the city charter to “prohibit the Dallas Police Department from making arrests or issuing citations for marijuana possession” for amounts less than four ounces. Voters in other Texas cities, including Austin and Denton, have overwhelmingly passed similar measures, though the ordinances are under legal challenge by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Local marijuana reform is part of a multiyear campaign by Ground Game Texas, a progressive Austin nonprofit cofounded in 2021 by Mike Siegel and Julie Oliver, two former Democratic congressional candidates. The group hopes the issue can give a boost to Dems higher up on the ballot.
But Dallas’s Prop R has been overshadowed by Props S, T, and U. (Let’s call them STU.) The three, respectively, would make it easier for citizens to sue the city in certain cases; would enable residents to influence how much bonus money the city manager gets and whether they are fired; and, most consequentially, would force Dallas to spend half its excess revenue on police and fire pensions and public safety. STU has been nearly universally panned by the Dallas political and business establishment. Critics contend that the propositions would make it difficult to run the city and would impoverish other public services in a crude attempt to bolster the police force. The backers of STU are a shadowy bunch. Dallas Hero, the dark money group behind the effort, has refused to disclose its funders, though hotel mogul Monty Bennett has admitted to providing office space and some financial backing. The Texas Observer also exposed Bennett’s hiring, through a company called Crowds on Demand, of paid right-wing protestors.
The Rio Grande Valley city of McAllen will vote on two propositions put on the ballot by Ground Game Texas. Prop A, called the McAllen Anti-Corruption Act, would cap contributions to local candidates at $500 per donor. (The current caps are $5,000 for city commissioners and $10,000 for mayoral candidates.) Prop B “will allow McAllen voters to utilize petition campaigns to adopt new policies, overrule Commission decisions, and recall elected officials,” according to Ground Game. McAllen elected officials including Mayor Javier Villalobos have accused the organization of meddling, while Ground Game has accused Villalobos of running an illegal campaign to defeat the measures.
In deep red Amarillo, voters will decide on a “Sanctuary City for the Unborn” ordinance. Prop A, as it’s titled, would follow in the footsteps of other initiatives in conservative Texas towns and cities, including Abilene and Lubbock, by abolishing abortion within city limits. It would also make it illegal to travel through Amarillo to get the procedure in another state, termed “abortion trafficking” in the ballot language. Enforcement would occur through lawsuits brought by private citizens—a legal innovation pioneered in the 2021 Texas Heartbeat Act passed by the Legislature. The proposed ordinance has encountered unexpectedly fierce resistance in Amarillo, including from conservatives who think it’s overreaching and intrusive. Prop A’s fate could have far-reaching national implications.
Neither Candidate Will Fix the Texas Border Crisis
Allegra Hobbs, 5:19 p.m.
It works to Donald Trump’s advantage that the problems plaguing the border are complicated and their solutions are not straightforward. When illegal border crossings surged under Biden in 2022, Trump cast these patterns as squarely a result of incompetence on the administration’s part. One upside to being out of power is that nothing can really be your fault.
What Republicans such as Trump and Senator Ted Cruz won’t acknowledge is that border crossings, after peaking in 2023, have dipped significantly. This is an inconvenient fact, so Republicans focus on horrifying stories of American women killed by undocumented immigrants—extremely rare occurrences they’ve worked hard to paint as a gruesome epidemic. At a recent mini-rally outside Austin, on his way to tape a three-hour podcast episode with Joe Rogan, Trump said Kamala Harris was “importing” criminal gangs into every state, “paving a trail of bloodshed, suffering and death all across our land.” To underscore his point, he brought forth the grieving mother of a 12-year-old girl authorities say was murdered by Venezuelan migrants. Trump claims mass deportations and an end to so-called “catch and release”—allowing migrants to await a court date outside of detention—would prevent such tragedies.
An aerial image of the border in May 2023.Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty
But does being “tough” on the border work in any sustainable way? The “zero tolerance” approach that Trump wants to reinstate from his first term severely strained our overburdened courts and, if Customs and Border Protection data is anything to go by, did little to deter migrants from attempting the dangerous journey to our border. The truth is, various presidential administrations for the last few decades have talked a lot about fixing the border and we have basically nothing to show for it. Encounters rise and fall, then go way up again, then plummet again, over and over, informed more by conditions in migrants’ home countries than U.S. policy. Politicians talk a lot about creating safe, legal pathways for legal immigrants, but the reality of a yearslong wait will continue to push desperate people to cross where they can and risk the consequences.
Trump has upped the ante, promising mass deportation of migrants who are here without authorization, which he claims is necessary because of the aforementioned bloodshed, suffering, and death. Putting aside the inherent cruelty, the proposal would cost billions of dollars and almost certainly cripple the economy. Many industries, especially here in Texas, are dependent on undocumented labor.
At the Trump rally, I asked Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller about his support of mass deportation despite the impact it would have on our state’s economy. He insisted it wouldn’t be a problem because business owners, for the most part, aren’t hiring undocumented workers. What about family separation, an inevitable byproduct of mass deportations in a state where many citizens have undocumented relatives? I asked if that was a concern. “Well, it would be if I was separated from mine,” he said. He went on to call it a “tragedy” that has occurred to some degree under every president in recent years.
A local precinct chair in attendance later told me Trump would only deport criminals, which is not what Trump himself has claimed. His followers don’t seem to know how seriously to take him. All they know is the border is deadly serious.
Ken Paxton’s Court of Criminal Appeals Friends
Forrest Wilder, 5:01 p.m.
Ken Paxton, our ethics-adjacent attorney general, will likely claim another big victory on Tuesday night. And I’m not predicting a Donald Trump win. Rather, three of
Paxton’s Republican allies running for the Court of Criminal Appeals—Lee Finley, Gina Parker, and David Schenck—are almost certain to beat their Democratic opponents, giving him a base of loyalists on Texas’s highest criminal court.
The story starts in 2021, when the nine-judge, all-Republican CCA ruled 8–1 that Paxton violated the Texas Constitution by prosecuting an election fraud case in southeast Texas without the permission of the local district attorney. The ruling outraged Paxton, who has been a central figure in promoting exaggerated or false claims about fraud at the ballot box. (He also infamously filed a lawsuit in 2020 to overturn the results of the presidential election in four other states.)
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks at the 2024 Texas State Republican Convention in San Antonio on May 23.Bryan Olin Dozier/NurPhoto via AP
But Paxton would have to wait two years for his revenge, as the 2021 ruling came down too soon to back challengers. In late 2023, after his impeachment spectacularly imploded in the Texas Senate, he launched a revenge tour, endorsing a slew of challengers to Republicans in the House who had voted to impeach. Paxton also went after three CCA judges up for reelection: Barbara Hervey, Sharon Keller, and Michelle Slaughter. The three women were all Republicans in good standing. Keller, for example, has served on the court for thirty years and is perhaps best known for denying the appeal of a man on death row with the words, “We close at five.” But the Paxton-Trump GOP demands total loyalty on something as core to MAGA identity as voter fraud. Paxton and Trump backed the trio of challengers, and their endorsements were then amplified by Texas media allies such as Chris Salcedo and Sara Gonzales. That was enough to hand Finley, Parker, and Schenck easy victories in the March Republican primary.
The three have done little to disguise their fealty to Paxton. Finley, a criminal lawyer from Collin County, the Dallas suburbs where Paxton’s political machine is centered, was seen campaigning with the attorney general in 2018, when Finley’s wife was running for election as the Collin County clerk. Parker, a Waco lawyer and Christian author affiliated with several self-described “prophets,” has been even more explicit. In February, she went on Salcedo’s talk show to praise Paxton for taking a “strong stand” against the CCA’s “bad, erroneous decisions.”
On her Facebook page, Parker keeps a steady stream of MAGA content, including reposts of interviews with “J6 patriots” and an article from a British tabloid about Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua taking over San Antonio apartments. She’s also posted photos posing with Brent Webster, a top Paxton deputy, at a Republican event in South Texas. She reposted paid advertising from Texas Scorecard, the media arm of far-right Christian nationalist and oil billionaire Tim Dunn, praising Paxton for “intensifying his efforts” to question the citizenship status of registered voters. Ditto for paid advertising by Blaze Media for a documentary called Voter Fraud Exposed: How Elections Can Be Stolen.
A Democrat hasn’t won a seat on the CCA in more than thirty years.
How Transgender Issues Came to Dominate the Texas Senate Race
Michael Hardy, 4:46 p.m.
Transgender issues are tricky for Texas Democrats, who must balance their support for LGBTQ rights against their fear of being portrayed as outside the mainstream. It’s a lot simpler for Republicans. According to the Texas GOP’s official platform, “there are only two genders: biological male and biological female, which are immutable and cannot be changed.” There are no transgender Texans, the party believes, only men pretending to be women and women pretending to be men. Such individuals therefore have no right to receive gender-affirming medical care, to play sports, or to use the restroom of their choice.
This position has led to some odd consequences, such as a trans male wrestler being forced to compete against girls, and some ugly consequences, such as Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton threatening to investigate parents of transgender children. The state’s crackdown on trans children has led many families to flee the state—an exodus no doubt welcomed by those trying to turn Texas into a Christian theocracy. A 2022 survey by the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ suicide-prevention group, found that one in five transgender and nonbinary children in Texas had tried to end their life in the past year.
Can Transphobia Save Ted Cruz’s Political Career?
The national Republican Party clearly believes that attacking trans children is a winning strategy. Republican candidates across the country, including former President Donald Trump, have spent more than $65 million on antitrans ads since August. In Texas, Senator Ted Cruz has launched a barrage of ominous television advertisements accusing his opponent, Dallas Congressman Colin Allred, of supporting transgender athletes. Allred responded by downplaying his pro-trans voting record, cutting an ad denouncing “boys playing girls’ sports.” Unfortunately, that kind of opaque messaging—obviously intended to court conservative voters without committing to full transphobia—may be the most trans Texans can expect.
Tim Dunn Is Still Funding the Texas GOP Civil War
Russell Gold, 4:28 p.m.
Midland oilman and right-wing political heavyweight Tim Dunn remains the single largest individual source of campaign cash in Texas politics this year—with a caveat. He is the largest source who is Texan. His $9.31 million in total contributions this year (including direct contributions as well as those through the Dunn-controlled investment vehicle Hexagon Partners) was tops for a Texan but trailed the totals of Pennsylvanian Jeff Yass, a school-voucher enthusiast and cofounder of the stock-trading giant Susquehanna International Group, and Miriam Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate and Republican megadonor.
The Billionaire Bully Who Wants to Turn Texas Into a Christian Theocracy
Dunn has built a political apparatus bent on pushing Texas to the right largely by primarying centrist Republicans in the state legislature and sending them into retirement. But while he spent the bulk of his contributions during the primaries ($3.37 million) and primary runoffs ($3.21 million), he dropped another $2.73 million in the general election.
Some of that went to the national Republican National Committee and the right-wing American Leadership PAC, but Dunn’s main focus remains the Texas Legislature. The majority of his donation money went to the Texans United for a Conservative Majority PAC, a group to which Dunn is by far the largest donor. The PAC gave more than $400,000 to David Lowe, an army vet and self-described Christian conservative, in his successful primary bid to unseat moderate Republican Stephanie Klick in a suburban Fort Worth Texas House district. It also donated $700,000 to David Covey’s unsuccessful bid to oust House Speaker Dade Phelan. In the general election, the PAC has given Republican Adam Hinojosa $350,000 in his bid to defeat incumbent Democratic state Senator Morgan LaMantia in the one swing district in the Texas Senate.
Who Are the Texans Who Love Ted Cruz?
Christopher Hooks, 4:07 p.m.
It’s common knowledge, not just in Texas but all across our beautiful quilt of a country, that nobody likes Ted Cruz. To the contrary, it appears, though. He was almost nominated for president on the Republican ticket in 2016 and has been elected statewide in Texas twice. He is likely, barring a medically worrying upsurge of Allred momentum, to be elected a third time. While Cruz may not have been especially loved in high school or in the Senate cafeteria, he has repeatedly secured confirmation from a sufficient number of voters that, in the words of Sally Field’s immortal 1985 Academy Awards acceptance speech, “You like me, right now.”
Ted Cruz Would Like to Reintroduce Himself
But is it enough to keep him in office? Democrats don’t think so, which is presumably why they keep taking shots at Cruz when he’s up for reelection. In 2018 hundreds of thousands of voters offered their support for Greg Abbott for governor and voted for Cruz’s opponent, Beto O’Rourke. Whether or not Cruz feels any sense of dramatic tension tonight, his problem remains that he was initially elected in a different political climate than the one he faces going forward. In 2012, when he first took office, any Republican would win. He needed to only win the Republican primary. He was well-suited for that task, and it put him on trajectory for his true goal: the presidency.
But he flopped, and now he’s stuck defending his Senate seat, every six years, in front of an electorate who remains iffy. He has tried to moderate to appeal to a wider swathe of voters, but that’s not what his fan base wants. At a recent rally in Williamson County, north of Austin, he touted one bipartisan bill he helped pass to accelerate permitting for new semiconductor plants. Really, he was saying, he managed to attach himself to a small part of a policy priority advocated by the Biden administration. The applause was tepid. He began talking about the need to keep boys out of girls’ sports. The audience roared.
There were old folks who’d been with Cruz from the start—who saw in him as same stalwart warrior they’d gotten to know a decade and change ago. There were two eighteen-year-olds attending the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor who cast their first vote for Cruz in part because they resented having to play against transgender athletes in high school. And there were recent transplants who didn’t seem to have a perfect idea of who Ted Cruz was. (“F— Phil Murphy,” yelled one man in the crowd, referring to the New Jersey governor.)
This may make fertile-enough ground for Cruz to survive this election. But there was something that should have given Ted’s ego pause. Very few—almost none—of the crowd were wearing Cruz paraphernalia from his golden age. More than half were wearing Donald Trump swag. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who introduced Cruz at the rally, stressed that Texans should vote for him because he would be a useful handmaiden to Trump. Old culture warriors don’t die, they just… fade away…
The Texas Supreme Court arrives to hear litigators make their arguments in Zurowski v. State of Texas, at the Texas Supreme Court in Austin on November 28, 2023.Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP via Getty
Abortion Isn’t on the Ballot in Texas—but These State Supreme Court Justices Are
By Sasha von Oldershausen, 3:32 p.m.
Texas is one of a handful of states that hold partisan elections for their supreme courts. It’s a flawed system that’s ideologically at odds with the judiciary, supposedly a cornerstone of impartiality. In effect, we’ve created a system that privileges partisanship because that’s the most reliable way for candidates to win. As Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, told me, “If they remain neutral, that undermines their ability to win an election in a primary, but if they pursue a strategy in the primary where they lean ideological, that undermines their standing on the bench.”
Up for reelection this year are three Texas Supreme Court justices, all Republicans—Jimmy Blacklock, Jane Bland, and John Devine. Devine, who’s faced a lot of criticism, even within his own party, for his record of absenteeism this term (he missed 56 percent of his oral arguments; his defense is that he had a primary to run in, while none of the other judges did) and certain choice comments he made about his Republican colleagues, very narrowly defeated his primary opponent in March. He’s also come under fire for his explicit antiabortion platform. He boasted on the campaign trail in 2012 that he’d been arrested 37 times for protesting outside abortion clinics. He will face off against Democrat Christine Vinh Weems, a sitting Harris County district judge and former trial attorney. Blacklock is running against DaSean Jones, a Houston district judge and an Army veteran. Bland, one of three women on the Texas Supreme Court and one of the more recent Greg Abbott appointees, will face off against Bonnie Lee Goldstein, who sits on the Fifth District Court of Appeals.
As there is no ballot measure on abortion policy, the Supreme Court races could prove critical for the future of Texans’ access to reproductive health care; with more women experiencing critical threats to their health or death as a result of these bans, more cases are likely to appear before the court. These justices were among those who ruled in favor of the state in Zurawski v. Texas, a landmark case in which Texas women who’d faced life-threatening complications during pregnancy banded together to seek clarifications on exceptions to the state’s abortion ban. “This is a life-or-death race for us,” said Lauren Miller, one of the plaintiffs in the case.
Christian Nationalism Was the Story of 2016. Is Christian Supremacism Next?
Sandi Villarreal, 2:59 p.m.
After the votes were counted in 2016, a surprising statistic (to mainstream political reporters, at least) emerged: About 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. In Texas, where white evangelicals make up about 14 percent of the population, that number was closer to 85.
In the months leading up to the election, many high-profile evangelical leaders had begrudgingly thrown their support behind the thrice-married New York reality TV star. But then came the Access Hollywood tape—and its stunning display of the kind of crass, violent language that those same leaders often condemn from the pulpit. Hundreds of books, op-eds, and think pieces followed the results, examining the motivation and seeming cognitive dissonance behind that vote. Many evangelical voters named Trump’s commitment to appoint anti-abortion rights judges as a primary issue. Others connected with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” messaging and promise to give evangelicals an even bigger seat at the table—to make the U.S. a nation “under one God,” as he told the Values Voter Summit in 2016. That movement, or collection of movements as its number of pet issues has multiplied over the years, was given a name—Christian nationalism—and Texas is its epicenter.
Self-described historian David Barton, the Aledo-based founder of WallBuilders, an organization that opposes church-state separation, lobbies Texas lawmakers on bills such as one requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in Texas classrooms (which didn’t become law) and another allowing unlicensed chaplains to work as school counselors (that one passed). National groups invoking scripture regularly flock to Texas in protest convoys to “secure the border,” and speak out against human trafficking. The state’s largest political donor is a Christian nationalist who has said only Christians should hold leadership positions.
For Christian nationalist and other evangelical voters, Trump has delivered. The judges he appointed helped overturn Roe v. Wade. He moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, formally recognizing it as the capital. And he’s vowed to check off more evangelical wish list items in a second term. During his 2024 campaign, he has promised mass deportations and paid lip service to false claims about child trafficking. At the National Faith Advisory Board Summit last week, Trump told faith adviser Paula White-Cain, a televangelist and leader in the evangelical independent charismatic movement, that “religion is under serious threat” in the country and promised the Christian leaders gathered a direct line to the Oval Office. (In February 2021 President Joe Biden reestablished the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships that was originally formed by George W. Bush and scrapped by Trump in favor of an initiative at one point led by White-Cain.)
Recent national polling shows 82 percent of white evangelicals favor Trump over Kamala Harris, a Baptist whose pastor was a student of Martin Luther King Jr.
Will January 6th Happen Again? Right-Wing Think Tanks Are Prepping for a Biden Version.
Christopher Hooks, 2:25 p.m.
In the summer, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Heritage Foundation—right-wing local and national think tanks, respectively—jointly hosted an “academic exercise” called the Transition Integrity Project, inspired by a 2020 initiative of the same name run by supporters of Joe Biden’s campaign that year. The first TIP was an exercise by some Resistance Liberals and moderates to game out what might be possible if Trump attempted to deny he lost the presidential election—which turned out to be exactly what happened, as you may remember.
This year’s TIP flipped the script and attempted—out of an “I know you are, but what am I?” type of pique—to game out what might happen if the tyrant Biden tried to do a coup instead. It found that if the Democrat were to lose the election, the Biden administration could attempt to use the CIA and FBI to keep Trump out of the White House, along with a lot of other weird and implausible findings.
To a skeptical eye, it looked a little as if the “think tanks” were making a preemptive argument that fraud from the right might be justified to meet inevitable fraud from the left—that because no hands on either side were fully clean, Trump and friends should take off their gloves. The punch line is that TPPF bigwig Chuck DeVore—formerly of Irvine, California, and one of the many accurséd Californians who afflict our fair state—wrote in response to the 2020 TIP that liberals had “predicted that it would be Trump and his supporters who would resort to violence. This may well be a classic case of a phenomenon called the Mirror-Image Fallacy in which analysts project their own attitudes and bias onto their opponents.” He wrote that in a piece released on October 26, about two months and two weeks before the January 6 riot.
Will Houston Voters Approve the Largest School Bond in Texas History?
Michael Hardy 2:03 p.m.
School bonds are typically an easy sell in Houston. Voters have approved five of the six ones proposed over the past 35 years. But this year’s $4.4 billion bond—the largest in Texas history—has proven unusually contentious because of the district’s controversial leadership. Last year, citing poor performance on standardized tests and board dysfunction, the state replaced the Houston Independent School District’s elected trustees with a board of managers handpicked by Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath. To lead the district, Morath tapped Mike Miles, the controversial former superintendent of Dallas ISD.
Under Miles, HISD schools have seen improvements in reading and math scores. But those gains have been overshadowed by the massive disruption caused by Miles’s authoritarian leadership style. The superintendent has imposed a strict, limited curriculum, ousted dozens of principals, and driven nearly five thousand teachers out of the district. Many families have expressed their displeasure by removing their children from Houston schools. This school year, HISD enrollment is on track to drop to its lowest level in at least a decade.
Supporters of the HISD bond, including Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and the pro-business Greater Houston Partnership, say that students shouldn’t be punished for the unpopularity of the superintendent. The bond includes $2.3 billion for rebuilding and renovating schools; $1 billion for lead remediation, security enhancements, and HVAC improvements; and $1.1 billion to expand pre-K and build three new career centers. But opponents see voting down the bond as the only way for Houston voters to express their displeasure at the state takeover. The Harris County Democratic and Republican Parties both oppose the bond, as do the main HISD teachers’ union and the Houston Chronicle editorial board. The opponents’ slogan—“No Trust, No Bond”—reflects a widespread distrust of Miles’s methods and motives.
Houstonians will likely have another chance to vote on a school bond. They may not have another chance to vote on Mike Miles.
Elon Musk speaks at a rally for Donald Trump in New York on October 27, 2024.Angela Weiss/AFP via GettyElon Musk Brought His Fortune to Texas—What Does That Mean for Our Politics?
Christopher Hooks, 1:31 p.m.
Texas has long been a place where rich men can buy off elected officials easily and under the cover of the law, which is part of what makes our politics so dysfunctional (or, looked at from another perspective, so wonderfully functional). The arrival of the world’s richest man to our shores, though, is another thing altogether. His relocation to Texas means that his attempt to buy a president is a story of Texas inflicting itself on the nation. Elon Musk has sunk something north of $100 million into his America PAC, which he launched with the explicit mission of financing ads and canvassing operations for Trump’s campaign and is beset by questions of both mismanagement and violations of election law. Time will tell if Musk helped or hurt Trump, and it may well be the latter.
Elon Musk Came to Texas to End the Oil Age
But the most startling feature of this election cycle, for us little people who simply live here, is Musk’s introduction into the world of Texas politics. For years he’d dipped his toes—he hired an army of lobbyists to try to win the right to sell Teslas direct to consumers, circumventing the car-dealership cartel in Texas, and he endorsed a candidate or two. This year he put real money into the vending machine that dispenses power at the Texas Legislature, and it has observers of all stripes scratching their heads as to what might come next.
In September, Musk gave $1 million to Texans for Lawsuit Reform. The name is a bit of a misnomer. A participant in the tort reform wars of the 1990s and early 2000s, TLR is today a kind of mother ship political action committee for moderate-ish Republicans, business Republicans—the kind that regularly get challenges from the far right. In October, Musk cut a $2 million check to Judicial Fairness PAC, a TLR-associated group that is supporting Republican appeals court judges across the state. (Why TLR? Well, the group has become embedded with the right-wing tech guy Joe Lonsdale, a California transplant who is setting himself up as a power in Texas. Lonsdale is Musk’s friend.)
Now, $3 million is a fairly sizable investment in Texas politics. That’s the size of the part donation, part loan a PAC supporting Attorney General Ken Paxton gave Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick prior to Paxton’s impeachment trial that may have helped get Paxton acquitted. (After the PAC’s leader was revealed to be associating with the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, Patrick bought Israeli bonds with the money rather than give it back, turning it into an investment.) But it is about one-thousandth of one percent of Musk’s net worth, if we estimate it at a quarter of a trillion dollars. You see the problem. Texas politics is full of petty billionaires and millionaires putting up table stakes and bluffing one another. Musk could, if his interest in the state continues, send everyone home. He could make little warlords like Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, traditional enemies of TLR, look like orphans begging for penny candy.
Musk could, in fact, give TLR a billion dollars and barely feel it. Will he? Well, it’s impossible to say what he’ll want in a year or two: He’s just as likely to ship himself to Mars. It seems highly unlikely that Musk, a pretty distractible sort of fellow, knows quite what his interventions mean—and that large groups of Texas conservatives will now be taught to see him as an enemy. But everyone who pays attention to the Texas Legislature must now have the sense of a casino manager who has watched a truly inexhaustible whale walk in. There’s alarm—and rightly so. But also fascination. How far will he go?
Why Joe Rogan Was Trump’s Last Interview
Christopher Hooks, 12:55 p.m.
Imagine traveling in a time machine to 1984 or 2004 and emerging during one of those elections in which Christian conservatives held sway in the Republican coalition and deviations from the cultural norm by either candidate were treated as gaffes. Then imagine telling past innocents that one of the most important media figures in the 2024 election is Joe Rogan, an ex-reality TV host who credits DMT, the psychedelic drug famed for facilitating encounters with what its users call “machine elves,” with saving his life. We’ve come a long way, baby.
Toward the end of their campaigns, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris courted Rogan, the nation’s most popular podcaster who has more than 18 million followers on YouTube. According to Rogan, Harris was unwilling to travel to Austin and sit for the full duration of a typical three-hour podcast. Trump was perfectly happy to travel—and sit for the full three hours— to give Rogan his campaign’s last big interview. It was a sympathetic interview, and Rogan didn’t challenge him very much. But Trump’s haters might not have expected him to hang tough for 179 minutes, skipping between various policy questions and talking in a slightly more normal tone than he does when he’s in front of an audience. It was one of the better showcases he could have hoped for.
On Monday night, Rogan posted a new interview with Elon Musk, one of Trump’s top donors, and announced incidentally that he was offering his own endorsement of Trump. This is not the best-timed endorsement—though it’s better than Beyoncé’s 2018 endorsement of Beto O’Rourke, which came in the middle of Election Day—but it testifies to the power of a sort of new Austin axis in Texas politics: right-wing tech money (Musk, Joe Lonsdale, others), culturally right-wing new media (Rogan and other podcaster-comedians such as Tony Hinchcliffe, who soured the national Latino vote for the Donald), and national Republicans who are ready to get down and dirty with them.
How Concerning Is It That Texas is Rejecting Federal Election Monitors?
Christopher Hooks, 11:59 a.m.
Stop the steal! Late on Friday evening, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, who oversees elections, notified the federal Department of Justice that, per Texas law, federal election observers would not be allowed inside polling places or ballot-counting centers. The Feds hoped to keep tabs on the count in eight counties—mainly population centers including Harris (Houston), Dallas, and Bexar (San Antonio). But they were also going to watch hot spots such as Waller County (on the outskirts of the Houston metropolitan area). Voters from the historically Black Prairie View A&M University live close to majority Republican suburbs, which has caused controversy at the local level about where to put polling locations and how to conduct elections. (The department is also sending observers to eight locations in deep-blue Massachusetts, the Texas Tribune points out.)
Since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law by a Texan, the DOJ has sent observers across the country to keep tabs on local election officials. When the U.S. Supreme Court gutted key parts of the law a few years ago, those mandatory checks became effectively voluntary. Texas is attempting to opt out. Nelson said she was simply following the law. But on Monday, Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Justice Department to stop the observer missions for good.
This story could have been designed in a laboratory to cause alarm among Texas Democrats. What are GOP state leaders trying to hide? But while there’s no good logic not to allow the federal observers—and while several of the affected counties would likely have welcomed them—their presence or lack thereof in the state is not going to affect the vote count for a few reasons.
The biggest is that the best election observers are Texans themselves—not elected county or state officials, whom you may not trust. But every polling place and every counting center is staffed by volunteers, normal citizens who are generally conscientious and civic-minded. There will be a lot of eyes on what happens here on Tuesday. If you’re a Democrat worried about Republican election rigging, know that the most populous counties in Texas are run by Democratic-elected officials who still have a wide latitude over how to run their elections. If you’re a Republican worried about Democrat election rigging, know that Republicans at the state level are watching them very closely.
A few things are true at once: Federal oversight of Texas elections helped reassure the public about the fairness of elections for decades. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act was a mistake. Texas officials often fearmonger about election fraud and unnecessarily interfere in how local elections are run.
But it’s also the case that our elections are generally secure and fair. So go vote!
Will Democrats Fail to Make Gains in the Texas House for the Third Time in a Row?
Forrest Wilder, 11:01 a.m.
The natural tendency in political journalism is to write about action, close races, and compelling campaigns that will decide the balance of power. And that’s by and large what I’m fixing to do. But first, at the outset, let’s state that perhaps the most remarkable thing about races for the Legislature is how few there are. Out of 31 Texas Senate seats, just one of them—a Brownsville-anchored Rio Grande Valley district held by Democrat Morgan LaMantia—is a plausible pickup for the opposite party. And in the usually volatile 150-seat Texas House there are maybe 10 seats in contention. That’s because we’re only two election cycles deep after the Republican-dominated Legislature drew maps that protect Republican incumbents and reduce the number of competitive districts.
How the Texas House Could Become More Radical
Thanks to gerrymandering and Democrats’ inability to capitalize on opportunities in 2020 and 2022, the makeup of the House has been incredibly stable since 2018, the Trump midterms when Beto O’Rourke nearly toppled Ted Cruz. That year, Democrats netted twelve seats in the House, leaving the balance 83 Rs to 67 Ds. But in 2020, despite big promises and lots of cash, Democrats failed to net a single seat. One problem: Lots of voters in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs split their tickets, voting for Joe Biden but picking Republicans down-ballot. That helped state lawmakers such as Angie Chen Button and Morgan Meyer, both representing parts of the Metroplex, barely hang onto their seats. Then, in 2021, Rio Grande Valley Democrat Ryan Guillen switched parties and Republican John Lujan won a special election in a San Antonio–area district. The House now stood at 85–65. In 2022 Republicans actually netted another seat, bringing the margin to 86–64. In other words, in six years, things hardly moved.
With a solid majority—and an increasingly right-wing one—the Republicans in the Lege were able to deliver in 2021 and 2023 on many priorities: the nation’s harshest restrictions on voting and abortion, massive spending on border security, permitless carry of handguns, an unconstitutional book ban, significant cuts to property taxes, and various attacks on trans Texans.
That brings us to 2024. Will anything change? Democrats would need to win a dozen seats to take control of the House. That is very unlikely. Only five races in 2022 were decided by fewer than ten percentage points, only three were decided by fewer than five, and one of them is held by a Democrat now. And only two districts currently held by a Republican House member would have been won by Biden in 2020 under the new maps. Barring a massive overperformance by Kamala Harris not currently evident in any polling, it’s hard to see how that could happen—the poker equivalent of drawing an inside straight. It doesn’t help Democrats that in the homestretch, Republican candidates are in some cases significantly outspending them, with Greg Abbott and allied big business political action committees opening up their nearly unlimited pocketbooks. So the more realistic range of outcomes is, on one end, Republicans netting a few seats and solidifying their majority, or on the other Democrats picking up a handful, maybe more.
That’s not to say there isn’t anything at stake. There is. At the top of the list: private-school vouchers. Backed by millions in out-of-state money from Pennsylvania billionaire hedge fund manager Jeff Yass, Governor Greg Abbott has spent 2023 and 2024 in a scorched-earth campaign to get the Legislature to pass legislation that would direct taxpayer funding for public schools to private institutions. Despite four special sessions, he was unable to get his bill through the Texas House last year. Democrats and a bloc of sixteen rural Republicans squelched the effort. But Abbott got his revenge this spring, when he helped defeat nine of those rural Republicans in the primaries and runoffs. Now he has a slim pro-voucher majority if he can hold serve on Tuesday.
On the target list for Democrats are a half dozen Republican incumbents—Chen Button, Lujan, Meyer, as well as Ben Bumgarner (southern Denton County/Flower Mound and Lewisville), Caroline Harris (Williamson County/Round Rock and Taylor), and Janie Lopez (Rio Grande Valley/Harlingen and Brownsville)—who back Abbott’s voucher plan. If they could knock off a few of those incumbents, Abbott’s plan could be in jeopardy.
Also in play is the House speakership. To the surprise of many, House Speaker Dade Phelan weathered a furious onslaught in the primary from Donald Trump, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and the Tim Dunn/Farris Wilks billionaire axis of the party. Phelan, who represents a southeast Texas district in Beaumont and Orange, narrowly squeaked by his opponent in a runoff. But he lost many of his lieutenants and backers during the primaries and faces a challenge to his speakership from State Representative David Cook, who has the backing of further right-wing legislators. Phelan could quiet the rebellion if he protects some of his remaining allies—Meyer and Chen Button come to mind—while seeing some of the angrier Ken Paxton/Abbott allies get picked off by Democrats, not that he’d ever admit that.
Bottom line: Don’t expect major shifts in the Legislature, but Democrats have a shot, yet again, of at least slowing the increasingly radical drift of the GOP.
Texans line up to vote early at the Great Northwest Public Library in San Antonio on October 21, 2024.Carlos Kosienski/Sipa via AP
Is Your Vote Public Information or Will It Be Kept Secret?
Allegra Hobbs, 10:02 a.m.
Kamala Harris’s campaign last week launched an ad with a fairly specific target audience: the wives of Trump voters who are secretly pro-Harris. The spot shows a woman entering a polling place with her MAGA-coded husband (wearing an American flag baseball cap) only to cast a vote for Harris in the privacy of the booth, after some knowing eye contact with the woman across from her. “Did you make the right choice, honey?” her husband asks after. She assures him she did.
The ad prompted the expected backlash from some right-wing men furious at the thought of a woman lying to her husband, or straying from his God-given male judgment in the voting booth (thereby validating the ad’s very existence). The ad reemphasizes a message from Harris campaign events: “Your vote is your choice,” said Representative Elissa Slotkin, addressing a crowd in Michigan last week. “You don’t have to tell anyone.”
True! But in Texas, the idea that our votes are secret—a cornerstone of free and fair elections—was called into question this past summer. After the primary, the right-wing blog Current Revolt claimed to have obtained Texas GOP Chair Matt Rinaldi’s ballot, which showed he’d voted for Ron DeSantis instead of Trump, as he said he would. (Rinaldi never confirmed or denied that it was his.) The Texas Tribune and Votebeat did some reporting to verify that it was, in fact, possible to obtain ballots—which do not include the name of the ballot caster—via open records requests and then to identify a specific voter by cross-referencing some information on the ballot with other publicly available information that the Texas Legislature has made easier to access in response to election fraud panic. Later, others were able to find Colin Allred’s primary ballot.
The law hasn’t changed since then, per se, but officials have taken steps aimed at preserving ballot secrecy. The Texas Secretary of State’s office recently issued an advisory to election officials overseeing such records requests. The agency lays out what information officials may redact from ballots before releasing them. Attorney General Ken Paxton also issued a legal opinion urging officials to safeguard voter privacy.
So are our ballots protected? First, it should be noted that tracking down a ballot via records request and working to identify its likely voter based on a constellation of information is not easy. Even if someone wanted to see how you voted, and if they happened to be knowledgeable enough to find your ballot, it would take a lot of work. But second, if the county officials do their jobs and heed the Secretary of State’s guidance, any potentially identifiable information would be redacted from a ballot obtained through an open records request.
It may seem silly we have to consider such things in the first place, but it’s all in the name of “election transparency.” Don’t you feel safe?
Republicans Could Gain Ground in These South Texas Congressional Districts
Christopher Hooks, 9:01 a.m.
The Trump era hurt the GOP’s electoral prospects in suburbs across Texas, but in one part of the state they made striking gains. Hispanics in South Texas and along the border began to vote more like their white rural brethren and less like urban Texans. This year, we’ll have a chance to examine how that shift is playing out in three congressional districts that run north from the border with Mexico.
The safest of the three for Texas Democrats is, funnily enough, the one in which their candidate is facing jail time. Incumbent Congressman Henry Cuellar, who represents the Twenty-Eighth, a district that runs from Laredo up to Bexar County, was indicted earlier this year on charges of bribery and money laundering. He’s accused of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from Mexican and Azerbaijani interests. (He denies wrongdoing.) National Republicans briefly talked tough about taking his seat, but their candidate Jay Furman raised just $323,000 in the months before the election compared to Cuellar’s $2.3 million, making the incumbent a prohibitive favorite to win reelection. The question for the future is how much ground he’ll lose—that might show the district’s direction if Cuellar is forced to leave the stage.
More interesting are two rematches next door. The Fifteenth Congressional District, which runs from Hidalgo County up to an area east of Bexar, was made more Republican during the last round of redistricting in 2021—causing longtime Democratic incumbent Vincente Gonzalez to run in a neighboring district instead. It was the top Republican target in 2022, when Republican Monica De La Cruz beat Democratic challenger Michelle Vallejo by 8.5 points—and became a GOP rising star in the process. Vallejo is up again this year, but the math in her district remains tough.
Texans Like Republicans. They Aren’t So Sure About Ted Cruz.
Michael Hardy, 8:07 a.m.
It’s the most expensive congressional race in the country: a heavyweight slugfest between two-term Republican senator Ted Cruz and three-term Democratic congressman Colin Allred. Control of the U.S. Senate may be at stake, so each campaign has spent tens of millions of dollars blanketing our airwaves with some of the nastiest political ads in recent memory. As Cruz has acknowledged, this should be an easy race for him. He’s the Republican incumbent in a Republican-dominated state that is widely expected to vote for former President Donald Trump. Yet the current polling average from FiveThirtyEight shows that Cruz leads Allred by just three points.
Ted Cruz Would Like to Reintroduce Himself
Six years ago, Cruz beat then-Congressman Beto O’Rourke by about the same margin. That should have been a wake-up call for a senator who spent most of his first term ignoring his home state in favor of building a national brand. Eight months after taking office, Cruz helped shut down the federal government in a highly publicized but doomed attempt to gut the Affordable Care Act. Encouraged by the publicity, he then launched a doomed presidential campaign. In 2020, he played a leading role in Trump’s effort to overturn the presidential election. Indeed, Cruz has little to show for twelve years in the Senate other than a thrice-weekly podcast and a long list of embittered colleagues.
Allred is hoping that Texans are tired of the drama. He has made Cruz’s alleged dereliction of duty—his attempt to interfere with the transfer of power to Joe Biden, his escape to Cancún during the 2021 ice storm, his lucrative podcast—the centerpiece of his campaign. “We don’t have to be embarrassed by our senator,” Allred said during the race’s single debate. “We can get a new one.” In turn, Cruz has tried to paint Allred as too liberal for Texas, highlighting the Dallas congressman’s support of transgender rights and opposition to Trump’s border wall. (Allred has walked back his position on the wall and left his position on transgender athletes vague.)
Just how unpopular must a Republican be to lose an election in Texas? Ted Cruz is surely praying that he doesn’t find out.
With or Without Trump, an Identity Crisis for the Texas GOP
Christopher Hooks, 6:58 a.m.
But Trump humiliated Cruz, and in November the altered political landscape the Don brought about washed out Dan’s son Ryan Patrick, a Harris County judge. Dan Patrick came onstage late at night to admit that Republicans had been creamed in Houston, and he looked more worried than conflicted. The GOP triumphed nationally and was blown out in Texas cities, where new Democratic voters and perplexed suburbanites didn’t love the party’s new direction. From the start, the Texas GOP had an uneasy relationship with Trump.
Problems abounded. Trump’s party continued to shed voters in Texas that the GOP could once rely on in every election. In the modern period, Texas Democrats have never gotten closer to winning statewide than when he was in the White House. In 2016, Trump won the state by 9 percentage points. In 2020, he won by just 5.6 points. In the 2018 midterm elections, Republicans Cruz, Patrick, and Attorney General Ken Paxton won by just 2.6 to 5 points. The party partially recovered during Biden’s term, but it remained on an unsustainable trajectory.
While the GOP lost voters in the middle, a contingent of right-wing Republicans in the state never came around to Trump either. They mistrust him. He did not come up in their shared political faith. As the Texas GOP has pushed extreme antiabortion laws without exceptions, Trump has been moderate on the issue and come out against a national ban. In March, then-chair of the Texas GOP Matt Rinaldi said he voted for Trump in this year’s primary, but a leaked ballot revealed that he lied, having voted for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Grumbling within the Christian right has persisted throughout the year, with some Texans greeting this summer’s Republican National Convention—whose stars included Amber Rose, Hulk Hogan, and Kid Rock—with bafflement.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry GOP
If Trump wins, there is at least the possibility that the Texas GOP will face another crisis year as in 2018. And if Trump loses—assuming he does not appear likely to run again—the party will have to finally sort out what it believes, why, and how to sell its beliefs to voters. These actions will require muscles that the Republican Party has allowed to atrophy.
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris Agree: Texas Is a Warning
Christopher Hooks, 6:00 a.m., 11/5/24
This summer, amid a drumbeat of dramatic, bizarre, and unprecedented events—among them an assassination attempt that came inches from killing the Republican candidate, an incumbent president’s inability to perform at a debate, and the revelation that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had part of his brain consumed by a pork-borne parasitic worm—it was common to hear that this was the most exciting presidential campaign in living memory. In a sense it was. But in another sense, for all its plot twists and turns, it was a strangely stable contest. Only one event, the change at the top of the Democratic ticket, really mattered. When Joe Biden was running, he consistently trailed Donald Trump in the polls. When Kamala Harris took over, she consistently led. For all the chaos of the last eight years, the country seems to be very finely divided.
Another paradox is that, while the stakes feel very high, and surely they are, this has been a largely substance-free campaign. The candidates have run on vibes. Trump says the vibes are rancid, and that only he can fix it. Kamala says the vibes used to be quite bad, and now they’re better, and “we’re not going back.” Americans may know enough about what the two candidates represent—except for those mysterious undecided voters, poor dears—that the nominees need not say much else.
Trump had the Republican party scrap its traditional platform and replaced it with a vague, brief assertion that his principles were the right principles. He has pledged the largest mass deportation campaign in our nation’s history—which, if carried out, would wreck the economy, tear families apart, and create a humanitarian crisis within the borders of the United States. He has little else—he’ll eliminate taxes on tips, maybe. The rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation produced a policy-dense blueprint for his second term, the famous Project 2025, and Trump angrily denounced it and banished Heritage.
Harris has mostly campaigned on repairing the damage of the first Trump term—beginning with the restoration of abortion rights—and preventing the damage of a second. She otherwise had to scramble to write her own policy portfolio, and it’s light on substance. There is a call for more housing and some other white papers, but no bolder attempt to reform or improve the government is on offer. A Kennedy—a dollar-store Kennedy, but a Kennedy nonetheless—campaigns for the Republican. A Cheney campaigns for the Democrat.
This is the first presidential election since at least the 1970s in which no notable Texan ran for the top office in one of the party primaries or appears on one of the tickets. The state also wasn’t properly contested by both parties in the general. Instead, Texas served a different role: a warning. In the Trump campaign’s telling, our state was besieged by an endless wave of migrants preying upon the innocent who, if not for our frontier strength, would soon be in Wisconsin. In the Democratic telling, Texans were the canary in the coal mine for the national regression of abortion law. At the convention and at a Houston rally before the election, Harris highlighted Texas women who suffered because of Trump’s Supreme Court. One of the few things on which both candidates could agree, it turns out, is that Texas is kind of a hellhole.
What’s at Stake in the “Most Important Election of a Lifetime”
Ben Rowen, 11:00 a.m., 11/4/24
This election, as many before it, has been billed as the most important one in a lifetime. As with any presidential vote, it is indeed consequential and there’s lots to follow (more below). But the irony for Texas voters is that the 2024 general election is not even the most important election in 2024.
Typically, November races in our state have little at stake. Republicans have dominated statewide elections–including those for the U.S. Senate–for three decades, meaning that usually not much is in play on the top of the ballot. The federal and state legislative maps, meanwhile, have been so gerrymandered as to make nearly every outcome certain. If last March you sat out the primaries, in which each party’s nominees were selected, you missed the major opportunity to determine your next batch of elected officials.
But there’s still time to vote if you haven’t already and plenty to watch for if you have.
Here are the major storylines we’ll be following:
Who votes for Donald Trump.
The former president enjoys a lead here of anywhere from 7 to 11 percentage points over Vice President Kamala Harris, according to the most recent polls. Democrats often speak of Texas as a blue state in waiting—based on plenty of faulty demographic assumptions. But even if that were true, Harris’s current chances are about as good here as Trump’s are in Colorado and New Mexico, which no one speaks of as swing states (even if the Trump campaign made a recent stop in the latter). Don’t just take my word: the candidates aren’t treating it as a battleground either. They’ve made stops here, but they’ve served only to offer admonishments to out-of-staters about what their states could look like if the other party wins.
That said, we’ll be able to get a good read on the direction of the Texas electorate by breaking down how Trump wins here, assuming of course there isn’t a colossal upset. Even as Trump has carried the state, the Texas suburbs have shifted away from him in recent elections (much more so than the rest of the GOP slate), as the Democrats increasingly become the party of college-educated voters. Conversely, Tejanos—most prominently in South Texas but also in the state’s biggest cities—shifted rightward in 2020. Will those trends continue?
Can Ted Cruz survive Colin Allred’s challenge?
After Beto O’Rourke set a high-water mark for Democrats in the state in his 2018 race for the U.S. Senate against Cruz, Democrats grew hopeful that the long-dormant Democratic Texas was finally blooming. The national party poured resources into the state only to face-plant in 2020, when Senator John Cornyn earned more votes than any candidate in Texas history to date, en route to both crushing his Democratic challenger and winning more votes than Trump. Allred is polling close to Cruz—he’s down about 3 to 5 percentage points, depending on the survey— though there remains a healthy bloc of still-undecided voters, who tend to break toward the GOP in Texas, and the Democrat remains a heavy underdog.
If Allred pulls off a victory, we might have entered our purple-state era. If he doesn’t, we’ll be watching how Cruz’s margin compares with Trump’s for potential signals about what that portends for the GOP. Are Texans getting more Democratic, or do many just dislike the figurehead atop the ballot while still loving his partymates below him?
Will Republicans or ultra-Republicans control the Texas House?
The balance of power between the parties in the Texas House won’t change, barring a blue wave of unprecedented proportion, but the balance of power between factions of the GOP might. Ahead of the 2025 Lege session, very-right-wing-but-relatively-moderate two-term Speaker Dade Phelan will face a speakership challenge from the very-right-and-not-at-all-moderate wing of his party—a group animated by opposition to the chamber’s impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton. More than two dozen GOP candidates have pledged to oppose Phelan, end the longtime process of letting Democrats chair committees, and prevent any Democratic bills from coming to vote until the grassroots right’s policy demands are met. Democrats won’t win the House, but if they can pick off some of the Phelan opponents in the GOP caucus, they can possibly save his Speaker bid and prevent themselves from becoming furniture in the Capitol. (Right now, they are more like smart home devices: approximating sentience, occasionally able to make their voice heard and ignored, and often dysfunctional.)
Ironically, two of the best pickup opportunities for Democrats are seats held by Republican Phelan allies in the Dallas burbs. If Dems knock them off, it might turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory if it costs Phelan his support within his caucus.
The South Texas battleground.
If you live in one of 35 of the 38 congressional districts in the state—anywhere outside of South Texas—your representative in the 199th Congress was decided in the primary. But those remaining three districts are important for determining control of the U.S. House, and it’s worth following along even if you don’t live there:
TX-15: After Trump’s overperformance in the Rio Grande Valley in the 2020 presidential election, GOP mapmakers tried to carve a Republican congressional district into South Texas in 2021. They were successful: In 2022, Republican Monica De La Cruz became the first Republican elected to a full congressional term (NB: see below for why “full” is needed as a modifier) in the Rio Grande Valley since Reconstruction when she defeated Democrat Michelle Vallejo. They face off again in the Fifteenth, which runs from McAllen to the San Antonio suburbs, in a race De La Cruz is likely to win.
TX-34: In 2022, Democrat Filemon Vela retired from Congress early, and Democrats struggled to find a candidate to run in a special election to replace him. Mayra Flores, a Republican who was born in Mexico and whose family immigrated to the Valley and picked cotton to support themselves, vied for the seat as a staunch border hawk. She won the partial term, becoming the first Republican to represent the Valley since Reconstruction, but lost to Democrat Vicente Gonzalez later that year in a bid for a full term. Gonzalez remains a favorite in their rematch in the Thirty-Fourth, which stretches from Brownsville nearly all the way to Corpus Christi.
TX-28: Democrats would not lose the Laredo-anchored Twenty-Eighth in a normal year, but their candidate, Henry Cuellar, has made this year anything but normal. Across the country Democrats have run mostly as the upholders of law and order against the party of Donald Trump, a felon, and as defenders of abortion rights. This places Cuellar in an odd spot: In April, he was charged by the Department of Justice on counts of bribery and money laundering, and he is the last anti–abortion rights Democrat in the House. His campaign has gone quiet, seemingly flipping an old maxim on its head: If you have nothing mean to say about your opponents that couldn’t be said about you, say nothing. Nonetheless he remains a heavy favorite over Navy vet Jay Furman.
What Do We Know So Far?
You’ll have to follow along tomorrow for analysis of all those races—as well as those for the Railroad Commission (the oil and gas regulatory group and the most misleadingly named body in a bureaucracy full of euphemisms such as the “sunset commission”), the Texas Supreme Court, and the Court of Criminal Appeals—but the two-week early voting period does provide some clues as to what direction Texas will go. Nearly nine million Texans have already voted. Because the state does not have registration by party and the ballots are, of course, secret, the best way to tell an early voter’s preference is by looking at what primaries they have voted in in the past. Let’s take a look.
Right now, 1.2 million more Republican primary voters and those in their households have voted than have Democratic primary voters and those in their households, according to political consultant Ross Hunt. After the early voting period in 2020, that gap was about 850,000. It’s possible Democratic voters will flood the polls tomorrow, but the shortfall these numbers imply means they have to make up significant ground to be competitive.
Now What?
If you are one of the nine million or so registered Texans who haven’t voted already, right now you are among the state’s largest political faction. (In every recent election, the number of nonvoters has dwarfed the number of voters for the winning political party.) But you don’t have to be. Click here to find out where your polling place is. Remember to bring a photo ID and check here to confirm you have an acceptable one.
There are innumerable rationalizations for not voting. In 2022, ahead of another election spoken of as the most important in Texas history, I wanted to get a sense of why so many in our state don’t go to the polls. In Pecos, a West Texas oil town in one of the state’s lowest-turnout counties, I chatted with a clerk at a dollar store. As she rang up a soda, she told me that she, like so many others, wouldn’t bother to cast a ballot that year. By way of explanation, she recited the expression “one vote can make a difference.” When I bemusedly asked why, then, she wouldn’t be exercising her power, she bashfully told me that she didn’t trust herself with it.
It should go without saying that this is a silly way to think of a civic duty. If you’ve yet to make up your mind on who to vote for, you have a day and change to do so, and I refer you to our corpus of political coverage. Your ballot—contrary to the concern of the Pecos cashier—almost certainly won’t be a deciding one, but you should still vote as if it will be.
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