The Presidential race has been beaten to death — perhaps the most noteworthy thing to come out of the Texas Presidential primaries was Marco Rubio’s (likely) failure to meet the 20 percent threshold for delegates. But Texas also had a full primary slate on Super Tuesday. The state doesn’t have a gubernatorial or Senate race on the ballot this year, but there were House and legislative races on the ballot, as well as primaries for many county offices (which are partisan offices in Texas.) And there are some important takeaways from those.
Republicans (Still) Hate Their Incumbents
While no Republican Congressmen actually lost primaries on Tuesday night (or even got forced into a runoff), numerous incumbents won their primaries with unimpressive vote totals. Three Congressmen — John Culberson (TX-07), Kevin Brady (TX-08), and Blake Farenthold (TX-27) — were held below 60 percent of the vote, while two more — Lamar Smith (TX-21) and Pete Sessions (TX-32) — just narrowly cleared that (admittedly arbitrary) bar.
I’ll get to Farenthold first, because he’s probably the least interesting of the three — an accidental Congressman who was swept into office in the 2010 Tea Party wave, then got handed a much friendlier district in the post-Census redistricting cycle. Farenthold is the kind of Congressman you expect to struggle to hold on to his seat; obviously, his district is such that he’s insulated from a real general election challenge, but his unseriousness means he’ll probably always have to face primary challenges.
Culberson and Brady are a different matter. Brady is the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee; Culberson is an eight-term incumbent. Both are among the foremost purveyors of ridiculous tax plans and draconian spending cuts. In other words, they’re the kind of Congressmen who you would think shouldn’t have a tough time in a Republican primary.
Or so we thought. Call this the Trump effect: if there’s an obvious takeaway from the Trump campaign, it’s that Republican primary voters are far less interested in flat-tax proposals and cuts to entitlement programs than Republican politicians would like to believe. Brady appears to have avoided a runoff by about 4,000 votes; Culberson by 5,000 or so. And these men are representing two Houston-area districts that, to be blunt, should be exactly the kinds of places that are the most receptive to batty libertarian-think-tank tax proposals. And remember, Trump got 24 percent of the vote in Culberson’s district and 28 percent in Brady’s district, so this isn’t simply about Trump bringing out the yahoos to the polls.
Short version: if these guys are struggling to avoid a runoff, the Republican swamp fever is worse than we thought.
And things get even worse down the ballot: by my count, a total of eight Republican state House incumbents either lost, are headed to a runoff, or are in a race that’s too close to call as of this writing. In a state where the Democratic Party is barely a viable entity in much of the state (and frequently doesn’t even run candidates), Republican primary fights have become the only way to throw out incumbents.
Issue Proposals: The Subtext
Texas primaries are open to all voters, but — well, just how much crossover is there?
One way to guess the amount of crossover activity is by looking at the “issue proposals” on the ballot. They are non-binding, but they do give voters a say in what goes into the party platform, and they’re sort of a rudimentary opinion poll on issues. But from an analytical perspective, the issue proposals can sometimes give insight into how many voters from the other party are crossing over. In many areas of the state, county offices are effectively determined in the primary — whether Republican (most suburban and rural counties, with a few exceptions) or Democratic (the Rio Grande Valley), with both parties being generally competitive in the urban “core” counties.
The Republican issue proposal results, though, are so all over the map that it’s difficult to get a feel: while Prop 4 (a generic proposal supporting the 10th Amendment) drew the support of 95 percent of primary voters, Prop 2 (“Texas cities and counties should be required to comply with federal immigration laws or be penalized by loss of state funds”) got just 61 percent. Prop 3 — calling for a prohibition on governmental entities deducting union dues from employee paychecks — is about as close to a straight Republican issue as you can get, and that was supported by 83 percent of voters. So it’s probably reasonable to think that about 17 percent of Republican primary voters were crossover votes.
The Democratic primary issue proposals had less resistance — four of them (on livable wages, fairness in the criminal justice system, climate change, and the Voting Rights Act) got 92-93 percent of the vote, while Prop 6 (on comprehensive immigration reform) got 89 percent. In other words, there weren’t a whole lot of Republicans and conservaDems voting in the Democratic primary. Prop 5 (proposing that public universities should be allowed to opt out of campus carry) was a bit more controversial, tabbing 78 percent of the vote. I personally voted for all of the issue proposals except for Prop 5 — which, granted, my reasoning likely differs from some who voted against. I voted against because I don’t think allowing universities to opt out goes far enough — I think that this garbage law should be repealed. Off my soapbox…
Less Action on the Democratic Side
A couple of Democratic Congressmen won their primaries by relatively unimpressive margins, and a state House incumbent was forced into a runoff — but unlike with the Republicans, there were obvious explanations for each.
The primary fights in TX-29 (Gene Green) and TX-33 (Marc Veasey) were, for lack of a better term, factional contests. Green is an Anglo incumbent representing a mostly-Hispanic district who drew a Hispanic primary challenger in the former of ex-Harris County Sheriff and recent mayoral loser Adrian Garcia; Veasey drew a Hispanic primary challenger in a district with a Hispanic plurality in terms of overall population but an African-American plurality of voting-age citizens. Green avoided a runoff by about 2,000 votes, Veasey by about 4,000, but unlike the Republicans who found themselves in trouble, the reasons the margins were relatively close were predictable. In Green’s case, considering that it’s hard to imagine a stronger primary challenger (at least on paper) than Garcia, he seems unlikely to lose a race in the future.
And, state Rep. Ron Reynolds was forced into a runoff (narrowly.) But considering Reynolds was recently convicted on a misdemeanor barratry charge, again, the reason he’s in trouble is specific to him rather than (like the Republicans) just a generic, throw the bums out movement.
If you’ve got commentary on other downballot or local races here in Texas, post them in the comments.