Those Battleground Texas warriors that moved down here from
Chicago to turn Texas blue may need to take out a long-term lease on their
apartments in Austin. It looks like it’s going to be a long battle.
In this post I am going to take a look at voting in Texas from
the 30,000-foot level. Among other things, I want to try to provide some
perspective that readers can use to assess the chances of a Democrat being elected
to a statewide office in the next few election cycles. Basically, there are two
chances; slim and none.
One of the most important things to understand about Texas
elections is that a majority of Texas voters cast their votes with a single, straight-party
vote. Thus, they are not casting votes for individual candidates. Rather, they are
voting for party labels.
In essence, state elections have been nationalized. The
electorate is polarized along party lines and Republicans have a clear advantage.
The candidates themselves don’t matter much; a strong Democratic candidate is
not going to beat a weak Republican.
In the 2012 general election two out of every three votes
cast was a straight-party vote. As a result, in the 2012 U.S. Senate contest where
more than 7.6 million votes were cast for either Ted Cruz or Paul Sadler; nearly
five million of those votes – more than 65 percent – were cast by straight-ticket.[i]
That means that, in Cruz’s case, barely 39 percent of the
people that voted for him actually selected him on a ballot by placing a mark
or pulling a lever next to his name. For Sadler, it was just 28 percent.
The second thing that is important to understand is that, for
at least two decades now, Republicans have received substantially more
straight-ticket votes than Democrats; and the gap has been increasing in favor
of the Republicans in recent years. In the 2012 general election Republicans
got more than 54 percent of the straight-ticket votes that were cast for one of the
two major parties. For Cruz and every other Republican running for a statewide
elective office in the 2012 general election that translated into a 429,159 vote
lead over their Democratic rival before a single “pick & choose” ballot was
counted.
To beat Sadler and win the senate seat Cruz needed about 3.8
million votes and he got a whopping 2.7 million them (71 percent) from Republican
straight-ticket voters. Thus, Cruz needed just 1.1 million additional votes
from the “pick & choose” voters - less than 42 percent - to win the
election. These numbers are not unique to the senate contest; they were similar
for every other race on the 2012 general election ballot that had both a
Democratic and Republican candidate.
Obviously, that’s bad news for Democrats but the worse news
for Democrats is that Republicans are doing even better with the “pick &
choose” voters than they are with the straight-ticket voters. In the senate
race Cruz needed only 1.1 million votes from the “pick & choose” group to win
but he got 1.7 million – nearly 66 percent. That means that, even if the
Democrats had matched the Republicans in the straight-ticket vote (which they
have not done for at least two decades) Cruz would have easily defeated Sadler.
To summarize the situation: Democrats start off in a hole
that is dug by the straight-ticket vote; the hole is dug deeper by the
“pick & choose” vote; and the Democrats end up getting buried.
Because the numbers in the other statewide contests that
pitted a Republican against a Democrat were very similar to those in the senate
race it suggests to me that party affiliation was also a primary influence in the
voting behavior of the “pick & choose” voters.
The pattern in the 2010 gubernatorial race between Rick
Perry and Bill White was similar.
Straight-ticket votes gave Perry a nearly half-million vote
lead. Thus, to win the election White needed to get more than 62 percent of the
“pick & choose” vote. Instead he got less than 47 percent and lost to Perry
by nearly 13 percentage points.
It seems very clear that, in general elections, the party
affiliation is more important than the candidate for most voters; and it is equally
clear that a solid majority of those voters consistently favor the Republican
brand.
There are Rays of
Hope for Democrats
There are some prospects that give Democrats hope for the
future.
Probably the most-talked about is the notion that Democrats
will benefit from the increasing number of Latinos. The theory is that
Hispanics are more likely to vote Democratic; therefore (the theory goes) there
will be a corresponding increase in the percentage of votes for Democrats as
the Hispanic percentage of the state’s population increases; which it has been
doing in dramatic fashion for decades.
The numbers on this are nothing short of phenomenal. From
2000 to 2010 the state’s population increased by 4.3 million; which is about
the same number of people that live in the entire state of Kentucky, the 26th
largest state in the Union.
Of those new arrivals in our state 3.3 million were
non-Anglo and 2.8 million were Hispanic; which is about the same number of
people that live in the entire state of Utah.
There are other numbers that might be encouraging to
Democrats, if you subscribe to the theory that a higher turnout of voters will favor
Democrats.
Less than 60 percent of the state’s registered voters voted
in the 2012 general election and, in the last gubernatorial election, the
turnout was only 38 percent. Furthermore, only 75 percent of the state’s voting
age population is registered to vote.
The raw numbers on this are also staggering. There are more
than 18 million Texans who are eligible to vote but less than eight million of
them voted in the 2012 general election and less than five million voted in the
2010 gubernatorial election. In other words, there are at least 10 million
potential new Texas voters out there; more than the entire population of
Georgia. In fact, if a new state was created out of only the voting-age Texans
that don’t vote it would be the eighth-largest state in the Union.
That is a hell of a lot of potential new voters.
Obviously, if the theory that a majority of these non-voters
will vote Democratic is correct there is huge upside potential for Democrats if
they can simply increase voter turnout.
Essentially, that’s what Battleground Texas is trying to do.
The problem for Democrats is that their advantages are all hypothetical
what-ifs while the Republican advantages are real and, seemingly, set in partisan
stone.
Democrats Have a
Steep Hill to Climb
To gain some perspective on just how many more voters would have
to go to the polls to elect a Democrat to a statewide office I applied the
“more is better for Democrats” theory to the results of the 2010 gubernatorial
race between Perry and White.
In that race Perry got 2.7 million votes; White got 2.1
million and third-party candidates got about 136,000 (2.73 percent).
In my analysis I assumed that the 2010 results were static
and would carry forward to the 2014 election unchanged; meaning that the
Republican candidate (presumably Greg Abbott) would get the same 2.7 million
votes, the Democratic candidate (presumably Wendy Davis) would get the same 2.1
million votes and the third-party candidates would continue to get the same
2.73 percent of the total votes cast.
Then I introduced two variables:
- Increasing the total number of voters.
- Making various assumptions about the percentage of those new votes that would be cast for Republicans and Democrats.
What I found is that, even if the total number of votes cast
increased by 25 percent and even if three-fourths of those “new” votes were
cast for the Democrat; the Republican would still win the election. If the pool
of voters increased by “only” 20 percent, then 83 percent of the new votes
would have to be cast for the Democrat for the Democratic candidate to win the
election. Even if the Democrat got 100 percent of the “new” votes the total
number of votes cast would have to increase by 13 percent for the Democrat to
win.
What this tells me is that, even if the “more is better for
Democrats” theory is true by a three-to-one margin, and even if there is a
substantial increase in the number of voters, there is probably not going to be
enough of either to elect a Democrat to statewide office in 2014.
For Democrats to have a realistic chance of winning a
statewide election I think there will also need to be a substantial shift in
the voting preferences of those four million or so Texans that are currently
and consistently voting for Republicans.
That’s not to say that Demographic shifts will not help
Democrats. In fact, they already have. Most of the large, urban counties, (where
the majority of Texans live) are now solidly Democratic (Dallas, Travis,
Bexar). In the state’s largest county, Harris (Houston), where 15 percent of
all Texas voters live, it was a virtual dead-heat between President Obama and
Mitt Romney in 2012.
On the other hand, Democrats are barely able to fog a mirror
in most of the larger suburban counties. In Collin County (Plano) where 65
percent of voters voted a straight-party ticket in the 2012 general election nearly
70 percent voted Republican. The numbers were similar in neighboring Denton
County. In Montgomery County (north of Houston) more than 73 percent of the
votes were cast by straight-ticket and more than 82 percent of those
votes were Republican.
Thus, it is difficult to see a plausible path to the
election of a Democrat to a statewide office without some relatively
substantial change in the “brand” preferences of current Republican straight-ticket
voters AND “pick & choose” voters statewide.
The hill to climb seems too steep to be gained solely by new-voter
demographics. Democrats, it seems to me, must gain at least a toehold in the big
suburban counties around Houston and Dallas, and make significant gains within
the ranks of existing Republican voters throughout the state, if they are to
win a statewide election in the foreseeable future.
The Debra Medina
Factor
In the race for governor, there is another possibility; a
third-party candidacy by Tea Party favorite Debra Medina. Medina is an
articulate and effective debater and there has been some talk that a well-heeled
Democrat with deep pockets has offered to fund Medina’s third-party candidacy
if she will agree to debate Davis in dozens of venues across the state.
Why, you may ask, would a Democrat do that?
The idea is that Medina and Abbott will split the Republican
vote, allowing Davis to win with a plurality of the same votes the Democrats
usually get.
I agree that Davis’s chances of winning might improve from
none to slim with Medina in the race. By my calculations, Medina would need to
get about 17 percent of the total vote and about 95 percent of her votes would need
to come at Abbott’s expense for Davis to squeak out a win and become the next
governor. While that may be a stretch it seems far more likely than Davis
beating Abbott in a head-to-head race without a substantial third-party
candidate.
It is worth mentioning that the votes for Medina would
likely reduce the number of straight-ticket Republican votes and that could, in
turn, cost down-ballot Republicans votes they would have otherwise received.
However, even if that did happen, it is hard to imagine any Democrat other than
Davis winning a statewide election in 2014 because those races would not be
impacted by a strong third-party candidate and the Republicans would still
likely receive the bulk of the “pick & choose” vote.
The Few That Choose
As discussed, winning the Republican Primary is tantamount to
victory; thus another aspect of Texas elections that is important to understand
is how relatively few voters decide who the Republican candidates will be.
In the 2012 Republican Primary for the open U.S. Senate seat
1.4 million votes were cast. That’s less than 32 percent of the votes that were
cast for the Republican candidate in the general election; less than 18 percent
of the total votes cast for all candidates in the senate race, just over 11
percent of all registered voters and less than eight percent of the state’s voting
age population.
Then, in the Republican Party Primary runoff between Cruz
and David Dewhurst, the total number of votes cast dropped to 1.1 million,
which is 6.08 percent of the voting age population in the State of Texas.
Of those 1.1 million voters 631,812 voted for the winning
candidate, Cruz. Then, in the general election, 60 percent of the votes that
were cast for Cruz were straight-ticket votes and not votes for the candidate per
se.
With these numbers in mind, I don’t think it is stretching too much to say that the decision to send Ted Cruz to Washington to represent
Texas in the United States Senate was made by roughly 3.5 percent of the
state’s voting-age residents.
[i]
My numbers are based on a study conducted by the Center for Public Policy and
Political Studies at Austin Community College. I have excluded the
straight-ticket votes for third parties, which were less than one percent of
the total straight-ticket vote. The ACC study covered only the most-populous 49
counties, which represent about 84 percent of the votes cast statewide. I then
applied the percentages from the study to the statewide vote totals to
determine my estimates of the state-wide straight-ticket vote.
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