Some quick takeaways from the Special Election in Texas for the Sixth Congressional District.
First, Texas uses a “jungle primary” for special elections. In plain English, that is a non-partisan primary with a run-off if nobody gets 50% of the vote. And because multiple candidates from a party can file, the parties can be forced to the sideline in the first round when there is no “consensus” pick. In this case, there were eleven Republicans and ten Democrats. If you translated the votes for each party into a partisan primary, the leading candidate in each party get about 33% of the votes for that primary. Needless to say that type of split makes it impossible for the party to push its voters to unify behind the party’s preferred candidate.
Second, as is normal for special elections, the turnout was very, very low. The final count was fewer than 80,000 votes which is less than 25% of the people who voted in November. For the reason noted above, the Democratic Party was not able to field a GOTV vote operation. But it is easy to see how such an operation could have made a difference. The Democratic candidate in 2020 got over 149,000 votes. If even 50,000 Democrats had shown up, the leading Democratic candidate would probably have finished first. If 75,000 Democrats had shown up, it would be two Democrats advancing to the run-off.
Even though midterms are notoriously bad for the party of the president, the simple fact is that Democrats could win in 2022 if Democrats vote. Given typical midterm turnout, if even 55 million of the people who voted for President Biden vote in 2022, it could be a good year for Democrats around the country. There are a lot of bills being held up by the fact that the Senate is split 50-50 and some Democratic Senators want to go slow and preserve the filibuster. If we can keep the House and win two or three of the winnable Senate seats (Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Ohio), then we might be able to finish the job in 2023. But that will require people who usually skip the midterms to decide that this election is too important to skip.
Third, right now, it looks like the Republicans have dodged a bullet by less than 500 votes. With two Republicans advancing to the run-off, they will hold this seat. As Democrats, we should help to elect the least Trumpy of the two candidates (but neither looks particularly Trumpy at the present time). The fact that the partisan breakdown of the vote seems to have reverted back to the pre-Trump results in this district may have some impact later this year when Texas redraws its lines. I would not read too much into the results of a special election, but there will be a temptation on the part of the Texas Legislature to assume that suburban Republicans will return to the fold when they draw the lines. If the Legislature makes that assumption, Texas could be a real battleground in 2022 as Democrats go after a lot of winnable suburban seats that Republicans think lean Republican.
In short, yesterday was a bad day for Democrats in Texas. But some of the reasons why it was a bad day are unique to Texas, and it shows what we need to do over the next 18 months to win in 2022. We are the party that is running on a program that has the support of most potential voters, but we need them vote in 2022.
