Texas Politics & Government: Ideas and Institutions

In Austin, Texas, two important changes in voting for Austin City Council members were implemented in November 2014. First, Austin moved from an at-large-by-place election to a single-member district election for its council members, and at the same time, increased the council from six members and a mayor to ten council members and a mayor. Second, the election date was moved from the first Saturday in May to the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, which coincides with the general election to elect national, state, and county officials. In the first election under this system, seventy candidates were competing in the ten single-member districts. In the election on November 4, 2014, only two of the ten council candidates won a majority of the votes in the district; so eight districts were scheduled to hold runoff elections between the two highest vote getters on December 16, 2014. Subsequently, one candidate withdrew, leaving seven districts to conduct runoff elec

The results on November 4th were not what Democrats had hoped for, and as a result, there are many assessments of Wendy Davis’ campaign and the efforts of Battleground Texas that assign blame for the poor showing (see this , this , this or this ). That is not the purpose of this post. I want to move forward—to indicate what might be different about 2018. In Part I, I will assess what happened in 2014. First, what was the composition of the electorate and which gubernatorial candidate did each category favor? From the exit poll, we get a good idea of who voted and for whom they voted. So here are the salient data. Females were more prominent among voters than males, but the expectation that Wendy Davis would do better than Republican Greg Abbott was incorrect: Abbott received 54 percent of the female vote, and Davis received 45 percent. A closer examination of the vote by gender reveals Davis’ strengths as well as her weaknesses. First, Davis did best among African American

There are 16,679,393 eligible voters (VEP) in Texas. This number excludes people under 18 years of age as well as those disenfranchised because of a felony or who are not citizens of the United States. Here is what those people did on Election Day (only 28.4 percent of VEP voted). If you're a Texan who is eligible to vote but didn't, I hope that you're embarrassed. If you're not registered to vote, you need to do so!

First, I predicted the total early vote in the state based on an estimation of the percentage of the total early vote that the early votel in the SOS counties (the 15 most populous counties in Texas) would represent. I predicted that it could be 67.16 percent. In actuality, it was 67.32 percent, which made my estimate of the total early vote 5,950 votes more than the actual early vote. Year Day 12 Total EV D12/TEV 2006 1,074,824 1,728,030 62.20% 2008 3,556,156 5,351,660 66.45% 2010 1,731,589 2,640,918 65.57% 2012 3,407,497 5,020,901 67.87% 2014 1,715,731 2,554,692 67.16% Prediction 2014 1,715,731 2,548,742 67.32% Actual Then I used my prediction of the total early vote in the state to predict the