Texas Politics & Government: Ideas and Institutions

The UT/TT Texas Poll published their November 2015 poll. The party identification of registered voters hasn't changed much, which is expected. The percentage of strong Republicans remains at about one-fourth of the registered voters. Strong Democrats are a little more than one-sixth of the registered voters. Depending on how one categorizes "leaners," Texas is either nearly a majority Republican or an equally-divided electorate: one-third Republican, one-third Democratic, and one-third independent.

Recently, Steven Greene, whom I admire as a political scientist and whose blog I follow closely, posted on "Why Asian-Americans Are Democrats." I went to the original source, a SSRN article and sent this in an email to Steven: I checked the article that you referenced by the political scientists and found it lacking. First, most of the support for Asian Americans being Democrats is based on the voting behavior of Asian Americans rather than their party identification. The support for Asian Americans identifying as Democrats from the ANES is based on extremely small samples (42 and 107). Furthermore, their statement about Asian Americans’ party identification is not supported by at least one of the sources they cite. Here is their quote: Kuo, Alexander, Neil Malhotra, and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, “Why Do Asian Americans Identify as Democrats? Testing Theories of Social Exclusion and Intergroup Solidarity.” SSRN. Feb 25, 2014: 11. “More recent empirical work using larg...

I wasn't even close with my prediction. My low prediction was 1,834,185, which is 251,039 more votes than were cast (1,583,148). That is an error of almost 16 percent. Why was it so far from the actual. My prediction was predicated on the early vote in the 15 largest counties in Texas making up 26.39 percent of the total vote. In reality, the early vote in those counties made up almost 32 percent of the total vote. My bad!