Texas Politics & Government: Ideas and Institutions

After five days of early voting for the runoff elections in the Democratic and Republican primaries, only 3.22 percent of Texas’ more than 15 million registered voters had cast ballots. The numbers are not impressive. The secretary of state’s office usually provides early voting information on the 15 counties with the largest number of registered voters, but for the runoff, the number of counties was increased to 30. Since the Republican Party had no runoff election for any statewide office, there were only 22 of the 30 counties that held runoff elections for Republicans. However, on the Democratic side, with a runoff in the gubernatorial contest, all 30 counties held Democratic runoffs. The chart displays the total ballots cast as a percentage of registered voters in the 30 counties. The 11,793, 711 registered voters in the 30 counties account for 77.3 percent of the 15,249,541 registered voters in Texas. In the Democratic runoff election, 1.19 percent of registered v...

Derek Ryan, Ryan Data in Austin, Texas, provided a report on the voters in Texas’ 2018 primary election. I have copied some of the charts and tables and created an additional chart for commentary. Source : Ryan Data Considering who voted in each party’s primary, nearly four-fifths of Republican primary voters were voters who had previously only voted in Republican primary elections. On the other hand, about two-thirds of Democrats were voters who had previously only voted in Democratic primary elections. For Republicans, just over one-tenth of primary voters were first-time primary participants. On the other hand, just over one-fifth of Democratic primary voters were first-time primary participants. Furthermore, only 2.2 percent of historical Democratic primary voters switched to vote in the Republican primary election. Meanwhile, 4.6 percent of historical Republican primary voters switched to vote in the Democratic primary election. Another table in Ryan’s repor...

Early voting in Texas Primary elections through Day 9. With just two days of early voting remaining, Democrats are exceeding their turnout in the 2016 Democratic primary. Also, the numbers are updated for Day 8 as the numbers from Dallas and Harris County changed dramatically from when I copied and pasted them from the Secretary of State's Web site. Here's the graph.

Day 8 of the Texas primaries continued a trend started on the second day. Democrats are more engaged than Republicans. On Day 8, the number of Democrats voting increased by 82,714 over the previous day. The gap between the turnout for the parties increased dramatically, going from10,742 to 44,157. The spike in 2018 Democratic turnout reflects the increase. Will the trend continue? Will the increased turnout in the Democratic Party primary yield an increase in Democratic turnout in the general election in November? Are the counties in the SOS counties a significant percentage of Texas' registered voters? And if so, are the counties mostly urban counties that tend to support Democratic candidates anyway? I can only answer some of those questions: The SOS counties constitute 65 percent of the registered voters in the state, which means that Texas' 239 other counties contain only 35 percent of the state's registered voters. Indeed, some of the counties are supportive of Democ...

Derek Ryan, a campaign consultant in Austin, provides analyses of voter turnout in reports on his Web site. In a recent report , he provides information on who voted in the Republican and Democratic Primaries through day four of early voting. In my opinion, there are two salient facts: (1) The Republican primary voters are overwhelmingly voters who have voted in previous Republican primaries and no Democratic primaries. On the other hand, almost one in five Democratic voters have no primary voting record but have voted in a general election previously; (2) The enthusiasm seems to be on the Democratic Party's side. Of course, Democrats have more contested elections and that increases voter turnout. So far, Democratic voters are nearly participating at the rate that they participated in the 2016 presidential primary. Here's who has voted in the primaries: Republicans and then Democrats.

The University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll shows little change in party identification among Texas registered voters one month before the March 6th primary elections. The PID has remained about the same since 2014. However, Republicans continue to win most elections, even though PID is reasonably equal between Democrats and Republicans.

Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes write in The Atlantic magazine: So we arrive at a syllogism: (1) The GOP has become the party of Trumpism. (2) Trumpism is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law. (3) The Republican Party is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law. A syllogism is, according to dictionary.com: 1. Logic. an argument the conclusion of which is supported by two premises, of which one (major premise) contains the term (major term) that is the predicate of the conclusion, and the other (minor premise) contains the term (minor term) that is the subject of the conclusion; common to both premises is a term (middle term) that is excluded from the conclusion. A typical form is “All A is C; all B is A; therefore, all B is C.”. 2. deductive reasoning. 3. an extremely subtle, sophisticated, or deceptive argument. Which definition applies here?   First, has the GOP become the party of Trump? Has he taken control of the party appa...