A political earthquake in Texas
Despite obvious voter suppression tactics in Dallas, Texas Democrats set a new turnout record and voted in bigger numbers than Republicans for the first time since 2002.
What happened in Texas yesterday, despite two very obvious instances of election fuckery, should be genuinely terrifying to Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Let’s start with the voter suppression: In Dallas County, which is of course heavily Democratic and Hispanic, Republicans decided at the 11th hour to abandon the use of countywide vote centers, which allow voters to show up at any polling place, and return to a system of assigned precinct-based polling places due to lingering conspiracy theories about voting machines. This meant that hundreds of voters who hadn’t been alerted to the change were turned away, demoralizing them and delaying the whole voting process. Texas Democratic Party Executive Director Terri Burke said that "around one-third of the voters are having problems.” One woman named Veronica Anderson, who had walked 2.5 miles to the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center to vote, told a reporter for the Dallas Free Press, “I walked up here because I want to vote so, so bad.” She said when they turned her away, it felt like “your self-esteem and everything is torn down.” (This damn near made me cry.)
It gets worse: Because of the polling place confusion, which was exacerbated by Texas’ recent redistricting, a judge in Dallas County agreed to extend voting hours to 9 p.m. to give voters a little extra time to find their correct spot. But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is challenging Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary, successfully petitioned the state Supreme Court to block that decision. Election officials were then ordered to set aside all ballots that hadn’t been cast by 7 p.m.—again, at the request of a candidate who was actively on one of the ballots. Paxton’s race went to a run-off, incidentally, and the confusion around the voting hours and setting aside of certain ballots will almost certainly be the subject of a legal challenge.
Considering how egregious the election fuckery was in Texas yesterday—and the fact that Republicans spent well more than double what Democrats spent on these races—it should be even more terrifying to Trump and the GOP that Democrats actually set voter turnout records in the state. Roughly 2.3 million Dems voted in the primary compared to 2.1 million Republicans, which is the first time since 2002 that they’ve outvoted the GOP in a midterm primary in Texas. In heavily Hispanic Zapata County, turnout was 143% the total number of votes Harris won in the 2024 general election.
Democrats even outvoted Republicans in the four districts that Republicans just gerrymandered to gain Trump seats:
James Talarico, the progressive seminarian challenging Rep. Jasmine Crockett, won his primary despite Bari Weiss’ CBS News censoring his Stephen Colbert interview. Talarico had been lagging in the polls behind Crockett, mostly due to his lack of name recognition, but the Colbert incident backfired and propelled him into broader fame (Streisand Effect!). This should also alarm Republicans, because Talarico actually does have a shot at defeating Paxton or Cornyn for a U.S. Senate seat come November and “turning Texas blue.” He very much looks like a young, clean-cut, Bible-quoting Republican white guy, and he uses that fact to challenge right-wing hypocrisy pretty deftly from the left.
Adding to the GOP’s pain, three Trump-backed candidates lost their primaries: Sid Miller, Cecil Bell Jr. and Stan Kitzman. And the Cornyn/Paxton primary going to a run-off is a nightmare for the party, because it means that two prominent Texas Republicans have to spend money attacking and exposing each other for weeks instead of attacking Talarico. (We know there’s a lot to expose about Paxton, in particular, because he’s already been impeached and investigated for fraud and corruption.)
Meanwhile, Crockett respectfully accepted her primary loss and endorsed Talarico, offering a unifying message of support for the party’s best shot to flip the Senate in November.
I don’t know if this is the year that Texas turns blue. Their politics are still plagued by bigotry and corruption and controlled by the oil companies. But I think if Democrats ever had a chance to claw back power in the Lone Star State and cause a real political earthquake, that chance is sitting in front of them right now.