Progressives Romp In Texas Primaries While Trumpers Flop

By Howie Klein — March 2, 2022

[Above, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaigns for progressives in Texas last month. -- eds]

Early voting in Texas was not very good-- especially not for Democrats. Republican primary voters turned out; Democrats didn't. This is horrific (although the Texas Tribune insists that "The party that draws more voters in Texas’ open primaries is not a reliable indicator for who will win the general election in November"):

Early turnout in Democratic areas-- including Austin, Dallas and Houston-- sucked. Over the weekend, Decision Desk reported that "Republicans have dwarfed Democrats in early voting, with more than 1 million voters casting ballots in the GOP primary compared to just more than 600,000 in the Democratic primary." An exception, though is for the Jessica Cisneros challenge to corrupt Blue Dog Henry Cuellar, where turnout is very high and in Zapata County, they were reporting "the highest Democratic participation of any county in the state."

[E]arly voting turnout among Democrats is mostly a story about areas near the Rio Grande vs. the rest of the state. South Texas also is the home to the 15th congressional district, which has a six-way race for the Democratic nomination, and the 34th, where incumbent Vicente Gonzalez shifted over from the previous 15th district to run and faces six opponents.

Turnout for the Democratic primary in the party vote basins of Dallas, Travis and Harris counties is under 10% of registered voters in each county, which is off previous form. Early voting in the 2018 Democratic primary represented 3.89% of the Harris County electorate, while this year it’s 2.85%. Travis and Dallas show similar drop-offs in the percentage of voters voting early, albeit from different levels.

Going into today progressives were hoping for best case scenarios... all difficult to achieve

An outright win for Greg Casar (TX-35)
An outright win for Jessica Cisneros (TX-28)
A run-off spot for Jessica Mason or Jasmine Crockett (TX-30)
A run-off spot for Rochelle Garza in the Attorney General race

One reason why early voting in the Democratic primary is so abysmally low is because there are no Democratic primary battles in 19 of the state's congressional districts-- so no reason to vote, especially with the big headliner race for governor a foregone conclusion (Beto O'Rourke). Here's a typical example in the suburbs north and west of Houston (TX-02), 3 Republicans from the Trumpist right are challenging incumbent Dan Crenshaw. So there are plenty candidates working to turn out the vote. Meanwhile Robin Fulford is the only Democrat running. As of the end of December, Crenshaw had already spent over $9 million. The other Republicans had spent around $30,000 combined and Fulford had spent $27,796.

Highlights so far tonight include how terribly the 2 fascist candidates for governor did-- Allen West (12.0%) and Don Huffines (11.3%), not to mention pathetic far right sad sack Louie Gohmert who came in dead last for the Attorney General nomination with just 17.1% of the vote. (On the Democratic side, despite there being 2 decent progressives and one moderate, the better of the 2 progressives, Rochelle Garza came in first (42.3%) and will face Joe Jaworski (21.4%), the moderate in a runoff.

In the congressional races, it was gratifying to see that wherever Marjorie Traitor Greene and her neo-Nazi allies jumped into a race, their candidates failed in GOP primaries. Her prime endorsee, psychopath Christian Collins in the open 8th district only managed 21.8% of the vote and the less insane candidate, conservative Morgan Luttrell 53.6%) who Traitor Greene ran around screaming is a RINO, appears to have won outright with no runoff. Same in the TX-02, where Traitor Greene's arch enemy, Dan Crenshaw killed a pack of Traitor Greene candidates with a whopping 76% of the vote. Traitor Greene sealed her reputation as the kiss-of-death endorser: get an endorsement from Marjorie Traitor Greene and lose... badly.

The 3 crucial congressional primaries all went well for progressives.

TX-28