When folks talk about the demographic time bomb the Republicans face in Texas this is what they are talking about. Texas is already voting and through day 6 11.2% of the Democratic turnout has been under 30. On the Republican side it’s 2.8%. And yes our turnout thus far is higher than theirs.
This is from data including the 30 largest counties which includes the Republican stronghold suburbs around Houston, Austin and Dallas.
We flipped seats in 18 by blunting the typically astronomical numbers for Republicans coming out of these counties. In other words traditionally Republicans win by blunting the cities with the suburbs and running up the score in rural areas. Beto came close to winning by severely cutting down those numbers in the suburbs.
We flipped seats in the House and State Legislature by turning parts of those suburbs so blue they overwhelmed the rural vote. Texas gerrymanders generally have a flavor of using suburbs for population count offset by heavy rural R vote. Push the suburb 10 points our way and we win.
Other good news:
Only 64.3% vs. 82.4%(R) of our primary voters thus far are traditional D only primary voters. Almost 20% vs. 11% have no recent primary voting history. A full 5.3% vs. 2.7% have no recent voting history. We have 5.6% in mixed primary voters vs. 2.3%. In terms of traditional crossover 5.2% of our vote have only voted in R primaries vs. 1.4% the other way.
In other words we’ve never had such a large percentage of non traditional primary voters vote in our primary.
Only 15.7% of Republican primary voters are under 50. 34.4% of ours are.
Total turnout is up in our primary over 16
Through day 6 turnout comparisons between 16 and 20 in traditional high population Republican Strongholds:
|
D percentage 2016 |
D percentage 2020 |
Collin |
26.66% |
46.05% |
Williamson |
29.16% |
52.01% |
Montgomery |
10.40% |
19.75% |
Denton |
25.68% |
40.40% |
Unknown News:
Looking at the county by county data the highest concentrations of R crossover and no previous primary votes into our primary are in Republican strongholds. In some of these places R crossover is 10% of the vote. Could be rat fucking could be party switching.
Also in our strongholds along the border our crossover into the Republican primary is very high. For instance in Webb county(Laredo) 31.7% of the vote in the Republican primary are people who’ve only voted in D primaries. Only 19.3% in that county are “only vote in R primary” voters. Yes more hard D’s are voting in their primary than Hard R’s.
To give you a sense of how weird that is there are exactly zero contested local R races in that county and only 4 R’s on the ballot outside of statewide and the president. Could be people who like the wall or people who want to vote against Trump twice. Maybe some of our Valley members could enlighten us.
As a result some of our Rio Grande Valley turnout numbers are down vs. 2016 so far.
People could be waiting. I know I have and am usually a first day of early voting voter.