Republicans shut out Democrats in Texas's special election. That's a bad omen for Team Blue.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Opinion: Republicans shut out Democrats in Texas’s special election. That’s a bad omen for Team Blue.

Opinion by Henry Olsen
Columnist
May 3, 2021 at 2:17 p.m. EDT

President Biden’s success in the suburbs last year has led many Democrats to crow about their chance to create a new version of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, which dominated U.S. politics for nearly 50 years. Saturday’s special election in Texas’s 6th Congressional District shows how far the party has to go to realize its dreams.

Texas’s 6th is a microcosm of the sort of place Democrats need to capture to establish a dominant majority. The seat is based in the southern suburbs of Fort Worth and moved rapidly to the left in presidential elections during the Trump era. Mitt Romney won it by 16 percent in 2012, but Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) won it by only three points against Beto O’Rourke in their 2018 Senate race, a showing Donald Trump repeated last year. As a result, Democrats were mildly optimistic that they could gain the seat when it became vacant after Republican Rep. Ron Wright died in February after being diagnosed with covid-19.

The special election’s structure encouraged those hopes. Under Texas law, all candidates are placed on the same ballot, with the top two advancing to a general election regardless of party should no one receive 50 percent of the vote. Saturday’s race had 23 candidates, including 11 Republicans. Most Democrats expected their leading candidate would advance to the runoff, a reasonable expectation given that both Biden and O’Rourke had received 48 percent of the vote. If that person then faced an extreme Trumpian conservative, he or she might have had a chance to prevail.

Saturday’s results dashed those hopes. Two Republicans — the late congressman’s widow, Susan Wright, and state Rep. Jake Ellzey — took the top two positions and advanced to the runoff. Democrats went from hoping to ride a blue tide to victory to being entirely shut out of the race. ... But that wasn’t even the worst news to come out of the evening for Team Blue. Republicans combined outpaced Democrats by a whopping 25 points, 62 percent to 37 percent, when all votes were tallied. That’s an even greater advantage for Republicans than had been the case last decade when this area — and many similar suburbs nationwide — were considered safe territory for Team Red. If this result is a harbinger of the midterms, Democrats are in for a bloodbath as the suburbs snap back into Republican lockstep.

{snip}

Henry Olsen Follow https://twitter.com/henryolsenEPPC
Henry Olsen is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

[DemocracyWins]

1. Oh noes the corcern trolling

we lost most of the special house elections in 2017-2018 and we gained 40 seats in the house in 2018, doesn't tell us how we are going to do in 2022. but I will say the DNC has much work to work to keep our majority in the House.

[PortTack]

2. There have been other special elections this year where the Dems did really well

Mayoral races in WI, St Louis, Moline, Il where dem progressives did well against qgop incumbents. Other races judgeships in WI, school boards. It’s Tx, forget it. Tx may be turning but not yet. I don’t think Tx is a really good indicator

[Ocelot II]

3. Henry Olsen is a GOPer; take this with a grain of salt.

He used to work for the American Enterprise Institute, is still a huge fan of Ronald Reagan, and characterizes himself as a "Populist-Conservative." So there's that.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

5. Thanks for the heads-up. I've got to go. Tornado warning.

6:41pm: Tornado warned storm passing near Bolivar WV and about to enter MD. Quite impressive on radar and almost no lightning.

Link to tweet

[Ocelot II]

6. Yikes, stay safe!

[mahatmakanejeeves]

7. We had a h-u-u-u-u-u-u-g-e wind come through last Friday afternoon, right after I

got back home (on foot) from my second Moderna shot.

Where's Toto???????

[Freethinker65]

9. +1000

[qazplm135]

4. no idea what happens in 2022

but there's little reason to believe that one jungle primary in the Spring in Texas is a harbinger of anything dealing with 2022.

[LeftInTX]

8. This is a Republican district and it has been for quite awhile.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

10. The Trump-Era Special Election Boomlet Is Over

The Texas 6th race is not that meaningful https://politicalwire.com/2021/05/03/the-trump-era-special-election-boomlet-is-over/

“In 2017 and 2018, special elections were the talk of the political town. The race for Georgia’s 6th District, a traditionally Republican seat that Trump carried by just a point, attracted tens of millions of dollars in donor money and countless hours of news coverage. It also jump-started the career of an unknown Democrat named Jon Ossoff, now the youngest member of the U.S. Senate. But it wasn’t just Georgia. Specials in Pennsylvania, Montana, even Kansas and South Carolina were treated as major political events.”

“By contrast, the Texas 6th race was a sleepy affair from a national perspective. The field of 23 candidates raised less than $3 million combined by April 11 — a tenth of what Ossoff alone raised in that 2017 race. Turnout in Texas was just 16%, a drop from 68% last November. Turnout in Georgia’s 6th also dropped from 2016 to 2017, but from 76% to a still-rocking 58%, and in the 2017 Montana special from 74% to 54%.”

[mahatmakanejeeves]

11. Thanks for the insight. NT