Texas suburbs hold key in fall election

As you hear predictions about today’s runoff based on the early vote, remember this: Everything we thought early voting told us about the March primaries turned out to be, if not wrong, then certainly not exactly right.

A majority of both the Democratic and Republican votes were cast early during the March primary in Texas, and the early bird analyses, published before the polls closed on Election Day, emphasized a sharp increase over recent midterm turnout, especially among Democrats. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott warned of a “blue wave” building in the deeply red Lone Star State.

That interpretation seemed off the mark when the final votes were tallied. Republican primary voters actually exceeded the Democratic total by more than 500,000 votes, close to the usual GOP advantage.

What happened? The early vote data included only vote totals from the top 15 counties in total registration. These counties are, of course, the largest urban and suburban venues in the state, where Democrats did make large gains. But the reports did not include the other 239 Texas counties, where Republicans maintained or even increased their usual margins.

That largely explains the discrepancy. The March primary, and in a few cases, the ensuing runoffs, remain the decisive local election in most of the state’s non-metropolitan areas. This is nothing new. When the Texas Legislature shifted party nominations from conventions to primaries in 1906, the Democratic primary immediately become the whole ball game; Republicans rarely even filed candidates in nonpresidential years.

That Democratic dominance began to fray in the 1960s, but outside of metropolitan Texas nearly all serious local office seekers continued to compete in the Democratic primary. The 1978 election of William Clements Jr. as the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction signaled the start of a 20-year shift that moved more and more effective elections from the Democratic to the Republican primary. But the bottom line is that there haven’t been competitive general elections in most rural and smaller urban counties here for the last 100 years.

What did change was that by 2000, the effective election, away from the border and South Texas, had become the Republican primary.

This drives up rural and smallcity primary turnout while voting lags in the more populous counties. Democrats did not field a single local candidate in 104 counties this year; there were just 12 counties where no GOP candidate filed for local office.

Consider primary voting for the U.S. Senate contest. In the 15 large counties, 787,069 Democratic votes were cast, compared with 748,319 GOP votes. But Republicans outvoted Democrats by more than 3 to 1 in the remaining 239 Texas counties. So what can we glean from the March results?

First, primary turnout remains extremely low in Texas. It hasn’t topped 30 percent of eligible voters since 1990. In 2018, only about 17 percent of eligible voters turned out.

Second, partly because primary turnout is so low, primary voting patterns don’t tell us much about the general election. In 2002, a spirited gubernatorial primary produced a sharp uptick in Democratic voting, but Republicans swept the November statewide contests. Democratic primary turnout fell by 50 percent in 2006, but statewide Democrats were more competitive than four years earlier.

Third, both parties can take some comfort from the 2018 primary. Republicans retained a huge advantage in non-metropolitan Texas, where they control more than 80 percent of local offices. However, Democrats widened their advantage in the core urban counties of Harris, Dallas, Bexar and Travis and closed the gap in Tarrant, the only large county that supported Donald Trump in 2016.

More important, the most impressive Democratic primary gains were in the suburban counties around Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio. With strong congressional candidates running in these traditional Republican areas and a well-funded Democratic Senate nominee in Beto O’Rourke, increasingly diverse suburban counties are key to Texas Democratic fortunes.

The 2017 state elections in Virginia and New Jersey, along with a smattering of recent special elections around the country, suggest that if there is a blue wave coming in November, upscale suburban areas will be Ground Zero. That may also be the case in Texas.

Murray is a University of Houston political scientist and director of survey research at the Hobby School of Public Affairs.