Democrats show up in force to cast ballots in Texas primary election

GOP votes still outnumber Dems

The Washington Post

Democratic voters showed up in force in Texas on Tuesday for the nation’s first primary of the year, providing fresh evidence that liberal enthusiasm could reshape even deeply Republican states comeNovember.

Near-final Election Day tallies tempered the most ambitious hopes of Texas Democrats, with Republicans casting about a half-million more overall ballots statewide, indicating that chances of claiming the Senate seat now held by Republican Ted Cruz or other statewide seats remainslim.

Still, Democrats could rightly boast about a major boost over their 2014 primary turnout, nearly doubling the number of votes cast. And the increases seen in the more than 1 million votes cast for Democrats were most pronounced in urban and suburban areas where the party is hoping to reclaim House seats now held by Republicans.

Texas also saw a record number of women — most of them Democrats — advancing in congressional and state legislative races.

And more Democrats statewide voted early this year than even in 2016, the year that Donald Trump, a Republican, was elected to theWhite House.

“It’s clear Texas Democrats are fired up, exceeding expectations, and charging forward to November,” Texas Democratic Party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said in a statement Wednesday.

From Houston to the border with Mexico, Democrats voted in numbers far greater than in 2014 primaries, motivated by a surplus of candidates, concern over one-party control of Washington and dissatisfaction with nowPresidentTrump.

But some of the races also showcaseddivisions between the moderate and more liberal wings of the Democratic Party that have emerged at the outset of an otherwise promising midterm campaign.

Republican party leaders, meanwhile, sent out a warning call to their own supporters about the growing Democratic engagement, despite their clear advantage in total ballots cast statewide.

“They are mobilizing in a powerful way,” warned Mr. Cruz after the polls closed in an interview with the CBS affiliate in Dallas. “At the end of the day, the good news is that there are a lot more conservatives in Texas than there are liberals.”

Political experts closely scrutinized Tuesday’s voting for a more complete picture of just how big the Democratictail winds will be in November, when Mr. Trump will lead a Republican effort to maintain control of the Houseand Senate.

Mr. Cruz easily won his party’s nomination for a second term in the Senate, but he all but admitted that he would have a far more difficult general-election campaign this time around against Democratic nominee Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who has cast his campaign as a movement and boasted of 10,000 volunteers in the state.

In an unexpected move, Mr. Cruz decided to attack Mr. O’Rourke by name before the polls had even closed. “Congressman O’Rourke’s campaign is benefiting from left-wing rage,” Mr. Cruz said in a conference call with reporters. “Left-wing rage may raise a bunch of money from people online, but I don’t believe it reflects the views of a majorityof Texans.”

Mr. O’Rourke — who let two primary rivals take 38 percent of the vote — declined to respond in a streamed Facebook video to supporters: “What is really exciting about what is going on in Texas right now is that all of the energy is around the big things we want to do together,” he said.

But “When you net the results, there are hundreds of thousands more voting in the Republican primary than the Democratic primary, so we absolutely have our work cut out for us,” Mr. O’Rourke also said by phone Wednesday. “This is an uphill, very tough fight for the next eight months.”

The turnout from the left in Texas follows a string of races around the country where Democrats have shown new enthusiasm for voting in nonpresidential years. Democrat Ralph Northam won the Virginia governor’s race in November, even though the Republican candidate, Ed Gillespie, received more votes than any GOP candidate for state office in Virginia’s history.

Democrats have also been winning special state legislative elections around the country, in states including Florida, Wisconsin and Kentucky that were once consideredsafe for Republicans.