Plainly seen in our primaries: Don’t mess with Texas voters

Among the advantages of living in a big state with an open primary is that on election night, you have plenty of options.

This year, I decided to watch the results roll in at Pico’s, where supporters of state Rep. Sarah Davis had gathered. Davis, who represents West University Place, is one of three Republican incumbents whom Gov. Greg Abbott targeted this cycle because of their failure to show him sufficient fealty. The governor’s attacks on Davis had been strikingly vicious and spectacularly misguided. Voters in House District 134 really like Davis, as it happens. There were Democrats at Pico’s on Tuesday night. There were also mainstream Republicans, like Harris County Judge Ed Emmett and state Rep. John Zerwas.

And after I arrived, I found myself making small talk with Ted Cruz supporters Roman Reed and Mark Aschermann.

I asked Aschemann, an attorney, what he thought of Davis’s challenger, Susanna Dokupil.

“It’s a joke. She’s a seasteader,” Aschermann said, referring to the fact that Dokupil serves on the board of the Seasteading Institute, a group that supports the idea of floating communities as a means to enable experiments in creating new societies.

“Don’t you think that’s kind of cool, though?” I asked.

“If I want to hang out with my prepper friends and prepare for the apocalypse, yeah,” Aschemann scoffed, before explaining that he wasn’t quite ready to give up on the American experiment just yet.

I turned to Reed, who was starting to get impatient with Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart.

“We’ve got to send a message to Abbott that he is not to meddle in local Republican primary races,” said Reed, a former Bellaire city councilman.

Eventually, Stanart tallied the