Needless to say, Democrats were festive this week. Written off for dead in 2002, Texas House Democrats will play a much more significant role in the upcoming legislative session.

And yet, despite a horrible election for the national Republicans where presidential nominee Barack Obama drove a substantial spike in Democratic base vote turnout, Texas Republicans managed to keep control of the state Senate and the statewide elected offices while remaining at parity in the Texas House of Representatives.

In some ways, the GOP House leaders have only themselves to blame for what happened Tuesday night. Here’s our take on yesterday’s events:

This year’s elections were a continuation of trends begun in 2006.

Republicans lost big in urban counties and picked up seats in rural Texas. The losses in near-city suburbs and urban counties happened in 2006 as well. The GOP is losing touch with voters in Dallas, Arlington, and parts of Houston, and it needs to figure out why.

Believe it or not, this election wasn’t necessarily as bad for the GOP as 2006 in terms of raw numbers. The party lost three to four seats, not six, in the House.

The Democrats targeted Harris County. Unlike their Dallas counterparts in 2006, Republicans retained some judgeships and some county-wide offices (County Judge, District Attorney, and Tax Assessor-Collector). In Dallas County, Democrats swept everything in 2006.

The consequences are more serious, however, because past losses have removed the GOP’s margin for error.

Even if Speaker Tom Craddick survives with his gavel intact, what he will be able to pass will be severely limited, and if there isn’t serious change in the way the House is run, the Democrats will take over in 2010.

Republicans need to figure out why lower-middle-class voters are abandoning the party.

We said this in 2006. Nothing changed. And Republicans lost seats.

Democrats had a field day with the GOP on several key pocketbook issues: college tuition, public education, insurance, and utilities, just to name a few.

Each of these issues is a little bit different. In a nutshell, however, the House needs to let the GOP members represent their districts more and pay less attention to the lobby.

And why won’t the leadership take on the tax-and-spend local government lobby and stand for lower property taxes? This is a winning issue for Republicans. So is fighting illegal immigration, but the House leadership killed any meaningful action on that issue, much to the delight of major GOP campaign donors who are from industries that profit from illegal immigration.

Also, the GOP needs to spend a lot more  resources on urban swing districts and general get-out-the-vote and party buildings in urban counties. Democrats spent millions on “ground-game” activities in Dallas and Harris Counties, and they were rewarded.

If the GOP doesn’t find ways to appeal to urban swing voters, or gets tagged again in the press for carrying too much lobby water, it’s over for GOP control of the House.

Republicans failed to engage on the Democrats’ weak points.

A lot of Democrats, such as Round Rock’s Diana Maldonado, pretended to be bipartisan moderates when they really aren’t. For the most part, the GOP let the Democrats get away with this poll-tested dodge.

Only at the end of the race did Maldonado’s opponent, Bryan Daniel, even begin to talk about Maldonado’s record of raising taxes on the Round Rock school board. Nor was there much discussion from the GOP of the money many Democrats got from the notoriously pro-abortion lobby group Planned Parenthood, and from the gay-rights group that calls itself the Human Rights Campaign Fund. Moderates don’t take money from either group, but the GOP allowed Democrats to get away from taking cash from both.

Democrats are talking out of both sides of their mouths on utility issues. They try to blame Republicans for high electric rates, but Rep. Jim Dunnam (D-Waco) — the House Democratic Leader — called a point-of-order on an electric bill that benefited electric companies at the expense of suburban ratepayers. The Republicans didn’t call him on it or make that a liability for Democratic candidates.

Also, where were the mailers taking issue with some of the bad votes Democratic incumbents took in 2007? The Democrats supported voter fraud by opposing common-sense legislation to require people to show a photo ID before they vote — something that is done in just about every other democratic nation on earth, including Mexico. Did anyone make a campaign issue out of that?

Where were the campaign mailers on taxes, guns, criminal justice, and other winning issues for the GOP? Democrats in marginal districts took some really bad votes on those issues, and for the most part, Republicans didn’t exploit it.

There’s no evidence Democrats will control redistricting in 2011.

Controlling redistricting requires winning statewide offices. Even if Democrats somehow take over the Legislature, a governor can veto a redistricting bill, which sends state lines to the Legislative Redistricting Board, which is controlled by statewide elected officials.

Additionally, legislative gridlock on a congressional map will get solved by the courts. Two of the three judges on the federal panels that hear redistricting cases will be appointed by the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, currently staunch conservative Edith Jones.

Democrats will pour money into statewide races in 2010. They likely think their best shot at the Governor’s Mansion is a Bill White-Rick Perry matchup, which may or may not materialize.

The Democrats did not get close to taking any statewide office in 2008 — probably the low-point for Republicans in this decade. And in 2010, they won’t have Obama on the ballot to gin up turnout in inner-city precincts.

Many of the House losses can be fixed in redistricting.

The technical problem with the GOP redistricting map drawn in 2001 is that it failed to take account of population shifts in districts. The GOP drew 55 percent Republican districts in parts of the state where new voters were trending Democrat, and by the end of the cycle, these districts became Democratic.

Republicans can take some of these seats back though the redistricting process. Some of the Democratic gains in urban areas are permanent, others are an artifact of aggressive redistricting.

Both the Hubert Vo and Kristi Thibaut districts in Houston have Republican pockets in them. Republicans could probably reshape these two districts into one that is solidly Republican and another that is Democratic and thus regain a seat. Similarly, Wendy Davis can easily be drawn out of a district by giving inner-city Fort Worth to one of the surrounding senators. Also, while Maldonado won in Williamson County, Democrats put money into the county-wide races, and the GOP still cracked 60 percent of the vote. It wouldn’t be hard for the GOP to redraw the dividing line in Williamson County to reclaim both districts.

One thing to remember is that the nature of redistricting gives Democrats disproportionate strength, compared to their statewide voter tally. The U.S. Supreme Court in the 1960s required drawing of state legislative districts based on pure population, which includes convicted felons, incarcerated inmates, illegal immigrants, and children. Most other democratic nations base district lines either on registered or eligible voters.

Democrats may be at parity in the House, but they still have a ways to go on statewide offices.

The GOP relied too much on lobby money, direct mail, and TV.

Remember the 1990s. The GOP was on the outside looking in. The Austin lobby and money backed Democrats largely, and Republicans made up for that by talking about real issues that people care about, and through a volunteer army.

There are still remnants of that in place. But some Republicans seem to be far too comfortable in power. More emphasis needs to be placed on general party building in urban counties.

The money crowd lost the 2006 and 2008 elections. If Republicans want to win again, warm, fuzzy TV ads and mailers with no real message won’t cut the mustard.

The GOP needs to give the base reasons to vote, and big tuition increases, property tax increases from cities and counties, and no action on illegal immigration don’t cut the mustard.

Reclaim the ethics issue.

The press has had a field day with the GOP on ethics. Yes, there is a double-standard with the editorial boards, but some of the hits on the GOP were justified.

Democrats carry water for the lobby too, and need to be called on it.

In a lot of cases, it’s not so much what the Republicans do, but how they do it. It’s one thing to act on issues the lobby raises. It’s another matter entirely when lobbyists get to write almost every detail of the bill.

(Tort reform is an example of a good concept that got mangled in execution by the House leadership.)

The reason House Republicans have taken such a beating in the press is that they have allowed bills to reach the floor with publicly indefensible provisions in them that provide financial benefit to GOP lobbyists or donors.

Next session, the GOP will face another series of ethical minefields (the sunsets of the Texas Department of Insurance and the Texas Residential Construction Commission, to name just two). Any last minute lobby amendments added to the committee substitute or the conference report, or any publicly indefensible garbage showing up on these bills as they are taken to the floor could result in Democratic control of the House in 2010.

The ethics issue has cost Republicans multiple seats. That needs to change.

The voters of Texas delivered yet another warning shot to the GOP.

Comments (1)

Comment	smaller | bigger
Name
Write the displayed characters
Subscribe via email (Registered users only) I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.
	Add Comment