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The 2022 elections in Texas favor Republican candidates. They haven’t lost a statewide election for more than a quarter of a century, and they’ve been in the majority of the Texas House and Senate for two decades. Republicans quashed Democratic efforts to gain ground in the 2020 elections.
The stakes were evident a year ago, when Democrats were pouring money into legislative races and boasting in advance that they would gain enough seats in the Texas House to force bipartisan compromise on redistricting and other issues. There was even some very loopy fantasizing that the two parties could end up with the same numbers in the House if Democrats were able to win eight of the seats they had targeted.
It didn’t happen. Republicans won the day, the year and the chance to draw the political maps for the next decade. Now they’re just cashing in their winnings.
First, they’re going after election practices used in Harris County in 2020 that turned out to be particularly popular with voters of color, like drive-thru voting and 24-hour early voting. The legislation that shot out of the Senate and then remained largely unscratched in the House on Thursday and Friday would outlaw those practices, make it illegal for election officials to send vote-by-mail applications to voters who haven’t asked for them, and tighten voter ID requirements at the polls.
That’s the legislation that prompted House Democrats to decamp to Washington, D.C., for more than a month this summer. The U.S. House passed a voting rights bill and the Texans claimed some credit for that, but they failed to stop the Republican juggernaut, which is now within days of getting the changes in voting law it has been seeking all year.
