- Are Texas suburbs slipping away from Republicans?
By the end of Election Day, the political maps of the state’s suburban and swing counties had a peculiar blue tint.
The blue washed over the Dallas-Fort Worth area and crept up on suburban counties in North Texas. It spread from Houston — in a county that was once a political battleground — and crested over some of its suburban communities. And it swept through the Interstate 35 corridor from Travis County to its neighbors to the north and south.
Counties that haven’t voted for a Democrat in decades turned out for Beto O’Rourke in his unsuccessful bid to unseat U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, and he picked up enough support in ruby red Republican counties to force Cruz into single-digit wins.
It could all be a blip — a year of Democratic enthusiasm spurred by a shiny candidate or vitriol toward President Donald Trump. But with margins narrowing over time in some of the GOP’s longtime strongholds, Tuesday night's results suggest that the Republican firewall in the suburbs could be cracking.
- In Dallas County, Republican gerrymandering backfired in 2018.
The Republican losses in Dallas County are as much a product of the 2018 blue waveas they are of 2011 redistricting, when the GOP was forced to confront a politically inconvenient demographic reality. The 2010 census showed that people of color, who tend to support Democrats, were behind all of Dallas County’s growth in the last decade. Meanwhile, the county’s white population decreased by more than 198,000 people.
On top of that, Dallas’ growth relative to the state as a whole meant that the number of House seats in the county needed to drop from 16 to 14. Mapdrawers knew that those two seats would have to be Republican-held seats because the Dallas County districts represented by Democrats — and mostly made up by Hispanic and black voters — were protected by the Voting Rights Act.
As far as Democrats and redistricting experts are concerned, Republicans could have opted to create a new “opportunity district” for the county’s growing population of color. That would’ve reduced the number of voters of color in Republican districts, giving the GOP more of a cushion through the decade, but it would have also likely added another seat to the Democrats’ column.
- In Texas, the "Rainbow Wave" outpaces the blue one.
Fourteen of the 35 gay, bisexual and transgender candidates who ran for office in Texas during the midterms claimed victory Tuesday night — a 40 percent success rate in deep-red Texas — and national and state activists say they’re confident this election cycle carved a path for a future “rainbow wave” in Texas.
The historic number of Texas candidates who ran for offices from governor down to city council positions joined a record-shattering rank of more than 400 LGBTQ individuals on national midterm ballots this year.|
- Texas House Speaker Joe Straus: Texas and the Republican Party are “moving in opposite directions”
Republicans in the Texas House were dealt a big blow Tuesday night, losing 12 seatsto Democrats and two in the Texas Senate.
Joe Straus, the Republican who has presided over the House for nearly a decade, said that's because win-at-all-cost politics may be effective at the state level, but "it creates carnage down-ballot in a changing state where a Republican Party and the state of Texas are moving in opposite directions."
The "small issues" that were popular among Republican primary voters didn't resonate in November, he said.
- As Democrats seize U.S. House control, Texas congressional delegation set to lose clout in Washington.
The Texas congressional delegation is poised to lose significant clout on Capitol Hill after the Democrats on Tuesday took control of the U.S. House and Texas voters elected nine new representatives — one-quarter of the state's 36 members.
All told, Texas Republicans will lose seven committee chairmanships. Three of those — Mac Thornberry of Clarendon, chairman of the Armed Services Committee; Mike Conaway of Midland, chairman of the Agriculture Committee; and Kevin Brady of The Woodland, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee — won re-election Tuesday and are likely to become ranking members on those committees.
Lamar Smith of San Antonio and Jeb Hensarling of Dallas announced earlier this year they would not seek re-election, ending their tenures as chairmen of the Science, Space & Technology and Financial Services committees, respectively.They're being replaced by fellow Republicans — Chip Roy in Smith's seat and Lance Gooden in Hensarling's — who both will begin their congressional careers low in the hierarchy of their caucus.
- After losing election, Houston juvenile court judge releases defendants en masse.
On Tuesday, Harris County Family Judge Glenn Devlin lost his re-election bid to Democrat Natalia Oakes. On Wednesday, he showed up for work in the 313th District Court and began releasing virtually all of the juvenile defenders who had detention hearings before him, according to the Houston Chronicle.
The Chronicle reports that Devlin simply asked the defendants whether they planned to kill anyone, then released nearly all of them from detention. Under state law, juveniles who are locked up while their cases are pending are required to have a hearing every 10 business days so a judge can decide whether they should stay in detention. It's not clear how many defendants Devlin released Wednesday, but the Chronicle reports that the judge reset all of their cases for Jan. 4 — the day Oakes takes the gavel in the 313th.
