The Texan Podcast - Weekly Roundup - November 6, 2020

Episode Date: November 6, 2020

This week on our “Weekly Roundup” podcast, the reporting team discusses the 2020 general election results: Trump won Texas, the Texas House didn't flip, state senate republicans lost their supermajority, and there was a lack of a blue wave in Texas...for now.

Hello, hello, friends. Mackenzie Taylor here, senior editor at The Texan, with a weekly roundup podcast covering the 2020 general election results. This week, the status quo remained largely unchanged. Not to spoil the fun, but Trump wins Texas, the Texas House doesn't flip, state Senate Republicans lose their supermajority, and there's no sign of a blue wave in Texas for now. Thanks, folks, for listening, and we'll talk to you next week. Welcome, folks. I'm here with isaiah mitchell brad johnson and daniel friend it's election week and i think we're all we actually

handled it pretty well i think in terms of sleep deprivation that's optimistic that might be that might be true yeah speak for yourself that's true but i think we're all doing pretty well we're we're hopped up on coffee we've been working hard oh that's right that's not true again i'm speaking for myself here yeah daniel doesn't even drink coffee how have you how have you kept going daniel i have kept going by breathing yes eating you know doing the normal human thing that's like usual yes that works that works isaiah what about you are you no you're a coffee drinker we drink drink the jet fuel together. Yeah. I mean, I'm not really hooked on it, but it's good for tamping down your appetite. So I drink a lot of it. Oh, that's really interesting. Isaiah definitely does have an appetite we all admire. I love that that was brought up. Well, let's begin, guys. We have

a lot to cover today. Isaiah, why don't you start us off with what happened in Texas in terms of the presidential election, the results of that, and what was some of the responses we saw? Sure. So right now at the time of recording, the actual president nationwide is still kind of an open position. So we don't know yet. But in Texas, Trump won pretty soundly, a lot more soundly than a lot of pollsters thought he would win.

And, you know, the idea of a Biden win was more than plausible, you know, according to a lot of the data and a lot of the punditry that we saw. And in fact, Trump actually flipped a number of counties. A lot of the hubbub in the news has been about counties along the Rio Grand. You will get in trouble with people from the Rio Grande Valley. If you say that those are counties along the Rio Grande Valley, which is a lot more of a specific term than just touching the river.

Yeah. I don't get it because I haven't spent a lot of time down there. But things like Willisee County, which doesn't even touch the river, is apparently part of the valley. I could go on. Anyway, there were a number of counties right on the border that were traditionally Democrat that went for Trump. Yeah. Val Verde, for example, voted for Clinton by 51.4% to Trump's 43.5% in 2016. Yeah. And, and, you know, and he got that county this time around. Zapata County has also has also turned a lot of heads heads because that's just another one that Trump flipped. So way down at the tip of Texas in the actual valley and along the Gulf was where Biden actually did win a number of counties. But even there, Trump flipped, I believe, Kennedy County and a number of others that are touching the Gulf that were more traditional

Democratic strongholds. There are assumptions that this has to do with the cracking of more traditional Democratic blocs of American demographics, namely Latino voters and Black voters. And, you know, the voting data that counties collect doesn't really touch on race. So a lot of that has to do with polling, which is kind of a self-defeating analysis to make in the face of the polls that were so very, very wrong. Yeah. But it's becoming clear that Hispanic voters, at least in Texas, are about as Democratic as white voters are Republican,

which is to say not in the 90th percentile or above. Yeah, absolutely. And I think watching those returns come in and seeing how maybe Clinton performed better than Biden did in a lot of these areas where there was an assumption that Texas might turn blue this time, whereas in 2016, it didn't. It was shocking to a lot of people. And we'll get into polling later and talk through exactly what that looked like, but you're spot on. There was a very big show of support for the president in areas that we had not previously seen. So thank you for covering that for us. Daniel, I'm pivoting to you. The other big race on the ballot was the U.S. Senate race, John Cornyn versus MJ Hager. Walk us through those results. So out of the statewide race, actually, I think I saw someone said this was nationwide

for a Republican. The Republican in a state race to receive the most votes in the country and in the state was John Cornyn. So he received quite a bit of support here in texas um now it was i think a little bit closer than it was in 20 or not sorry it was much less close than in 2018 uh between the senate race between ted cruz and beta o'rourke um of course that was a fiercely competitive seat uh since the senate race wasn't at the top of the belt this year. And the focus was more on the presidential race. I think that had something to do with it. Also John Cornyn is very different than Ted Cruz.

I'm sure that played a role. Also MJ Hager is very different than Beto O'Rourke. So just entirely different circumstances that this was in. But Cornyn definitely pulled through uh kind of as even polling predicted um you know it put him several points above hagar and uh he he did in fact uh pull ahead quite a bit um with 54 of the vote um so yeah he received almost 6 million votes, 5.9 million, and Hagar received 4.8 million. He received over a million more than Ted Cruz did in 2018, which, again, as you mentioned, it's slightly comparing apples to oranges because two different races, but still. A midterm versus a presidential also.

Yes, exactly. But, you know, still interesting to see that actually play out. Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting, too. Democrats came in and spent a lot of money, especially here in the last month, on federal races, including Hagar's Senate race and also all the congressional races, which didn't work out too well for them.

So Cornyn and Hagar throughout the entire past two years have raised about the same amount and spent, I think, roughly around the same. I think Cornyn has spent a little bit more. But in the last month, in the last two filing periods of the FEC in October, you saw that Hagar came in and completely wiped out Cornyn's cash advantage, raised twice as much as him in the last two weeks, or the first two weeks of October, I guess. Largely due to the Supreme Court situation, I would say. That's when she got the time. I'd say that was definitely part of the factor.

Of course, you know, right before the election is when everything is ramping up. And the primary race, you know, it wasn't like 2018 where Beto O'Rourke was the candidate from the get-go. With this one, you know, you had a very competitive primary where nobody had any name ID. You know, Hager had the most with like, I think it was like 20, 30% name ID. And she came out with, I think, about 30% of the vote. I think the entire race there was 30 40 undecided yeah the entire time during the democratic primary whereas the cruise beto i mean

that was the race talked about nationwide right i mean beto was on every late night show he was part of the discussion on snl i mean there are so many things culturally that surrounded that race and the money that flooded in for you know in, in terms of the 70, 80 million dollars at the end of the day was, I mean, historic. And that was just Beto. Exactly. Cruz brought in, I think it was over 50. Yeah, it was over 100 million dollars. So unbelievable race.

So, yeah, all that to say, it's a very different circumstance, especially if you have Donald Trump and Joe Biden at the top of the ticket. Yes, all that to say. So Hager did not have the name id right at the beginning she was in a kind of a it wasn't a too close of a runoff but it was a pretty close runoff nonetheless with cinderella west out of dallas um and so you know she had that going for him while cordon was the nominee the whole time presumed to be on the november ballot um so he had that advantage too um but yeah he he walked away pretty easily and you know to be expected right yeah i mean that was there was a lot of talk about as isaiah mentioned the

presidential going blue um obviously that didn't happen there was never there was not a lot of serious talk about hager flipping this seat yeah um because she did not did not have to support the beto did whether it's from the the money the financial side or just electorally right and you know the obvious played out and she makes a very interesting candidate right and even in terms of her military experience she's got the tattoos the motorcycle she's She's a mom, a wife. There's a lot going for her. But it was, you know, overshadowed by the presidential. So definitely an interesting race. Okay.

Awesome, Daniel. Thank you for covering that for us. Let's move down. We're just going down the ballot, essentially. Let's talk about the congressional races. Brad, I want to start with you. I think one of the races we were all watching really closely, I mean, it was watched throughout the country. This was one of the hottest congressional races in the country for very specific reasons to high profile candidates that really exemplify their ideologues to a lot of their base. Right. Saying that they exemplify a certain portion of the Republican Party and a certain portion of the Democrat Party in terms of what they believe and what they stand for. Walk us through what happened in the 21st Congressional District.

So this is something I've covered pretty much since the beginning, since I started here, and especially since it became clear that Wendy Davis was jumping in the race to run against Chip Roy, the incumbent Republican. And as you mentioned, this was probably the most watched congressional race in the country. And it's a district that historically has been very red, but got closer and closer and closer. And in 18, Chip Roy won his first election by a small small margin a few points and the question was you know can wendy davis someone who's far more well known than the democrat opponent in 2018 joseph kopzer um i mean she she ran for governor um she of course had that speech on the floor of the senate where she

filibustered that uh pro-life bill and so. And so this was two huge personalities going at it, slugging it out. And in a new district, too. I mean, I don't think people talk enough about how, you know, Wendy Davis ran in Fort Worth and represented Fort Worth previously. Right. It was that she was a Tarrant County state senator. Right. And sure, she ran, you know ran across the state when she ran against Abbott, but that's an entirely different thing than running for a Hill Country, San Antonio, Austin district. I mean, this is an entirely new group of voters. Yeah.

And the two duped it out over issues, coronavirus, spending, health care, all these things. And they did not hold back at all. So it played out on Tuesday night. Chip Roy won by just over six points, which was surprising. I mean, everyone kind of expected it to be really close. I'm sure if someone was putting money on it, they would have bet Chip Roy, the incumbent of the district, had not gone blue yet. But no one was real confident going in that it would stay that way. And turns out, uh, you know, he outperformed vastly what he did in

18. And, uh, you know, I pulled some stats this morning, um, tweeted them out and, uh, I found them to be very interesting. So Wendy Davis, she obviously lives in Austin for this race anyway. And that was her hub of support. And she won it by a wide margin, 72% to 24%. And she won that by a 58,000 vote margin. So that right off the bat, you you would think that's a that's an advantage obviously um but she vastly underperformed outside of travis county and even bear county went uh went to roy's favor by you know a slim three points but still you know a population

center is where democrats have to run up the numbers and it is a different it's not the entire county it's a certain slice of it but yes yes and so i i siphoned it out and uh outside travis county chip roy won uh with 62 of the vote and he in 89 000 vote margin and then um i i siphoned it out even further to get just the Hill Country counties. And that amounted to 42% of the vote. So it's a very, very sizable margin or portion of the race. And Chip Roy won it even more, 71%. Yeah. And that is the story of this.

Wendy Davis did not compete in places outside of, not only outside of Travis County, but outside of Travis County and Bexar in the Hill Country. You know, those are the voters that decide which way this is going to go. And Roy, he won those counties outside of Travis and Bexar by 85, thousand votes. And so that just not only did it erase Wendy Davis's Travis County margin, but it it supplanted it and, you know, gave him his own advantage there. And so that was that was shocking to me. I did see five thirty eight on Election Day moved the race in favor of Republican. And so the The last minute change. Yeah. Because before it was toss-up, right? It was, yeah. And so that kind of gave me some indication, especially it being 538. But, you know, I didn't expect this, the way it unfolded.

And it was pretty shocking. And one other piece to note was that of the hill country counties, Comal County itself accounted for 41 percent of chip roy's margin wow and so like that was his his uh stronghold yep and so yeah that's that's what won it wow and davis she only won hayes county outside of tra. Oh, she did win Hayes. Which, I mean, makes sense considering what happened in Hayes County in terms of the Texas House. Right.

Right. But it was by fewer than 1,000 votes. Interesting. So that was the only county she won other than Travis. Wow. Well, and it's going to be very fun to do some electoral overlap and look at, okay, who performed well in these districts, which Democrat candidates or officials outperformed or underperformed Biden. It's going to get very fun to splice up these numbers. Yep.

Awesome. Well, thanks for covering that for us. That's a spicy one. We love a good high-profile matchup. Isaiah, speaking of high-profile matchups, the 23rd Congressional District, just as you said in your piece, has kind of become known as a very middle ground politically in terms of a traditional swing district. Walk us through what happened there and whether the results were expected or surprising. Yeah. So this is a very different race than what you were talking about, Brad, mainly because this district, Texas 23, has a reputation for being very down the middle.

And the congressman that holds it now, Republican Will Hurd, is retiring. So it was an open seat. And a much more conservative Republican, Tony Gonzalez, won the race in a major surprise to pollsters. Well, replacing Will Hurd, but against his opponent, Gene Ortiz Jones, Democrat Gene Ortiz Jones. And Chip Roy and Wendy Davis are both ideologues to a degree. They're purists in their principles, and that's what their writing of his own team, you see words like bipartisan, policy over politics, being united instead of divided. And his votes reflect that. He built a reputation around not being afraid to stand up to Trump and reaching across the aisle and sponsoring legislation that was just, you know, not controversial.

That was his national security focus, but not kind of the, I don't know, MAGA border type rhetoric that we saw from a lot of other Republicans. Right. Yeah. And you don't necessarily see MAGA stuff from Chip Roy, but he is very solidly conservative in a more purist kind of way in his messaging and in his votes and that's that's not at all the case with heard heard one with mere hundreds of votes less than a percentage point in 18 right in 2018 yeah and so his grip on that district was just uh was just weak and um on top of that polls conducted on behalf of Gonzalez's campaign,

the Republicans campaign for this year, found his Democratic opponents slightly in the lead, like 42% to 41% for one poll. You know, she had a cash advantage over him almost the whole time. Daniel, I don't know if you know the numbers just for him. If not, you know, no need to dig him up. But Jones, the Democrat, was absolutely the favorite for this race. Like, McKenzie had me write a pre-write saying that Gene Ortiz Jones wins the race, you know, just to have that kind of in our pocket when the inevitable happened. But that didn't happen. Gonzalez won, and he won by a pretty big chunk, were we going to say? say yeah so throughout the entire race uh ortiz jones actually outraced gonzalez by 6.2 million to 2.3 million so basically three times as much money um than the republican yeah republicans jumped up at in the

last last period right like did he jump up with with republicans across the state or no not really um because in the last the last filing period with the federal races you actually saw democrats get a lot more support now in the state races it was a little bit different why that is i don't know um but in the last filing period right before the election that covered the first two weeks of october um ortiz jones still she still outraisedraised Gonzalez three times as much money. So he raised 550,000 and she raised 1.5 million. So still significantly outpacing him at all points in the race. Well, I bring this up to say that I'm looking at the Secretary of State's website right now, Texas Secretary of State, and Gonzalez got 50.66% of the vote.

Jones got 46.51%. So that is a little bit more than a four-point degree of difference between them. And, you know, as we mentioned earlier, with Hurd, the last guy winning by, you know, only a few hundred votes, a four percent lead is, you know, is much more solid. It's substantial. It is a substantial lead for this district, and it has ramifications potentially for how candidates run their campaigns. push the same kind of message for herself that Hurd crafted for himself. Moderate, unifying, focused on the issues instead of the ideology. And that didn't quite deliver for her, even though the pollsters were putting her ahead, even though her funding was ahead. And

there are a lot of neon signs pointing to a Jones victory that didn't quite materialize. So another reason, well, another ramification, I should say, to put it on that end of things. Democrats, including Jones, did not run a ground game very strongly in 2020. They really peaked at that strategy to their advantage in 2018 with Beto. Yeah. They really peaked at that strategy to their advantage in 2018 with Beto, who is famous for his very personal method for talking to voters and potential voters. Cruz was pretty reclusive in 2018, and that hurt him a lot. And it was to Beto's advantage that he had a lot of block walkers going for him. And a lot of the Democrat efforts this year were virtual. They were by text or by the phone. And a lot of people are saying that that hurt

them here. You know, so this big win for Gonzalez, you know, this four point margin of victory, it could have something to do with his strong messaging, carving out a dedicated group of voters that will be more motivated to get out for him. Right. And it could also, not to the exclusion of the other reason, have something to do with the fact that he ran a ground game. He was driving around talking to real voters and Democrats were reluctant to do that this cycle. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a really good synopsis. And I'll say too that, I mean, in 2018, Ortiz Jones,

she was, the results were so close to your point that she was invited to come to orientation in DC. She actually went to DC, attended the congressional orientation because there were recounts happening. People weren't sure whether it would be heard or Ortiz Jones in the, you know, in the seat once, you know, swearing in came, but it ended up being heard. And to your point too, I think this, the spectrum of what's

conservative versus what's not nowadays is so different in the Trump era, but we definitely had a difference in heard and that he was much more middle of the road, much more moderate in his rhetoric, whereas Gonzalez was more on the Trump train. I mean, he had an endorsement from the president in the primary, right? And that became a Cruz versus Trump situation because the other candidate at the time had an endorsement from the junior senator here in Texas. So just a very different kind of contest, certainly in terms of how strong, to your point, the messaging was in aligning with the president,

whereas Heard certainly did not do that in his time campaigning. Can I add something on this? Absolutely. So you mentioned that Democrats relied very heavily on the texting and phone calls and that kind of stuff. I saw a lot of my friends just getting um mentioning that they were getting uh you know texts from campaigns that they uh parties that they have never supported and they will never support and it shows the complexity of uh of having accurate data and how difficult it can be because if you are if

you're spending time texting a, and you're a Democrat candidate and you're texting Republican voters, reliable Republicans, you are wasting your time and you're never going to flip them. And, um, wasting resources is, and especially time is a, is a big problem. And, um, you know, I wonder how much of that played into, um, you know, these democratic losses or, you know, not pulling out what they had expected. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, text banking is kind of the shiny new strategy.

Yeah. It's not new to this race. It was pretty prevalent in 2018. And I didn't get any text in 2016 because I was only 17 years old. Well, she said something about voter data because voter data is not always reliable. That's true. Who knows? But I got tons of texts in 2018, tons of texts this year as well.

And I didn't see any from Republicans. I saw, you know, I got a billion of them from the Democrat Party, none from the Republican Party. I don't know if that has something to do with how they collect the data. You know, like I'm young, I went to college. Who knows what lists that puts me on. Yeah. But I don't think I see Republicans using this strategy as, as prevalently. Yeah.

But that's a totally anecdotal data point from me. So, yeah. Well, also, I mean, there's no way to verify really that that the voter you are texting is the person you are wanting to reach out to and um it's a lot easier to do that when you're knocking doors and seeing people face to face and you can correct errors on the first go around um to hit them later and so uh it's not really something you're able to do that well or efficiently with just through text. But in the time of coronavirus. Right. And we have two very different, you know, rhetoric strings going around in terms of what's actually acceptable and what's not in terms of campaigning. Right.

What like Democrats in person. I mean, I think that there were races in which, you know, candidates did every forum or every town hall virtually. Yeah. And that's an entirely new mechanism. Back in the 21st congressional, Wendy Davis, she went to, she attended the debates virtually and Chip Roy was in, in, in state studio.

And if that doesn't show you the partisan divide, right there, there you go. Well, good stuff. Zay, thanks for covering that for us. Daniel,

coming back to you, you have been covering a lot of these congressional races from There you go. Well, good stuff. Zay, thanks for covering that for us. Daniel, coming back to you. You have been covering a lot of these congressional races from the get-go. There were particularly four new congressmen that were elected kind of in unison here. Walk us through your piece on that. Well, there are actually seven new congressmen elected. Yes. But four in, yes. Walk us through this piece.

Yeah. So the seven new, well, seven new, there could be six depending on how you slice this. So there were three competitive, last, hold on. Let me rewind the clocks. Go back a year and everybody was talking about the Texas. If you don't remember that, just go back, look on Twitter, search for Texas.

Democrats saw that there were Republican congressmen after Republican congressmen in Texas retiring. And they were like, oh, they're getting scared after 2018. This is time for a new blue wave. We're going to come in and pick up a bunch of seats. Now, you know, if you look at the data, like three of those were solid red. They were never going to go to Republican. They didn't. The other three, which Isaiah just touched on, Texas 23 was one of them.

They were never going to go to the Democrat. Yes, that's what I meant. Listeners are supposed to know what I mean, not what I say. So I just presume that they can. I was doing the math in my head. I'm glad you said something. So, yeah yeah three were safe three three were safe for republicans three um not a little bit more on the line um as as

potential toss-ups um and eventually like you know in the past few weeks uh before the election they were rated as toss-ups uh by i think the cook political report and maybe some other, um, prediction outlets. Salvador's crystal ball. So yeah. Yeah. Um, so Texas 23 was one of those. The other two was Texas 22 and down in the Houston area,

Fort Bend County is actually where the most of it is. Um, and then Texas 24 up in the DFW area with Tarrant and, uh, Dallas. And I think it goes into Colin or Denton County is one of those two. Um, and so those were the three that were most competitive. Those ones still ended up going towards the Republican.

Texas 22 was by a safe 30,000 votes. Texas 24, Beth Van Dyne, the Republican, is leading by 5,000 votes. Candace Valenzuela, the Democrat, is not conceding, despite multiple calls from van dyne's camp for her to concede so that one is probably the the most contested out of these uh congressional elections for open seats now the other three seats that i'd mentioned um there's actually four other seats so the the fourth one was the one that was added this year when Representative John Ratcliffe in Texas' fourth congressional district,

which is up in northeast Texas, very deep red congressional district, John Ratcliffe was nominated by Donald Trump to be the next director of national intelligence in his administration and was confirmed by the Senate. And so his seat has been vacant since like the summer, basically. And so the GOP had this very interesting way of selecting a new candidate where all the GOP precinct and county chairs met in Sulphur Springs in August

and chose someone new. There were a bunch of people that were trying to get that nomination, but State Senator Pat Fallon, uh, actually won that. And so he is, uh, won that. And then everybody was presuming that he would win the November election, which he did by a nice healthy margin. I think it was like over 70% of the vote went to him. Um, so that was one of them. Now, the other three open seats that, you know, these congressmen were retiring, they announced that, uh, last fall you have, uh, Texas's 11th congressional district, which is in West Texas. You have, uh, Texas 13th congressional district, which is in central Texas covering Waco and College Station. So, you know, in the 11th congressional district, you had August Pfluger, who retired veteran. He really didn't really have a whole lot of name ID coming into it. But when he announced his race back in, I think, like September of last year. During the October quarterly filing, he announced

that he had raised $700,000, which was just like this huge amount for someone that basically no one in Texas politics had really paid any attention to before. But that paid off and he won the primary race, which had like, I think, over 12 people in it. He won that outright with 52% of the vote in March. So again, this is a safe congressional Republican district. So he went through with 80% of the vote on Tuesday. Also with 80% of the vote on Tuesday was that Panhandle district, which is rated as the country's most Republican district, interestingly enough. And out of all the congressional races in Texas, this was the one that received the

highest margin for Republicans, which was also 80%, but slightly higher than Pfluger. And so Ronnie Jackson is going to be the new representative. He is a former White House physician who served under the past three presidential administrations. He received Donald Trump's endorsement back in the primary and the runoff that he had with Josh Weingartner, who's an ag lobbyist. So, yeah, that was a fun race to watch. And then the other person who was running, which this is why I said that, uh, depending on how you slice it, there's six or seven new reps. So this one is Pete Sessions, who was a representative in Texas's 32nd congressional district, uh, but ran in the 17th congressional district this time, uh, after he lost in 2018. Um, and so he moved down to Waco and ran in this race, had a pretty fiery, uh,

primary and runoff election. Um, the candidate who is backed by representative Bill Flores, who's the incumbent right now, um, actually endorsed Bill Flores endorsed Renee Swan. Um, and so there's a lot of competition there between Swann's camp and Pete Sessions. But Pete Sessions won in the July runoff. So those are the new representatives, all Republican, no Democratic gains, despite lots and lots of money being poured into the state. I like it. Well, thanks for covering that for us. What a synopsis.

Always, always well done. Bradley, we're going to pivot to you the texas senate there is one particular race we are watching the rest were pretty much cut and dry walk us through what happened in sd19 so sd19 is i believe the largest senate district if not it's right up there um geographically and it runs runs along the border from Bexar County all the way out to the New Mexican border. And so it pitted Pete Flores, the incumbent Republican, who he ran in 2016 when the seat was up for regular election. He lost. He lost to Carlos Uresti.

I'm not sure how long he was in that position, but he had been there for some time. And he lost pretty handily. The district is very blue. It hadn't gone red since Reconstruction. A long, long time. And so... A very long time. But Carlos Uresti, of course,

was indicted and convicted of uh being involved in a ponzi scheme and so i think it was 11 conviction 11 felony convictions so yeah he's in jail now but then um pete flores ran again in the special and managed to flip the seat and which was a huge political story i mean having exactly just like you framed it's huge. And made more important is the fact that in 18, the losses that Republicans had in a few Senate majority, which essentially prevents the Democrats from being able to filibuster and then allows Republicans to just basically bypass what the Democrats want, theoretically, of course. And so that was on the line. It wasn't just Pete Flores' seat on the line, him being an elected official.

It was very significant, especially ahead of the session and coming in January. And so, um, he was facing a state representative from San Antonio, Roland Gutierrez. And, you know, it was a lot of people kind of expected it to flip back, which is what happened. He lost. Um, but itself, you know, it went Beto O'Rourke won it by 15 points in 18. Same year that Flores won the seat for in the special election. But it Flores vastly outperformed it. Beto's Beto's take of the district, and he lost by only like 3.3%. Yeah, he outperformed what made sense.

What Beto did, yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, even in defeat, he, you know, there are no moral victories, especially in politics, because, you know, if you don't win you're not in but um this is about as close as you can reasonably get to it because of just how stacked against him the odds were just due to the the makeup of the district's very blue district and you know there's no there's no way getting around that yeah um but uh anyway the republicans uh super majority is lost going into next session and session, and that could affect some of their policy priorities they want to get through, whether it's more property tax legislation, whether it's defund the police legislation or punishments for cities that choose to defund their police. Governor Abbott has mentioned that.

And then another one is taxpayer taxpayer funded lobbying legislation. It's all got to go through the Senate if it's going to pass. And now, you know, Democrats have, you know, another card in their hand to use. And it'll be more difficult to for the Republicans and Dan Patrick as lieutenant governor to just blow off the Democrats in the next session. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you for covering that for us. Definitely one of the bigger races in the state. It was very fun to watch. Daniel, I'm coming to you again. We're going out of order a little bit here, which does crazy things to my brain, but you know what? We're going to be just fine. Walk us through. I think there were one of the big talking points going into the election was, the texas house going to flip from republican to democrat control daniel did that happen no no wow unbelievable walk us through what did happen

and whether or not it was it was much of a change so i'll tell you what happened not much happened you know uh succinct as always we were talking about this earlier with uh brad i think isaiah was there too. Um, and we're like, how are we going to, like, we have plenty to talk about.

We're going to be talking forever about the election. I'm like, we can sum it up in like two sentences. All you need to tell people is basically nothing really happened because the incumbents won in pretty much every race except a few exceptions. Um, so, you know, the,

the, those two exceptions in the Texas house were HD 132 and HD 134 with representatives Sarah Davis and Gina Kalani both losing, one being a Republican, one being a Democrat. And so their losses kind of cancel each other out. The makeup of the Texas house is staying the same um you know this is interesting interesting from a different different perspectives that you might have on it um you know you look at 2018 you had 12 seats that were lost uh to or lost the republicans lost to democrats and then you also had several seats. I believe there are nine in 2018 that Beto O'Rourke carried, but the Republican incumbent also kept. So,

you know, those were the kind of the seats that were really like the strong battleground seats that everybody was watching. You know, you thought Republicans might be able to pick up a few seats that they lost in 2018, which they did with the one of Gina Kalani. And you also thought, well, maybe the seats that Democrats carried, if there's strong Democratic turnout, that maybe some of those seats that Beto O'Rourke carried will also flip at the Texas House. And also one of those did with Representative Sarah so, but all the others stayed the same, like nothing really changed. You know, you have lots of money pouring into these races. Now there were some close races and there are some that, um, I imagine there'll be some recounts done

in a few of these. Uh, but you know, as the results have come in right now, the unofficial complete results from the secretary of State's website, those show no changes in the makeup of the Texas House. A lot of hoopla for nothing. Yeah. So I think it's 87-63. Is that where we're at? I think it's 87 Republicans and 63 Democrats. So look at that. Look at that. It's a shocker of a result. And certainly there was room for it. I mean, with the amount of money spent on some of these house races that exceeded what was spent on some of these it rivaled what was spent on some of these you know lower profile congressional races but um definitely an interesting result to see and a lot of a lot of money spent a lot of hoopla for not much not much shift and not much change um let's talk about collin county

isaiah collin county was one of these areas that folks talked a lot about in terms of flipping from red to blue there were two house seats in particular that you know garnered the targeting of a lot of democrats walk us through what happened there and whether or not we had any sort of change yes state representatives matt shaheen and Jeff Leach, both Republicans and both conservatives to a degree, hang on by a thread. Well, I should say they hung on by a thread in 2018 when, you know, in Shaheen's district, House District 66, he was only 391 votes ahead of his opponent, Democrat Sharon Hirsch. He ran against her this year and won by more than a percentage point. That's still small, but it's a lot bigger than 391 votes, you know, for the county. And a similar situation with Jeff Leach. He was not facing the same opponent. He was facing

a more openly progressive opponent. That's a label that his opponent, Lorenzo Sanchez, would accept and apply to himself. Yeah. And, again, his margin of victory in 2018 was a lot slimmer than this year. This year, it was between two and three points, percentage points. He went 51-point- something percent to 58.2 percent against sanchez and so um we're seeing republican grip kind of tightening again yeah in collin county when as in a lot of places uh it was expected to weaken if not get lost entirely

in this election so um like daniel pointed out earlier both representatives in this election. So, like Daniel pointed out earlier, both representatives in this case ended up with more cash on hand by the final filing period. And there were a lot of high Democrat fundraising numbers up to late October, you know, up to the penultimate filing period. And that turned a lot of heads, you know, that caught a lot of heads. That caught a lot of headlines. Democrats are going to flip. And their high numbers at the very, very end, kind of the 11th hour, flew into the radar. Well, Isaiah, thank you for covering that for us. I think those two House seats in particular, I'm going to pivot to Dallas County races and just talk about those real fast. Our reporter Hayden Sp sparks covered this for us but i think those two collin county seats house district 66 and 67 were huge democrat targets

and you know neither flipped we saw the same thing happen in dallas county with angie chin button and morgan meyer seats both were incredibly close in 2018 and both were largely expected to flip i'd say particularly for mor Morgan Meyer, Representative Morgan Meyer, really has some kind of more urban areas of the county. And that seat didn't even flip. And that was one of those that if you asked a lot of, you know, insiders, consultants, pollsters, which Texas House seats, like name, you know, your top five Texas House seats, most likely to flip from Republican to Democrat, Morgan Meyer's would have been near or at the top of that list. And so interesting to see that he was able to maintain his seat as was Angie Chen Button, as was Leach, as was Shaheen. So different pairs in North Texas House districts that maintained their representation. Very interesting stuff. Bradley, I'm coming to you. More Central Texas. There were

two House districts that you've been covering since the get-go. Walk us through what happened here. Yeah, so along the lines of things not changing. Yeah. We're just telling you a lot of different things that have not changed. Yes. We're updating you on a lot of things that did not happen. But there is something of interest in this. So Representatives Aaron Zwiener and Vicki Goodwin, both remain, they maintain their seats and will be returning to the Capitol in January.

Well, that's assuming that there's not a virtual session. Oh, that's true. Let's hope not. They have to be in Austin, but whether or not they're in the Capitol, yeah. They have to be in Austin. Is that a constitutional thing? Interesting. Okay.

But in the race, interestingly enough, both of their 2018 margins shrunk substantially. In House District 45, Zweener, her dropped to 1,200 votes, about half of what it was in 18. And an even bigger drop came in HT47 with Vicki Goodwin. Her margin dropped from about 5,000 down to 1,300. And so, you know, that right there shows the power, you know, the effect that the beta wave had in 18. And not only did that turn a reliably red district, I mean, it was still, you know, kind of close, but it had been read consistently. Not only did that flip it blue but it made the margin pretty substantially high yeah um however you know this time around the the candidates man

the republican candidates in hd 45 was carrie isaac in uh hd 47 which is of course in in austin in uh travis county was 1300 and uh it it was Justin Barry was the Republican candidate there. Both of them, you know, managed to shrink the margins. And we're still kind of the jury's still a little bit out on on HG 47. I mean, it's mostly called but hasn't been officially. And, you know, I spoke to the campaign, Justin Barry's campaign, and they said they're not ready to call it yet. They're watching the provisionals come in and we'll see what happens. But, you know, 1,300 is a lot to swing. You know, if this was a few hundred votes, it might be conceivable, but we'll see what happens there. But it's looking like, you know,

those two Democratic incumbents, they secured their victory. Yeah. And there are different districts than your Leach, Shaheen, or Meyer, Chen, Button seats, particularly in that those are either urban or suburban, right? They're in more developed areas of the state. Hayes County, Blanco County, I mean, these areas that particularly – HG 47 is in Travis County. It's a different kind of seat but hd 45 certainly has a lot of rural representation it's very it's a decently sized district i believe it's all of blanco and all of hayes county yeah in this house district and we're seeing a lot of people move from austin out to these more rural areas and

it's not suburban i mean parts of are, but it largely there it's, it's, it's a very kind of shifting and changing district in that people are moving from Austin out to these areas and finding a little bit of, you know, respite. Yeah. And so it's definitely interesting to see that shift happen in the hill

country. Yeah. And in 47 to remark on that a bit, you know, one issue that really played a big factor in this was the police issue yeah i mean not only did austin you know cut 150 million dollars from their police department's budget so obviously that right there was a massive part but the republican candidate justin berry is a police officer himself yeah and so this that issue was unavoidable for vicky goodwin. And, you know, she obviously didn't cost her the election. But, you know, I would be hard pressed to believe that that did not contribute to the significant shrinkage in the the margin of victory that she had. So, yeah.

Yeah, for sure. Well, guys, I'm going to pivot to a little bit of free-flowing discussion. If I say it's free-flowing and it's planned, then I think it still counts as free-flowing, right? I actually have no idea what you're about to say. I hope that it's not another quasi-fun topic. Another quasi-fun. Isaiah only likes real fun topics. No, I want to talk through what were the more surprising things we saw. I want to give Daniel a chance to talk about the TPI that he's worked so hard on the results from that, you know, it's unbelievable. Um, and just walk through kind of the punditry surrounding the election and what, you know, what we took from it. Um, so what, what surprised you the most, Daniel, I'm gonna start with you.

What surprised you the most? Um, talk about some of those predictions, talk about TPI and what we saw post election. You know, you used the word unbelievable. And that's how everybody was treating it when I was saying what I thought would happen before the election. Now look who's laughing. Let's just say I was really, really wrong and Daniel was very, very right. I wasn't very, very right. You were more right than I was.

That's not anyway. So, yeah, like we don't publish our predictions because that's stupid and it's a fool's errand but we do like to make predictions amongst ourselves and and kind of see who's going to get it right um and i think it's just fun practice to try and figure out how elections except for a reporter down in houston holly hansen who refuses to make predictions and holly in refusing to make predictions credit is your i should give credit where credit is due and like nothing really changed so yeah her prediction was right in that not having a prediction anyways um no i i based most of my predictions on the texas partisan index that we created and the way that you can go back

and look at i can search for different podcasts that we've the way that you can go back and look at, I can search for different podcasts that we've done on those. You can go to our website and look up the Texas partisan index. And basically what I did was I looked at the Texas House and Senate seats and I compared the median share of statewide races of Republicans versus Democrats in 2016 and 2018 and came up with the average of those. And that basically gives you the TPI rating the partisan leanings of each district. Now, when we were making our internal predictions and kind of guessing about who's right and who's wrong, I said Morgan Meyer was going to keep his seat. And everybody laughed at me.

Yeah, we really did. And they're like, no, he was going to keep his seat. And everybody laughed at me. Yeah, we really did. And they're like, no, he's going to lose. And I was like, no. Like, I think the Republicans that are at risk, based on the TPI, would be Sarah Davis, Angie Chin Button, and Dwayne Bohack in 138, his open seat. Which the Macy Hole ran in. Yeah, and she won. And Angie Chin Button won. Sarah Davis was the only one to lose. his open seat. I said, those are the most likely ones ran in. Yeah. And she won, um,

the, and Angie Chin button one, Sarah Davis was the only one to lose. Um, so I said, those were the ones that were most likely to, um, most likely to change hands, uh,

for the Democrats. Now, uh, Morgan Myers district has a TPI of our 54%. Um, so on average in the statewide Republican races in 2016 and 2018, Republicans got 54% of the vote. Now if you go back and you look at how much Trump did, he did terrible.

He got like 44%, I think, in 2016. And I'm assuming that he did pretty bad this time too. In the district? Compared to other Republicans on the ballot, yeah um in the district compared to other republicans on the ballot yeah in that district uh but on average republicans still receive 54 of the ballots you know these are even looking at you know the state supreme lower, uh, for Republicans. Um, in 2018, the median share of Republicans was, it did slightly favor Democrats and Morgan Myers district, um, at just, uh, 48.3% of the vote. But comparing that, uh, you know, you you know taking into consideration the fact that it

was a midterm versus presidential and the people who come out to vote was different um i said like no there's probably it's probably moving left some but it's not going to move completely left um and guess what i was right let's go ahead and spike that football game. He totally spiked it on Twitter. It was pretty darn good. And so looking at the TPI, the other thing that's just not surprising are the two seats that did change hands with Sarah Davis and Morgan Meyer. Based on the Texas Partisan Index, Morgan Meyer, or sorry, not Morgan Meyer, Gina Kalani, I'm looking, I have the TPI pulled up right next to each other. They're right next to each other.

Mike Schofield in HD 132 defeated Gina Kalani. And her district is the most Republican leaning just right below Morgan Meyer on the TPI. And Sarah Davis is the most Democratic leaning district held by Republicans on the TBI. So, you know, using that as an analysis as kind of a gauge of which districts are turning more blue, which ones are turning more red. Obviously, there's a lot of factors to consider, but it does give you a pretty good indication. And I think the results on Tuesday proved that. Yeah, absolutely. Something else, too, that never made sense to me was that every article I read predicting seat flips at the state legislature or in Congress or with the presidency,

we're all just charting a line between 2018 and now effectively, you know, like if you just read these articles, almost all of them say, you know, they describe it like metaphorically in terms of momentum or progress or things like that. When you're just drawing a line between two points. Yeah. Where in 2018, there was such a clear peak with such a popular candidate for the Democrats that that just did not. That's totally absent from this year's race. Yeah. You know, Joe Biden was less popular in Texas than Hillary Clinton.

Which is crazy to think about. Although, well, yes, it is crazy to think about. And even going back to, you know, the 2018 cycle, I think, you know, Democrats and progressives just like you thought, saw it as a trend line that was beneficial in terms of its trajectory. Whereas Republicans saw, okay, well, we got decimated in 2018, so we're going to get decimated again. Let's prepare for it, right?

There was that kind of mentality of, oh, gosh, well, it's just going to keep getting worse, but how much worse will it get? Whereas we literally saw the status quo for the most part remain unchanged. There's another factor to consider, that I haven't heard talked about yet this year, probably because the presidential election is essentially not over yet. But I remember in 2016, hearing from certain pundits that, you know, even from certain Trump strategists, that having the media, by and large, predict Democrat victories was motivating to Republican voters. Yeah. So in 2018, there was, you know, great predictions of blue waves in Texas.

And after, you know, letting Texas kind of cure in that for two years, with these kinds of prophecies among the media, that itself might have had a motivating factor for Republican voters to get out. Certainly. Well, and we've talked a lot about this. This has been my talking point from the beginning, even though I predicted, you know, incredible Democratic gains. I still said this from the get go was that Trump's people who came out in 2016 versus Beto's folks who came out in 2018, who comes to the polls in 2020, right? Will that be an incredible increase

in turnout in which we see new voters return from both of those election cycles because we have trump and biden on the ballot or will one demographic outshine another and i think it you know the status quo remaining unchanged kind of answers that question although we have a lot of voter data to continue to parse through but daniel you had pointed out the rhythms of midterms versus presidentials right like usually the opposition to the president gains most strongly during the midterm i mean yeah i mean in the past several administrations at least when you have a republican in the white house democrats turn out to vote in the midterm when you have a democrat in the white house republicans turn out to vote in the midterm and it's flipped during the um during the presidential race the incumbent party at least in re-elections with uh 2012 and 2000 this year specifically

looking at those two uh you have better the the incumbent is better at turning out so fathers were sharp weren't they yeah they knew a thing or two brad do you have any uh surprising aspects that you saw well i was so shocked that michael bloomberg flushed away another 2.3 million dollars see if you can catch my sarcasm um so yeah my i wish you'd spend it on me. Yeah, that would be nice, wouldn't it? Whenever Michael Bloomberg gets brought up, I always remember the really intelligent person on Twitter that took his hundreds of millions of dollars that he spent and said that if he were to give it away to every American,

he would give a million dollars away to each American citizen. And it's like, do you even have a calculator app's do the math on this um but yes i would say that was my most surprised moment well tell us tell us about that race really fast we have so many things to cover but quickly tell us about that race yeah so the railroad commission race um that was in my mind one of the most important races of the the uh the season, you know, it's largely something that people didn't really pay attention to. But, you know, the importance of oil and gas and energy overall to Texas is so paramount that this race shouldn't have been overlooked. And, you know, it wasn't by the left. They really wanted to flip the seat, hence the Michael Bloomberg throwing in $2.3 million.

But in the race, Republican Jim Wright, and I'll have a story up on this later today. So by the time this podcast is up, it'll be published. Republican Jim Wright handily beat Krista Castaneda, the Democrat nominee. And it wasn't really surprising. And he pretty much wiped the floor with her it was a 10 point about a 10 point win and uh he finished with over a million more votes than she did so um yeah that was the railroad commission race a million that that is an incredibly substantial margin um okay folks we have our fun topic today is not a fun topic

according to what isaiah would call a fun topic but we're going to talk about it the speaker's race has been a huge political story this week that by and large was outshone by the election for good i mean again we're dealing with the 2020 election here the general election but there has been an incredible amount of shifting that's gone on in the texas legislature in terms of where different members allegiances lie brad you've been covering it for the most part boys feel free to jump in, but quickly give us a synopsis of what has happened with the speakers race this week. The race has basically lasted a week.

Or as it sits right now. It will still probably continue on the next few days. We'll see what happens, but it has been a very brief run of things so far. We saw Sinfronio Thompson, representative from Houston, was the first one to come out and say she was running for speaker. Obviously,

that hinged upon the Democrats taking the House, which did not happen. And so there were multiple other Democrats that also jumped in. And all of their hopes to become speaker were dashed away on Tuesday night. However, we have had, you know, a couple Republicans that are, you know, caucusing, getting support for their candidacy. One of them is Jeannie Morrison, who announced, I believe that was either late last week or early. Right. I can't.

I don't remember. The timeline is so, this election has just thrown everything off. But anyway. It happened in 2020, didn't it? It did. Yes. We'll go with that. Sometime this year.

But she she announced she wanted to run. And, you know, at this point, there were multiple Republicans and it was there was no clear picture. And it kind of consolidated into these two camps. And Jeannie Morrison is the candidate in one of them. She's been endorsed by Trent Ashby, another who uh threw his name in the ring for speaker oddly enough she endorsed him i was about to say yeah and then the day not even 24 hours later um he decided to withdraw and endorse her which is when you endorse a candidate you are for all intents and purposes withdrawing from the race you're saying i would rather you be

speaker i'm like yielding my candidacy you're telling people don't don't vote for exactly and uh the other candidate is a representative dade feeling and uh he was once he jumped in the race it was kind of clear that he if you were if you're a betting man, you put money on him because he came out with a lot of support. And as you know, I it was Wednesday. I attended the press conference and he had at the Capitol. He announced that, you know, he had the votes to become speaker. And obviously the voting won't happen until the legislature convenes in january but you know he has maintained a pretty solid at least as he put as he has put put out and released a pretty solid list of names uh both

in the democrat democratic party and in the republican party um to support him for the speakers yeah and need 76 yes you need 51 and i believe the last thing i saw was he had uh well over 100 yeah at least according to him yes now things can change yeah people can change their minds um but as of right now dade phelan will be the next speaker and um yeah and we've heard a lot of you know different uh there's been a lot of talk about discontent within the republican caucus about phelan's candidacy and speakership um i know that there was a state rep today, Michelle Beckley,

a Democrat who won reelection in a district that was targeted by Republicans, but alas, she remains in the legislature as well. Status quo again, but she came out and said, you know, representative Phelan,

I have not heard from you. I've not been contacted by our quote unquote next speaker. And we do know from, you know, different members and different people we've talked to that there's certainly discontent in that group that Phelan has support from, or at least has, you know, the list of folks. But will that discontent be enough to, you know, overturn or change any sort of numeric certainty of his election? I don't think so, but it might,

who knows? Things can fall apart. We shall see. But but as of right now we'll see what happens well gentlemen any final thoughts any words of wisdom for our listeners that was fun thank you did you did you enjoy that fun topic isaiah i could barely contain the fun that i felt would you do you want to do you want to say a fun thing i'm giving you the option to say a fun thing i'm i'm i'm drawing a blank you're you're you're you're fun now of fun that speaker conversation was too much fun for you yeah that's the way to put it uh brad or daniel any final words any words of wisdom come on gentlemen i'm relying on you i need sleep daniel are going to take up drinking coffee anytime soon?

Nope. Great. Well, folks, on that note, thank you so much for listening and we will catch you next week. Thank you all so much for listening. If you've been enjoying our podcast, it would be awesome if you would review us on iTunes. And if there's a guest you'd love to hear on our show, give us a shout on Twitter. Tweet at the Texan News. We're so proud to have you standing with us as we seek to provide real journalism in an age of disinformation. We're paid for exclusively by readers like you, so it's

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