This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
I am very encouraged. Although Beto O'Rourke lost yesterday's Senate race, it is significant that 75-80% of Latinos voted for him, alongside unprecedented levels of voter turnout by the Latino community in this election. According to this Texas Observer piece titled, "In the Rio Grande Valley, New Citizens Turn Out to Vote for the First Time," it's heartening to see that many first-time voters turned out. Trump's anti-immigrant campaign particularly affects the Latino community as
noted in this America's Voice bulletin below.
Analysts correctly state that Beto O'Rourke's race helped "down-ballot" candidates. Democrats in Texas, for example, picked up a whopping 12 Texas House seats, particularly in North Texas—but more is needed to overcome the advantage that Republicans still hold in the House. Of these twelve, all are women and from what I can tell, three are Latina, boding well for the Mexican American Legislative Caucus in the House.
Perhaps the most amazing accomplishment for the state of Texas was overall turnout, surging to near-presidential election levels at 8.3 million people strong, as noted by the Texas Tribune. This nearly amounts to the 9 million votes cast in the 2016 presidential election.
With great candidates like Beto running a phenomenal U.S. Senate race, Texas is definitely winnable without PAC monies. However winning requires investment, especially by the democratic party that has largely neglected Texas and Texas voters.
While saddened by Beto's loss, us Texans owe much to his courage, stamina, and progressive values and vision which definitely have a home in Texas.
American Election Eve Poll shows Latino preferred O’Rourke over Cruz 74%-24%
AUSTIN, TX – Higher voter turnout was reported all across Texas during this year’s midterm election, leading to an increase in Latino and suburban voters that broke heavily for Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke in his race to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz. Despite the high numbers, O’Rourke was unable to defeat Cruz, but as findings from the American Election Eve Poll show, the Democrat built the foundation to turnout voters of color in Texas who showed up and overwhelmingly supported him across the state.
Data from the election eve poll was corroborated by on the ground data from county and precinct election returns showing over a 100% increase in the Latino vote in Dallas, Houston, El Paso as well as throughout the Rio Grande Valley. Precinct analysis of the vote returns by the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Initiative suggest around 75-80% of Latinos voted for O’Rourke.
Latinos overwhelmingly continue to favor Democrats as our finding show, and immigration reform remained the number one issue for Latinos in the Lone Star State.
The American Election Eve Poll examined how African American, Asian American & Pacific Islander, and Latino voters in Texas engaged in the 2018 midterm elections.
85% of African American voters in Texas think Donald Trump’s racist statements and policies will cause a major setback to the progress made in recent years by African Americans.
66% of AAPI voters in Texas think Donald Trump’s racist statements and policies will cause a major setback to the progress made in recent years by AAPIs.
77% of Latino voters in Texas think Donald Trump’s racist statements and policies will cause a major setback to the progress made in recent years by AAPIs.
Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice issued the following statement: “This should be a wake-up call for Democrats that Texas is winnable. Beto O’Rourke has paved the wave for future progressive candidates to loudly support policies that are pro-immigrant. Unprecedented support from Latinos shows that there are gains to be made if the investments are there.”
Mario Carrillo, Texas State Director of America’s Voice issued the following statement, “Texas is well on its way to becoming a swing state, and Latino voters remain the key. Beto O’Rourke’s campaign went a long way in engaging and inspiring Texans in every corner of the state, and we must build on the foundation he has set.”
“Latinos in Texas have made their presence felt throughout the state with historic turnout for a midterm along the border, gains in Latino-heavy districts, as well as sending two Latinas to the House of Representatives. We must continue investing in Texas, especially along the border, to ensure that Latinos continue to grow their power in a state in which they’ll soon be the majority.”
I want to publicly acknowledge my friend, Laura Yeager, and the League of Women Voters for their hugely successful efforts at increasing voter registration and voter turnout in Texas. Many efforts merit mention, of course. But this one is important because they worked particularly hard on getting Texas teachers and Texas high school students to vote. It's hard to get depressed about Beto not winning yesterday when our state is becoming a "voting state," instead of a "non-voting" one.
Thank you all for your hard work encouraging educators to vote and model civic engagement for kids. I really think our efforts made a difference in helping voters think about public education, and turn out to vote.
I wanted to share some early stats I've pulled out comparing yesterday's election to the 2014 midterm election. (These are all Texas-specific numbers.)
Percentage of eligible voters registered to vote:
2014 - 74.15%
2018 - 79.40%
Increase of 5.25% in voter registration.
Percentage of registered voters who turned out to vote:
2014 - 33%
2018 - 53%
WOW!!!! That is an increase of 20% in voter turnout!
Total voter turnout:
2014 -
US Senate- 4,648,358
Governor - 4,718,268
2018-
US Senate - 8,323,954
Governor - 8,298,078
That is a 79% increase in number of voters for US Senate.
That is a 76% increase in number of voters for Governor.
These are huge increases in voter participation! Our work is paying off. As we grow voter registration, participation, and turnout, we will continue to build the culture of voting we are working toward.
I LOVE what's happening in Texas right now! Excellent piece on the complicatedness of the Latinx vote in our state. I agree with the Beto campaign that it's not that we're a red state, but a non-voting one.
Culpability may be found in the Republican Party's machinations that delimit the vote through gerrymandering, voter ID, and a lack of candidates that could potentially inspire the Latinx vote. The democratic party is also to blame for a woeful lack of underinvestment in the Latinx community. Folks are understandably antsy about this election. I tell them that Beto has already won. He has inspired our state and nation. And for that there is every reason to feel optimistic about the future of our country. Please go vote if you've not already done so. Put it on your calendar this evening for tomorrow. -Angela Valenzuela
The Republican Party’s future dominance of the Lone Star State, and the nation itself, relies on rigging democracy to its advantage. It won’t work forever.
This year, I voted in Texas for the first time. It was complicated.
Registering to vote was simple
enough. The post office had a form I could print out with my personal
information and change of address. Because I don’t own a car, I had to Lyft to
the Bexar County Elections Department and turn in my registration. Although I
was more than a week ahead of the deadline, the sheer number of new
registrations meant that I was not in the system until weeks after the deadline
had passed. I was able to check online and see that I was registered, although
my registration card did not arrive until several weeks later.
Obtaining
an ID was another matter. Texas has one of the strictest voter-ID laws in the
country. It is very selective about which IDs are valid—the
Republican-controlled state legislature determined that military IDs and gun
licenses are fine, but employee and student IDs are not—and to vote I would
have to obtain a Texas state ID. I could get a driver’s license if I turned in
my license from Washington, D.C., from where I’d recently moved, and as long as
I brought proof of citizenship, proof of my Social Security number, proof of
identity, and proof of residency. So I brought along my passport, W-2s, bank
statement, insurance statement, phone bill, and D.C. driver’s license. The
employee at the Texas Department of Public Safety who signed the piece of paper
that would serve as my temporary license was named “Borders”; he made a joke
about not crossing him.
Texas
billed me $35 for my new license; with transportation to and from DPS and the
Bexar County elections office, the cost of my registering
to vote in Texas topped $80.* For anyone who is missing any of those
documents and would need to obtain them, the price would be far higher. I work
from home, so I have the privilege of being able to visit these facilities
during working hours, and I can afford both the cost of transportation and the
necessary documents. I live in the city, so public facilities are not difficult
for me to get to. For people with more traditional jobs or who have less
disposable income, these barriers stand much higher.
Moreover,
Texas has all but banned voter-registration drives, which is how
many low-income and minority voters are registered, through laws that bar
anyone but a deputy voter registrar in a particular county from
registering voters in that county. If they tried to register a voter in another
county, even they would be breaking the law. From trying to register to casting
a ballot, it is hard to vote in Texas, maybe harder than in any other state.
That’s
by design. Although Republican dominance of Texas long predates these new
voting restrictions, their implementation is part of a national GOP strategy of
maintaining political control through scorched-earth culture-war campaigns that
target historically disfavored minorities and the disenfranchisement of the populations
whose growth and influence could challenge that control. It is a consciously
counter-majoritarian strategy for a party that wants to maintain its power
indefinitely, even if most of the American electorate opposes it.
Immediately
after the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013,
Texas Republicans moved to implement a voter-ID law that would have the effect
of making voting more difficult for Democratic-leaning constituencies. In 2014,
a federal judge found that the law was an unconstitutional “poll tax” that
deliberately discriminated against black and Latino
voters, who were more likely to lack the required forms of ID or have a
difficult time obtaining them. In response, the Texas legislature made the law
slightly more lenient, allowing Texas residents to vote without ID if they sign
a document stipulating, under penalty of arrest, that they faced a “reasonable
impediment” in obtaining an ID. By 2018, the legal battle was over and Texas
Republicans had won.
In-person voter fraud is rarer than getting struck by lightning. That said, the
requirement that people prove their identity at the polls is reasonable. But
there are many ways to do that even without requiring a photo ID—let alone
skewing the list of acceptable IDs toward those that voters from one particular
party are more likely to have. Under federal law, voters are required to prove
their identity before voting in federal elections, but those requirements are
more permissive than the ones adopted under strict photo ID laws, allowing
voters to provide documents such as pay stubs and bank statements.
“The
reality is that in-person voter fraud is not a widespread problem. And the
justification for these laws is really empty. And I think that’s a key part of
the context here, when you think about the problem that the laws are designed
to address,” said Max Feldman of the Brennan Center for Justice. “So with that
background, though, I think that it’s important that the IDs required are
widely accessible and are not possessed by one group at a significantly lesser rate
than other groups.”
The
Democrats’ defeat in 2016 ushered in a parade of pundits who argued that the
party had failed because it had assumed demographics were destiny, and had
relied too strongly on what they labeled “identity politics.” The truth is closer
to the reverse. In Texas and other states, Republicans have sought to engineer the
demographics of the electorate to be whiter and older, the better to run
culture-war campaigns that scapegoat religious and ethnic minorities for the
nation’s problems. The question is, how long can the Republican Party
manipulate the political process to pursue an agenda on taxes, immigration, and health care that most of the country does
not want?
“Texas
has one of the lowest voter turnouts in the country, and the elected officials
who currently hold power want to keep it that way,” said Cristina Tzintzún
Ramírez, the director of Jolt, a Latino voting-rights group in the state. “They
don’t want the people that make up this state to determine a new direction for
Texas.”
Texas’s
voter-ID law is part of that, but so is its redistricting process. The Texas
delegation to Congress consists of two Republican senators, 25 Republican House
members, and 11 Democratic House members. My cousin and I are both represented
by Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat who has been in Congress so long that he voted for
the Defense of Marriage Act and also voted to repeal it. My cousin lives in
Austin; I live more than 70 miles away, in San Antonio. The district, two urban
enclaves connected by a long, thin ribbon stretched between them, was ruled
unconstitutional twice by federal courts, but was then upheld in a 5-4 Supreme
Court decision this year. It is an obvious artifact of the effort to pack
liberal whites and Latinos into one district, where they can’t threaten
Republican dominance of the delegation.
“The Texas House, the Texas Senate, is majority
Republican. The governor is Republican. The lieutenant governor is Republican.
The attorney general is Republican. The whole state is a ‘red state.’ I’m not a
politician, but it would make sense that these politicians who are in power
would want to retain power,” said Edgar Saldivar of the Texas ACLU. “So what
we’re seeing not just in Texas but across the country is an effort by state
legislatures to make it more difficult for minorities, for poor people and people
of color, to cast votes, because they might fear that they would lose power, if
everyone had a fair and equal chance to vote.”
Texas’s
population is 42 percent non-Hispanic white, or “anglo,” in
Texas terms, and 40 percent Latino, but the electorate was 65 percent white in 2016,
and only 21 percent Latino. White Texans are substantially more likely to be
conservative, and Latinos are more likely to vote Democratic. The Latino population also skews younger, and
younger people are less likely to vote. That helps explain the dominance of
ultraconservative Republican lawmakers in the state: Texas’s electorate is far
more conservative than its population as a whole. A majority of Texans (54 percent) believe
that the federal government should ensure that all Americans have health-care
coverage, for example, and Texans’ opinions on gun control, immigration, and abortion are more moderate than it might
seem to outsiders. Texas has a reputation as a blood-red state, but if its
electorate looked more like its population, it might be more of a light salmon.
So
why don’t more Latinos vote? “There’s always this wrong perception of Latinos
as the sleeping giant, when in reality it’s not Latinos’ fault that they’re not
voting; it’s the party’s fault for not engaging Latino voters and making them
see why they should vote,” said Emily Farris, a professor at Texas Christian
University. “I think that’s true across the board, not just for Latinos but for
a number of people.”
There’s
also another, less-acknowledged factor in Republican dominance of Texas
politics, alongside voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the failure of the
Democratic Party to invest in engaging them. The economic barriers to voting in
this state are so strong that it is simply harder for working people to vote,
or to believe that if they do vote, their lives will change in meaningful ways.
“The
government for a long period of time now has not reflected them or their
values, and people need something to vote for,” Crystal Zermeño, the strategic
director of the Texas Organizing Project, told me. “People are struggling in a
state where it’s hard to be poor, it’s hard for them to see themselves in that
process, when there’s not really a vision of what Texas can be.”
When
liberals think about the future of Texas, they often look wistfully to
California, whose demographics are broadly similar (its population is about 40
percent white and 40 percent Latino) in a reliably blue state. The California
electorate is somewhat less white than that of Texas, with white voters casting
59 percent of ballots in 2016—but unlike in Texas, the white voting population is
roughly evenly divided between moderates, liberals,
and conservatives. California is toward the top of the list of states by voter
turnout, while Texas lingers close to the bottom.
“We’re like evil twins,” said Sylvia Manzano, a
voting expert at Latino Decisions. “Depending on who you ask, the other is the
evil twin.”
I
don’t mean to suggest that demographics are destiny—the differences between
Texas and California illustrate the importance of organization, persuasion, and
mobilization.
One
of the key distinctions between California and Texas, activists and experts
told me, is that while California Governor Pete Wilson’s anti-immigrant initiative,
Proposition 187, turned the state’s Latino voters against the Republican Party,
until recently, Texas Republicans were considered moderate on immigration—the
last U.S. president from Texas sought to pass legislation granting undocumented
immigrants legal status, a proposal that would be a nonstarter in Trump’s GOP.
“Texas
Republicans didn’t used to be that way. In fact, George W. Bush used to say,
‘I’m not going to be like California’ in reference to the hostile
anti-immigration rules,” said Manzano. “It’s so interesting how saying ‘I’m not
going to be like California’ has changed in terms of what that meant to a
Republican politician in Texas.”
The
mobilization against Prop 187 helped build a Latino turnout organization in the
Golden State, while in Texas, neither party has made a similar organizational
effort.
“There
is more investment also in that state from progressives into voter registration
and voter turnout that Texas does not yet have,” said Tzintzún Ramírez. “People
compare us to California all the time and they say, ‘Oh, anti-immigrant laws
were passed, and there was a backlash and the state turned blue,’ but what they
don’t talk about is the long-term investment it took to make that happen.” The
perception that the Democratic Party is waiting expectantly for Republican
nativism to provoke a Latino voter boom, without ever investing in organizing
the community, is a source of enduring frustration for the activists who work
to increase Latino political participation. “[Beto] O’Rourke is doing as well
as he is not because of the progressive infrastructure that has been built, but
in spite of it,” said Tzintzún Ramírez.
Republican
dominance of Texas, which traces back at least as far as 1994, the last time a
Democrat held statewide office, predates the party’s recent push to restrict
the franchise. But if the party believed that dominance would continue
unchallenged indefinitely, those restrictions wouldn’t have been necessary.
Demographics aren’t destiny, but the Republican Party has approached its
counter-majoritarian social engineering under the assumption that they are.
“Texas is really emblematic of the rise of the
Trump administration,” said Tzintzún Ramírez, “in that people are afraid that
our demographics are changing, that people of color will become the majority
nationally, and in Texas and California we already are.”
This
is part of why Texas Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz are constantly invoking
the specter of Texas turning into California—a more energized Latino
electorate, and a more liberal, urban white population. Cruz once mocked his Democratic rival, Beto O’Rourke,
by saying that Democrats “want us to be just like California, right down to
tofu and silicon and dyed hair."
It’s
impossible to imagine a Democratic politician seeking statewide office mocking
millions of people this way without it becoming a major scandal—think of the
uproar over Hillary Clinton’s “deplorable” remarks or Barack Obama saying
Clinton’s primary voters were “clinging to guns and religion”—but Cruz’s
remarks reflect his distinct fear that an influx of white liberals from
California to Texas’ metropolises could blunt the Republicans’ advantage in the
state. If Republicans believed that liberal-bashing could hold the state for
them forever, they wouldn’t need to restrict the franchise. The highest percentage of Californians who leave the state go to Texas,
and many of them have been younger and college educated. But it takes only one
look at the Trump administration, whose most committed nativists have been Californians, to know that those leaving
aren’t necessarily left-leaning.
Nevertheless,
Cruz is already too late to stop silicon, tofu, and dyed hair from coming to
Texas. There are two vegetarian restaurants in my neighborhood alone—and the
last time I was at one of them, a group of uniformed military personnel came in
and sat down at the table next to mine. The restaurant was bedecked with Texas
iconography—including those ubiquitous signs with the Texan battle cry “Come
and take it.” San Antonio has plenty of pickup trucks with Beto stickers, and
homes with American flags on their porch and Beto signs in their yard. The
liberal culture that Cruz and others consider antithetical to Texas is already
here, and the synthesis exists without contradiction: It is inarguably blue,
inarguably Texan, and not quarantined to Austin.
The red state–blue state dichotomy has always been
reductive—every state has thousands, and in some cases millions, of people who
fit the opposite mold. It is no coincidence that Barack Obama’s introduction on
the national stage was a speech rejecting that very concept. “We worship an
awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around
our libraries in the red states,” Obama said at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.
“We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends
in the red states.” It is such a simple sentiment—it feels almost dated in its
charity and generosity—yet one that inarguably renders a picture of America
closer to how it actually is than much political reporting or cable-news
programming.
What makes this era different is the lengths to which Republican
politicians are willing to go to set the rules to maintain their dominance in
areas that are not as red as they would like them to be. The future of the
Republican Party relies on its ability to prevent or deter people of color from
exercising the franchise. And the more politicians manipulate the process, the
more they need to reassure themselves that their voters are the only legitimate
ones, that they would have won even if they hadn’t rigged the game.
“No matter whether a suppressive or discriminatory voting law
ultimately affects the outcome of a race for political office: These laws can
still be unconstitutional, and they still place a burden on people’s
constitutional rights that should not be there,” said the Brennan Center’s
Feldman. “That said, they can—excluding certain groups of people from the
voting booth can obviously have an impact on what their representation looks
like. And I think that at least some state legislators are well aware of that.”
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross lied to Congress about the
process of adding immigration-status questions to the census; the questions
stand to chill participation from Latinos and undercut Democratic-leaning areas. Georgia
Secretary of State Brian Kemp, seeking a promotion to governor, engaged in one of the largest mass
disenfranchisements in U.S. history, in an apparent attempt to blunt the
influence of the Peach State’s black voters. Republican legislators in North
Dakota, after an upset win by Democrat Heidi Heitkamp in the 2012 Senate race,
passed a law designed to disenfranchise the Native American population
that put her over the top. President Donald Trump, in a last-ditch effort to
energize his base for the midterms, has promised to repeal the Fourteenth
Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, which would create a
permanent, stateless, hereditary, nonvoting underclass for the first time since
the nation abolished slavery.
Whatever happens on Tuesday, the Republican Party cannot govern
forever with the support of a shrinking minority of the population. Eventually
there will be a reckoning. Even in Texas.
* The original version of this story
misstated the cost of a license in Texas. We regret the error.
We
want to hear what you think about this article. Submit
a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
-Angela Valenzuela 
