Ross Ramsey, The Texas Tribune

By Ross Ramsey, The Texas Tribune

May 31, 2022

Time is the enemy. A week has passed since 21 people were murdered in an elementary school in Uvalde, an atrocity still at the center of public and private attention and concern.

Gov. Greg Abbott and other politicians bound to gun culture are squirming, but history tells us public attention will subside, that voters will move on to other issues and that the Texas pols can relax into their ardent deregulation of guns, the No. 1 cause of death by injury for kids in the U.S.

The elected officials who have done little to protect Texans and other Americans after any of the mass shootings that came before Uvalde have something in common with the dumbfounding inaction of the 19 first responders who idled in a hallway at Robb Elementary for more than an hour last Tuesday while a gunman killed 21 children and teachers.

Those officials are frozen by their fear of what might happen if they act, governed by what the most zealous Second Amendment voters might do if they try to make gun safety a priority.

They are not the noble heroes we hoped they would be. They’re just scared. And it is a powerful fear, too, that can hold them at bay while people they have the ability to save are instead murdered.

They’ve literally made it easier to buy guns and ammo in Texas than it is to vote, or to get certified to cut hair or handle food. Only the first of those things — buying guns and ammo — requires no training, registration, licensing or certification.

Those lawmakers are doing their jobs as they see fit, tailoring their responses to the wishes of some of their most outspoken voters. Ignoring the massacre has risks of its own, but their political judgment is and has been that the wrath of gun rights supporters will be worse than the wrath of voters who think gun violence is out of hand and should be reversed.

What happened last week once again pits the deregulators against the consequences of their own work. Virtually anybody in Texas can buy or carry a gun, and that means virtually anybody will, trained or not, stable or not, evil or not.

It’s so scary that the uniformed officers in the hallway didn’t challenge the killer. It’s so scary that the lawmakers in Austin and Washington consistently side with the people behind the guns instead of the people in front of them.

Voters can fix this, if they want. Politicians are hypersensitive to voters, and if the mandate is for anti-violence, that’s what the conversations in the capitals will be about. Our recent history predicts apathy — that in a short time, voters will move their attention elsewhere while the interest groups whose livelihoods depend on gun deregulation persist.

A gun lobbyist is nothing but a persistent activist, showing up to work every day with a particular focus, always talking to lawmakers, bending policy long after others’ attention has wandered.

The rest of us? Not so much. That’s not just about gun safety. It happens with foster care, pandemic restrictions, just about everything. We’re concerned with the headline issues, for a minute, and then we go back to what we were doing. Those hyper-aware politicians, after a few days, only hear from lobbyists and interest groups and other professional seekers of government favors. It’s not surprising who usually wins the day.

The “good guy with a gun” idea was disproved by 19 good guys with guns last week. The promises of action that followed other mass killings have been undone by majorities of the 181 Texas lawmakers and the 535 members of Congress again and again.

The results haven’t changed because we haven’t changed. Our outrage faded after Sandy Hook, Parkland, Santa Fe, El Paso, Sutherland Springs, Odessa and all the others. Texas has had 21 school shootings so far in 2022, according to the Gun Violence Archive, and based on the response of our policymaking politicians, the voters of Texas and of the U.S. are unstirred by that.

Now it’s been a week. The holiday weekend had the usual run of movies and grilling and family gatherings and parades. We get distracted. We put terrible things in our rearview mirrors and move on.

It’s true that the politicians haven’t solved this, and that failing belongs to them. They’re cowards, shackled by the fear that voters will be harder on them for doing something than we are if, once again, they do nothing.

That failing belongs to voters. The power to turn government heads is easy to understand and hard to exercise. All it takes is attention — and persistence, which is nothing more than sustained attention and action. Attention is easy; persistence is rare. Look at how many times we’ve been outraged by mass killings and how many times we’ve moved on and let the ardent gun rights advocates control the government.

Texas Republicans have controlled state government for more than two decades, consistently working to deregulate guns for years, believing that’s what their voters want, and Democrats are blaming them for the results and calling for new laws. That’s what their voters want. Remember, though, that Texas got its open-carry laws when Democrats had a say. That’s what voters wanted.

Politics is about words, but also actions. The Texas responses to shooting after shooting amount to an institutional defense of gun culture, preserving a ghastly status quo instead of remaking it.

That’s on the state’s voters. If what lawmakers were doing was out of line, we’d be punishing or correcting them, and that hasn’t happened.

They do represent us, and they’ll change things if we insist.

This is not an easy issue. There aren’t a couple of bumper-sticker solutions we can put into law to fix it. But the mindset, the will to solve the problem, doesn’t exist yet. It will take a long time and a ton of work, like coming up with vaccines in the face of an epidemic, or going to the moon or building a highway system. But lawmakers have promised action before and done little. They misled us, and voters should be as livid about that as the governor said he was about being misled by lies about law enforcement heroics in Uvalde.

We’ve seen for years the power of the small group of voters who control Republican primaries in Texas, and by doing so, control state policy. If you make it easier for a murderer to obtain a murder weapon, you should have to explain to the victims and everyone else why you thought that was a good idea.

Now’s the time.

Politicians don’t have to lose elections to get the message; they just have to get the message voters are sending. In 2018, Republicans won all of the statewide elections, but they knew voters were incensed about property taxes and public education, and in 2019, they came to Austin with those issues at the top of their priorities.

There’s an election between now and the next regular session of the Legislature next January. And if they hold special sessions on gun safety before then, as lawmakers from both parties have urged, that election will offer voters a chance to say whether they’ve done enough.

They’ll respond to gun violence, but only if a persistent public demands it.

Editor’s note: Ross Ramsey, who co-founded The Texas Tribune, retired as the Tribune’s executive editor earlier this year.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/05/31/texas-gun-laws-voters/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

By Ross Ramsey, The Texas Tribune

April 20, 2022

"Analysis: Gerrymandering has left Texas voters with few options" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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Unconventional Wisdom - April 20, 2022

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The biggest blow to Texans’ voting rights isn’t found in the election laws. It’s in the political maps, where voters’ choices are overwhelmed by the partisan desires of politicians.

Redistricting removes voters’ choices, undermines public opinion, and makes government less responsive and less respected as it slips out of the control of its citizens.

Politicians have gotten so good at drawing political maps that they’re spoiling democracy. Few of the races for the Texas Legislature and the state’s congressional delegation are competitive in November; districts are drawn for either Republicans or Democrats to win, with few designed to promote competition between the parties.

The real choices, such as they are, are left to the sliver of voters who decide in primary elections what candidates their parties will send on to the easy wins in November. A lot of the 2022 elections for Congress and the Legislature are already behind us.

The effect? Rather than casting a wide net to attract voters, politically polarized legislative bodies produce polarized maps that appeal to small groups of partisans who vote in primary elections, like the ones in March that drew less than 1 in 5 registered voters this year. More numerous general election voters are left with uncompetitive November choices in districts drawn for one party or another, but not both.

Texas lawmakers drew new maps last year, after the latest census numbers came in from the federal government, telling us how many people are here now, and exactly where they live. Texas got two new congressional seats as a result of the state’s growth over the last decade, and probably would have won a third had all of the state’s residents been accurately counted.

Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election in 65 of the state’s 150 state House of Representatives districts, while losing to Donald Trump in 85 other districts and by 5.6 percentage points statewide. That might as well have been the template for legislators who drew the maps last year. Their House map has 66 Democratic seats and 84 Republican seats.

The average Republican candidate in that 2020 election did better than Trump, winning by 9.1 percentage points. In the new House map, House District 112, where state Rep. Angie Chen Button, R-Richardson, is the incumbent, those candidates won by 7.9 percentage points — better than Trump’s performance. That’s the most competitive Republican district on the House map, but based on recent history, Democrat Elva Curl will have a hard time taking it away.

On the other side, four of the most competitive Democratic districts went to statewide candidates by fewer than 5 percentage points in 2020. After next month’s primary runoffs produce the party nominees, three of those will be among the few truly contested legislative races in November: HD-118 in San Antonio, HD-70 in Collin County and HD-37 in Harlingen. The fourth race, in South Texas’ House District 80, is all but over: Rep. Tracy King, D-Batesville, doesn’t have a Republican opponent in November.

The Texas Senate districts are even less competitive. Of the 19 districts drawn for Republican advantage, Trump’s smallest margin of victory — 13.1 percentage points — was in SD-9, where incumbent Sen. Kelly Hancock, R-North Richland Hills, will face Democrat Gwenn Burud in November. Trump’s win was a low-water mark in that district: The average Republican candidate in a statewide race won by 18.2 percentage points there. It’s hard country for Democrats.

The Democratic Texas Senate districts are only a little more competitive. Republicans drew a dozen seats it would be hard for their own candidates to win — giving some ground to Democrats but also locking in the GOP’s majority grip on the Senate. Only one Democrat, Sen. Beverly Powell of Fort Worth, was fenced into a Republican district. She won her primary but then dropped out of the race, saying there is no way for a Democrat to win it: Trump won there by 15.8 percentage points, and statewide Republican candidates, on average, won by 19.2 percentage points in 2020. As unhappy as Democrats were about her decision, she’s probably right about the district.

Congressional maps in Texas are similarly noncompetitive. Two dozen of the 38 districts are safely Republican, 11 are safely Democratic and one is truly competitive — at least on paper.

The last — CD-28, where Rep. Henry Cuellar of Laredo is in a primary runoff with Jessica Cisneros, also of Laredo — is a wildcard. It’s a Democratic district, where Trump lost to Biden by 7 percentage points and the average Republican statewide candidate lost by 9.5 percentage points in 2020. But Cisneros came within 4 percentage points of beating Cuellar two years ago, and the FBI raided his home and office just before the primaries this year.

News like that can overwhelm a district’s partisan history, and Cuellar is in a race even though his district looks safe for Democrats. You’ll probably hear a lot about it; the way lawmakers drew these maps, all but a handful of races are uninteresting or noncompetitive or both.

They made the choices that used to be left to voters.

We can’t wait to welcome you in person and online to the 2022 Texas Tribune Festival, our multiday celebration of big, bold ideas about politics, public policy and the day’s news — all taking place just steps away from the Texas Capitol from Sept. 22-24. When tickets go on sale in May, Tribune members will save big. Donate to join or renew today.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/20/texas-redistricting-elections/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

By Ross Ramsey, The Texas Tribune

Texas hasn’t outlawed abortion for everyone — just for those who can’t afford to travel to other states and countries where the decision about whether to have a child is left to the person who’s pregnant.

The state’s new restrictions on abortions, effectively outlawing them after about six weeks of pregnancy, have been in effect for almost eight months. A fetus’ initial cardiac activity is detectable at about that time — often before a person knows they’re pregnant. Under current Texas law, abortion is illegal after those pulses can be detected.

It’s still legal in other states, however, if a pregnant Texan has the means to get there.

The new state law includes a novel civil enforcement mechanism — so new it’s even confusing to some prosecutors — that deputizes citizens to report anyone who helps a pregnant Texan obtain an abortion. That keeps the state from being sued, since it’s not enforcing anything, and it pays a bounty of up to $10,000 to the people ratting on their fellow Texans. It’s a backhanded way to punish anyone assisting, in any way, in an abortion — excluding the pregnant person.

It’s got a good chance of becoming a model enforcement tool for other states — Idaho’s version is being contested in court, for instance — but someone should probably explain it to prosecutors first.

Consider the case of Starr County District Attorney Gocha Allen Ramirez, who asked a grand jury to indict a woman for murder over a self-induced abortion, got her arrested on a Thursday and then released her the next Saturday with this astonishing admission: “In reviewing applicable Texas law, it is clear that Ms. [Lizelle] Herrera cannot and should not be prosecuted for the allegation against her.”

Why? Because it’s not against Texas law, Ramirez said when dropping the indictment.

Had someone helped her, they might have been open to prosecution. That makes traveling to other places for abortions riskier for helpers, but not for pregnant people. And there’s evidence Texans seeking abortions have been traveling to other states.

Oklahoma was initially the most popular option, but that’s about to end, now that the Oklahoma Legislature made it a felony to perform abortions there. The new law will take effect this summer, assuming their governor signs it as expected. That’ll move attention elsewhere, but there are still states where the decision on whether to have an abortion is left to people who are pregnant.

The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks into a pregnancy. The justices could alter the constitutionally protected right to abortion that has been in place since the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, based on fetal viability, or about 23 weeks into a pregnancy.

Other states have followed Texas and Mississippi into stricter laws, and many have approved so-called “trigger laws” — bans on abortion that would take effect if and when the Supreme Court abandons the Roe v. Wade precedent. Oklahoma’s law is pending. So is Idaho’s. Kentucky lawmakers approved a 15-week ban that includes restrictions on medication abortions this month. A new Florida law, based on the Mississippi law, will take effect this summer.

A map of what’s legal in each state is taking shape. In one example, The Washington Post is tracking abortion laws — both restrictive and permissive — that are in effect now or are working through various state legislatures. It’s a geographic guide to the legal obstacle course that could come into focus when the high court rules in the Mississippi case later this year.

For people seeking abortions who live in states where the procedure is not allowed, it points to the places where it is allowed. Some states are considering variations of the Texas law, hoping to make it illegal to perform abortions on their residents even in other states. Missouri is an example. Texas doesn’t have anything like that — yet.

Instead, the state has virtually banned abortions within its borders, effectively taking away what is currently a constitutionally protected right — until and unless the Supreme Court rules otherwise — from anyone unable to travel to a state where abortion is still allowed.

For pregnant Texans with means, a trip to an out-of-state doctor is an expensive option. But it’s still an option — one that most Texans don’t have.

We can’t wait to welcome you in person and online to the 2022 Texas Tribune Festival, our multiday celebration of big, bold ideas about politics, public policy and the day’s news — all taking place just steps away from the Texas Capitol from Sept. 22-24. When tickets go on sale in May, Tribune members will save big. Donate to join or renew today.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/18/texas-abortion-law/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

By Ross Ramsey, The Texas Tribune

Gov. Greg Abbott wants to bus undocumented immigrants to Washington, D.C., to display his opposition to the Biden administration’s immigration policies, to win some attention in an election year and to turn conversation away from the thin results of the state’s expensive border security efforts.

Abbott’s proposal for caravans to the U.S. Capitol won’t do anything for the migrants or remedy the mess on the border, but they’re just collateral in a debate where too many people in power are trying harder to get political points than to get solutions. The migrants are getting a foot in the back from the state’s top politicians, who have also targeted transgender kids in public schools, college professors and public school leaders.

They’re vilifying and bullying people instead of solving problems.

This week’s announcement got Abbott some attention on TV — especially before his staff clarified that only migrants who “volunteer” would be transported. In his blustery announcement on Wednesday, Abbott made it sound like he was announcing a bold poke at the feds, planning to ship thousands of migrants on as many as 900 buses.

The Texas Tribune’s James Barragán reported that the stern proposal was weakened considerably in the fine print, which said that only “volunteers” who had been processed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security would be sent to Washington.

Abbott is grabbing headlines in an election year, and this performance momentarily raised an issue Abbott wants to talk about and to put his name in the same sentence with President Joe Biden’s.

The governor had a political purpose, too: diverting voters’ eyes from the disappointing results of the state’s showy $3 billion border security efforts. Those results were detailed by Lomi Kriel and Perla Trevizo of The Texas Tribune and ProPublica, and Andrew Rodriguez Calderón and Keri Blakinger of The Marshall Project.

The operation has also produced piles of ticky-tacky misdemeanor trespassing charges against thousands of undocumented immigrants and few of the kinds of smuggling and drug trafficking arrests touted as the reason for the spending, as reported by The Texas Tribune’s Jolie McCullough.

Within hours after announcing the government plan, Abbott’s campaign was using it in a fundraising appeal to supporters.

“Governor Greg Abbott JUST ANNOUNCED that Texas is going to use charter buses to DROP OFF BIDEN’S ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS in Washington, DC,” read the appeal on Abbott’s campaign website. “We want to MAKE SURE that Biden knows JUST HOW REAL this crisis is.”

While Abbott’s border program is already costing the state billions of dollars, Texas Military Department officials told legislators this week they need another $531 million to keep operating past May. National Guard troops deployed on the border by the governor have complained about their living and work conditions and pay.

What began as a broad attack on the Biden administration’s border policies and immigration enforcement won favor last year with Texas lawmakers, who approved billions in spending when Abbott asked. Months later, the troops and the state police were at the border, along with some wall builders, but the results have been meager. More importantly, the state’s work doesn’t seem to have much effect on the numbers of people crossing or trying to cross into the U.S.

The administration now wants to end “Title 42,” which started during the pandemic and allows immigration officials to turn people away at the border. Abbott’s proposals to ship migrants to the nation’s capital, to step up inspections of commercial vehicles coming into Texas, and to put boat blockades and concertina wire at some cross points on the Rio Grande are all responses to ending Title 42.

How does all of that add up?

What sounded in the governor’s words like a forced transport of migrants from Texas to Washington will be “voluntary.”

The National Guard troops on the Texas-Mexico border are running out of money and asking the state for more.

The governor’s Operation Lone Star isn’t producing the kinds of law enforcement results that would burnish the governor’s reputation — or anyone else’s.

The politics of Operation Lone Star might turn out better than the actual endeavor. The elections are in November.

And Texas legislators will be back in January to look at all of it, to write a new state budget and to decide whether Abbott’s $3 billion border adventure deserves any more of the taxpayers’ money.

We can’t wait to welcome you in person and online to the 2022 Texas Tribune Festival, our multiday celebration of big, bold ideas about politics, public policy and the day’s news — all taking place just steps away from the Texas Capitol from Sept. 22-24. When tickets go on sale in May, Tribune members will save big. Donate to join or renew today.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/08/texas-immigration-abbott/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

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If you say — or write — that it’s harder to vote in Texas today than it was a year ago, or four years ago, someone will tell you how easy it is and how full of beans you are.

But what are we supposed to make of the thousands of rejected mail-in ballots during the Republican and Democratic primaries this month? The Texas Tribune’s Alexa Ura and Mandi Cai reported that 18,742 ballots were tossed in 16 of the 20 Texas counties with the most voters. And the Associated Press reported, after a survey of 187 of the state’s 254 counties, that 22,898 mail ballots — 13% of the total — were rejected this year.

The normal rate of rejection is 2%. In the 2020 presidential election, the rejection rate was under 1%.

Republicans in the state Legislature (and above) wanted to tighten the screws on elections in Texas last year, their answer to unsubstantiated claims of widespread irregularities and cheating in the 2020 election. That complaint started with President Donald Trump’s anguish over his reelection loss to Joe Biden and his efforts to upend voting results in enough states to flip the results.

Trump won in Texas in a 2020 election that, all carping aside, marked a pretty good day for Republicans in the state. It was also an election that put a big dent in the popular Democratic idea that “Texas is not a Republican state — it’s a low-turnout state.” In that high (for Texas) turnout election, Republicans won all of the statewide elections and held or improved their numbers in the congressional delegation and the Texas Legislature.

But whining winners and whining losers are nothing new in politics, in Texas or anywhere else. With the former president stewing loudly about his loss, the state’s governor, lieutenant governor and top legislators came to Austin last year with reform on their minds.

Over noisy and temporarily effective opposition from elected Democrats, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a new Texas voting law that included, among other things, bans on around-the-clock voting, drive-thru voting, public officials sending vote-by-mail applications to voters who didn’t request them and changes to mail voting — including new ID requirements — that complicated longstanding practices and evidently confused a lot of voters.

Changes in voting laws often go to courts, and if they’re coming to the courts from Texas, the judges frequently find discrimination and disenfranchisement, whether the subject is voting, elections or redistricting. This new Texas law, being challenged on some of that same familiar ground, is no exception, but the rules have changed. Texas and other states with histories of discrimination used to be required to get federal permission before making changes. That’s no longer the case, so it’s easier for the state to make changes that might not have won approval in the past. While the judges are looking at the latest challenges, there’s an election underway, and in this first test of the new law, about one of every eight mail ballots was thrown out.

Every eighth person who voted by mail didn’t get their vote counted. Depending on where those voters live and how they voted, that’s a big enough number to change the results of some races. In Harris County, the AP reported, 19% of the mail ballots were tossed out, or nearly 7,000. By comparison, the state’s largest county rejected only 135 ballots in the last midterm election in 2018.

It’s not like Texas has a lot of votes to throw away. The turnout was dismal in these primaries: 82.5% of the state’s registered voters were no-shows. About 3 million voters took part: a little under 2 million in the Republican primary and just over 1 million in the Democratic primary. About 14.2 million of registered voters in Texas blew off the primaries.

Every voter in a low-turnout election has more clout; their choices are diluted by fewer other voters than in a high-turnout election. Trashing 23,000 votes in the wake of new legislative restrictions on voting almost sounds like a crime. The election-doubters who tightened Texas voting laws in the name of secure elections would have gone to town if they had found that many people disenfranchised by scammers.

They’d have found their long-sought but never-proved evidence of widespread election tampering. At least they know who did it this time — and so do the rest of us.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/18/texas-rejected-election-ballots/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

That health care is legal under Texas law, but this is election season. Cynics who think politicians will say anything to get reelected have a new, sparkling piece of evidence.

Other people caught doing what the governor and attorney general are doing — Texas public school students, for instance — risk breaking the law. Check out the definition of illegal bullying in the Texas Education Code: “Bullying means a single significant act or a pattern of acts by one or more students directed at another student that exploits an imbalance of power and involves engaging in written or verbal expression, expression through electronic means, or physical conduct …”

Substitute “elected officials” for the first instance of “students,” and it’s evident what’s going on here. There’s more to that definition, which specifies bullying that “has the effect or will have the effect of physically harming a student, damaging a student’s property, or placing a student in reasonable fear of harm to the student’s person or of damage to the student’s property; is sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive enough that the action or threat creates an intimidating, threatening, or abusive educational environment for a student …”

Lucky for them, Abbott and Paxton and others like them aren’t students who can be prosecuted under that part of the education laws approved by their government. The gist of that law, however, is crystal clear, and so is the effect of their actions and rhetoric.

Texas government officials aren’t short of real problems to solve, like the two-year COVID slide of public education, weaknesses in the state’s electric grid and the state’s persistently awful foster care system. Or the continuing mess on the border, teacher shortages, criminal justice reforms and so many more.

But most of those aren’t sexy election issues. Paxton is in a runoff. Abbott faces a well-known, well-financed Democrat in November. And as The Texas Tribune’s Patrick Svitek has reported, they think they’ve got a hot item to entice Republican voters.

“This is a winning issue,” Abbott’s top political strategist, Dave Carney, told reporters last week. “Texans have common sense.”

For those two lawyers — the current attorney general and the former attorney general, this new definition of child abuse has been a losing issue — so far — in court.

Paxton is suing the federal government to protect the state’s federal funding after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said restricting someone’s ability to receive medical care solely on the basis of their sex assigned at birth or gender identity is likely a violation of the Affordable Care Act for federally funded entities. It’s a lot of money: In 2020, the state’s Health and Human Services Commission got $26 billion in federal funding.

Since Abbott’s February directive on gender-affirming health care, which followed a nonbinding opinion on that subject from Paxton, the state has begun investigations of at least nine families. Both the directive and the AG’s opinion were issued in the final days of the GOP primary — an election in which Abbott was fending off conservative contenders and Paxton was trying to survive challenges from three serious opponents.

The courts have since blocked enforcement while lower courts hear challenges to the new state policy. But some medical facilities have suspended hormone therapy and other treatments.

Abbott won his GOP primary with ease. Paxton fell far short of the majority he needed for nomination to another term; he’ll be in a runoff with Land Commissioner George P. Bush in May.

The kids and the families targeted by the state are terrified and rattled — and lawyered up — as reported by the Tribune’s Sneha Dey and Karen Brooks Harper.

“How is that considered child abuse to accept them and love them?” one mother told them. “How can they overstep their power and try to come and tell me how I should love my child?”

For LGBTQ mental health support, call the Trevor Project’s 24/7 toll-free support line at 866-488-7386. You can also reach a trained crisis counselor through the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by calling 800-273-8255 or texting 741741.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/11/texas-transgender-politics/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

The late Fred Rogers told a story to help kids through terrible times. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news,” Mr. Rogers said, “my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You can always find people who are helping.’”

That’s not a bad test for voters considering political candidates. Who’s trying to shake you up? Who’s trying to work out the problems we face? Are they telling you what to fear — or how they’re going to fix it? Are they complaining about their opponents — or saying how they’d go to work?

During political seasons like the one we’re in, there’s more fake drama about current events than real proposals to make things better. Challengers are often facing incumbents, and that means they have to try to discredit the government in order to persuade voters to call for a change. Incumbents are busy telling us the newbies would mess everything up.

Many of them don’t specifically address what they think needs to be done, at a time when they could be setting an agenda — and getting voter ratification for it — by talking about how they’d solve some of Texas’ biggest problems.

Candidates are good at describing problems. They’re great at sweeping phrases, too, like “if elected, I’ll fix that.” But they speak in generalities, and what happens when they’re elected — or more to the point, what doesn’t happen — somehow slips past voters when it’s time to put people in office.

Teachers in Texas are overworked, underpaid, micromanaged and asked to do a lot more than teach children. Everybody says that, everybody knows that, and the lawmakers who are now talking about it on the campaign trail are often the same people who didn’t do much to fix it in the last legislative session, or the one before that.

Instead, they’re talking about removing books from libraries and “protecting” children from learning about the state and the country’s racial history, and how that is reflected in laws and legal precedents that remain in place today.

Police have many of the same problems teachers have, starting with assignments that ought to be in other hands. The state’s jails and prisons are home to many people with mental health problems — a health care concern that has been effectively assigned to law enforcement.

Rural hospitals in Texas are buckling: 26 have closed since 2010, according to the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals, and 158 remain.

Inadequate rural broadband gets a lot of attention from politicians, too, and has a chance to be a bright spot. The state has a new office focused on broadband access and affordability and also some money from the infrastructure funds approved by the federal government last year.

The state’s foster care system is shambolic, tangled in court, and a good example of a longtime problem lawmakers and policymakers haven’t been able to tame. It’s a potential campaign issue for outside candidates criticizing insiders, but the solutions have been evasive. Solving it would be a campaign issue, too — one to brag about. Nobody’s tried that.

The list of problems to fix is a long one. State government was built for things like this, an organized way to work out large-scale, gnarly problems of interest to every Texan. Political campaigns aren’t aimed at solving those problems, but they are aimed at the problems of getting elected. Think of the Texas border with Mexico, a real problem and also a campaign issue. The finger-pointers are busy, but the proposed solutions aren’t in those commercials; a lot of Texas vs. the federal government, and not a lot of here’s the way to fix it.

There’s a scene in the movie Apollo 13, as NASA officials are finding out the astronauts are in danger of not making it back to Earth, when flight director Gene Kranz turns their attention to their jobs.

“Quiet down, quiet down. Let’s stay cool, people. … Let’s work the problem, people.”

That’s the sort of person Mr. Rogers was talking about, and the sort you should look for when you’re deciding who’ll get your vote.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/07/texas-elections-problems/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

The former president’s endorsement of Ken Paxton, the besieged incumbent AG, was central to Paxton’s first-place finish in the first round of the primaries. It wasn’t enough — Paxton is on his way to a runoff with Land Commissioner George P. Bush — but it kept him alive.

If that race draws a crowd — it will be at the top of the GOP’s runoff ticket — the voters Paxton and Bush lure to the polls will be voting in down-ballot races. And because runoffs typically have even lower turnout than primaries, small changes in who votes could have an outsize effect. A wave of Trump Republicans could be a boon to conservatives in other runoff races, and a bad omen for candidates who aren’t in the former president’s fold.

Paxton’s TV commercials on the way to this week’s primary featured Trump as prominently as the candidate’s own name. Paxton had the blessing of the popular former president in a race where Republican voters were trying to pick and choose from four well-known candidates. That signal muted attacks from whistleblowers who said Paxton was misusing his public office to help a political donor — and from a lingering 2015 felony securities fraud indictment against him that has never gone to trial.

Even with all of that, Paxton got 42.7% of the vote in Tuesday’s primary. On the upside for Paxton, that was nearly twice the support Bush mustered, enough to finish first among the four candidates. On the downside, it means the incumbent failed to command even half of the support of the voters in his own party — a sign that they’re willing to make a switch if the right candidate comes along.

It’s going to be hard for those voters to ignore Trump’s embrace. The former president remains popular with Texas Republicans, and he rebuffed Bush’s courting in favor of Paxton.

Paxton has been up against establishment names before, running for speaker in 2011 against Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, who he tried to paint as insufficiently conservative. That fell far short of success, despite the loud conservative activists who backed him. He topped a couple of mainstream Republicans in his first race for attorney general, but the electorate was different. He wasn’t vying for votes from legislators in both political parties or even for the votes of Republican legislators. Instead, he was able to rely on conservative activists’ strength in a low-turnout GOP primary — the same sort of primary he was in on Tuesday. He was in a runoff that year, too, which he won by almost 27 percentage points.

In 2018, no Republicans challenged him, but Democrat Justin Nelson came close in the general election, losing to the incumbent by 3.6 percentage points.

Paxton is wounded this time. Voters brushed off his indictment when they reelected him in 2018. The abuse of office allegations are new and were the focus of his three challengers, each of whom mostly agreed with him on policy while arguing that a nominee with ethical clouds over him would be an easier target for Democrats in November.

But Trump has a favorite in the race, and he’s a favorite of the state’s Republican voters. In a February 2022 University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll, 80% of self-identified Republican voters had either a “very” or “somewhat” favorable opinion of the former president. More than half of those — 52% — were very favorable.

Bush has consistently positioned himself to the right of his father, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and his uncle, former president George W. Bush. He’s tried to win Trump’s favor, even opening his campaign by handing out drink Koozies with a drawing of Trump shaking his hand over the words, “This is the only Bush that likes me. This is the Bush that got it right. I like him.”

He likes Paxton more, however, and that makes a difference in a runoff. Most of the state’s Republican primary voters, even with their strong affection for the former president, voted against Trump’s pick for attorney general. On the other hand, Trump’s support might be the biggest reason the incumbent made it to the runoff.

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/04/texas-election-runoff-donald-trump/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

No matter how the Texas primaries shake out on Tuesday, voters will send some well-known politicians packing.

It’s cutting time.

The Republican race for attorney general might be the best example, with three candidates who’ve been elected statewide and an East Texas congressman who’s familiar to anyone with a cable TV subscription.

Ken Paxton, first elected in 2014, was indicted in 2015 on felony charges that, as a private lawyer, he solicited investors for a company without telling them he was being paid to do so. That case, now almost seven years old, has never gone to trial. That’s not all: In late 2020, several of the top attorneys in his agency accused him of using his public office to benefit a political donor, making their whistleblower complaints to state officials and to federal investigators.

The Democrats were always going to challenge the Republican incumbent. But the ethical clouds over Paxton attracted strong challengers from his own party: George P. Bush, the state’s land commissioner and a member of a storied family in Texas politics; U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert of Tyler, whose reputation as a rabble-rouser in Congress has earned him fans and foes beyond his district; and Eva Guzman, who gave up a safe seat on the Texas Supreme Court to run for the state’s top legal job as the most experienced lawyer in the pack.

Someone is going home on Wednesday. Two of those four candidates, if nobody wins a majority of votes and there’s a May runoff; three of them, if someone wins outright.

Races like that reverberate down the ballot. Bush’s empty seat at the state’s General Land Office attracted four Democrats and eight Republicans. Ten of those 12 candidates will be at home in November, watching the general election results and thinking about what might’ve been.

Most incumbents don’t have Paxton’s worries. But some have drawn semi-famous foes.

Greg Abbott is leading all of the polls in his bid for another term as governor — and by a comfortable margin. He’s got some opponents whose names you might know. Allen West, a one-term member of Congress from Florida who also chaired the Texas Republican Party for a time, is there. So is former state Sen. Don Huffines of Dallas.

He’s also got opponents you might not know: Paul Belew, Danny Harrison, Kandy Kaye Horn, Rick Perry and Chad Prather. And before you say you know Rick Perry, you should know that’s not the former governor seeking another term. There’s more than one RP in Texas politics.

Some candidates have made themselves known in unexpected ways. Sarah Stogner, a Republican running for the Texas Railroad Commission, pulled off her top and rode an oilfield pumpjack, then posted the short video on TikTok to make her name more familiar. The stunt brought some attention to what had been a relatively sleepy race. “I need to get people’s attention, right?” Stogner told The Texas Tribune’s Mitchell Ferman. “And here we are, it’s working.”

The incumbent, Republican Wayne Christian, has two problems. Railroad commissioners aren’t well known, and he faces ethics questions after voting to permit an oilfield waste dump facility and then accepting a $100,000 political contribution from the company that got the permit.

The primary has three more people on the ballot, including Marvin “Sarge” Summers, who died in a car crash after starting the race. He can still get votes, however, and they’ll still be counted. But only one of the five names will go forward after the primaries and, if needed, the runoffs.

Some candidates do come back after losing elections, including some famous ones. Texans know one name on the Democratic ballot for governor because of his losses in races for the U.S. Senate and the presidency.

But Beto O’Rourke isn’t in the general election yet. To do that, he’ll have to get past four other Democrats on Tuesday.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/28/texas-election-candidates/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

If you’re having a hard time telling where government work stops and campaign work begins, which announcements are political and which ones are civic, which ones are paid for by political donors and which are financed by Texas taxpayers, it’s because there is often no difference between the two.

The top three Republican incumbents on the ballot have each amped up their campaigns and their official efforts as the elections approach, with the political and government offices running in parallel, reinforcing the campaigns’ themes.\

For instance, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick rolled out a campaign ad touting his hard-line position on immigration and border security. At about the same time, under his state letterhead, he announced the formation of a new Senate Committee on Border Security.

“Public safety is government’s first responsibility and there is no greater threat to public safety in Texas right now than the failed, open-border policies of the Biden Administration,” he said in that news release. Pretty close to what he says in the TV ads for his campaign: “Texas must secure the border because Biden and his administration won’t. And we must stop those here illegally from voting.”

READ: Gov. Greg Abbott says critics are "playing politics" over Texas National Guard suicides

Gov. Greg Abbott held another news conference on the U.S. side of the border — it’s hard to keep count of these things — this time accompanied by a dozen Republican attorneys general, to excoriate the administration’s handling of border security and immigration. Can you guess what ads his campaign is running? They’re about what the campaign sees as the Biden administration’s failures at the border and about Abbott’s endorsement by the union that represents many Border Patrol officers.

Attorney General Ken Paxton’s official press releases are written in the overblown rhetoric of closely fought Republican primary races — like the one he’s in the middle of right this minute.

“The Biden Administration has sown nothing but disaster for our country through its illegal, unconstitutional immigration policies,” Paxton said under government letterhead on Friday morning. “Biden’s latest round of flagrant law-breaking includes his Central American Minors Program, which has contributed significantly to many states being forced to take in even more aliens. My fellow attorneys general and I are suing to stop it.”

His ad echoes that language.

READ: 'Dangerous': Inside Greg Abbott’s crazy Lone Star rebellion

Texas has laws against using public employees and state resources for campaigning. There is a regular seasonal cycle of top state employees of elected officials moving to their bosses’ campaign offices a few months before an election, then moving back into their state jobs after a win. They’re careful to use state phones and computers for one job, campaign equipment for the other.

The fuzzy part is in the work they do, no matter where they are, and how it melds the political work of campaigning with the work of governing. The messages might well be the same, maybe even legitimately in harmony. Someone campaigning for better border security might genuinely want it, and might be saying the same thing in their state job.

But the complaints about what’s happening on the border, while directed at the federal government, might as well be directed at the state officials talking about state-based solutions who haven’t been able to solve the problem. In the case of Abbott, Patrick and Paxton, that’s seven years and counting, through Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington, D.C. Their campaigns might as well be directing fire at the incumbents they’re trying to reelect.

If the campaign pitch is that they should be reelected because they want border security fixed, it suggests they’ve been sitting on their hands for all those years — spending billions in taxpayer money, dispatching state police and National Guard troops, rounding up migrants they can accuse of breaking other laws, squalling at and suing the federal government.

READ: REVEALED: Gov. Greg Abbott intervened to put a positive spin on Texas' power grid

It’s a case of politicians listening to Texans’ concerns without solving their problems. Texas voters, and Republican Texas voters in particular, have had border security and immigration atop their lists of most important problems facing the state for more than a decade, according to dozens of University of Texas/Texas Tribune Polls.

They’re still waiting for the government folks to do what the politicians promise every election cycle.

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Laws are laws until judges or legislators toss them out. For political purposes, a law that doesn’t survive court challenges can still count as a win — as long as it remains in place through an election.

Some of the biggest political issues in Texas are pending in court.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on Friday about the constitutionality of federal vaccine mandates, a tussle that has the federal government on one side and Texas and other states on the other.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans is now the forum for lawsuits over the state’s new ban on abortions after detection of a fetal pulse, usually about six weeks into a pregnancy. That’s one of the nation’s most restrictive laws and its fate will ultimately depend on a ruling from the Supreme Court, which is reconsidering its 49-year-old ruling in Roe v. Wade.

The election season in Texas is well underway, even with two major legislative issues — new political maps and newly restrictive voting and election laws — working their way through the courts. The courts have delayed elections in the past when redistricting maps were not to their liking, but they don’t have a lot of time left: Early voting in the Texas primaries starts on Feb. 14. And the state’s new law on voting and election practices, also tangled up in court, will remain in place until and unless the courts say otherwise.

In each of those cases, the supporters of the new laws, or of the federal orders on vaccines, will get their way unless the courts decide otherwise. Opponents of those laws, looking for federal lenience, will all have to wait.

It all might balance out in the long run, but vaccines, abortions and voting in an election that’s weeks away are short-run concerns for many. The winning side might change when those cases are complete, but in the meantime, the assumption is that the governments that changed the rules knew what they were doing.

When it comes to elections, that’s a relatively new development. Texas has been cited over and over by the courts for “intentional discrimination” in redistricting. A lawsuit filed in October alleges that the new maps provide fresh examples of that.

But Texas is no longer required, as it was until 2013, to get changes in its maps and its voting laws approved by federal courts or the U.S. Department of Justice before putting them into effect.

States make laws all the time, but voting laws are a peculiar case. The federal Voting Rights Act was written to stop states with histories of discriminating — states like this one — from revising and refining their bad behavior to stay ahead of equal rights legislation. They were required to get permission before their changes could take effect.

But after that 2013 ruling from the Supreme Court, instead of waiting for “preclearance,” states can proceed with their new laws until the courts stop them. A voting or election law that turns out to be illegal after the lawsuits are judged remains in effect until that judging is done.

In the meantime, the elections go on under the new law, which is presumed to be constitutional — and nondiscriminatory.

Abortion laws and vaccine or mask mandates can be time-sensitive, too. For now, the new restrictions on abortion in Texas remain in effect while the court challenges to it proceed. Anyone seeking an abortion — or helping someone seek an abortion — is subject to the restrictions in the new law. Even if the courts eventually overturn the Texas law, someone seeking an abortion right now has to follow it.

The same goes for the federal vaccine mandates. Unless the courts put a temporary hold on those orders, they’ll remain in effect for now.

It’s clear what laws are in effect on voting, redistricting, abortion and vaccines here in the first month of 2022 — what Texans are allowed to do in the current election, whether they’re able to obtain abortions and whether they’re required to follow government vaccine mandates.

But it might be temporary.

You never hear politicians promise that hurricanes and tornadoes won’t hurt you, that you won’t get wet (or flooded) when it rains, that protracted heat waves won’t endanger anyone or that urban fires are no threat during droughts.

That would be nuts.

But after the storm that left Texans across the state freezing in the dark last February, the state’s leaders are promising now that the winter just ahead of us won’t cause any electric blackouts.

The odds are probably in their favor. Freezes like the one this year are rare, and freezes that cover the entire state are rarer still.

But making a promise that nobody is going to have a power failure is a big bet, and an unnecessary one. It would probably be enough to say, for political purposes, that they’ve taken steps to protect the state’s electric grid if the weather repeats itself.

While Texas Democrats aren’t openly hoping for a freeze or a power failure, that sort of disaster would be helpful to their political chances in a year when circumstances favor the Republicans. Democrats still want to turn Texas blue — their 2020 election slogan — but turning Texans blue to get there could be a smidge too literal for the liberals.

The guarantee that the lights will stay on started with Gov. Greg Abbott, and has now filtered down to the regulators he installed after the last freeze.

“I can guarantee the lights will stay on,” Abbott told Austin’s Fox 7 News last month. He said he was confident because of the laws put in place in response to the February freeze. This week, Peter Lake, the chair of the state’s Public Utility Commission, echoed his patron.

“The ERCOT grid is stronger and more reliable than ever,” said Lake, who was appointed to the PUC — the state’s electric utilities regulator — in April. “We are going into the winter knowing that the lights will stay on.”

One difference between now and this time last year is that state regulators and the main players in the electric grid — the companies that generate, transmit and distribute electricity and the companies that supply electric plants with fuel — know just how wrong things can go.

So do the state’s politicians, who set up the current regulatory framework and whose standing with voters could hinge on whether the state’s homes are lighted and heated when it gets cold outside.

New laws and rules require electric generators to prepare their facilities for the cold, taking a precaution that was recommended but not heeded after winter blackouts in 2011.

The natural gas companies that provide most of the fuel for those plants during winter months aren’t yet being held to the same standard. The Texas Railroad Commission regulates them, and state lawmakers didn’t require winterization of those suppliers. They and the electric generators are powerful and influential, but the electrics suffered most of the blame for the blackouts, and the Texas Legislature was more lenient with the gas suppliers. They have another year before they have to worry about winterization requirements, and then only after a new committee makes recommendations.

That’s on the other side of the coming winter. Natural gas lobbyists say the best protection against winter weather is keeping their electricity on. That’s half of what is supposed to be a kind of virtuous cycle, where electric companies heat the gas providers who supply the electric companies. Last February, it was often a vicious cycle: Gas companies that weren’t identified as essential customers lost power, froze up and stopped sending the needed fuel to the electric companies.

Texas blacked out. Nearly everyone was miserable, and hundreds of Texans died.

The long-range weather forecasts this year are better than they were 12 months ago. Meteorologists — who, unlike politicians, don’t make promises about what’s going to happen two or three months from now — say a storm like the last one is less likely this winter.

Texas legislators did put some new safeguards in place this year, mostly aimed at the electric companies. Before Abbott and the regulators were promising a warm and well-lighted winter, lawmakers gave gas providers more time, gambling that Texas wouldn’t get another storm like the last one — at least, not right away.

Republican incumbents in statewide office in Texas have comfortable leads over the declared challengers within their own parties, according to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

The Democrats they'll face are either undeclared or, according to the latest polls, largely unknown.

The first round of the 2022 elections is less than four months away — the primaries are slated for March 1 — and candidates will start filing Nov. 13.

What kind of year will it be? Texas Republicans, especially the incumbents, start with large advantages.

Gov. Greg Abbott's popularity with Texas voters has faded over the last two years, but remains strong among Republican voters, the latest UT/TT Poll found. Overall, more people (48%) disapprove of his performance than not (43%). But 79% of Republican voters approve, and that's the group he has to worry about first.

It might be the only group of voters he has to really worry about at all. Democrats haven't won a statewide race since 1994. They came close in 2018 behind the pitched contest for U.S. Senate between Republican incumbent Ted Cruz and Democrat Beto O'Rourke. But 2020 reestablished the GOP dominance in Texas: Donald Trump won by 5.6 percentage points, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn won by almost 10 percentage points and Republicans fended off well-financed Democratic efforts to gain power in the Texas Legislature.

Democrats talk about their electoral potential in Texas; Republicans talk about their electoral record.

The bigger threat for Republicans might be in March. And judging from the polling, the folks at the top of the GOP ticket aren't in terrible trouble.

The campaigns are only beginning, but the primary season will be a short one, unless redistricting and voting law fights in the courts delay the election.

As it stands, candidates have to register to run before Dec. 13 — just five weeks from now. And early voting in the March 1 primary starts on Valentine's Day. If you were working in a political campaign, staring at a calendar, that's not much time, and weeks of it will be lost — for political purposes — to the holiday season. It's not a lot of time to raise money, get a candidate's name and ideas known to voters, turn those voters out and win a race.

That's trouble for candidates of all parties, especially those of non-incumbents without big campaign bank accounts.

Abbott, who had a campaign account balance of $55 million at mid-year, had a solid lead over his Republican primary challengers in that recent poll. His opponents have more ground to make up and have much less money to do it with. More than half of the GOP voters (56%) said they'd vote for Abbott in a primary held now. Former Texas GOP Chair Allen West was second — with only 13%. Former state Sen. Don Huffines mustered only 7%.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's reelection number matched the governor's. And Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who's been wrestling with an indictment on securities fraud charges for most of his tenure in that job, and with allegations from former top aides that he used the office for the benefit of a political donor, remains well ahead of his primary challengers, with 48% of Republican voters saying he's their choice. Land Commissioner George P. Bush (16%), state Rep. Matt Krause (3%) and former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman (2%) have a long climb ahead and a short time to get it done.

The most talked about Democrat in that field, O'Rourke, hasn't said he will run. It's widely assumed, and Abbott has even run some advertising attacking him, but he remains undeclared. The two Democrats who want to challenge Patrick — Mike Collier, a businessman who ran against Patrick in 2018, and political consultant and pundit Matthew Dowd — haven't moved most Democratic voters to choose: 67% said they haven't thought enough about that race to have an opinion. That's an even bigger crowd in the Democratic race for AG: 72% haven't got a preference between former Galveston Mayor Joe Jaworski and Dallas lawyer Lee Merritt.

Democrats came closest to statewide victories in 2018, when that Cruz-O'Rourke Senate race was the talk of politics and voters drawn to that fight changed the look of the state's electorate. They did better in congressional and legislative races, too — benefiting from a voting practice that's no longer in place.

At the time, Texas still had straight-ticket voting — where voters could, with a single vote, choose all of the candidates from their party of choice. The swell of support for O'Rourke wasn't enough to get him or other statewide Democrats over the top, but it tightened up a lot of the races. The vote for the Democratic at the top swamped some Republicans in down-ballot races and scared a number of them at the top of the ballot.

If O'Rourke or anyone else makes the top race close in 2022, it might not have the same effect. The UT/TT Poll had Abbott beating O'Rourke in a hypothetical race by 9 percentage points, which would look more like that Cornyn race last year. And even a close race at the top, without straight-ticket voting in place, might not threaten candidates at the bottom of the ballot like it did in 2018.

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Democrats won't be rallying voters with claims they can flip control of the Texas Legislature in the general election a year from now.

The redistricting maps nearing approval in the current special legislative session make that a near impossibility.

Missing their last chance to win a majority in the Texas House in 2020 — remember that "Turn Texas Blue" battle cry? — was politically expensive for the state's Democrats. It meant the new political maps drawn to fit the new 2020 census would be tailored by Republicans, for Republicans, and that Democrats' wishes would end up in the dustbin or, at best, in the courts.

That's what's happening, and those are the maps that will be used in the 2022 elections. They're not quite law yet but will be soon, and they are markedly more Republican than this conservative state's recent voting history.

Because those maps almost guarantee Republican majorities in the state's congressional delegation, in the Texas House and Senate, and in the State Board of Education, the 2022 elections will really be about the executive branch. The odds there aren't great for the Democrats, either.

In the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump got 52.1% in Texas and Joe Biden got 46.5%. With that baseline, Republicans should have 78 seats in the House, 16 in the Senate, 20 in the congressional delegation and eight on the SBOE. In the new maps, voters in 85 of the House districts favored Trump, along with 19 Senate districts, 25 congressional districts and nine SBOE districts.

The proposed maps favor Republicans more than the state's voters do. But even if they were precisely representative of how Texans voted in the last statewide elections, the GOP would have an edge: They won all of those contests.

Whatever else you might say about that situation — whether it's "to the majority go the spoils" or "gerrymandering is undemocratic" — those are the maps that will be used in the 2022 elections. And if they aren't given wholesale makeovers, they strongly favor Republican candidates and are designed to keep Republican majorities in all four places.

Democratic candidates haven't won a statewide election in Texas since 1994. Midterm elections — those that fall between presidential elections — are typically hard on the party of whoever is in the White House. That's a Democrat right now, and Republicans running for office in Texas (and everywhere else in the country) will be campaigning against whichever Biden administration policy happens to be most unpopular with voters at the time.

To top it off, the Democrats do not yet have a standard-bearer, though it would be a surprise at this point if former U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke of El Paso did not enter the governor's race before the start of the holiday season. While there has been a lot of conversation about who else might run for this or that, that late-forming Democratic ticket shortens the time available to raise the money and build the public reputation and recognition needed to win a statewide election. It takes time to become a household name, even if only the political households in the state are in the audience.

Having missed their shot at real influence on the maps, Texas Democrats start the next decade trying to find ways to win on Republican turf. At the end of the last decade, their biggest advances came in legislative races, particularly in the Texas House.

The new maps will make that difficult, particularly in the next couple of election cycles. The current maps were drawn in 2010 by Republicans trying to bolster their majorities, then tinkered with by federal judges who found intentional racial discrimination by lawmakers and other problems in the designs of some districts. Over the next 10 years, the state's growth and changing politics eroded that advantage. That might happen again between now and 2030, but that won't help the Democrats in 2022.

Their best chances are at the top of the ballot, where Republican incumbents are known to voters and have money, organization and an undefeated winning record that stretches back more than a quarter of a century. Those chances aren't all that great; they're just better than the chances Democrats have for legislative majorities.

Judging by their governing record this year, the Republicans — starting with Gov. Greg Abbott — are most worried about competition from members of their own party in next year's primaries. They're defending their right flanks from conservatives, not their left flanks from liberals.

It's not hard to see why.

The federal judge who temporarily blocked enforcement of the new abortion restrictions in Texas said state lawmakers knew the law was unconstitutional and wrote it to try to prevent the federal courts from saying so.

"A person's right under the Constitution to choose to obtain an abortion prior to fetal viability is well established," U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman wrote. "Fully aware that depriving its citizens of this right by direct state action would be flagrantly unconstitutional, the State contrived an unprecedented and transparent statutory scheme to do just that. … It drafted the law with the intent to preclude review by federal courts that have the obligation to safeguard the very rights the statute likely violates."

Pitman's order has already been paused. The state asked the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to restore the near-total ban, and on Friday, that court said the abortion law should remain in effect until it has heard arguments on Pitman's ruling. That ruling would have prevented anyone from enforcing Senate Bill 8, which outlaws abortions after detection of early cardiac activity in an embryo — usually around six weeks into a pregnancy. That's before many people know they're pregnant.

The law also includes a section that puts enforcement in the hands of private individuals — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor called them "bounty hunters" — instead of state officials.

That mechanism drew Pitman's particular attention. He focused much of his ruling on the state's attempt to work around the courts, and around judges like him.

He didn't like that one bit.

"S.B. 8 is deliberately structured so that no adequate remedy at law exists by which to test its constitutionality," Pitman wrote. "By purporting to preclude direct enforcement by state officials, the statutory scheme is intended to be insulated from review in federal court. The State itself concedes that the law's terms proscribe review by the federal courts, limiting review to state court alone."

REFERENCE

Read U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman's October 6, 2021 ruling in U.S. v. State of Texas(775.8 KB) DOWNLOAD

This was a lawsuit brought by the federal government against the state government, and he cited the federal argument in making the point about the state's enforcement plan.

"The final factor identified by the United States will likely carry the most weight, as states can be expected not to deliberately deprive their citizens of redress through the courts," he wrote.

Later, he added, "State actors worked deliberately to craft a statutory scheme that would avoid review by the courts, and thereby circumvent any pronouncement of its unconstitutionality."

He said the state hadn't extracted itself entirely from enforcement anyway, that "the State has its prints all over the statute," since the law requires state employees and courts to take part, even if they're not bringing charges against people who help Texans obtain abortions.

And not just state employees. If the state is relying on private citizens to enforce the law through civil actions — to do themselves what the state itself has decided not to do — it has given them its power, and made them "state actors."

"The State chose to deputize them; the State chose to remove any requirement that they suffer an injury to bring suit (an injury is almost always required to bring suit); and the State chose to incentivize them by automatically awarding them damages of at least $10,000 if their suit is successful," he wrote.

His injunction was designed to stop enforcement of the law while it's being litigated and to remove "irreparable harm" Texans face if the law is in effect.

He also made a point that got lost in the first reports of the ruling and subsequent appeals: If the Texas law remains in effect, it will be an example — and not a good one, in Pitman's view — for other states.

"… had this Court not acted on its sound authority to provide relief to the United States, any number of states could enact legislation that deprives citizens of their constitutional rights, with no legal remedy to challenge that deprivation, without the concern that a federal court would enter an injunction," he wrote.

That could happen on abortion laws, or Second Amendment laws or other Constitutional rights, according to Pitman.

"If legislators know they cannot accomplish political agendas that curtail or eliminate constitutional rights and intentionally remove the legal remedy to challenge it," Pitman wrote, "then other states are less likely to engage in copycat legislation."