Here are 5 reasons to vote Tuesday: 4 Texas House seats and a new Tarrant County DA
Four Texas House seats in the Fort Worth area will be decided Tuesday.
You really should vote.
Two Republican incumbents and two suburban leaders are on the runoff ballot, up against four raw rookies who offer totally different ideas of how to run Texas.
These House races have been buried beneath the circus of a race for Texas attorney general and the confusing campaign for Tarrant County district attorney between 30-year courthouse prosecutor and judge Phil Sorrells and courthouse newbie Matt Krause.
That race for the Republican nomination is too close to call. So are all four Texas House races serving north Fort Worth, Denton and Parker County. Reps. Stephanie Klick and Glenn Rogers and suburban leaders Ben Bumgarner and Laura Hill are matched up against party insurgents David Lowe, Mike Olcott, Nate Schatzline and Jeff Younger.
A tiny handful of voters Tuesday will help decide how our county and state will be run for the next two years.
This is the way it always works in Texas.
Republicans haven’t lost a state or Tarrant County election since 1994. So our elected officials are basically decided in the March primary and the May runoff. It works the same way in Democratic districts, so not much is left for November.
So far this year, only about 2% of voters have cast Republican runoff ballots.
So unless there’s a huge turnout Tuesday, only the most partisan diehards or extreme voters in both parties will decide leaders for the next two years. On the Democratic side, less than 1% voters have cast ballots to choose statewide candidates for the fall.
About 94% of Tarrant County voters are eligible for the Republican runoff — in other words, everybody except the 6% who cast Democratic ballots March 1. You can vote Tuesday if you didn’t vote at all March 1, but you can’t cross over to the other runoff.
The smaller the turnout, the more it favors the wild-card challengers, many of them backed primarily by West Texas oil millionaire religious activists or by former gubernatorial candidate Don Huffines of Highland Park.
““Low turnout favors challengers — that’s been a model the far right has used to unseat incumbent Republicans for a decade,” University of Houston political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus said.
What makes it tougher for incumbents this year is that Republican voters are anti-establishment and “looking for a fight,” he said.
Voters overall have election fatigue, UT Arlington associate dean Rebecca Deen said. Texas’ calendar has four state or municipal elections or runoffs within 16 weeks.
“I’m not surprised that turnout is low,” she said.
Forty-year TCU professor Jim Riddlesperger gave another reason for the low turnout: Many voters simply aren’t as interested in choosing party nominees.
“People in general are perhaps more focused on summer vacations than politics at this point,” he said. “The thought of Colorado mountains or South Padre [Island] beaches might distract attention.”
First, go vote.
This story was originally published May 20, 2022 at 10:55 AM.
