|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
In politics, revenge is a dish best served on Election Day.
Years of grudges, intraparty conflict and frustration over candidates not toeing the party line built up to Tuesday’s Republican and Democratic primary results that saw incumbents battle through competitive races or get ousted altogether.
The results largely will determine the outcome of the Nov. 5 general election. Partisan gerrymandering creates noncompetitive districts for both parties, and an urban-rural divide between parties further intensifies divisions, said Mark Jones, a political science professor at the University of Rice.
The voters making those key decisions during primary elections are a small percentage of the general population and generally are more engaged and partisan than general election voters overall. They tend to prefer hyper-partisan candidates, Jones added.
“I think voters don’t realize that nine out of 10 elected officials were decided yesterday or will be decided in the May runoff,” Jones said.
There were 371,506 ballots cast in Harris County in the Democratic and Republican primaries, according to complete but unofficial results. In a county with roughly 2.6 million registered voters, that represents a dismal turnout of about 14.3 percent.
Turnout in party primaries varies widely depending on whether there is a competitive race at the top of the ballot, but Tuesday was unique because President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump essentially are running as incumbents, Jones said.
The general election, particularly in presidential years, always sees a much larger turnout, usually about three times more than the primaries.
The theme of revenge was prevalent throughout this year’s primaries, starting at the top: Trump tells supporters he will be their “retribution” for Biden’s 2020 victory and his liberal policies.
Across Texas and Harris County, voters in several races were exhorted not to vote for a candidate – often an incumbent – but against them.
In Republican House races across the state, Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton were active and loud in endorsing challengers to incumbents they declared were disloyal to the party and conservative values.
Abbott endorsed challengers to 14 Republicans who had voted against his plan to use tax dollars for private school vouchers. Nine of the incumbents will not be in the House next year because they either lost to their challenger or declined to run for reelection. At least three others face runoffs.
Paxton trained his sights on 37 House Republicans who voted to impeach him last year. Eight of those incumbents either declined to run for reelection or lost their primaries. At least seven Paxton-backed challengers forced incumbents to runoffs.
Locally, Democratic voters on Tuesday ousted Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg from the November ballot, replaced a handful of district judges with progressive challengers, and forced state House District 146 Rep. Shawn Thierry into a runoff against her more liberal challenger.
Ogg spoke to the revenge theme in her concession speech Tuesday night, saying she had made a lot of powerful enemies.
“We are in a time of low trust in government by the people,” Ogg said. “They vote is at an all time low. … This gives and results in extreme partisan candidates, and it’s not good for us as a people.”
Her opponent, former prosecutor Sean Teare, ran as a self-professed progressive with the backing of Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and other Houston-area liberal leaders. Hidalgo, in particular, has sparred with Ogg over budgets and staffing and has been particularly outspoken on the district attorney’s investigation and subsequent indictment of three of her aides accused of steering an $11 million vaccine outreach contract to a Democratic political consultant.
Throughout the campaign, Teare claimed Ogg had weaponized her office against her political opponents.
Ogg lost the support of local Democrats after a series of high-profile case losses, a lingering backlog of criminal cases and public feuds with Commissioners Court over the four years since her last election.
In a contest decided by hyper partisan voters, those scandals were enough to propel Teare to victory by nearly 50 percentage points, according to unofficial results.
Even Teare agreed that his support came from voters largely angered by Ogg rather than any enthusiasm for his campaign.
In Texas House District 146, Rep. Shawn Thierry, D-Houston, faces a runoff against labor organizer Lauren Ashley Simmons, who challenged the incumbent over her votes restricting gender-affirming treatment for transgender people. Thierry was widely criticized by Democratic officials for the vote and for comments she made about the LGBTQ+ community in the weeks leading up to the election.
Thierry said her positions are in line with Black voters in her district who are more socially conservative than white progressives.
Without a competitive presidential primary on either the Democratic or Republican ballots, there were few other races to draw less-engaged voters to the polls, said Jeronimo Cortina, an associate professor of political science at the University of Houston.
Local, partisan races filled with intraparty conflict — like the district attorney’s race, Thierry’s race and the Republican House districts across the state — did little to motivate less-engaged voters, Cortina added.
“The general election voter had zero interest in these types of politics, zero interest in the races with vitriol,” Cortina said.
Tuesday’s low turnout and hyper partisan races will only further divide the Democratic and Republican parties, said Michael Adams, a political science professor at Texas Southern University.
“That’s something we have to address in terms of civic engagement and democracy,” Adams said. “How do you fix these things if you have such a small percentage of people determining the outcome for everyone?”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print.
