Austin at Large: Blue Blood, From a Turnip

It's not uncommon to check in with the voices of the national #Resistance, on MSNBC or Twitter or Crooked Media or wherever, and find outrage over looming right-wing perfidy and MAGA foolery across this great land, and say to oneself, "Oh, that. We've done that already. This is Texas!" At the moment, the most obvious example is the push to further erode the ability and right of non-Republicans to vote. It's a great unifying cause for a GOP that's otherwise deeply conflicted about its future; both Trumpists and corporate-crats agree that if everyone were allowed (or worse, encouraged) to vote, they would never win elections. They may not all agree with Apesh*t's lingering fantasies of a stolen 2020 election, even if they still feel a need to give lip service to the emerging MAGA gospel. But they do believe, quite deeply, that Joe Biden's wins in Georgia and Arizona and recapture of the Great Lakes states should not have happened, and that they did happen only because their party went soft on voter suppression during the pandemic. They sure as heck aren't going to let that happen again!

But in Texas, it's been happening for a generation; we're pretty universally regarded as the least voting-friendly state in the union. There's been plenty of outrage over Republican gerrymandering in two successive redistricting cycles, with another one on tap; over transparently draconian voter ID laws and ludicrous barriers to voter registration; over last session's failed attempt to purge the voter rolls, which ended David Whitley's tenure as Texas secretary of state as quickly as it began; and over the hissy fits thrown by state leaders last cycle to thwart voting by mail.

Monster In a Ballot Box

Despite all of this, 17 million Texans are registered to vote, and more than 11 million voted for president in 2020. As we've mentioned before in this space, that was beyond the expectations of both Democrats and Repub­licans; Apesh*t's 5.5% margin of victory (just over 600,000 votes) was buoyed by a lot of low-propensity voters, including Black and Latinx Texans who responded when GOP organizers came to their doorsteps, which Democratic organizers did not do.

The congealing narrative chalks this up to one-time-only pandemic conditions that the Blue Team won't encounter in future elections, but that's only partly true. As the Texas Democratic Party's own postmortem deep dive into the data discovered, a lot of energy in progressive circles is focused on engaging with and mobilizing people who are already more than likely to vote for Democrats – and more problematically, not engaging with voters whose support (such as in predominantly Latinx counties in South Texas) is assumed to be built into "base" turnout projections. The lack of field organizing in 2020 surely made it more likely that persuadable lower-propensity Texas voters would be missed by Democratic organizers, but those votes have been left behind before.

Ironically, because the savvier minds within Texas GOP politics know that they and their ideas are becoming increasingly unpopular, they are under far fewer illusions that the votes they need will materialize automatically. That now creates for them a quandary: Holding a hard line on voter suppression (sorry, "election integrity") is certainly necessary for them to stay competitive in a state that may still be red but isn't getting redder. But all these barriers were in place in 2018 when the GOP got its clock cleaned down ballot, losing seats in the Legislature and in Congress that will not automatically be regained in redistricting, given who and where the new Texans are. At what point does waving the bloody red-state shirt over the ballot box end up costing Republicans the votes they'll need to hold on to their desired share of power?

Great Minds Think Alike

This past Monday, March 15, Gov. Greg Abbott set up shop in a drab Houston conference room to launch his priority election measures. Flanked by Sen. Paul Betten­court, who looks like Boss Hogg from The Dukes of Hazzard, and Rep. Briscoe Cain, who looks like Piggy in (several different versions of) Lord of the Flies, the optics were stellar as Gov. Loveless tried to build enthusiasm for juice that he knows isn't worth the squeeze. "Right now I don't know how many or if any elections in the state of Texas in 2020 were altered because of voter fraud," Abbott told reporters. "What I can tell you is this, and that is any voter fraud that takes place sows seeds of distrust in the election process."

What also sows seeds of distrust is when Texas officials allow Apesh*t's narcissistic injuries and delusions to steer the ship of state – including this state. Cain himself, as a volunteer legal adviser to the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania, played a cameo role in the nonsense that ended in violence on Jan. 6. He chairs House Elections this session, and he and Bettencourt have filed bills that mostly clap back at Harris County's attempts in 2020 to make it easier to vote by mail. The high-pitched national rhetoric on both sides about democracy at risk may be welcome, if it means passing federal voting rights legislation and killing off the Senate filibuster, but it goes beyond the actual import of the measures on tap in Texas, which will mostly just make it harder for old white folks to vote. That's what they wanted, right?