On Election Day 2016, I spent the evening with my friends at a Dallas Spanish TV station. Around 5 P.M., the questions were about the polls and expectations of a Clinton victory. It all changed when we went back on the air at 10 P.M. and did some work on the Facebook transmission. By midnight, we were talking about why all the experts got it wrong.
Over the last few days, I’ve been reading and answering some Spanish media questions about the Texas primary. The narrative at 5 P.M. was that the Democrats were turning Texas purple. By 10 P.M., the narrative was about the red wall and the hurricane that never hit land.
The GOP primary performance was even bigger than the numbers we saw.
Governor Greg Abbott received 1.3 million votes, while the entire Democrat team was around 700,000! This is even worse for the Democrats, considering that they had a contest for governor, and Mr. Abbott didn’t.
Senator Ted Cruz got about the same 1.3 million votes, and the Democrats were under a million.
So Governor Abbott and Senator Cruz are set for re-election. They will be running against two very liberal candidates who should consider moving to San Francisco.
The real problem is that the GOP has a big vote reserve that will show up in November. In 2014, Abbott got 2.9 million votes. So we can expect a lot more Republicans to show up later this year.
Yes, the Democrats did a good job in getting out 460,000 early votes. How many more can we expect in November? Not enough to win a single statewide race.
