*****Official Election Day Results Thread*****

[TxHoops]

All in all, about what the smart money projected, Dems take house, senate remains red.  Far short of a “blue wave.”  Or a red one for that matter.  For those of us with little to no faith in Washington, stalemates are usually a good thing.  

[PhatMack19]

24 minutes ago, TxHoops said:

All in all, about what the smart money projected, Dems take house, senate remains red.  Far short of a “blue wave.”  Or a red one for that matter.  For those of us with little to no faith in Washington, stalemates are usually a good thing.  

Huge pickups in the Senate.  Those courts will start getting loaded up soon    

 

 

[TxHoops]

15 minutes ago, PhatMack19 said:

Huge pickups in the Senate.  Those courts will start getting loaded up soon    

 

 

No doubt.  Not only didn’t lose seats, should pick up a few.  

[LumRaiderFan]

11 hours ago, TxHoops said:

All in all, about what the smart money projected, Dems take house, senate remains red.  Far short of a “blue wave.”  Or a red one for that matter.  For those of us with little to no faith in Washington, stalemates are usually a good thing.  

Agree...this is looking like a good time for some gridlock.

[tvc184]

If the Dems were going to catch a break, the House is the smallest accomplishment possible. 

Any time any party controls at least one part of Congress, they can prohibit any legislation.  No law can be passed without both houses passing the exact same bill. But...

At this point there are obviously things that the GOP wants that will now not happen  But.... nothing previously passed into law can be overturned either. Things like Pelosi’s promise to repeal the tax cut simply cannot happen. No new healthcare legislation can be passed with the GOP going along with it, etc. 

Both the Senate and the House will be ineffective for the next two years however....

The Senate was really for all the marbles. That loss could have been devastating for Trump and the GOP. The Senate, unlike the House, has Constitution authority independently. 

Had the GOP held the House and lost the Senate, it would have been really bad. 

All presidential appointments (Supreme Court, cabinet, other federal judges, ambassadors, etc.) and all treaties with other countries have to be approved by the Senate and only the Senate. There is no need to get consent from Pelosi and the House can stop nothing. 

So for the next two years Congress will be ineffective but Trump’s conservative lock on the Supreme Court (if Ginsberg or anyone else leaves for any reason in the next two years) will be for a generation to come and  our tax break are locked in. So Mitch McConnell with control all appointments and Nancy Pelosi will control... gridlock. 

Not a great night for the Republicans but far from the devastating results that it could have been. Holding the Senate was very much the most important issue and the Republicans looked to have actually gained seats.

[PhatMack19]

The Beto affect had a big impact on all of the local elections.  Lots of good Judges lost.  Harris County(and their $4.3 billion dollar budget) is now ran by a 27 yr old career college student that became a citizen 5 years ago.

 

This was the last election with straight party voting.  Some of this won’t happen if the people had to actually click on each candidate. 

[BS Wildcats]

3 hours ago, PhatMack19 said:

The Beto affect had a big impact on all of the local elections.  Lots of good Judges lost.  Harris County(and their $4.3 billion dollar budget) is now ran by a 27 yr old career college student that became a citizen 5 years ago.

 

This was the last election with straight party voting.  Some of this won’t happen if the people had to actually click on each candidate. 

Harris County going to wish that hadn't of happened.  The Republicans are going to have to rise up and stop this movement towards socialism/communism before it's to late. It's a shame that low info voters are ruining this country.  obama damaged this country more than we ever imagined.

[Chester86]

Now, Mr/Ms./Mrs Voter, tear down that Beto sign..........finally and oh so thankfully!!!!!

[baddog]

I didn't vote for anyone in California, why should any of their money go to out-of-their-state candidates......like Beto O'rourke? Isn't that the same as what they accuse the Russians of doing.....interfering with elections? I think campaign contributions should stay in state, but that's just me.

[BS Wildcats]

Get ready for a Robert Francis O'Rourke presidential run in 2020.

[TxHoops]

37 minutes ago, BS Wildcats said:

Get ready for a Robert Francis O'Rourke presidential run in 2020.

I think you might be right.  If you can get within 2.6 percentage points in a statewide race in this State, you might have legs nationally.   Popular with the young voters, women, etc.   Hell he lost by less than Dan freaking Patrick’s opponent which is amazing (and proves something about straight ticket voting, albeit on the other side, that was mentioned earlier in this thread).  

And let’s be honest, compared to some of the names that are bantered about by the Dems...

[Peppermint Patty]

45 minutes ago, TxHoops said:

I think you might be right.  If you can get within 2.6 percentage points in a statewide race in this State, you might have legs nationally.   Popular with the young voters, women, etc.   Hell he lost by less than Dan freaking Patrick’s opponent which is amazing (and proves something about straight ticket voting, albeit on the other side, that was mentioned earlier in this thread).  

And let’s be honest, compared to some of the names that are bantered about by the Dems...

He reminds me of Rubio. We see what happened to him as a presidential candidate.

[PhatMack19]

10 minutes ago, Bandwagon Ranger said:

He reminds me of Rubio. We see what happened to him as a presidential candidate.

Yeah, eventually he will have to debate and that won’t go well

[PhatMack19]

San Fran passed their homeless tax on all businesses with over $50 mil a year in revenue.  Normally I would welcome all of those businesses to Texas, but they come here and continue to vote for what they left.  Makes no sense. 

 

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[PN-G bamatex]

7 hours ago, PhatMack19 said:

This was the last election with straight party voting.  Some of this won’t happen if the people had to actually click on each candidate. 

Ed Emmett lost because Ed Emmett had some serious campaign blunders. That said, he was an excellent county judge who deserved reelection. For Houston's sake, I hope to God Rodney Ellis runs things behind the scenes and not this kid.

For those wondering, here's essentially what happened with the Beto-Cruz race. I won't say which horse, but a lot of this came straight from the horse's mouth.

Ten days ago, we were up by double digits in every race in internal GOP polling. Abbott, Hegar and Bush were all up by 18+. Patrick and Paxton were hovering around 12. Cruz was coming in right at ten points.

Then Pittsburgh and the pipe bomber happened.

O'Rourke played the typical Democrat in claiming that his campaign was totally unsupported by PACs when in fact he had support from quite a few PACs, just not in the form of direct campaign donations. O'Rourke kept himself and his campaign out of it, but several of those supposedly non-existent PACs made a big deal out of the president's rhetoric in the Dallas and Austin suburbs. The result? Williamson and Hays Counties went blue for the first time in decades. Denton and Collin Counties stayed red, but barely. We started losing voters immediately after the pipe bomber pulled his stupid stunt and it only accelerated as we got closer to election day. To roughly quote my horse, we lost five points in the last five days of the voting period. They kind of backed off over last weekend and we bounced back well on Election Day. But it wasn't enough to recover anything like the lead we started with.

To my knowledge, nobody made as big of an issue in any other state, and that's why there's such a stark difference in the results. Republicans overperformed public polls in 48 out of 50 states, the lone exceptions being Texas and Nevada. McSally in Arizona was ahead by fractions of a point and is on track to win by a full point. DeSantis and Scott were both down by two in Florida and are about to win by half a point to a point. Kemp was ahead by a fraction of a point in Georgia and is about to win by two, if Abrams will ever let it go. Hawley in Missouri was ahead by about half a point and pulled it off by about two. Braun in Indiana way overperformed the polls there to beat Donelly by several points, and Blackburn in Tennessee was always projected to win comfortably but still way overperformed her numbers. Heitkamp lost by more than she was expected to in North Dakota. On the House side, the Democrats were projected to gain 39 seats by Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight. They've got 27 and their ceiling, depending on how things shake out in races that are too close to call, is now 34 seats. Given the national trend, if you take away Pittsburgh and the pipe bomber, we're looking at a totally different election in Texas.

As much as I hate to say it, the Lone Star State was the only real blemish on an otherwise very good night for Republicans. Trump lost the House like pretty much every president going through his first mid-term, but he lost way fewer seats than Obama and actually gained a stunning amount of ground in the Senate. I just wish he would have talked about the economy a little more. We might have had a better outcome in Texas and might have actually kept the House.

[BS Wildcats]

28 minutes ago, Bandwagon Ranger said:

He reminds me of Rubio. We see what happened to him as a presidential candidate.

I don't think he wins the nomination, but he will run.  Does anyone else think of him as a white obama when hearing him talk?  He imitates obama's style of speaking pretty good.

[PN-G bamatex]

6 minutes ago, BS Wildcats said:

I don't think he wins the nomination, but he will run.  Does anyone else think of him as a white obama when hearing him talk?  He imitates obama's style of speaking pretty good.

And he does so intentionally.

[Chester86]

5 minutes ago, BS Wildcats said:

I don't think he wins the nomination, but he will run.  Does anyone else think of him as a white obama when hearing him talk?  He imitates obama's style of speaking pretty good.

Hates cops (wonder why) and wants open borders.....you are correct sir.

[PN-G bamatex]

A couple more notes on the Beto-Cruz election (my thoughts, not from the horse's mouth):

In addition to everything I stated earlier, I think this race really boiled down to an old fashioned turnout war. Independents and Democrats (identified by their casting votes in Democratic primaries) comprised a substantially larger portion of the voting electorate than they normally do. That's not because the Democratic base or the number of independents in Texas grew substantially in two years as it might indicate at first glance. It looks to me like a lot of Texans who voted for Trump in 2016 didn't show up to the polls this time, where just about everybody who voted for Hillary Clinton made it a point to.

Trump won 4.685M out of 8.696M voters in Texas in 2016. Ted Cruz won 4.240M out of 8.324M voters. Ted Cruz won 425K fewer votes than Trump in an election with 675K fewer voters overall.

Meanwhile, Beto O’Rourke won 4.018M voters versus Hillary Clinton’s 3.878M for a difference of 140K additional votes. We know that Beto registered a ton of first-time voters, probably comprising that 140K voters and then some.

Trump’s margin of victory over Clinton in 2016 was 808K votes. If you start with that 808K vote margin, take away those 425K votes that didn’t show for Cruz, and add in Beto’s newfound 140K votes, what do you have? About a 243K vote margin. Cruz actually won by a margin of 223K.

The math there adds up a little too well. It looks like Beto turned out every single Hillary Clinton voter in the state plus some, where Cruz couldn’t bring out all of Trump’s voters. That makes sense in an election year where the Democrats have the momentum and Republicans don’t, especially after two crazy Republicans decided to act like the redneck al Qaeda. It makes more sense when you take into account that Beto only won four counties that Hillary didn’t (Jefferson being one of those counties, and the other three being suburban counties in Dallas and Austin), all of which went for Trump by comparatively narrow margins in 2016.

But I say all of that to say this: I think the fact the math here lines up almost perfectly just reaffirms that the political landscape of Texas today really hasn't changed all that much since 2016. Beto just did a way better job of turning out his base than we did. Given the kind of campaign he ran, visiting every county a half dozen times and running the most voracious ground game Texas has ever seen, that really seems to be the most plausible explanation to me.

[Hagar]

1 hour ago, TxHoops said:

I think you might be right.  If you can get within 2.6 percentage points in a statewide race in this State, you might have legs nationally.   Popular with the young voters, women, etc.   Hell he lost by less than Dan freaking Patrick’s opponent which is amazing (and proves something about straight ticket voting, albeit on the other side, that was mentioned earlier in this thread).  

And let’s be honest, compared to some of the names that are bantered about by the Dems...

No doubt Hoops.  Hillary, Biden, Warren, etc, all have baggage.  If Beto can do this well in Texas, barring any faux pas, he'll be a formidable candidate.  

[1989NDN]

Texas is turning from red to purple before your very eyes.  It will be a blue state in the next 10 years.  Demographics have changed and they are not going back to an Anglo majority.  You see it in every major city in Texas, e.g., Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, and El Paso.  The Hispanic population is booming in Midland-Odessa.  Will that area of Texas be the next one to turn from bright red to a shade of purple?  We will see.  If it does, then Texas will begin its change from purple to blue.

Go Indians.  Peace.

[Hagar]

8 hours ago, PhatMack19 said:

The Beto affect had a big impact on all of the local elections.  Lots of good Judges lost.  Harris County(and their $4.3 billion dollar budget) is now ran by a 27 yr old career college student that became a citizen 5 years ago.

 

This was the last election with straight party voting.  Some of this won’t happen if the people had to actually click on each candidate. 

I hear the term, "Low Information Voters" bannered around by both parties, but turning Harris County over to someone like Ms Hidalgo is insane.  It boggles the mind.  

I know this sounds crazy, but perhaps folks need to take a simple test before you can register to vote.  Name the president.  Name your 2 Senators and your Representative.  Name 5 SCOTUS members.   Just thinking out loud.  The results there have me beating my head on the wall.  

[LumRaiderFan]

28 minutes ago, 1989NDN said:

Texas is turning from red to purple before your very eyes.  It will be a blue state in the next 10 years.  Demographics have changed and they are not going back to an Anglo majority.  You see it in every major city in Texas, e.g., Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, and El Paso.  The Hispanic population is booming in Midland-Odessa.  Will that area of Texas be the next one to turn from bright red to a shade of purple?  We will see.  If it does, then Texas will begin its change from purple to blue.

Go Indians.  Peace.

On the bright side, an economy run by Democrats will eventually shut down illegal immigration.

[TxHoops]

17 minutes ago, LumRaiderFan said:

On the bright side, an economy run by Democrats will eventually shut down illegal immigration.

I see what you did here.

This is funny, I don’t care who you are!   

[TxHoops]

1 hour ago, Bandwagon Ranger said:

He reminds me of Rubio. We see what happened to him as a presidential candidate.

Yes, he lost to a trust fund baby, turned reality tv star.   Did anyone mention low information voters ITT?