Texas Tribune
Fixing ballot secrecy in Texas won’t be easy, experts say
by By Natalia Contreras, Votebeat and The Texas Tribune, The Texas Tribune – 2024-06-26 11:00:00
SUMMARY: The article addresses challenges and measures to ensure ballot secrecy amidst increased calls for election transparency. Pam Anderson's test from Colorado a decade ago revealed that linking a ballot to its voter was possible, prompting the state to enhance voter privacy. In Texas, recent revelations showed that public records could expose voter choices, leading to emergency guidance from state officials to prevent such breaches. Texas faces added burdens on local election officials for redactions and maintaining voter privacy, highlighting the need for balancing transparency and secrecy. Other states like Colorado and North Carolina have also implemented measures to protect voter anonymity.
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When Pam Anderson was a county elections clerk in Colorado about a decade ago, she worried about whether the state's increasingly transparent election process had made it possible to link a ballot to the voter who cast it.
As a test, she asked her staff in Jefferson County to see whether they could find a ballot that she had cast in a previous election.
It took them less than 20 minutes.
“It was a big revelatory moment to know this could be possible,” said Anderson, now an election administration expert and consultant.
Since then, Colorado has taken steps to protect a voter's right to a secret ballot: Election officials there remove the voting method and polling location from public reports detailing voter participation. The state has invested in training election officials to redact information from the records it releases publicly, and purchased technology to help make those redactions more efficiently, Anderson said.
Such measures could help point the way forward for Texas, where recent laws enacted in the name of increasing election transparency have made it possible — in limited instances — to use public records and data to determine how individual voters voted.
The vulnerabilities came into public view last month, after a right-wing news site published what it said was the ballot a former Texas GOP chair cast in this year's Republican primary. Votebeat and The Texas Tribune were able to verify that the private choices some voters make in the voting booth could be identified using public, legally available records.
Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson and her staff were aware of the risk that voters' choices could be exposed to public discovery, and election administrators across the state had been warning about it.
But it wasn't until after the Votebeat and Texas Tribune report that Nelson's office and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued emergency guidance to election officials, instructing them to stop releasing information that can help expose how people voted.
This week, Nelson's office quietly issued an additional directive that will require even more redactions and aim to limit opportunities for members of the public to cross-reference records and pinpoint a particular voter's ballot.
The guidance from Nelson and Paxton adds to the burdens on local election officials to figure out what information they have to redact in a given case to prevent records from being used to link individual voters with a specific ballot or ballot image.
Limiting threats
Other states have already contended with the tension between ballot secrecy and transparency. Striking the right balance between those two goals, experts say, is neither quick nor easy.
To fully protect all voters' private choices, Texas will need to provide additional support and resources to local election administrators whose voting systems, equipment, and recordkeeping procedures vary by county, experts said.
Anderson, who was the Republican nominee for Colorado secretary of state in 2022, said election officials will need time to work through the problem, taking into account all the specifics that apply — everything from the types of voting systems used in the state and the turnout in individual elections to the types of documents election officials must release.
Some local election officials said the state's initial guidance to redact was too broad. Redacting “is not an easy fix and it can't be a cookie-cutter thing for everyone,” said Trudy Hancock, the Brazos County elections administrator.
During a House Elections Committee hearing earlier this month, Christina Adkins, head of the elections division in the Texas Secretary of State's Office, acknowledged during questioning that county clerks and election officials performing redactions would still have access to records that could tie a voter to their ballot.
“That's why I think that this is a short-term solution, and why there needs to be some bigger discussions about how to prevent this issue from occurring on the front end of the election,” Adkins said.
The latest guidance from Nelson's office, obtained by Votebeat earlier this week, will require more redactions. It prohibits counties from using electronic poll books — the equipment used to check in voters at polling sites — to generate and print numbers on ballot paper. That stems from concern that such numbers, which link the ballots to the device used to check in the voter, could later be cross-referenced with other information to pierce ballot secrecy.
This directive will force multiple counties including Dallas, Travis, and Williamson to quickly change their procedures and revamp their worker training in a presidential election year. Some counties will also have to order new paper ballot stock in order to comply, an unexpected expense. That new ballot stock will be sequentially numbered, and those numbers will then have to be redacted in order to avoid creating yet another ballot secrecy risk.
Balancing act
The U.S. adopted the secret ballot in the late 19th century in an attempt to address issues of vote-buying and voter intimidation For decades, election officials across the country have striven to find the best ways to protect voters' ballot secrecy.
Following the passage of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, election technology evolved, chain-of-custody procedures improved, more jurisdictions switched to using paper ballots, and election records became much more detailed. These are the changes that prompted Anderson's request to her staff more than a decade ago.
In areas with very small voter precincts and low turnout, the risk of identifying how someone voted also increased. And the way in which election-related data is disclosed can add to the risk.
In Colorado, an effort to allow 16-year-olds to vote in school district elections four years ago failed over ballot privacy questions. The issue was that only a small number of teens in each precinct would have obtained the specific ballot style for school district elections, making it easier to tie such voters to individual ballots.
In Texas, when someone voted and by what means are considered public information. Each county reports what kind of ballot — in-person, mail, provisional, overseas — a voter cast and whether they voted early or on election day. Many other types of information are also available through open-records requests, or published online, including data from electronic poll books used at individual voting precincts; “cast vote records,” the electronic representation of how voters voted; and ballot images, which are copies of actual ballots as marked by voters.
The push to make more records public grew in Texas after the 2020 presidential election as conspiracy theories about the outcome took hold in the state.
In contrast, other states have sought to limit the availability of election information to help safeguard ballot secrecy.
Colorado no longer publicly reports election participation by vote method or by location, in part because so few people vote in person there. In addition, the election officials in the state combine and shuffle small batches of ballots to protect anonymity, a technique often used with military and overseas voters.
North Carolina in 2002 banned the public release of cast vote records and voted ballots. This year, a May primary had such low turnout that the State Board of Elections also removed precinct-level results from its website “so that people couldn't use that and our voter history data to see how individuals voted,” said Patrick Gannon, the public information director for the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
With some election data, North Carolina officials are permitted to insert “statistical noise” in certain areas before publishing results, Gannon said. For instance, if all voters in a particular North Carolina precinct voted for the same candidate, the state would add a small, random number of votes to the other candidates in the published vote totals for that precinct — but not in the official, certified results.
That way, “no one could use our precinct data and voter history data to determine how any individual voted,” Gannon said.
The U.S. Census Bureau uses a similar method in its data to protect privacy.
When elections officials employ this tactic, vote counts in specific precincts will differ slightly from those in the final results, which some experts have said could be misleading.
But “if state officials did not add statistical noise to the precinct sorted data, any person could use that dataset, combined with our voter history dataset, to determine how certain people voted in certain situations,” Gannon said, underscoring that the practice does not alter the official results. “We only insert statistical noise where absolutely necessary.”
Potential breaches
Experts say election officials seeking to protect ballot secrecy should first understand how exactly a voters' ballot could be exposed, so they can decide what information really needs to be withheld.
“A lot of the times when we talk about the secret ballot, we don't really specify how the secret ballot could be violated,” said Michael Morse, an assistant professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania whose research focuses on voter registration and election administration.
The key is understanding the mechanism that threatens the secret ballot so that the fix is properly tailored to the threat, he said.
Morse's most recent research, with political science professors Jeff Lewis at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Shiro Kuriwaki of Yale University, examines the extent to which releasing certain election records — such as cast vote records — can identify voters and their ballot choices.
They found that for 99.8% of Maricopa County voters in Arizona's 2020 general election, the release of ballot records did not lead to the revelation of any vote choice. Morse and his colleagues showed that a vote would be revealed there only if all voters in a “reporting group” — for example, a single precinct, or those who voted by a certain method within a precinct — are unanimous in their choice of a particular candidate.
Florida tries to limit this risk by aggregating results in some cases. Election officials there typically report election results by precinct and vote method. But if there are fewer than 10 voters who cast ballots in a particular precinct using a particular method, then by law, election officials report only the aggregated precinct-wide results.
This type of aggregation rule doesn't work perfectly, Morse and his colleagues explained.
“It suppresses some results that would not lead to vote revelation, but might not suppress a few that could,” he said
Morse and his colleagues point to longer-term measures, such as redistricting, as potentially more effective solutions.
“Lining up the district lines for multiple offices to avoid split precincts would increase the number of voters per precinct and thus reduce the extent of revelation,” he said.
Texas election officials have proposed a similar long-term solution that would require the Texas Legislature to increase the minimum number of registered voters allowed in voting precincts. Currently, county election precincts must have at least 100, but not more than 5,000 voters. However, in some large counties, a precinct can have as few as 50 voters.
The Texas Legislature will resume in January.
A new burden
By law, Texas election officials are already required to redact identifiable information in election records such as Social Security numbers, state-issued identification numbers, and phone numbers. But the recent guidance from the Texas Secretary of State's office said they're obligated to do more, if necessary, to protect voter privacy, though they might need to seek guidance from the state attorney general to know whether they're doing too much.
That means an added burden on local election officials.
“It's time consuming, and it requires additional effort on the part of the election administrator, who is working on behalf of the voter to help maintain their privacy and anonymity,” said Tammy Patrick, CEO for programs at the National Association of Election Officials.
Hancock, the election administrator in Brazos County, home to College Station and Texas A&M University, said lawmakers should consider the time and resources that redactions have required in recent years. Hancock's office is one of many election departments across the state that have been flooded with public information requests seeking granular election data. And although her office gets help from the county's public records department, most of the state's smaller counties do not have that support — or funding for software to help with redactions.
“A department with only two people on staff would have to handle that themselves. They'd also be under a time crunch to respond, and they'd also be in the middle of running an election,” Hancock said. “So you would either have to hire somebody to come in and redact that stuff, or they would have to take the other person to stop their duties to redact.”
The concern is not only about time, workers, or resources, she said, but also about figuring out exactly what to redact.
“You never know what information people are going to use to connect the dots,” she said. “What's to stop one person from requesting one thing, another person requesting another thing, another person requesting another thing, and then they all work together to connect those dots?”
Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.
Disclosure: Texas A&M University and Texas Secretary of State have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
Just in: Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming; U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania; and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt will take the stage at The Texas Tribune Festival, Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Buy tickets today!
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The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Texas Tribune
Odessa residents face another water outage
by By Dante Motley, Story by Carlos Nogueras Ramos, The Texas Tribune – 2024-06-29 15:26:45
SUMMARY: Odessa residents experienced another water outage due to a leak in the city's aging water infrastructure. Crews couldn't isolate the leak and had to shut down the entire water system to make repairs, affecting tens of thousands of residents. A public safety alert informed residents about the shutdown, which required a 24-hour boil-water notice once service resumed. Mayor Joven highlighted that many outside the city limits also depend on the water system. Odessa is working on long-term repairs and has applied for funding from Texas's new $1 billion water fund. Additionally, prominent figures will attend The Texas Tribune Festival in Austin.
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Tens of thousands of Odessa residents were once again without water on Saturday afternoon as crews worked to fix a leak in the waterline — an ongoing problem in the city's aging infrastructure.
Crews in the fast-growing city at the center of the Permian Basin were not able to isolate a leak discovered Saturday morning. City manager John Beckmeyer said faulty valves forced workers to shut down the entire system to make repairs. The city's aging 700-mile-long system has seen recurring problems and it is due for a major overhaul, he said.
After a much larger leak led to a water outage in May, Mayor Javier Joven said that a majority of county residents outside city limits also rely on the city's water plant.
The city sent out a public safety alert around noon notifying city residents the water would be shut off at 2 p.m. Beckmeyer said estimated residents would be without water for three hours, and under a 24-hour boil-water notice after it comes back.
Breckmeyer said Odessa eliminated a crew that regularly checked valves about a decade ago as a cost saving measure.
The city now has standard operating procedures to limit the time water is shut off when leaks cannot be isolated with the goal of preventing dayslong water outages like in 2022. Odessa also started notifying residents about water problems with cellphone alerts after many were surprised by May's outage.
Beckmeyer says the city is working on fixing the valves, but contracted repairs will take time and they won't be cheap. The city applied for support from a new $1 billion statewide water fund that was approved by constitutional amendment voters in November.
Just in: Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming; U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania; and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt will take the stage at The Texas Tribune Festival, Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Buy tickets today!
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Texas Tribune
Remembering Kinky Friedman’s campaign for Texas governor
by By John Jordan, The Texas Tribune – 2024-06-28 17:45:17
SUMMARY: Kinky Friedman, who passed away Thursday, was a multifaceted figure known for his roles as a Peace Corps volunteer, bandleader, satirist, singer-songwriter, novelist, essayist, perennial political candidate, and devoted animal rescuer. He also worked as a comedian, chess player, and cigar smoker. In 2006, he ran as an independent candidate for Texas governor, promoting a pro-teacher, anti-death penalty, and anti-Trans-Texas Corridor platform. His campaign, characterized by chaos and authenticity, resonated with voters disillusioned with traditional politics. Despite falling short, his unique persona and populist appeal highlighted widespread frustration with the political status quo.
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You come to see
What you want to see
Yeah you come to see
But you never come to know
— Kinky Friedman, “The Wild Man of Borneo”
Kinky Friedman died Thursday. His obituaries have listed his various endeavors: Peace Corps volunteer, bandleader, provocateur, satirist, singer-songwriter, mystery novelist, essayist, perennial candidate for various offices (Kerrville justice of the peace, governor of Texas, commissioner of agriculture). I'd add Borscht Belt comedian, killer chess player, dedicated cigar smoker and savior of dogs to the list.
He was also, as it happens, my boss when he ran in a four-way race for governor in 2006.
I have never known anyone who worked harder at not having a real job, and I count my own efforts in that regard pretty impressive. His campaign had plenty of career-minded people focused on order and organization. There were a few who seemed determined to avoid not only work or a job but really any kind of useful activity whatsoever.
Over the years I've come to understand that this was by design, that this was Kinky's preference. A level of chaos for him was a feature, not a bug.
Hiring me was just one example: Nearing 50, I had a resume that consisted of pretty much one job: Bass player.
I joined the campaign seeking to escape a life that was becoming unbearable to me after 30 years as a professional musician. A few years earlier, at a festival in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, two bandmates and I had taken the stage and begun tuning our instruments — the adjusting of monitor levels, the thump of drums and splash of cymbals that precede a live show — when I suddenly felt I could hear every individual thought of every person in the audience. I looked wildly at my bandmates, wondering if it was just me. That condition, which I'm not sure even has a name, only worsened over the succeeding years. Crowds became intolerable, an impossible situation for a professional musician. When I got the call from our former booking agent and Kinky's first campaign manager, Cleve Hattersley, I jumped at the chance. It was a measure of how much of a musician I was that I thought I was getting a real job.
The first time I remember meeting Kinky was at UT-Austin, an early campaign event. With a large following of students in tow, he strolled the campus, chewing on an unlit cigar and answering questions from a rapt group of students. I was taken with his ease, his sharp and rapid wit and his comfort with tough questions (which I noticed he didn't actually answer).
The particulars of Kinky's run for governor were never very specific, but his platform was very pro-teacher and public schools, deeply dubious of the death penalty and adamantly opposed to Gov. Rick Perry's proposed Trans-Texas Corridor, an ambitious but deeply unpopular multinational superhighway, rail and utility corridor that would have cut a gigantic swath across the state.
Kinky further offered an aspirational vision to voters that was long on slogans, if short on details. It spoke to Texans' deep sense of identity, including distrust of government. “How hard can it be?” and “You can lead a politician to water but you can't make him think” were classic Kinky one-liners, and they appeared on T-shirts and bumper stickers we sold hand over fist. He tapped into a sentiment neither liberal nor conservative: pissed off. Very few people, if indeed anyone, looked to Kinky for policy pronouncements. What drew many, myself included, was an abiding frustration with the status quo.
Unlike the major-party nominees — Perry and former Democratic congressman Chris Bell — the independent candidates, Kinky and former Austin mayor and state comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, faced the difficult challenge of actually getting on the ballot. The hurdles were considerable: get 1% of the previous election's number of voters (in 2006, that meant about 50,000) to sign a petition. But each signature had to be from a registered voter, and that voter could not have voted in either the Republican or Democratic primary. Voters could only sign one or the other petition — either Strayhorn or Kinky, but not both — or the signature wouldn't count. And our campaigns would have 60 days, from the primary until May 11, 2006, to gather those signatures, which would then be validated by the Texas Secretary of State.
To maximize those 60 days of signature gathering, we'd have to engage in strenuous campaigning far earlier than the party candidates. When I signed on in the spring of 2005, about 18 months ahead of Election Day, the campaigning was just getting underway. My first job was to paint our first headquarters, a tiny, drafty office in an old two-story building a couple of blocks south of the Capitol. I installed the first computer, a Dell machine with Windows (I spent so much time on the phone with a Microsoft tech support worker in India that I knew her children's names), set up the first telephone, even had my bike stolen from the alley behind the office.
We ultimately had two more HQs as the campaign rapidly grew — the second was a former main office and warehouse for a cosmetics firm, offered to the campaign either gratis or very nearly free by a millionaire friendly to Kinky. We were booted when the production crew for the beloved TV series “Friday Night Lights” scouted our building and offered a ton of money to our landlord. I made the producers pony up considerable funds to move us seamlessly and overnight into our new home, a closed car dealership with a big campaign sign mounted high and visible from the adjacent highway. After our campaign ended, Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign took over the spot.
We were on the campaign trail constantly. If we failed to get enough signatures, two years of very hard work would just waft away like smoke from one Kinky's cigars.
Our approach for getting those 50,000 or so petition signatures was different from Strayhorn's. She decided to spend huge amounts of money on a firm that would fan out with mostly temp workers. We decided we'd keep it in house, so we bought banks of used computers and engaged many volunteers (we were using Facebook when it was still limited to colleges and universities), as well as everyone on staff, to participate in the gathering. We were therefore able to verify our signatures before delivering them to the secretary's office, while Strayhorn's campaign relied on sheer bulk. On the day we delivered all our signatures (in an elaborate convoy led by Austin cops on motorcycles) we knew we had wildly exceeded the minimum. Our total of verified signatures left Strayhorn in the dust.
For a man who avoided real jobs, Kinky was relentless. He was on the road all the time, all over Texas, in front of anyone who'd have him. And plenty would — he was an incredibly engaging presence who read rooms as only politicians and performance artists can. He shared a gifted politician's knack for making you feel, in a brief one-on-one encounter, like you were the only person in the world. If he had an engagement at 2 p.m., he considered himself late if he wasn't there by noon. It was a running joke that if he had a noon flight, you'd be driving him to the airport at 5 a.m.
Kinky's campaign reflected a persistent vein of frustration that has fueled populist insurgents like Ross Perot in 1992 and Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in 2016. A former Texas governor, George W. Bush, was in the White House, presiding over unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Texas, Perry, was in some hot water for his support of the Trans-Texas Corridor. Meanwhile, the Democrat, Chris Bell, outperformed expectations in the end, because the youth turnout from Kinky never really materialized. The conventional wisdom at the time was that Kinky was peeling votes from the left, Strayhorn from the right and middle. The reality was more nuanced. At the hundreds of Kinky campaign events I worked, there were young ideological voters, middle aged and elderly former hippies, resolute Libertarians and future Tea Party adherents. What they saw in Kinky was someone who wouldn't filter himself, someone whose image was crafted by himself and no one else. It wasn't enough to win, but with Strayhorn at 18% and Kinky at 12%, it was the wildest Texas election in recent memory.
As a fellow musician, I know the power of authenticity, and I have never met anyone as authentic, as completely himself, as Kinky.
John Jordan, a native of Corpus Christi, was a longtime Austin bass player before he worked on Kinky Friedman's campaign in 2006. He joined The Dallas Morning News's Austin bureau in 2008 as an office manager and The Texas Tribune in 2012 as an editorial administrator. He was named deputy director of photography in 2022.
Disclosure: Dell, Facebook, Microsoft and Texas Secretary of State have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
Just in: Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming; U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania; and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt will take the stage at The Texas Tribune Festival, Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Buy tickets today!
The post Remembering Kinky Friedman's campaign for Texas governor appeared first on TexasTribune.org.
The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Texas Tribune
Down ballot Texas Dems worry Biden debate hurts them, too
by By Matthew Choi and Jasper Scherer, The Texas Tribune – 2024-06-28 13:19:52
SUMMARY: President Joe Biden's poor performance in Thursday's presidential debate has created unease among Texas Democrats, fearing it may jeopardize their down-ballot races in November. Biden's allies acknowledged his struggle during the debate, marked by disjointed sentences and lack of clarity, which overshadowed discussions on significant issues like abortion rights and the Capitol attack. Critics within his party, such as Julián Castro, expressed disappointment. Meanwhile, Republicans, including Congressional candidates, capitalized on Biden's slip to challenge Democratic counterparts. Despite these setbacks, some Democrats remain optimistic, urging caution and confidence in addressing Trump's controversial stances in future debates.
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WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden's unsteady performance at Thursday's presidential debate has sparked a wave of anxiety among Texas Democrats, some of whom fear their party's standard bearer could drag down the rest of the ticket and cost Democrats down-ballot seats in November.
Even Biden's allies and supporters in Texas acknowledged the debate was a disaster. The president, who hoped to quell concerns about his acuity and fitness for office, routinely struggled to muster up complete sentences and often wove multiple points together, muddling his message. The performance overshadowed the debate's substance, including former President Donald Trump's support for rolling back abortion rights and refusal to disavow the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — issues where Texas Democrats hope to seize the upper hand this fall.
“Biden had a very low bar going into the debate and failed to clear even that bar,” former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro said on social media. Castro, a former San Antonio mayor, faced Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary. “He seemed unprepared, lost, and not strong enough to parry effectively with Trump, who lies constantly.”
Two-thirds of debate viewers polled by CNN after the debate said they thought Trump outperformed Biden, though only a small fraction of those who backed Biden before the debate say they would now consider voting for Trump.
Statewide polls show Biden trailing Trump by a wider margin than at any point in the state four years ago, and Democrats worry that a further slip could torpedo their chances in key races, including U.S. Rep. Colin Allred's challenge to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and several GOP-controlled state House seats they are targeting. The fate of these largely unknown down-ballot candidates is closely linked to their party's success atop the ticket, where presidential nominees are more visible to everyday voters and have far more money to drive turnout.
“I think that if you are a down-ballot candidate in a swing area, that candidate's responsibility for turnout becomes even bigger than it was before yesterday,” said Ed Espinoza, a Democratic strategist who previously oversaw the progressive group Progress Texas. “You're gonna need an extra push.”
Allred's campaign and social media was silent throughout the debate. The Dallas Democrat declined to comment after leaving the U.S. House chamber on Friday, saying he was still “processing” the debate.
U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, an El Paso Democrat who serves as a national co-chair on Biden's campaign, said “it was not the night any of us wanted.” Still, she expressed more dismay that reporters were not further challenging Trump's comments about migrants coming from prisons and asylums, which she described as “beyond vile.” Escobar said she still had confidence that Biden could counter Trump's remarks in the future.
U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth, acknowledged that Biden underperformed, but warned members of his party to be cautious before declaring the president's reelection effort dead.
“I don't think members should say anything that they will regret later before everybody's had a chance to just kind of chill a little bit,” he said.
Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, delighted at Biden's debate performance, immediately using it to target Democratic congressional candidates who had endorsed Biden's fitness. The National Republican Congressional Committee didn't hesitate to unearth an old quote by Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez of McAllen, where he said Biden was “healthy, he's sharp, he's a full package.”
“Vicente Gonzalez has supported Joe Biden every step of the way – in his open border and inflationary policies and now as Biden mentally struggles to do the job as president,” former U.S. Rep. Mayra Flores, who is challenging Gonzalez for the 34th district, said in a text message. “Now is not the time for feeble leadership from Biden or blind yes men like Gonzalez.”
Biden's age could be particularly effective among Hispanic voters, who are on average the youngest ethnic group in the country. The only U.S. races targeted by national party groups are in majority Hispanic districts in South Texas.
“It just confirmed what all Americans already know: that he is a feeble man not able to perform the duties of his position,” said U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-McAllen, who is facing a competitive challenge from Democrat Michelle Vallejo to keep her seat in the 15th district.
Republicans are hoping to flip two U.S. House district seats this year in South Texas — the 34th and the 28th districts — and are investing heavily to hold onto the 15th district. National Democrats are also showing early interest in the Senate race in Texas for the first time in decades, identifying the state as their most likely flippable seat in a largely difficult map for Democrats this year.
But Democrats retort that their congressional candidates don't tie themselves closely to Biden anyway. U.S. Reps. Henry Cuellar, a Laredo Democrat in the 28th district, and Gonzalez both routinely vote against their party, voting with Republicans on issues ranging from the border to energy regulation. Allred voted for a Republican resolution condemning Biden's handling of the border, though he later reversed course on a similar resolution.
In Harris County, where Republicans have gained recent momentum after losing political control, GOP Chair Cindy Siegel said her party would do everything it can to tie Democrats to Biden's most glaring weaknesses, from inflation to immigration. Siegel also predicted that Trump would “help us succeed and win our down-ballot races” — a striking change in posture from just four years ago, when Biden carried Harris County by 13 points over Trump.
“I fully expect that [Trump's] going to do a lot better than he did back in 2020,” Siegel said, arguing that national polls showing stronger support for Trump among Black and Hispanic voters would be borne out in Harris County's diverse pool of voters.
Democratic state lawmakers and legislative candidates stayed largely silent throughout the debate, mostly resharing other posts that called out Trump's repeated falsehoods and criticized the debate format for letting said falsehoods run unchecked. State Rep. John Bucy of Austin, one of the few Democrats in the Legislature who said anything during the debate, wrote that Trump, in claiming credit for the demise of Roe v. Wade, was “directly responsible for Texas' extreme abortion ban.”
Abortion rights are perhaps the leading issue for Texas Democrats up and down the ballot, including at the Texas Supreme Court, which has upheld the state's abortion bans. A political group called Find Out PAC is targeting three GOP justices over the issue, including the court's refusal to allow a Dallas woman to obtain an abortion for a nonviable pregnancy that her doctors said was life-threatening.
The PAC's leader, former Under Secretary of the Air Force Gina Ortiz Jones, expressed optimism in the wake of Biden's poor performance, citing Trump's abortion comments.
“Last night, we saw why Texans should be alarmed, motivated, and optimistic about ousting Texas Supreme Court Justices Jimmy Blacklock, John Devine, and Jane Bland,” Jones said in a statement. “Trump brags about eliminating Roe, but these justices are more extreme. They've shown that medical exceptions can exist on paper, but not in reality.”
Nothing new
Though Texas is a national priority for U.S. House and Senate races this cycle, the Biden campaign has not put much focus into flipping the state. Texas voted for Trump by 5.6 points in 2020, and Biden remains deeply unpopular in the state.
Espinoza, the Democratic strategist, said the lack of national investment — and the possibility of an unpopular president dragging down the rest of the ticket — is nothing new for Texas Democrats.
“It's not like there have been a ton of coattails to ride in years past,” he said.
Gonzalez said he expected to overcome GOP attacks by touting his record over four terms in Congress.
“The problem with [Republicans'] strategy is people in my district know me well, and tie me to $9 Billion dollars in Federal funding I've delivered, funding that has created jobs and is transforming South Texas infrastructure, healthcare & education,” Gonzalez said in a text message. “And they tie [Flores] to the fact that she was a 5 month special election fluke that embarrassed South Texans by not offering a single bill or proposal that would improve lives and not delivering a single dollar in resources during her short tenure.”
The collective Democratic panic has led to questions about whether Biden should remain at the top of the ticket. On his podcast Friday, Cruz, who characterized Biden's performance as an “old man on his front porch screaming get off my front porch,” theorized former First Lady Michelle Obama could be tapped in a last minute salve for the Democrats.
The party still hasn't officially named its nominee. If Biden does step down, party delegates would determine their pick at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.
Biden, who said he had a sore throat during the debate, attempted to assuage concerns at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Friday. Appearing considerably more alert and using a more forceful tone than during the debate, Biden said he would not be running unless he firmly believed himself capable of the job.
“I don't walk as easily as I used to. I don't speak as smoothly as I used to. I don't debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth,” Biden said to the crowd. “When you get knocked down, you get back up.”
Disclosure: Progress Texas has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
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