Texas' New Senator Is Absolutely Terrified About His State Going Blue

[Texas Lawyer]

103. There were major GOTV efforts in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, McAllen, Corpus Christi, Austin, etc.

While none of these efforts were based on the presidential race, the statewide votes across the whole ballot reflect that we have work to do as illustrated by the votes in 2012:

57.20% - Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan
41.36% - Barack Obama/Joe Biden

56.63% - Ted Cruz
40.45% - Paul Sadler

56.18% - Christi Craddick
39.58% - Dale Henry

53.73% - Nathan Hecht
41.88% - Michele Petty

55.51% - Sharon Keller
41.22% - Keith Hampton

These results are only a marginal improvement (on average) over the statewide results in 2010 (we actually lost ground at the top of the ticker from 2010 to 2012 but we've made some down-ballot progress since then):

54.97% - Rick Perry
42.29% - Bill White

61.78% - David Dewhurst
34.83% - Linda Chavez-Thompson

64.05% - Greg Abbott
33.66% - Barbara Ann Radnofsky

59.87% - Debra Lehrmann
37.26% - Jim Sharp

More troubling is the trend which shows no statewide improvement from 2008 (actually, we have slipped backward a bit since 2008):

55.45% - John McCain/Sarah Palin
43.68% - Barack Obama/Joe Biden

54.82% - John Cornyn
42.83% - Richard J. (Rick) Noriega

52.13% - Michael L. Williams
44.35% - Mark Thompson

51.09% - Dale Wainwright
45.88% - Sam Houston

51.64% - Tom Price
45.53% - Susan Strawn

I would love to share your optimism, but these numbers have a real world significance we would be foolish to ignore. We cannot fix the problem until we diagnose the problem and understand the magnitude of our task.