[ad_1]
The first time she met the woman who would become her state representative, they were both serving as greeters at a polling location in Round Rock. Throughout early and Election Day voting, Jennie Birkholz, a Democrat and public health care consultant, answered voters’ queries about a school board election in the Austin suburbs in November 2022. She recalls Caroline Harris Davila, a Republican running for a seat in the state House of Representatives, shaking hands with would-be constituents and bringing her adorable golden retriever for voters to pet. In between conversations with those about to cast ballots, Birkholz, who has two school-aged children, asked Harris Davila what Birkholz considered to be softball questions related to public schools and how they are funded. Birkholz says the conversation was friendly, but she didn’t get specific answers and left the chat unsatisfied. She decided on the spot to make a run for the Texas House.
Two years later, Birkholz says that public education still is motivating her candidacy, especially as Republican lawmakers in Austin are trying to pass a voucher program that would divert taxpayer funds from public schools to private ones. Several major GOP donors in Texas and out of state, including some billionaire Christian nationalists, support the voucher program, in some cases as part of a larger effort to undermine traditional public education. But Birkholz says most voters she’s spoken with in the fast-growing suburbs north of Austin oppose the plan. “I’ve knocked on [thousands of] doors between the March primary and now,” she told me recently. “What I’m hearing from voters is they do not like that their tax dollars will go to private entities where there’s little to no accountability.”
Her experience accords with polling on the issue: while a majority of the six percent of Texans who vote in Republican primaries express support for vouchers, an April survey from the nonprofit Texas Hispanic Policy foundation found that 57 percent of all likely Texas voters oppose using tax dollars to provide school vouchers for all parents. While polling results on the issue vary based on how the question is asked, its biggest opponents at the Capitol are legislators from small-town or rural areas where public schools serve as a center of community life and private alternatives are few or nonexistent. The Republicans who have opposed vouchers say they are acting on the views of their constituents.
Those opinions mattered little to Greg Abbott, however. Since last year, amid pressure from his biggest benefactors, the governor has pressed on the issue repeatedly despite mounting evidence that vouchers don’t tend to produce good educational outcomes. When the Lege wouldn’t bend to his will, Abbott resorted to threats and spread lies about Republicans who wouldn’t support his plan. In the lead-up to this year’s primary elections, he aimed to depose most of the 21 Republicans who, in 2023, voted against funding school vouchers. In the March GOP primary and the May runoffs, Abbott helped take down nine of the sixteen anti-voucher Republican incumbents who ran for reelection. Others whom he had targeted retired, so he netted thirteen pro-voucher votes this spring. That’s more than enough to overcome the voucher bill’s eleven-vote margin of defeat last year when members voted 84–63 to kill it. In late May, after the runoffs ended, Abbott declared his revenge tour victorious. “The Texas legislature now has enough votes to pass School Choice,” he posted to X. “Congratulations to all of tonight’s winners. Together, we will ensure the best future for our children.”
The governor indeed has much to celebrate, but he seems to be taking for granted an important event on the calendar: the general election in November, when many of the victorious Republicans will face challengers. While the state’s long dysfunctional Democratic Party hasn’t won a statewide election in three decades, and while Republicans thoroughly gerrymandered the state’s legislative districts in 2021 to protect nearly all of their current seats, the map still isn’t entirely safe for the GOP. Two Democratic candidates are running in districts that former President Donald Trump would have lost in 2020 under the districts’ new boundaries, and five are running in districts he would have won by fewer than five percentage points. If even three of those seven can knock off Republican incumbents, Democrats could put Abbott’s pro-voucher majority in jeopardy, assuming of course that no elected official changes their mind on the issue in 2025 and that the Democrats don’t lose seats elsewhere. Democrats hold one seat that Trump would have won in 2020 with the district’s current boundaries: House District 80, where Democratic state representative Tracy King of Uvalde is retiring. The party also holds one seat that Trump would have been within five points of Biden in: House District 74, anchored in Eagle Pass, and represented by Democrat Eddie Morales Jr.
President Joe Biden is profoundly unpopular in Texas and the Republican brand remains strong, but political consultants in both parties think that Democrats have a realistic shot at wresting some of those seven seats from Republicans. Most of the battleground races are in suburban districts in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, a rapidly growing and diversifying area where Democrats have made inroads in the past decade. Others are in the Austin suburbs, the Rio Grande Valley, and San Antonio.
Many Democratic organizers see their best pickup opportunity in the Alamo City, where progressive community organizer Kristen Carranza is vying to unseat state representative John Lujan, a pro-voucher Republican who represents suburbs south and east of San Antonio. Democrats had long retained the seat before Lujan, a firefighter and former sheriff’s deputy, flipped it during a 2021 special election and held it in 2022. Under the new district lines, Trump would have lost there by nearly three percentage points. Carranza believes she can win the seat back by hammering Lujan on vouchers. While canvassing, she says she meets many blue-collar workers who have some ties to education: they’re related to a teacher or have kids enrolled in public school. “The first thing anyone asks you in San Antonio is what high school you went to,” she said. “We’re so loyal to our public schools here, so public school is always going to be number one to voters in the district here.”
Roughly one hundred miles north, Harris Davila’s district offers another prime target. Democrats held the seat for four years, before the maps were redrawn to favor Republicans in 2021. (The seat’s former representative, James Talarico of Austin, moved to a bluer district and won there.) Still, Harris Davila’s new district isn’t all that red: Trump would’ve only won it by about four percentage points. Such a tight partisan divide might have encouraged a moderate Republican to seek the seat, but Harris Davila, who did not respond to an interview request, is not one. She was one of only 23 Republicans in the House to vote against impeaching Attorney General Ken Paxton and is among the most socially conservative in her caucus. She supports vouchers, worked for the senator who wrote the abortion bounty bill that passed in 2021, and heaped praise on the U.S. Supreme Court after it overturned the constitutional right to the procedure. Birkholz, like Carranza in San Antonio, is pitching herself as a public school advocate: her campaign website prominently features her husband, who works as a public school psychologist.
Across the state, the main challenge for Democrats will be that many Republican incumbents are more popular than Trump—particularly those in the North Texas suburbs. Neither Lujan nor Harris Davila ever shared the ballot with the former president, but Republican state representatives Morgan Meyer, of University Park, and Angie Chen Button, of Richardson, did. In 2020, Trump lost their state House districts by fourteen and nine percentage points, respectively. Meyer and Button narrowly eked out wins over their Democratic opponents that year. The districts were redrawn so that Trump would’ve won them both—albeit barely so. This year, both Republicans drew Democratic challengers: Elizabeth Ginsburg, a lawyer who lost to Meyer by twelve percentage points in 2022, is running again, while former Miss Texas Averie Bishop is vying for Button’s seat.
Matthew Wilson, an associate professor of political science at Southern Methodist University, said the demographics of those North Texas districts, particularly those held by Meyer and Button, are not favorable for Trump. Many residents are affluent and have a college education, and their politics are more congenial for centrist conservatives. “These voters don’t respond very well to Trump’s bombastic, over-the-top style and they’re turned off by Trump’s combative approach to politics,” Wilson said. “They prefer more traditional, Bush-type Republicans.”
Democrats are hopeful the issue of abortion rights will help them even among more traditionally conservative voters in November. In 2021, Meyer and Button voted in favor of both the abortion bounty bill and a law that effectively outlawed the procedure in Texas when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Those votes are unpopular: only 15 percent of likely Texas voters in 2022 supported banning abortion, a finding surveys have repeatedly found, and suburban women, in particular, consider access to the procedure a key issue. But both Button and Meyer prevailed in 2022 after that vote. “A lot of voters, whatever their preference on abortion [rights] may be, were not necessarily bringing that as their primary consideration when it came to voting,” Wilson says. “The challenge for Democrats is to get people to both vote pro-choice and then to translate that into supporting specific candidates.”
If abortion-rights issues alone can’t motivate voters, back in Round Rock, Birkholz believes education is the Democrats’ strongest issue this election. “We have huge coalitions of teachers and parents saying, ‘We care about our public schools,’ ” Birkholz said. “On the other side, it’s just billionaires pushing the issue. That’s where I see hope.”
[ad_2]
Source link
