The March primary in Texas is often more important than the November general election
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AUSTIN (KXAN) — Early voting is now underway for the Texas primaries on March 5. Voters will be choosing their party nominees for everything from the president of the United States to justice of the peace in your local county.
Voter Guide: What to know for the March 2024 primary elections
The winning candidates will then represent their respective parties on the November ballot. But in a lot of races, the primary election is perhaps even more important than November’s general election.
Gerrymandering may be one of the reasons.
Redistricting is the highly political process of redrawing district boundaries after new census data is released. Parties can draw district lines in ways that set them up for success in future elections, a process known as gerrymandering This means groups of like-minded voters are often grouped together into one district, and the knock-on effect is that fewer districts are competitive in general elections.
“In states like Texas that are gerrymandered beyond belief, the primary is often the general election,” said Brian Smith, a politics professor at St. Edward’s University.
Let’s take the Texas House of Representatives as an example. In 2022, the first election using new districts after the 2020 census, all 150 seats were up for grabs. The results of those are in the chart below. Of the 150 total races, 86 were won by Republicans, and 64 were won by Democrats.
But 58 of the seats only had one candidate on the ballot in November, meaning more than a third of Texas House elections had unopposed candidates: 36 Republicans and 22 Democrats. Click through using the arrow in the top right to see which districts were automatically won.
If the 58 districts that were unopposed are removed, that leaves 92 seats in the House remaining. But how competitive were those remaining districts? Turns out, not very competitive at all.
The average margin of victory in those 92 districts was 32.57 percentage points. That’s equivalent to Candidate A getting two-thirds of the total vote, and Candidate B only one-third — not exactly a competitive margin.
The chart below shows the 92 districts that were contested in the 2022 general election. Click through to see how many of those districts were decided by fewer than 10 points. The difference is stark.
Only four of the 150 districts in the Texas House were competitive in November 2022 — decided by fewer than 10 percentage points:
House District 112: Republican Angie Chen Button defeated Democrat Elva Curl by 9.66%
House District 118: Republican John Lujan defeated Democrat Frank Ramirez by 3.68%
House District 37: Republican Janie Lopez defeated Democrat Luis Villarreal Jr. by 3.66%
House District 70: Democrat Mihaela Plesa defeated Republican Jamee Jolly by 1.46%
With so few competitive districts, it’s often easy to see which candidates will win in a November general election. That’s why primaries are so important — the candidates chosen then are likely to go on to win and become state representatives, depending on which district they’re running in.
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