I Wonder If That Includes Me?

Speaking to Newsweek, Joshua Blank, the research director at the University of Texas at Austin's Texas Politics Project, said there was "little indication of a Democratic surge" from the voting thus far. 

…. 

He said: "Voters with previous Republican Primary history now have a 387k vote advantage over their counterparts. This margin has increased 141k since yesterday's report. 

"Nearly half of people who have voted in all four of the last four Republican Primaries have voted (47%) while 50% of people who have voted in all four of the last four Democratic Primaries have voted."

I voted in the GOP primary one year, in hopes of defeating Dan Patrick before the general election. It was a strategy by his GOP opponent, and it scared Patrick shitless.

It also didn’t work.  

I still occasionally get text messages from the GOP because of that. So it’s conceivable my vote is included in that assessment.

OTOH:

Hearing a whole helluva lot of this on the trail. https://t.co/6x9rceRvoA

— Sam Cornale (@samcornale) October 26, 2024

This is Texas, and such stories are purely anecdotal anyway. Except Liz Cheney was here urging people to vote for Harris, and 1.5 million people wanted to see Harris in a football stadium just last night. And there is no precedent to count on to predict how many Republicans will refuse to vote for Trump; or Cruz, for that matter.

I still remember that the prelude to Bush v Gore was TeeVee calling the face for Bush, based on Florida polls. And then calling it for Gore, as results came in; then calling it for Bush again; and finally throwing up their hands, long before the recount became inevitable.

And 24 years later, we still act like polls are the vox dei.

So how can you predict the outcome of the vote based on who you think has voted already?*

*Texas does not require reporting party affiliation when you register to vote. There’s no way to know how many Democrats or Republicans have voted, and turnout to primaries is notoriously light. Calculating by who has done so is a mug’s game and means, again, those with no such history must be voting for Jill Stein. They might as well be interpreting the utterances of the Oracle of Delphi, or making predictions based on the Revelation to John on Patmos (personally I think John of Patmos found the same mushrooms Ezekiel found along the banks of the Chebar.) Besides, early voting only started Monday , and doesn’t end until November 1. And there’s always Election Day. Reading chicken entrails never goes out of style, though I think I’d gravitate to tarot if I had a deck like this.)