Examining the set of quotes in this Tuesday night Politico article headlined “Republicans are freaking out about Hispanic voters after a Texas upset” first requires one crucial but not especially difficult assumption: That they really are freaking out after that 15 point state Senate special beatdown on Saturday and rather than just performatively dialing up the panic meter to keep their base engaged.
If it was limited to just the actual politicians then maybe it’s mostly fear porn. But that Texas GOP consultant Brendan Steinhauser says that the “imagery coming out of Minnesota in the last few days has had a huge impact on not only Hispanic voters, but swing voters, independents in Texas and around the country. What’s transpired there has definitely led to a bit of a political backlash,” and Latino Never Trumper GOP strategist Mike Madrid said younger Latino men are activated against MAGA because all this ICE shit has “angered and upset them” then, well, maybe it really is as bad as Politico and Ted Cruz and fucking asshole Lt Gov Dannie Goeb aka Dan Patrick make it sound.
The problem for the rest of us is there’s zero quantification of how bad it’s supposed to be because the actual turnout numbers are completely useless. On Saturday Dem Taylor Rehmet won by 15 in a district Trump carried by 17 percent in 2024, which sounds impressive when you don’t actually present any of the raw counts whatsoever, which Politico didn’t. Rehmet took 54,267 votes to Republican Leigh Wambsganns’ 40,598 for a total turnout of 94,865 in this runoff. Both of them also lost a few thousand raw votes from their first round on November 4th in which some other GOP d-bag and Wambsganns combined for 52.4 percent. So that was stupid and hopefully the Texas GOP fired whoever was supposed to bribe third place loser John Huffman to drop out back in September.
That total turnout was barely over a third of the 277,883 regular 2022 general for the seat. Plus it’s not even same electorate because Texas Republicans completely redrew the Ft Worth-area district after that cycle. Calling it a 32 percent swing from Trump +17 is borderline malpractice because 2024 presidential turnout had to be approaching half a million, and that might even be lowballing it.
Thank you oh so very much for that completely effing useless non-frame of reference, Politico, you freaking schmucks. It’s be one thing if they asked these Texas Republicans what if anything it was that their own data revealed that has them so worried. Even just saying “The sources declined to elaborate on the specifics behind this freaking out” would’ve let us know they at least tried.
Put it up against the December 2025 Tennessee 7th special: That was 99.3 percent of 2022 Midterm turnout and it swung 13 percent left. Honestly it’s a really tough call as to whether that snapshot of the electorate isn’t better than if the Dem Aftyn Behn had flipped the seat by 1.3 percent at under half regular turnout. And yet even if that was much more clearly bad news quantitatively for Team MAGA, they didn’t seem as worried qualitatively as they have been these last few days.
What is it that their own data from that one low-turnout Saturday special election is saying that all the other Dem overperformances in how many goddamned low-turnout special elections has it been the last decade did not? Is it just that they tend not to lose otherwise safe R Texas specials and now the canary’s dead? Is it just two ugly months of nonstop ICE abuses and a couple of dead US citizens later that the vibes are that much worse than the already were in early December?
Fuck vibes, man. Give us some goddamned numbers. Let’s see the data, if there even is any.