4% of registered voters elect new US Senator

H

huisache

2,500+ Posts
a million people voted out of 12,750,000 registered in our state yesterday and so Ted Cruz goes to DC with abut 4% of the vote.

An acquaintance of mine won the worthless democratic nomiation for congress in our district with 6,000 votes. Think of that: a major party nomination in a sprawling district can be had for 6,000 votes.

She was on television celebrating last night. NO doubt Cruz was as well.

Should we be celebrating when over 90% of the voters don't even bother to show up? When will the candidates catch on that most everybody hates them or feels such contempt for them and the process that they wont even bother to show up, no matter how easy it is?

Meanwhile, the presidential candidates don't campaign, they just raise funds to pay for ads that are misleading at best and lies at their worst.

Where is the bottom?

Or as Joan Didion says, no matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up
 
Ted Cruz hasn't been elected yet. He was nominated in a R primary.

I get your larger point and tend to agree, but still. It might be nice to properly characterize what was happening yesterday.
 
I have a contest going with some friends re what it would take for our acquaintance to beat the Republican incumbent in our district, Blake Farenthold. Getting caught with a little boy or a goat are not permissible entries.

TRy the same thing with Cruz; what would it take for Sadler to beat him?

Cruz effectively won the Senate seat yesterday.
 
This is part of why our system is messed up. We get elections where the only two choices are two people that the far right and far left supported. You must impress one of these two groups to have a chance at office. Its even worse in very red or blue states since the primary might as well be the election. We get Boxer and Feinstein from Cali because 4% of the of the far left population of one state liked them?
 
The good news is that an extremely rich politician tried to buy himself a seat in the United States Senate with relentless personal attack ads based mostly on fabrications he got his *** handed to him in one of the most monumental flops you would ever want to see. The glass is at least half full!
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huis

well the low turnout was NOT for lack of trying to GOTV by Cruz supporters . Of course we wnated a vote for Ted but our final words were to please vote period.

The timing of the run off vote was brutal

BTW there are 13,065,425 Registered Voters which makes it even worse.

I do not know how many Dems voted in the Dem race that Sadler won
but I am guessing less.

It is very likely that Cruz takes it all
but what if Dems mounted the kind of campaign Cruz supporters mounted when Cruz was at 2%?
 
Cruz's win all but assures his victory in the general election. Absent an "October surprise," Cruz will crush Sadler who is playing the role of sacrificial lamb.

Two things are remarkable to me:

Fist, the Tea Party continues to flex considerable muscle. It took on an extaordinarily well-funded, impressively connected, and overly endorsed establishment candidate and steamrolled him. Folks, Cruz's victory wasn't even close.

Second, Texas will likely elect its first Hispanic Senator. Addendum: Texas will likely elect a conservative, Republican Hispanic senator at that.

The Tea Party provided passionate, sleepless support for conservative minority and female candidates across the state. In addition to supporting Cruz (Hispanic), the Tea Party supported Dr. Donna Campbell (female) over Sen. Jeff Wentworth for a state senate seat in my area.

My point is that maybe more people will realize how intellectually lazy it is to reflexively label it as a party of bigots.
 
It is not my fault that only 4% voted. I vote in almost every election, Federal, State, Local, County, City, School Board etc.

I vote as often as possible, hell, I voted 17 times for Cruz.

I took my friends Voter Registration cards and went and voted for them. All I had to do was show a little poster card and I got a pin number and was able to vote. Didn't even have to show a picture id or any other id that had my name on it.

In November I am going to take the whole day off and just vote over and over again, unless I have to show a picture id.

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For Big Brother reading this, I am just kidding, I could have and talked it over with a number of friends.
 
What's really amazing is that in May Dewhurst had a commanding 25 point lead over Cruz in the polls. He later won the primary by 10 points but obviously not enough to avoid the runoff. Now here we are barely 2 months later and the race wasn't even close.
 
huisache,
Yes, Cruz is the prohibitive favorite in November. I don't think anybody would argue a position other than that. However, turnout in primaries is always lower then in general elections, and turnout in primary runoffs is even worse. It's a long standing trend.

As I said, I agree in general about your cynicism regarding politicians. Most of them are nothing more than pigs feeding at the trough and holding on to power by determining which other pigs (individual welfare, contracting, corporate welfare, union welfare, etc.) also get to feed.

If the tea party types forget their principles and become no more than another brand of pig, I don't want to think about how bad that would damage my faith in our government.
 
The funny thing is that the Tea Party folks in my area actually are holding the candidates that say they are part of the Tea Party to a higher standard then other politicians.
 
I have no love for Dewhurst and never have. I will reserve judgment on Cruz, though I note he is an Ivy Leaguer and therefore I couldn't vote for him even if he was more to my ideological tastes.

My larger point is that we have quit voting as a society. Large numbers of people don't bother to register, of those who do, smaller percentages are voting as the decades go by.

You have generally larger turnouts for presidential races but primary runoffs are notoriously low; this year they were abysmally low.

So we have people going to the Senate, for example, with single digit percentages of the overall eligible voters. Cruz won not because he has a great message or huge support; he won because his opponent had no support at all to speak of among the voters. The party establisment was behind him and they couldn't get their "followers" to go to the polls. So Cruz won with the Tea Party support---which appears to consist of about 3% of the voters.
 
Is it better when clueless people go to the polls? I'd say no. I think people that only vote in the presidential elections would tend to fall in that category.

Now, if the argument is that more people should get a clue, then I agree 100%. If the argument is that more people need to vote because it is the voting that is most important, I would disagree.
 
The people that would vote in a primary tend to be knowledgable on the issues they care about and the candidates. They also tend to have viewpoints that are farther to the right of most republicans or farther to the left of most democrats. This benefits candidates that are towards the extreme end of their party in many cases. Not so much in the republican presidential primary for some reason.
 
pharmD, I don't live in Texas. Can you tell me more about the Texas tea party and Cruz's positions? I think Huisache labelled him as an extremist, and I would like to get a better idea of what his positions are and what makes him an extremist.
 
pharm

" you posted You say 4% of eligible voters but you don't mention it was a primary. I didn't vote b/c I am not a Republican. Perhaps you quote a % of registered Republican voters. "

It was NOT a primary, it was a run off
and you didn't have to be a Repub to vote

There was also a DEM run off with 2 dems running for the party nomination to be on Nov ballot
as well as many down ballot races for both parties
Did you not know that?


Actually less than 2% of registered voters voted in the Dem race.
 
Roger:

Who did you vote for in the Primary, or the Runoff?

I would bet even money you didn't vote, not that you or I could prove it but the way you complain tells me that is all you are about....
 
If none of the candidates are acceptable to him, why should he vote?

That is part of my point: the overwhelming majority of the possible voters don't see any reason to vote. So ideological nutcases and bedwetters who are afraid of everything in the imagination end up controlling who gets elected.

I've worked on a number of campaigns in the last half century and the quality of those running keeps going down. The notion that Paul Sadler and Ted Cruz or Dewhurst are the best Texas has is laughable. But the best Texas has don't run for anything anymore.

In the WSJ today, Karl Rove sez Obama has had over 150 fundraisers in the last year, nearly double what W had when he ran for reelection. The candidates need to raise tons of money to try to convince increasingly small minorities of votes to elect them.

Only a blind man or a true believer could get excited about any of these guys.
 
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