READ CAREFULLY:
I have been writing a lot about the power of a big-choice election in November.
This week, Texas Republicans won a special election for a state Senate seat in a district along the Mexican border. Every Republican campaign in the country should study this race carefully.
You may not have read about this GOP victory, because the liberal national media is not exactly excited to report that Republicans reclaimed a seat they had not held in 139 years. The liberal media is especially shy about reporting on a Republican victory in a district that Hillary Clinton carried by nearly 12 points in the 2016 presidential election.
From the left’s standpoint, this victory is even more frightening because the district is 73 percent African-American and Hispanic.
Furthermore, at a time when people are touting gigantic Democratic voter turnout and lagging Republican participation, this special election runoff had twice as many voters as the last Texas state Senate special election runoff in February 2015.
In fact, the turnout for this race went up from 26,207 in the first round of the election to 44,487 in the runoff, according to Sam Taylor with the Texas Secretary of State’s Office. The Republican candidate received 23,576 votes to the Democrat’s 20,911.
Pete Flores, the Republican victor, spent 27 years as a game warden. As Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told me: “Flores was tireless as a campaigner. He put 7,000 miles on his car during the last five weeks of the campaign.”
In many ways, the Flores all-out, personal campaigning resembled President Trump in the last weeks of the 2016 campaign. This is a good reminder to Republicans that campaigns matter, and you can’t predict who will win six weeks out from an election.
Flores had run four years earlier and lost by 20 points. Now he is the first Hispanic Republican state senator in Texas (yet another reason the liberal media is avoiding talking about the race). Since Flores defeated former Democratic U.S. Rep. Pete Gallego, his victory has some extra punch to it.
Patrick said this race was a classic example of a big-choice campaign. He had read my recent paper, The Republican Choice for 2018: Win or Lose, which outlines the importance of big- choice campaigns over small-choice campaigns and said this was a perfect example of the potential for a big-choice campaign to overwhelm the media bias (a point Brooke Rollins had also made to me).
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